The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 | Page 5

labors are directed for absentee masters
by hired overseers, whose interest is not to create a wholesome
confidence between laborers and proprietors, but to get the most they
can out of them during their own term of employment; if they are
treated with the old slaveholding arrogance, embittered by the
consciousness of a check; and if thereby the more self-respecting are
driven off, and the more abject-spirited who remain are rendered still
more abject: I submit it is not fair to argue from this class of
semi-slaves to the character of those who are really free, who call no
man master, who have a chance to be men if they will, unhampered
except by the general depressing influences that will always work in a
country where slavery has lately existed, and where the slaveholding
class have still a predominant social and political influence. And it is to
be noted that Carlyle's picture is drawn from the neighborhood of a
plantation, and so are Trollope's. Mr. Trollope, it is true, takes all
imaginable pains to write himself down an ass. By his own ostentatious
confessions, the only intellectual comprehensiveness to which he can
lay claim is an astonishingly comprehensive ignorance. In view of this,
his sage discoursings upon grave questions of political and social
economy have about as comical an effect as the moralizings of a
harlequin. But he is a lively describer of what passes under his eyes,
and his sketches of what he heard and saw among the planters and on
the plantations are doubtless authentic. However, he did not visit the
small settlers; and to take pains to inform himself of the condition of a
class of the population which he was not among, except by catching up
the dinner-table maledictions of his planting friends against the class
which they hate most, as being least dependent on them, would be of
course entirely contrary to his professed superficiality.
There are but two recent works of much value on emancipation in
Jamaica--Underhill's and Sewell's. The work of Mr. Underhill, although,
as a delegate of a missionary society which had much to do in bringing
about emancipation, he might be supposed to have a strong party
interest, is marked by an impartial caution which entitles it to great
respect and confidence.[4]

As to Mr. Sewell's book, it is marvellous how he could obtain so clear
an insight in so short a time into the true condition of things. The
paucity of statistical facts, however, plagued him, as it does every
writer on Jamaica; and while the delinquencies of the planters are
patent and palpable, he could not appreciate so well as a resident the
difficulties arising from the provoking treacherousness of the negro
character.
It is known by most, who do not choose to remain conveniently
ignorant, that though the ruin of Jamaican planting prosperity has been
accelerated by emancipation, it had been steadily going on for more
than a generation previous. In 1792 the Jamaica Assembly represented
to Parliament that in the twenty years previous one hundred and
seventy-seven estates had been sold for debt. In 1800, it is stated in the
Hon. Richard Hill's interesting little book, 'Lights and Shadows of
Jamaica History,' judgments had been recorded against estates in the
island to the enormous amount of £33,000,000. In the five years before
the slave trade was abolished in 1807, sixty-five estates had been given
up. Against the abolition of the slave trade the Assembly made the
most urgent remonstrances, representing that it would be impossible to
keep up the supply of labor without it. In other words, the slaves were
worked to death so rapidly that natural increase alone would not
maintain their number. The result justified their prediction.[5] In 1804,
it appears that there were eight hundred and fifty-nine sugar estates in
operation in the island. In 1834 there were six hundred and forty-six. In
1854 there were three hundred and thirty. Thus it appears that in the
thirty years previous to the abolition of slavery, one quarter of the
estates in operation at the beginning of that term had been abandoned,
and in the twenty years succeeding abolition one half of those
remaining had been given up. It is certainly no wonder that so great a
social shock as emancipation, coming upon a tottering fabric, hastened
its fall. But the foregoing facts show that, in the language of Mr.
Underhill, 'ruin has been the chronic condition of Jamaica ever since
the beginning of the century.'
The distinguished historian of the island, Bryan Edwards, himself a
planter, and opposed to the abolition of the slave trade, describes the

sugar cultivation, even before the supply of labor from Africa was cut
off, as precarious in the highest degree, a mere lottery, and often, he
says, 'a millstone around the