The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION FROM E.B. LYON, ESQ., SPECIAL MAGISTRATE.

Jamaica, Hillingdon, near Falmouth, Trelawney, May 15, 1837.

TO J.H. KIMBALL., ESQ., and J.A. THOME, ESQ.

DEAR SIRS,--Of the operation of the apprenticeship system in this district, from the slight opportunity I have had of observing the conduct of managers and apprentices, I could only speak conjecturally, and my opinions, wanting the authority of experience, would be of little service to you; I shall therefore confine the remarks I have to make, to the operation of the system in the district from which I have lately removed.

I commenced my duties in August, 1834, and from the paucity of special magistrates at that eventful era, I had the superintendence of a most extensive district, comprising nearly one half of the populous parish of St. Thomas in the East, and the whole of the parish of St. David, embracing an apprentice population of nearly eighteen thousand,--in charge of which I continued until December, when I was relieved of St. David, and in March, 1835, my surveillance was confined to that portion of St. Thomas in the East, consisting of the coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains, and the sugar estates of Blue Mountain Valley, over which I continued to preside until last March, a district containing a population of four thousand two hundred and twenty-seven apprentices, of which two thousand eighty-seven were males, and two thousand one hundred and forty, females. The apprentices of the Blue Mountain Valley were, at the period of my assumption of the duties of a special magistrate, the most disorderly in the island. They were greatly excited, and almost desperate from disappointment, in finding their trammels under the new law, nearly as burdensome as under the old, and their condition, in many respects, much more intolerable. They were also extremely irritated at what they deemed an attempt upon the part of their masters to rob them of one of the greatest advantages they had been led to believe the new law secured to them--this was the half of Friday. Special Justice Everard, who went through the district during the first two weeks of August, 1834, and who was the first special justice to read and explain the new law to them, had told them that the law gave to them the extra four and a half hours on the Friday, and some of the proprietors and managers, who were desirous of preparing their people for the coming change, had likewise explained it so; but, most unfortunately, the governor issued a proclamation, justifying the masters in withholding the four and a half hours on that day, and substituting any other half day, or by working them eight hours per day, they might deprive them altogether of the advantage to be derived from the extra time, which, by the abolition of Sunday marketing, was almost indispensable to people whose grounds, in some instances, were many miles from their habitations, and who were above thirty miles from Kingston market, where prices were fifty per cent. more than the country markets in their favor for the articles they had to dispose of, and correspondingly lower for those they had to purchase. To be in time for which market, it was necessary to walk all Friday night, so that without the use of the previous half day, they could not procure their provisions, or prepare themselves for it. The deprivation of the half of Friday was therefore a serious hardship to them, and this, coupled to the previous assurance of their masters, and Special Justice Everard, that they were entitled to it, made them to suspect a fraud was about being practised on them, which, if they did not resist, would lead to the destruction of the remaining few privileges they possessed. The resistance was very general, but without violence; whole gangs leaving the fields on the afternoon of Friday; refusing to take any other afternoon, and sometimes leaving the estates for two or three days together. They fortunately had confidence in me--and I succeeded in restoring order, and all would have been well,--but the managers, no longer alarmed by the fear of rebellion or violence, began a system of retaliation and revenge, by withdrawing cooks, water-carriers, and nurses, from the field, by refusing medicine and admittance to the hospital to the apprentice children, and by compelling old and infirm people, who had been allowed to withdraw from labor, and mothers of six children, who were exempt by the slave law from hard labor, to come out and work in the field. All this had a natural tendency to create irritation, and did do so; though, to the great credit of the people, in many instances, they submitted with the most extraordinary patience, to evils which were the more onerous, because inflicted under the affected sanction of a law, whose advent, as the herald of liberty, they had expected would have been attended with a train of blessings. I effected a change in this miserable state of things; and mutual contract for labor, in crop and out of it, were made on twenty-five estates in my district, before, I believe, any arrangement had been made in other parts of the island, between the managers and the apprentices; so that from being in a more unsettled state than others, we were soon happily in a more prosperous one, and so continued.

No peasantry in the most favored country on the globe, can have been more irreproachable in morals and conduct than the majority of apprentices in that district, since the beginning of 1835. I have, month after month, in my despatches to the governor, had to record instances of excess of labor, compared with the quantity performed during slavery in some kinds of work; and while I have with pleasure reported the improving condition, habits, manners, and the industry which characterized the labors of the peasantry, I have not been an indifferent or uninterested witness of the improvement in the condition of many estates, the result of the judicious application of labor, and of the confidence in the future and sanguine expectations of the proprietors, evinced in the enlargements of the works, and expensive and permanent repair of the buildings on various estates, and in the high prices given for properties and land since the apprenticeship system, which would scarcely have commanded a purchaser, at any price, during the existence of slavery.

I have invariably found the apprentice willing to work for an equitable hire, and on all the sugar estates, and several of the plantations, in the district I speak of, they worked a considerable portion of their own time during crop, about the works, for money, or an equivalent in herrings, sugar, etc., to so great a degree, that less than the time allotted to them during slavery, was left for appropriation to the cultivation of their grounds, and for marketing, as the majority, very much to their credit, scrupulously avoided working on the Sabbath day.

In no community in the world is crime less prevalent. At the quarter sessions, in January last, for the precinct of St. Thomas in the East, and St. David, which contains an apprentice population of about thirty thousand, there was only one apprentice tried. And the offences that have, in general, for the last eighteen months, been brought before me on estates, have been of the most trivial description, such as an individual occasionally turning out late, or some one of an irritable temper answering impatiently, or for some trifling act of disobedience; in fact, the majority of apprentices on estates have been untainted with offence, and have steadily and quietly performed their duty, and respected the law. The apprentices of St. Thomas in the East, I do not hesitate to say, are much superior in manners and morals to those who inhabit the towns.

During the first six or eight months, while the planters were in doubt how far the endurance of their laborers might be taxed, the utmost deference and respect was paid by them to the special magistrates; their suggestions or recommendations were adopted without cavil, and opinions taken without reference to the letter of the law; but when the obedience of the apprentice, and his strict deference to the law and its administrators, had inspired them with a consciousness of perfect security, I observed with much regret, a great alteration in the deportment of many of the managers towards myself and the people; trivial and insignificant complaints were astonishingly increased, and assaults on apprentices became more frequent, so that in the degree that the conduct of one party was more in accordance with the obligations imposed on him by the apprenticeship, was that of the other in opposition to it; again with the hold and infirm harassed; again were mothers of six living children attempted to be forced to perform field labor; and again were mothers with sucking children complained of, and some attempts made to deprive them of the usual nurses.

Such treatment was not calculated to promote cordiality between master and apprentice, and the effect will, I fear, have a very unfavorable influence upon the working of many estates, at the termination of the system; in fact, when that period arrives, if the feeling of estrangement be no worse, I am convinced it will be no better than it is at the present moment, as I have witnessed no pains taking on the part of the attorneys generally to attach the apprentices to the properties, or to prepare them in a beneficial manner for the coming change. It was a very common practice in the district, when an apprentice was about to purchase his discharge, to attempt to intimidate him by threats of immediate ejectment from the property, and if in the face of this threatened separation from family and connections, he persevered and procured his release, then the sincerity of the previous intimations was evinced by a peremptory order, to instantly quit the property, under the penalty of having the trespass act enforced against him; and if my interference prevented any outrageous violation of law, so many obstructions and annoyances were placed in the way of his communication with his family, or enjoyment of his domestic rights, that he would be compelled for their peace, and his own personal convenience, to submit to privations, which, as a slave, he would not have been subject to. The consequence is, that those released from the obligations of the apprenticeship by purchase, instead of being located, and laboring for hire upon the estate to which they were attached, and forming a nucleus around which others would have gathered and settled themselves, they have been principally driven to find other homes, and in the majority of instances have purchased land, and become settlers on their own account. If complete emancipation had taken place in 1834, there would have been no more excitement, and no more trouble to allay it, than that which was the consequence of the introduction of the present system of coerced and uncompensated labor. The relations of society would have been fixed upon a permanent basis, and the two orders would not have been placed in that situation of jealousy and suspicion which their present anomalous condition has been the baneful means of creating.