CHAPTER XV.

TRANSITION OF THE NEGROES FROM APPRENTICESHIP INTO FREEDOM.-MEASURE FOR THEIR WELFARE PROPOUNDED AND MUTILATED IN THE CABINET AND DEFEATED BY SIR R. PEEL IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.-LORD MELBOURNE'S GOVERNMENT RESIGNS: IT IS RECONSTITUTED, BUT THE MEASURE IS GONE. THE NEGROES SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES FOR TWENTY-SIX YEARS.

ANNO DOM. 1838-39. ANNO ET. 38-39.

IN May, 1838, I wrote to my father that I was in doubt whether I could take any holidays in that year, and enclosed an official minute addressed to me and my answer to it, by way of explanation, adding, “The task proposed to me was one which I could not, with a good conscience, consider myself at liberty to decline or devolve. It is, in fact, that of preparing the West Indies for the transition from apprenticeship to freedom."

The six years' apprenticeship, commenced under the imperial abolition of slavery act on the 1st August, 1834, had no sooner been established than its inherent and incurable evils began to be developed. The stipendiary justices sent out from England, if they could not prevent, could materially mitigate and control, the oppression of the negroes by their masters, so far as that oppression was exercised in the exaction of labor; but the master so controlled regarded the amount of labor exacted as ruinously insufficient. On the other hand, the planters, in their capacity of local justices, could perpetrate all manner of cruelty and wrong under the shelter of local laws-send

ing men and women to their horribly overcrowded prisons, to be put on the treadmill and flogged without mercy upon the flimsiest pretexts. The superior courts were partisans of slavery; the legislatures were worse than the judicatures; all were imbittered and enraged against the negroes and their friends, and the police were fit agents for giving effect to the passions of their employers.

The anti-slavery party in this country renewed their agitation, and on the 11th April, 1838, an act was passed by Parliament (1 Vic., c. 19) to amend the act for the abolition of slavery, the object of which was to remove various evils and abuses in the apprenticeship system for which no remedies could be obtained from the local legislatures; and another act was passed to enable the crown to shut up such of the West Indian prisons as might be found unfit for use, and thereby compel the legislatures to provide others.

The result was more anger than ever on the part of the Jamaica Assembly, manifested by a protest in which they grossly insulted both Houses of Parliament, and, indeed, the English nation. The governor, an excellent old soldier, Sir Lionel Smith (described by the Duke of Wellington in a private letter to the secretary of state as fit for any situation in which he could be placed), wrote confidentially to Lord Glenelg, 17th May, 1838: "It is impossible for any one to answer for the conduct of the house of assembly. Many are there in the island who would be delighted to get up an insurrection for the pleasure of destroying the negroes and missionaries. They are, in fact, mad. I have received a letter from a magistrate, telling me that some militia officers threaten, if I do not call out the militia, that they will assemble of their own accord; but for what I know not.... Also that I am to be shot. I mention these silly things to your

lordship to show some of the consequences of a seditious press upon the minds of the people."

By this time the apprenticeship had become intolerable to all parties; the dangers resulting from it were manifest; one local legislature—that of Antigua—had renounced it from the beginning; several others had done so after experience of it; and the Jamaica Assembly itself, in June, 1838, came to the same conclusion, and passed an act under which final emancipation was to take effect on the 1st August following, instead of the 1st. August, 1840.

It was now more urgently necessary than ever that laws should be enacted to provide for the exigencies of the new state of society, and that laws should be repealed which were utterly at variance with the liberty of the subject.

How little the liberty of the subject was provided for by the mere abolition of prædial servitude, is shown by - an article written by James Spedding in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1839: "A single illustration will be sufficient. The following case may occur at any time, may be occurring while we write. . . . The great mass of the laborers are tenants at will of their former masters and have no homes but such as belong to them. The manager calls on them to enter into a contract involving heavy duties and small pay, and lasting for a long time. If they consent they bind themselves to a bad bargain, and in case of any kind of failure to fulfil the entire conditions of it, which need not be expressed in writing, they may be deprived of all their wages, or imprisoned for three months in a Jamaica prison, at the discretion of any justice of the peace. If they refuse, they are liable, at the discretion of any two justices, to be summarily ejected from the estate. Being ejected, they may be

brought before the nearest justice as vagrants wandering abroad. . . and sentenced to hard labor in the house of correction for six months. . . they may besides, be they males or females, receive thirty-nine lashes."

I had written, in the summer of 1838, four long papers on the preparatory measures proper to be taken by the government. My views had met with the concurrence of every one in the colonial office, and had been brought before the government. I have no copies of them and no recollection of their substance; but in October, it appears I was not content with the course of action which the government was contemplating, and on the 24th of that month I wrote on the subject to Mr. Stephen:

"... I cannot help expressing to you privately my persuasion that the government is in danger of falling into a system of erroneous policy on this question and creating great and continual discontent to no purpose. What they are doing and about to do is, in fact, a repetition of the policy pursued from 1823 to 1834, on slave melioration, and I think the experience of the effects of that policy, contrasted with the experience of the effects of reversing it, which we have had subsequently, should teach us a different lesson. I observe, indeed, that Lord Howick considers the question at issue to be now of a different character, and the position of the government with the assemblies to be totally altered, insomuch as the interests of the planters are now identified with the general interest, and they must be equally desirous with the government that order, industry, and contentment should prevail. So far forth it is true there is a common object; and it may be likewise true that the liberal and protective laws which the government would * Lord Howick was in the cabinet, but not at this time in the colonial office.

desire to establish would be the best means of attaining it. But the planters would not see this. I believe that to have been true which was so often urged, that many of the meliorating laws proposed from 1823 to 1834 would have been equally for the interest of the planter and of the slave. But these laws were as much resisted by the assemblies as those which were for the interest of the slaves solely. Liberality, charity, forbearance, equal dealing, etc., would be, no doubt, like honesty, the best policy in the present circumstances of the planters; but it is nevertheless certain that this is not the policy by which their legislation will be guided, and we have already had specimens, in the St. Vincent's vagrancy and contract for service acts, that every effort will be made to enact laws at direct variance with this policy; and it may be reasonably feared that all persuasion to the contrary will be of no more avail than the annual meliorating circulars and the daily animadversions on acts of assembly in the previous controversy of ten years long. Now I cannot but think, that if we are to learn anything from experience, it should be this: That assuming the objects of the government to be necessary to the establishment of the liberty and promotion of the industry of the negroes, and that the habits and prejudices, if not the interests, of the planters are strongly opposed to them, then the only method of accomplishing them effectually and completely, and the best method as regards irritation and discontent, will be by exerting at once and conclusively a power which shall overrule all opposition and set the question The persuasory and recommendatory process may appear to be the more conciliatory at first; but I am convinced that the appearance is fallacious. The West Indian legislatures have neither the will nor the skill to make such laws as you want made; and they cannot be

at rest.