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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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.
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