The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

"Emancipation was preferred to apprenticeship, because of the inevitable and endless perplexities connected with the latter system."--David Cranstoun, Esq., colonial magistrate and planter.

"It is not pretended that emancipation was produced by the influence of religious considerations. It was a measure of mere convenience and interest."--A Moravian Missionary.

The following testimony is extracted from a letter addressed to us by a highly respectable merchant of St. John's--a gentleman of long experience on the island, and now agent for several estates. "Emancipation was an act of mere policy, adopted as the safest and most economic measure."

Our last item of testimony under this head is from a written statement by the Hon. N. Nugent, speaker of the assembly, at the time of emancipation. His remarks on this subject, although long, we are sure will be read with interest. Alluding to the adoption of immediate emancipation in preference to the apprenticeship, he observes:--

"The reasons and considerations which led to this step were various, of course impressing the minds of different individuals in different degrees. As slave emancipation could not be averted, and must inevitably take place very shortly, it was better to meet the crisis at once, than to have it hanging over our heads for six years, with all its harassing doubts and anxieties; better to give an air of grace to that which would be ultimately unavoidable; the slaves should rather have a motive of gratitude and kind reciprocation, than to feel, on being declared free, that their emancipation could neither be withheld nor retarded by their owners. The projected apprenticeship, while it destroyed the means of an instant coercion in a state of involuntary labor, equally withdrew or neutralized all those urgent motives which constrain to industrious exertion in the case of freemen. It abstracted from the master, in a state of things then barely remunerative, one fourth of the time and labor required in cultivation, and gave it to the servant, while it compelled the master to supply the same allowances as before. With many irksome restraints, conditions, and responsibilities imposed on the master, it had no equivalent advantages. There appeared no reason, in short, why general emancipation would not do as well in 1834 as in 1840. Finally, a strong conviction existed that from peculiarity of climate and soil, the physical wants and necessities of the peasantry would compel them to labor for their subsistence, to seek employment and wages from the proprietors of the soil; and if the transformation could be safely and quietly brought about, that the free system might be cheaper and more profitable than the other."

The general testimony of planters, missionaries, clergymen, merchants, and others, was in confirmation of the same truth.

There is little reason to believe that the views of the colonists on this subject have subsequently undergone much change. We did not hear, excepting occasionally among the missionaries and clergy, the slightest insinuation thrown out that slavery was sinful; that the slaves had a right to freedom, or that it would have been wrong to have continued them in bondage. The politics of anti-slavery the Antiguans are exceedingly well versed in, but of its religion, they seem to feel but little. They seem never to have examined slavery in its moral relations; never to have perceived its monstrous violations of right and its impious tramplings upon God and man. The Antigua planters, it would appear, have yet to repent of the sin of slaveholding.

If the results of an emancipation so destitute of principle, so purely selfish, could produce such general satisfaction, and be followed by such happy results, it warrants us in anticipating still more decided and unmingled blessings in the train of a voluntary, conscientious, and religious abolition.

THIRD PROPOSITION.--The event of emancipation passed PEACEFULLY. The first of August, 1834, is universally regarded in Antigua, as having presented a most imposing and sublime moral spectacle. It is almost impossible to be in the company of a missionary, a planter, or an emancipated negro, for ten minutes, without hearing some allusion to that occasion. Even at the time of our visit to Antigua, after the lapse of nearly three years, they spoke of the event with an admiration apparently unabated.

For some time previous to the first of August, forebodings of disaster lowered over the island. The day was fixed! Thirty thousand degraded human beings were to be brought forth from the dungeon of slavery and "turned loose on the community!" and this was to be done "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye."