The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

[Footnote [B]: We had a specimen of the stuff special magistrates are made of in sailing from Barbadoes to Jamaica. The vessel was originally an English man-of-war brig, which had been converted into a steamer, and was employed by the English government, in conveying the island mails from Barbadoes to Jamaica--to and fro. She was still under the strict discipline of a man-of-war. The senior officer on board was a lieutenant. This man was one of the veriest savages on earth. His passions were in a perpetual storm, at some times higher than at others, occasionally they blew a hurricane. He quarrelled with his officers, and his orders to his men were always uttered in oaths. Scarcely a day passed that he did not have some one of his sailors flogged. One night, the cabin boy left the water-can sitting on the cabin floor, instead of putting it on the sideboard, where it usually stood. For this offence the commander ordered him up on deck after midnight, and made the quarter-master flog him. The instrument used in this case, (the regular flogging stick having been used up by previous service,) was the commander's cane--a heavy knotted club. The boy held out one hand and received the blows. He howled most piteously, and it was some seconds before he recovered sufficiently from the pain to extend the other. "Lay on," stormed the commander. Down went the cane a second time. We thought it must have broken every bone in the boy's hand. This was repeated several times, the boy extending each hand alternately, and recoiling at every blow. "Now lay on to his back," sternly vociferated the commander--"give it to him--hard--lay on harder." The old seaman, who had some mercy in his heart, seemed very loth to lay out his strength on the boy with such a club. The commander became furious--cursed and swore--and again yelled, "Give it to him harder, more--MORE--MORE--there, stop." "you infernal villain"--speaking to the quarter-master and using the most horrid oaths--"You infernal villain, if you do not lay on harder the next time I command you, I'll have you put in irons." The boy limped away, writhing in every joint, and crying piteously, when the commander called at him, "Silence there, you imp--or I'll give you a second edition." One of the first things the commander did after we left Barbadoes, was to have a man flogged, and the last order we heard him give as we left the steamer at Kingston, was to put two of the men in irons.]

It is not a little remarkable that the apprenticeship should be regarded by the planters themselves, as well as by other persons generally throughout the colony, as merely a modified form of slavery. It is common to hear it called 'slavery under a different form,' 'another name for slavery,'--'modified slavery,' 'but little better than slavery.'

Nor is the practical operation of the system upon the master much less exceptionable. It takes out of his hand the power of coercing labor, and provides no other stimulus. Thus it subjects him to the necessity either of resorting to empty threats, which must result only in incessant disputes, or of condescending to persuade and entreat, against which his habits at once rebel, or of complaining to a third party--an alternative more revolting if possible, than the former, since it involves the acknowledgment of a higher power than his own. It sets up over his actions a foreign judge, at whose bar he is alike amenable (in theory) with his apprentice, before whose tribunal he may be dragged at any moment by his apprentice, and from whose lips he may receive the humiliating sentence of punishment in the presence of his apprentice. It introduces between him and his laborers, mutual repellancies and estrangement; it encourages the former to exercise an authority which he would not venture to assume under a system of perfect freedom; it emboldens the latter to display an insolence which he would not have dreamed of in a state of slavery, and thus begetting in the one, the imperiousness of the slaveholder without his power, and in the other, the independence of the freeman without his immunities, it perpetuates a scene of angry collision, jealousy and hatred.

It does not even serve for the master the unworthy purpose for which it was mainly devised, viz., that of an additional compensation. The apprenticeship is estimated to be more expensive than a system of free labor would be. It is but little less expensive than slavery, and freedom it is confidently expected will be considerably less. So it would seem that this system burthens the master with much of the perplexity, the ignominy and the expensiveness of slavery, while it denies him its power. Such is the apprenticeship system. A splendid imposition!--which cheats the planter of his gains, cheats the British nation of its money, and robs the world of what else might have been a glorious example of immediate and entire emancipation.

THE APPRENTICESHIP IS NO PREPARATION FOR FREEDOM.--Indeed, as far as it can be, it is an actual disqualification. The testimony on this subject is ample. We rarely met a planter, who was disposed to maintain that the apprenticeship was preparing the negroes for freedom. They generally admitted that the people were no better prepared for freedom now, than they were in 1834; and some of them did not hesitate to say that the sole use to which they and their brother planters turned the system, was to get as much work out of the apprentices while it lasted, as possible. Clergymen and missionaries, declared that the apprenticeship was no preparation for freedom. If it were a preparation at all, it would most probably be so in a religious and educational point of view. We should expect to find the masters, if laboring at all to prepare their apprentices for freedom, doing so chiefly by encouraging missionaries and teachers to come to their estates, and by aiding in the erection of chapels and school-houses. But the missionaries declare that they meet with little more direct encouragement now, than they did during slavery.

The special magistrates also testify that the apprenticeship is no preparation for freedom. On this subject they are very explicit.

The colored people bear the same testimony. Not a few, too, affirm, that the tendency of the apprenticeship is to unfit the negroes for freedom, and avow it as their firm persuasion, that the people will be less prepared for liberty at the end of the apprenticeship, than they were at its commencement. And it is not without reason that they thus speak. They say, first, that the bickerings and disputes to which the system gives rise between the master and the apprentice, and the arraigning of each other before the special magistrate, are directly calculated to alienate the parties. The effect of these contentions, kept up for six years, will be to implant deep mutual hostility; and the parties will be a hundred fold more irreconcilable than they were on the abolition of slavery. Again, they argue that the apprenticeship system is calculated to make the negroes regard law as their foe, and thus it unfits them for freedom. They reason thus--the apprentice looks to the magistrate as his judge, his avenger, his protector; he knows nothing of either law or justice except as he sees them exemplified in the decisions of the magistrate. When, therefore, the magistrate sentences him to punishment, when he knows he was the injured party, he will become disgusted with the very name of justice, and esteem law his greatest enemy.

The neglect of the planters to use the apprenticeship as a preparation for freedom, warrants us in the conclusion, that they do not think any preparation necessary. But we are not confined to doubtful inferences on this point. They testify positively--and not only planters, but all other classes of men likewise--that the slaves of Barbadoes were fit for entire freedom in 1834, and that they might have been emancipated then with perfect safety. Whatever may have been the sentiment of the Barbadians relative to the necessity of preparation before the experiment was made, it is clear that now they have no confidence either in the necessity or the practicability of preparatory schemes.

But we cannot close our remarks upon the apprenticeship system without noticing one good end which it has undesignedly accomplished, i.e., the illustration of the good disposition of the colored people. We firmly believe that if the friends of emancipation had wished to disprove all that has ever been said about the ferocity and revengefulness of the negroes, and at the same time to demonstrate that they possess, in a pre-eminent degree, those other qualities which render them the fit subjects of liberty and law, they could not have done it more triumphantly than it has been done by the apprenticeship. How this has been done may be shown by pointing out several respects in which the apprenticeship has been calculated to try the negro character most severely, and to develop all that was fiery and rebellious in it.

1. The apprenticeship removed that strong arm of slavery and substituted no adequate force. The arbitrary power of the master, which awed the slave into submission, was annihilated. The whip which was held over the slave, and compelled a kind of subordination--brutal, indeed, but effectual--was abolished. Here in the outset the reins were given to the long-oppressed, but now aspiring mass. No adequate force was substituted, because it was the intent of the new system to govern by milder means. This was well, but what were the milder means which were to take the place of brute force?