All Simultaneous Action On The Part Of The Blacks Appears To Them Impossible; And Every Change, Every Concession Granted To The Slave Population, Is Regarded As A Sign Of Weakness.

The horrible catastrophe of San Domingo is declared to have been only the effect of the incapacity of its government.

Such are the illusions which prevail amidst the great mass of the planters of the West Indies, and which are alike opposed to an amelioration of the condition of the blacks in Georgia and in the Carolinas. The island of Cuba, more than any other of the West India Islands, might escape the common wreck. That island contains 455,000 free men and 160,000 slaves: and there, by prudent and humane measures, the gradual abolition of slavery might be brought about. Let us not forget that since San Domingo has become free there are in the whole archipelago of the West Indies more free negroes and mulattos than slaves. The whites, and above all, the free men, whose cause it would be easy to link with that of the whites, take a very rapid numerical increase at Cuba. The slaves would have diminished, since 1820, with great rapidity, but for the fraudulent continuation of the slave-trade. If, by the progress of human civilization, and the firm resolution of the new states of free America, this infamous traffic should cease altogether, the diminution of the slave population would become more considerable for some time, on account of the disproportion existing between the two sexes, and the continuance of emancipation. It would cease only when the relation between the deaths and births of slaves should be such that even the effects of enfranchisement would be counterbalanced. The whites and free men now form two-thirds of the whole population of the island, and this increase marks in some degree the diminution of the slaves. Among the latter, the women are to the men (exclusive of the mulatto slaves), scarcely in the proportion of 1 : 4, in the sugar-cane plantations; in the whole island, as 1 : 1.7; and in the towns and farina where the negro slaves serve as domestics, or work by the day on their own account as well as that of their masters, the proportion is as 1 : 1.4; even (for instance at the Havannah),* as 1 : 1.2. (* It appears probable that at the end of 1825, of the total population of men of colour (mulattos and negroes, free and slaves), there were nearly 160,000 in the towns, and 230,000 in the fields. In 1811 the Consulado, in a statement presented to the Cortes of Spain, computed at 141,000, the number of men of colour in the towns, and 185,000 in the fields. Documentes sobre los Negros page 121.) This great accumulation of mulattos, free negros and slaves in the towns is a characteristic feature in the island of Cuba.) The developments that follow will show that these proportions are founded on numerical statements which may be regarded as the limit-numbers of the maximum.

The prognostics which are hazarded respecting the diminution of the total population of the island, at the period when the slave-trade shall be really abolished, and not merely according to the laws, as since 1820, respecting the impossibility of continuing the cultivation of sugar on a large scale, and respecting the approaching time when the agricultural industry of Cuba shall be restrained to plantations of coffee and tobacco, and the breeding of cattle, are founded on arguments which do not appear to me to be perfectly just. Instead of indulging in gloomy presages the planters would do well to wait till the government shall have procured positive statistical statements. The spirit in which even very old enumerations were made, for instance that of 1775, by the distinction of age, sex, race, and state of civil liberty, deserves high commendation. Nothing but the means of execution were wanting. It was felt that the inhabitants were powerfully interested in knowing partially the occupations of the blacks, and their numerical distribution in the sugar-settlements, farms and towns. To remedy evil, to avoid public danger, to console the misfortunes of a suffering race, who are feared more than is acknowledged, the wound must be probed; for in the social body, when governed by intelligence, there is found, as in organic bodies, a repairing force, which may be opposed to the most inveterate evils.

In the year 1811 the municipality and the Tribunal of Commerce of the Havannah computed the total population of the island of Cuba to be 600,000, including 326,000 people of colour, free or slaves, mulattos or blacks. At that time, nearly three-fifths of the people of colour resided in the jurisdiction of the Havannah, from Cape Saint Antonio to Alvarez. In this part it appears that the towns contained as many mulattos and free negroes as slaves, but that the coloured population of the towns was to that of the fields as two to three. In the eastern part of the island, on the contrary, from Alvarez to Santiago de Cuba and Cape Maysi, the men of colour inhabiting the towns nearly equalled in number those scattered in the farms. From 1811 till the end of 1825, the island of Cuba has received along the whole extent of its coast, by lawful and unlawful means, 185,000 African blacks, of whom the custom-house of the Havannah, only, registered from 1811 to 1820, about 116,000. This newly introduced mass has no doubt been spread more in the country than in the towns; it must have changed the relations which persons well informed of the localities had established in 1811, between the eastern and western parts of the island, between the towns and the fields. The negro slaves have much augmented in the eastern plantations; but the fact that, notwithstanding the importation of 185,000 bozal negroes, the mass of men of colour, free and slaves, has not augmented, from 1811 to 1825, more than 64,000, or one-fifth, shows that the changes in the relation of partial distribution are restrained within narrower limits than one would at first be inclined to admit.

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