LETTER XXXXVI.

THE WORKING OF THE ABOLITION BILL IN JAMAICA.*

TO MONS. JULIEN.

MY DEAR SIR,

Kingston, Nov. 14, 1834.

The apprenticeship system might have answered the object it was meant to accomplish, had it met with a fair trial. The difficulties, however, it had to encounter in this island, where I had an opportunity of observing its progress, did not allow of its obtaining that trial.

These difficulties may be referred to six heads.

1st-Non-residence of the great majority of large proprietors on their estates.

2nd-Inability of the majority of resident proprietors to pay wages to negroes for over-time.

3rd Separate interests of the attorneys who manage the estates of the absentees, from those of the

owners.

4th-Importunity of merchants at home (to whom two-thirds of the estates are mortgaged) for large returns, while the means of obtaining them with the diminished time of labour must necessarily diminish cultivation.

5th-Jealousy of the local magistrates, whose jurisdiction is superseded by that of the special magistrates. 6th-Irritation of the overseers, whose power over the slaves has been taken away by the new law.

These I consider the chief sources of the difficulties

* The substance of this letter was laid before the late colonial minister.

now in the way of a desirable settlement of the question of slavery, and of the opposition which the apprenticeship system is now encountering at the hands of the white population.

The dislike to the apprenticeship, on the part of the negroes, may be referred to three heads.

1st-Incapacity, or at least unwillingness, to comprehend prospective advantages.

2nd-Reluctance to labour without wages.

3rd-Disposition, in some instances, to withhold their own time, and that of their children under six years of age, as a retaliation for past grievances, real or imaginary; or the recent deprivation of their old allowances.

To these causes the indolence that is supposed to be natural to the negro character, and the sudden cessation of field-punishment, might be added; but I have not done so, because wherever I have seen the negro paid for his extra time by an owner in whom he had no mistrust, that indolence was overcome, and the stimulus of arbitrary punishment was not required. Individual exceptions there may be: I speak of the majority of the apprentices, where the proprietor is able to pay wages, and not disposed to annoy the negroes.

The four first sources of difficulty I do not refer to, because they are too obvious to need any comment. The fifth is one, the mischief of which is more immediately felt in the colonies than any of the others. In the absence of the extensive proprietors, the local magistrates, in a great many instances, are chosen from the body of attorneys, and small, and perhaps embarrassed, proprietors, and political adherents of both in large towns.

The magistrates of Kingston hold their commissions from the corporation, and are independent of the executive, and from the constitution of that body it is far from being desirable that they should be so. The corporation of Kingston is founded on the American model; it is a municipal democracy, totally unfitted for the state of society in Jamaica. The opinions of the

Governor, the Chief-Justice, and the Attorney-General, -I am much deceived, if they are not to the extent that its existence is an evil; and I am pretty sure the respectable inhabitants of Kingston think that the removal of its privileges would be a public benefit. Constituted as the local magistracy is, opposition to the executive must be expected. Many of the country magistrates, nevertheless, so far as humanity is concerned, I am quite sure, might be trusted with the execution of the new law, however adverse they are to its principle, but the great majority of them most certainly not; they feel injured by the appointment of the Special Justices, and therefore their influence is successfully exerted over the press and the House of Assembly, to thwart the government, to oppose the Special Justices, and to vex the negroes.

Overseers and book-keepers are not only adverse to the new system, but interested in defeating it. It has deprived them of authority, and in a few years it will deprive them of bread. Their irritation, no longer to be vented in actual violence, is exhibited on every trivial occasion, in expressions of invective and abuse, which the negroes resent by a sullen spirit of indolence in the field. It cannot be denied, where such treatment is experienced, they do not work as heretofore : it cannot indeed be expected that they should; they consider the curtailment of their allowances more than a counterpoise for the abridgement of the time of labour. Their conduct, under this impression, may be unreasonable, and in some instances provoking, but firmness is not more requisite than forbearance to remove it. In a few instances at the commencement they went to the extent of a dogged refusal to work at all; but that spirit was of short continuance; in others, they have gone to the length of hooting the magistrates who were brought to coerce them; and on one occasion, the trash-house was consumed while a special justice was investigating the complaints of the proprietor. In fact a bad spirit prevails between the apprentice and the owner.

The privileges of the one and the prejudices of the other are at war. The special magistracy is interposed between them, and the issue depends on the prudence, independence, and even the numerical force of the latter.

The vexations of the negroes may be thought trivial, but in reality they are not so. Their rights are not sufficiently protected by the new law. It is very true the apprentices cannot be flogged by their masterstheir evidence cannot be refused in a court of justicetheir time of labour is limited, or at least ought to be limited to nine hours a day-they cannot be sold in the market-place by public sale, nor separated from their families for the payment of jailors' fees-humanity is happily spared these outrages; but in all that respects the mode of administering their supplies, of apportioning their time of labour, of defining the nature and extent of the jurisdiction of the special justices, the matter is so vaguely expressed in the Act as amended here, that loop-holes are left for innumerable vexations, which it is not in the power of the special magistrate to prevent or punish. These vexations consist in withholding the customary allowances of salted provisions, rum, and sugar, or, where they are continued, of exacting from the negro such extra labour as the law has allotted for the necessary cultivation of the negro grounds. It is in vain that the Attorney-General invokes the spirit of the law to secure for the apprentices the continuance of their usual allowances, and those privileges which the old law afforded to the slaves, of exemption from field-labour for those women who had six children living on a property, or the allotment of lighter work for those in the last months of pregnancy, or the abstraction of sufficient time from their masters for the necessary performance of the offices of maternity, which was formerly permitted to the mother in the field. To the negro who looks on the deviation from an established custom as the deprivation of a right, these alterations in the management of a property

are of no little amount: the aged and infirm people who formerly attended the working gangs in the capacity of cooks and nurses, are no longer allowed, or, where they are, their services are paid out of the time of the labourers. The severity of a recent Act constitutes it an act of vagrancy for the negro of one property to be found in the negro huts of another, though persons connected by those ties which custom sanctions here are usually to be found on all adjoining estates; while the children under six years of age, whose parents may refuse to apprentice them to their former owners, may be taken before the special justice on the plea of destitution; or, where deterred from that proceeding by the frequency of its failure, the parent may be menaced with the dismissal of those children from the property, which the law does not oblige them to provide for. These vexations are in daily operation: they are opposed by the special magistrates, but cannot be put down; and the result of the attempts to do so, is a spirit of resistance to their authority, a jealousy of their exercise of it which knows no bounds and acknowledges no control.

The following letter, addressed to the editor of the Chronicle, is a tolerably good specimen of the feelings of the colonists towards those who administer the new law. The letter is well known to be written by a member of Assembly-one who is a great writer as well-as speaker.

CORRESPONDENCE.

To the Editor of the Kingston Chronicle.

August 30th. "Sir:-I beg the use of your columns to express my indignation at the base subserviency, or culpable carelessness, which has led our legislators to pass the Supplemental Abolition Act.

"The proceedings of this parish of the Special Magistrates have compelled many sufferers to look into the law for relief and redress, but they are met by the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth clauses of Mr. Alexander Barclay's Act.

"Was it not enough that we surrendered our property at the VOL. II.

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