Chapter III.—: The “Ruin” of Jamaica an old Story.

In reference to the alleged former prosperity and pretended present “ruin” of Jamaica, we have seen in what that prosperity consisted; and that, by the operation of causes entirely independent of the nature of the labor employed, that prosperity, such as it was, had already reached its period, and had commenced a gradual decline years before the abolition of slavery, or even of the slave trade.

That prosperity, to restate the matter in a few words, consisted in the diligent and laborious cultivation of a certain number of sugar and coffee plantations, by upward of three hundred thousand negroes, in the lowest state of degradation, misery, ignorance, and barbarism, uninstructed, religiously or otherwise, naked, or nearly so, supported on a scanty allowance of the coarsest food, (and a large part of that imported,) forced to labor some sixteen hours a day, and annually diminishing at the rate of nearly three per cent.,—the number being kept good only by fresh importations from Africa,—while all the profits of this forced and cruel toil went into the coffers of a few great British commercial houses, except what stuck by the way, and was employed in the maintenance of about twenty-five thousand white residents of the island, who alone were taken into account when the people and the prosperity of Jamaica were spoken of.

These white persons had a political representation in the colonial legislature, and except as to matters of trade, with which alone the home government interfered, they were lords and masters of the island, (always saving the supreme authority of the non-resident proprietors and mortgagees, who controlled at pleasure the legislation of the Assembly.) These white residents consisted in, perhaps, about equal numbers of creoles, or persons born on the island, and of accessions from abroad. Of these creoles the larger part were the descendants of the early British settlers, once numerous, but gradually wasting away, without slaves, poor and lazy, but to whom manual agricultural labor would have been a disgrace; living, as they could, by odd jobs, and occupying a position somewhat like that of the poorest and meanest white population in our southern towns and villages. The rest of the creoles were the children of more recent settlers, of whom a certain proportion had been sent “home”—that is, to Great Britain—for education, but who were no more able than the other class of creoles, already described, to perpetuate their race; and who, in the competition of business, were entirely outdone by the immigrant class, in whom, conjointly with the sugar houses at home, resided the motive power that kept the system in operation. The most successful of this immigrant class were generally Scotchmen,—hard, sharp, driving, and close-fisted,—who got what they could, and saved what they got; and who found it not difficult to conquer in Jamaica all the little “prejudices” and scruples which they had brought with them from Scotland.

A few of these whites found employment as lawyers and physicians; for the island was very unhealthy for white people living as the whites of Jamaica did, and the white inhabitants were very litigious, to say nothing of numerous debts to be collected. Here and there a jolly parson might be met with; for Jamaica had a few old livings. A somewhat larger number came out as clerks in mercantile establishments, and as millwrights, carpenters, masons, or smiths—employments of which they soon learned to shift all the manual labor upon negro slaves trained up to the business. But the chief occupation was the management and superintendence of the plantations, each of which had a chief overseer, with several inferior overseers, or bookkeepers, as they were called, and, in the case of absentee proprietors, an attorney to represent the proprietor.

The family circle was quite a rarity in slaveholding Jamaica. Marriage was the exception, not the rule. The male white population far exceeded the females in number, of whom, however, the greater portion was left to wither in single blessedness. Of the immigrant population very few were women; and such wives as were occasionally brought out from Great Britain pretty generally soon wished themselves at home again. The white men supplied themselves with mistresses and housekeepers, either from among the slaves or the free people of color, who formed, during the so-much-regretted era of Jamaica prosperity, a third and equally distinct class of the population. These free people of color, with whom were reckoned also a few manumitted negroes, amounted to about ten thousand in number, being the offspring of the connections above mentioned. In a few rare cases these colored children were educated and provided for in a fatherly manner. If the mother were a slave, it was considered in Jamaica—our democratic slaveholders think differently—only an act of common decency to secure the freedom of the child; but here, in general, the care of the father stopped. With few exceptions, the males, unprovided with any means of gaining for themselves a creditable livelihood, keenly sensitive to the honor on the one side of their white parentage, and to the disgrace of their African blood on the other, were left speedily to terminate, or miserably to protract, a wretched existence as they might. They were subjected to much the same legal disabilities and indignities as are the colored people of our Southern States, not being allowed to testify against a white man, to vote, or to hold any office; and the legislature of Jamaica had also provided—a thing not yet found necessary in any of our Southern States—that no testamentary devise from a white person to a negro or mulatto should be valid if it exceeded the amount of seven thousand dollars. The females had, as their only resource, the concubinage above described—a degraded position, in which, however, they often fulfilled, with the utmost scrupulousness and self-devotion, all the duties, without enjoying one of the rights, of a wife, and which, as it secured to them and their colored relations a white champion and protector, was regarded as the greatest piece of good fortune, and the most respectable position to which they could possibly attain.

Such was the prosperity over the decay of which so many regrets are uttered—the enjoyments, if they are to be called such, secured by it to the limited white population, and to them only, being of the grossest character. From living constantly among negroes, mostly imported from Africa, over whom they exercised despotic authority, the white immigrants, the greater part of them not over refined to begin with, degenerated into gross barbarians. Their only relaxations were drunken frolics, naked negro girls being employed to wait at table; while it was an ordinary piece of Jamaica hospitality to furnish, not only a bed to the guest, but a woman to share it. Such were the pleasures of the whites of Jamaica. Their business consisted in watching and driving up the negroes, and in gradually accumulating the means to flit for a moment as nominal proprietor of a plantation, which proprietorship, in nineteen cases out of twenty, speedily transferred these hard-earned gains into the coffers of some London sugar house.

Nor was even this wretched system sustained, except by a strict monopoly of the British sugar market, secured to the British West India planters—a monopoly which, in the latter quarter of the last century, was so severely felt by the British consumers, considering the prices at which they might have purchased the rival sugars of French St. Domingo, as to raise a great clamor in England against the whole system of West India cultivation as a ruinous and losing concern, accompanied by a scheme for drawing the supply of sugar from the East Indies—a scheme which only received its quietus when the revolt of the slaves in French St. Domingo had freed the British colonies from that invidious contrast. On the other hand, the legislature of Jamaica complained with no less emphasis of the wretched condition to which the island was reduced. They stated, in a formal report, that, in consequence of the interruption of their usual supplies, resulting from the quarrel between Great Britain and her northern continental colonies, (now the United States,) fifteen thousand negroes had perished, between the end of 1780 and the beginning of 1787, “of famine, or of diseases contracted by scanty and unwholesome diet.” Another report, dated November 22, 1792, represents that, in the course of twenty years preceding, one hundred and seventy-seven estates were sold for the payment of debts, fifty-five were thrown up,—so long ago had that abandonment of estates commenced, of which we nowadays hear so much, as though it were a new thing growing out of emancipation,—and ninety-two were then in the hands of creditors, while, during the same period, eighty thousand and twenty-one executions, amounting to above twenty-two million five hundred thousand pounds sterling, had been lodged in the provost marshal’s office.

Such was the prosperity of Jamaica in 1792; and accounts still more lamentable are given in a another report of November 23, 1804, and in reports of the British House of Commons, of July 24, 1807, of April 13, 1808—report No. 279, 1812, and No. 381, 1832; from all which it appears that Jamaica ruin is an ancient and chronic complaint—as painful, no doubt, but apparently not much more dangerous than the gout, which, as the patient has survived it for seventy years or more, is not likely, perhaps, to result in immediate dissolution; especially as the inhabitants of the island, in spite of this protracted and reiterated ruin of the sugar planters, are vastly better off in every respect—socially, politically, intellectually, religiously, physically, and morally—than at any former period.

Published for gratuitous distribution, at the Office of the American Anti-Slavery Society, No. 138 Nassau Street, New York. Also to be had at the Anti-Slavery Offices, No. 21 Cornhill, Boston, and No. 31 North Fifth Street, Philadelphia.