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.
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