Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Do They Think That They Have Acquired The Right Of
Putting Down Commiseration, By Comparing* The Condition Of The Negroes
With That Of The Serfs Of The Middle Ages, And With The State Of
Oppression To Which Some Classes Are Still Subjected In The North And
East Of Europe?
(* Such comparisons do not satisfy those secret
partisans of the slave trade who try to make light of the miseries of
the black race, and to resist every emotion those miseries awaken.
The
permanent condition of a caste founded on barbarous laws and
institutions is often confounded with the excesses of a power
temporarily exercised on individuals. Thus Mr. Bolingbroke, who lived
seven years at Demerara and who visited the West India Islands,
observes that "on board an English ship of war, flogging is more
frequent than in the plantations of the English colonies." He adds
"that in general the negroes are but little flogged, but that very
reasonable means of correction have been imagined, such as making them
take boiling soup strongly peppered, or obliging them to drink, with a
very small spoon, a solution of Glauber-salts." Mr. Bolingbroke
regards the slave-trade as a universal benefit; and he is persuaded
that if negroes who have enjoyed, during twenty years, all the
comforts of slave life at Demerara, were permitted to return to the
coast of Africa, they would effect recruiting on a large scale, and
bring whole nations to the English possessions. Voyage to Demerara,
1807. Such is the firm and frank profession of faith of a planter; yet
Mr. Bolingbroke, as several passages of his book prove, is a moderate
man, full of benevolent intentions towards the slaves.) These
comparisons, these artifices of language, this disdainful impatience
with which even a hope of the gradual abolition of slavery is repulsed
as chimerical, are useless arms in the times in which we live. The
great revolutions which the continent of America and the Archipelago
of the West Indies have undergone since the commencement of the
nineteenth century, have had their influence on public feeling and
public reason, even in countries where slavery exists and is beginning
to be modified. Many sensible men, deeply interested in the
tranquillity of the sugar and slave islands, feel that by a liberal
understanding among the proprietors, and by judicious measures adopted
by those who know the localities, they might emerge from a state of
danger and uneasiness which indolence and obstinacy serve only to
increase.
Slavery is no doubt the greatest evil that afflicts human nature,
whether we consider the slave torn from his family in his native
country and thrown into the hold of a slave ship,* or as making part
of a flock of black men, parked on the soil of the West Indies; but
for individuals there are degrees of suffering and privation. (* "If
the slaves are whipped," said one of the witnesses before the
Parliamentary Committee of 1789, "to make them dance on the deck of a
slave ship - if they are forced to sing in chorus; 'Messe, messe,
mackerida,' [how gaily we live among the whites], this only proves the
care we take of the health of those men." This delicate attention
reminds me of the description of an auto-da-fe in my possession. In
that curious document a boast is made of the prodigality with which
refreshments are distributed to the condemned, and of the staircase
which the inquisitors have had erected in the interior of the pile for
the accommodation of the relazados (the relapsed culprits.)) How great
is the difference in the condition of the slave who serves in the
house of a rich family at the Havannah or at Kingston, or one who
works for himself, giving his master but a daily retribution, and that
of the slave attached to a sugar estate! The threats employed to
correct an obstinate negro mark this scale of human privations. The
coachman is menaced with the coffee plantation; and the slave working
on the latter is menaced with the sugar house. The negro, who with his
wife inhabits a separate hut, whose heart is warmed by those feelings
of affection which for the most part characterize the African race,
finds that after his labour some care is taken of him amidst his
indigent family, is in a position not to be compared with that of the
insulated slave lost in the mass. This diversity of condition escapes
the notice of those who have not had the spectacle of the West Indies
before their eyes. Owing to the progressive amelioration of the state
even of the captive caste in the island of Cuba, the luxury of the
masters and the possibility of gain by their work, have drawn more
than eighty thousand slaves to the towns; and the manumission of them,
favoured by the wisdom of the laws, is become so active as to have
produced, at the present period, more than 130,000 free men of colour.
By considering the individual position of each class, by recompensing,
by the decreasing scale of privations, intelligence, love of labour
and the domestic virtues, the colonial administration will find the
best means of improving the condition of the blacks. Philanthropy does
not consist in giving a little more salt-fish, and some fewer lashes:
the real amelioration of the captive caste ought to extend over the
whole moral and physical position of man.
The impulse may be given by those European governments which have a
right comprehension of human dignity, and who know that whatever is
unjust bears with it a germ of destruction; but this impulse, it is
melancholy to add, will be powerless if the union of the planters, if
the colonial assemblies or legislatures, fail to adopt the same views
and to act by a well-concerted plan, having for its ultimate aim the
cessation of slavery in the West Indies. Till then it will be in vain
to register the strokes of the whip, to diminish the number that may
be given at one time, to require the presence of witnesses and to
appoint protectors of slaves; all these regulations, dictated by the
most benevolent intentions, are easily eluded:
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