FEBRUARY 22.
During many years the Moravians have been established upon the neighbouring estate of Mesopotamia. As the ecclesiastical commissaries had said so much to me respecting the great appetite of the negroes for religious instruction, I was desirous of learning what progress had been made in this quarter, and this morning I went over to see one of the teachers. He told me, that he and his wife had jointly used their best efforts to produce a sense of religion in the minds of the slaves; that they were all permitted to attend his morning and evening lectures, if they chose it; but that he could not say that they showed any great avidity on the subject. It seems that there are at least three hundred negroes on the estate; the number of believers has rather increased than diminished, to be sure, but still in a very small proportion. When this gentleman arrived, there were not more than forty baptised persons: he has been here upwards of five years, and still the number of persons “belonging to his church” (as he expressed it) does not exceed fifty. Of these, seldom more than ten or a dozen attend his lectures at a time. As to the remaining two hundred and fifty, they take no more notice of his lectures or his exhortations, than if there were no such person on the property, are only very civil to him when they see him, and go on in their own old way, without suffering him to interfere in any shape. By the overseer of Greenwich’s express desire, the Moravian has, however, agreed to give up an hour every day for the religious instruction of the negro children on that property: and I should certainly request him to extend his labours to Cornwall, if I did not think it right to give the Church of England clergymen full room for a trial of their intended periodical visitations; which would not be the case, if the negroes were to be interfered with by the professors of any other communion: otherwise I am myself ready to give free ingress and egress upon my several estates to the teachers of any Christian sect whatever, the Methodists always excepted, and “Miss Peg, who faints at the sound of an organ.”
For my own part, I have no hope of any material benefit arising from these religious visitations made at quarterly intervals. It seems to me as nugatory as if a man were to sow a field with horse-hair, and expect a crop of colts.