The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

On our return to Morant Bay, we visited the house of correction, situated near the village. This is the only "institution," as a Kingston paper gravely terms it, of the kind in the parish. It is a small, ill-constructed establishment, horribly filthy, more like a receptacle for wild beasts than human beings. There is a treadmill connected with it, made to accommodate fifteen persons at a time. Alternate companies ascend the wheel every fifteen minutes. It was unoccupied when we went in; most of the prisoners being at work on the public roads. Two or three, who happened to be near by, were called in by the keeper, and ordered to mount the wheel, to show us how it worked. It made our blood run cold as we thought of the dreadful suffering that inevitably ensues, when the foot loses the step, and the body hangs against the revolving cylinder.

Leaving the house of correction, we proceeded to the village. In a small open square in the centre of it, we saw a number of the unhappy inmates of the house of correction at work under the direction, we are sorry to say, of our friend Thomas Thomson, Esq. They were chained two and two by heavy chains fastened to iron bands around their necks. On another occasion, we saw the same gang at work in the yard attached to the Independent chapel.

We received a visit, at our lodgings, from the special justice of this district, Major Baines. He was accompanied by Mr. Thomson, who came to introduce him as his friend. We were not left to this recommendation alone, suspicious as it was, to infer the character of this magistrate, for we were advertised previously that he was a "planter's man"--unjust and cruel to the apprentices. Major B. appeared to have been looking through his friend Thomson's prophetic telescope. There was certainly a wonderful coincidence of vision--the same abandonment of labor, the same preying upon provision grounds; the same violence, bloodshed and great loss of life among the negroes themselves! However, the special magistrate appeared to see a little further than the local magistrate, even to the end of the carnage, and to the re-establishment of industry, peace and prosperity. The evil, he was confident, would soon cure itself.

One remark of the special magistrate was worthy a prophet. When asked if he thought there would be any serious disaffection produced among the praedials by the emancipation of the non-praedials in 1838, he said, he thought there would not be, and assigned as the reason, that the praedials knew all about the arrangement, and did not expect to be free. That is, the field apprentices knew that the domestics were to be liberated two years sooner than they, and, without inquiring into the grounds, or justice of the arrangement, they would promptly acquiesce in it!

What a fine compliment to the patience and forbearance of the mass of the negroes. The majority see the minority emancipated two years before them, and that, too, upon the ground of an odious distinction which makes the domestic more worthy than they who "bear the heat and burthen of the day," in the open field; and yet they submit patiently, because they are told that it is the pleasure of government that it should be so!

The non-praedials, too, have their noble traits, as well as the less favored agriculturalists. The special magistrate said that he was then engaged in classifying the apprentices of the different estates in his district. The object of this classification was, to ascertain all those who were non-praedials, that they might be recorded as the subjects of emancipation in 1838. To his astonishment he found numbers of this class who expressed a wish to remain apprentices until 1840. On one estate, six out of eight took this course, on another, twelve out of fourteen, and in some instances, all the non-praedials determined to suffer it out with the rest of their brethren, refusing to accept freedom until with the whole body they could rise up and shout the jubilee of universal disinthrallment. Here is a nobility worthy to compare with the patience of the praedials. In connection with the conduct of the non-praedials, he mentioned the following instance of white brutality and negro magnanimity. A planter, whose negroes he was classifying, brought forward a woman whom he claimed as a praedial. The woman declared that she was a non-praedial, and on investigation it was clearly proved that she had always been a domestic; and consequently entitled to freedom in 1838. After the planter's claim was set aside, the woman said, "Now I will stay with massa, and be his 'prentice for de udder two year."

Shortly before we left the Bay, our landlady, a colored woman, introduced one of her neighbors, whose conversation afforded us a rare treat. She was a colored lady of good appearance and lady like manners. Supposing from her color that she had been prompted by strong sympathy in our objects to seek an interview with us, we immediately introduced the subject of slavery, stating that as we had a vast number of slaves in our country, we had visited Jamaica to see how the freed people behaved, with the hope that our countrymen might be encouraged to adopt emancipation. "Alack a day!" The tawny madam shook her head, and, with that peculiar creole whine, so expressive of contempt, said, "Can't say any thing for you, sir--they not doing no good now, sir--the negroes an't!"--and on she went abusing the apprentices, and denouncing abolition. No American white lady could speak more disparagingly of the niggers, than did this recreant descendant of the negro race. They did no work, they stole, were insolent, insubordinate, and what not.

She concluded in the following elegiac strain, which did not fail to touch our sympathies. "I can't tell what will become of us after 1840. Our negroes will be taken away from us--we shall find no work to do ourselves--we shall all have to beg, and who shall we beg from? All will be beggars, and we must starve!"

Poor Miss L. is one of that unfortunate class who have hitherto gained a meagre support from the stolen hire of a few slaves, and who, after entire emancipation, will be stripped of every thing. This is the class upon whom emancipation will fall most heavily; it will at once cast many out of a situation of ease, into the humiliating dilemma of laboring or begging--to the latter of which alternatives, Miss L. seems inclined. Let Miss L. be comforted! It is better to beg than to steal.

We proceeded from Morant Bay to Bath, a distance of fourteen miles, where we put up at a neat cottage lodging-house, kept by Miss P., a colored lady. Bath is a picturesque little village, embowered in perpetual green, and lying at the foot of a mountain on one side, and on the other by the margin of a rambling little river. It seems to have accumulated around it and within it, all the verdure and foliage of a tropical clime.