Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays; Vol. 6 / With a Memoir and Index

by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay

Mr. Wall was Governor at Goree. In that situation he flogged a man to death, on pretence of mutiny. On his return to England, he was indicted for murder. He escaped to the Continent. For twenty years he remained in exile. For twenty years the English people retained the impression of his crime uneffaced within their hearts. He shifted his residence—he disguised his person—he changed his name,—still their eyes were upon him, for evil, and not for good. At length, conceiving that all danger was at an end, he returned. He was tried, convicted, and hanged, amidst the huzzas of an innumerable multitude. (1)

Edward Huggins of Nevis, about fifteen years ago, flogged upwards of twenty slaves in the public market-place, with such severity as to produce the death of one, and to ruin the

(1) We should be far, indeed, from applauding those shouts,
if they were the exultation of cruelty; but they arose from
the apprehension that Court favour was about to save the
criminal; and the feeling expressed was for the triumph of
justice.

constitutions of many. He had grossly violated the law of the Colony, which prescribes a limit to such inflictions. He had violated it in open day, and in the presence of a magistrate. He was indicted by the law officer of the crown. His advocate acknowledged the facts, but argued that the act on which he was tried, was passed only to silence the zealots in England, and was never intended to be enforced. Huggins was acquitted! But that was a trifle. Some members of the House of Assembly lost their seats at the next election, for taking part against him. A printer of a neighbouring island was convicted of a libel, merely for publishing an official report of the evidence, transmitted to him by authority. In a word, he was considered as a martyr to the common cause, and grew in influence and popularity; while a most respectable planter, an enlightened and accomplished gentleman, Mr. Tobin, who, nobly despising the prejudices of his class, had called the attention of the government to these diabolical outrages, was menaced with prosecutions, assailed with slanders, and preserved only by blindness from challenges.

Let these cases be compared. We do not say that Wall was not as bad a man as Huggins; but we do say that the English people have nothing to do with the crime of Wall, and that the public character of the people of Nevis suffers seriously by the crime of Huggins. They have adopted the guilt, and they must share in the infamy. We know that the advocates of slavery affect to deride this and similar narratives as old and threadbare. They sneer at them in conversation, and cough them down in the House of Commons. But it is in vain. They are written on the hearts of the people; and they will be remembered when all the smooth nothings of all the official defenders of such transactions are forgotten.

The truth is simply this. Bad laws and bad customs, reciprocally producing and produced by each other, have given to the Whites in all the slave islands—Dutch, Spanish, French and English—a peculiar character, in which almost all the traits, which, in this quarter of the world, distinguish the different nations, are lost. We think we describe that character sufficiently when we call it the despotic character. In nothing does this temper more strongly appear than in the rage and contempt with which the Colonists receive every command, and indeed every admonition, from the authorities of the mother country. When the territorial power and the commercial monopoly of the East India Company haws been at stake, has that great body conducted itself thus? Do even foreign powers treat us in this manner? We have often remonstrated with the greatest sovereigns of the Continent on the subject of the slave trade. We have been repulsed—we have been deluded. But by whom have we been insulted? The representations of the King and people of England have never been met with outrageous scorn and anger,—except by the men who owe their food to our bounties, and their lives to our troops. To the most gentle and moderate advice, to the suggestions of the most respectable of the West Indian proprietors resident in England, they reply only in ravings of absurd slander, or impotent defiance. The essays in their newspapers, the speeches of their legislators, the resolutions of their vestries, are, almost without exception, mere collections of rancorous abuse, unmixed with argument. If the Antislavery Society would publish a small tract, containing simply the leading articles of five or six numbers of the Jamaica Gazette, without note or comment, they would, we believe, do more to illustrate the character of their adversaries than by any other means which can be devised. Such a collection would exhibit to the country the real nature of that malignant spirit which banished Salisbury, which destroyed Smith, and which broke the honest heart of Ramsay.

It is remarkable, that most of these zealots of slavery have little or no pecuniary interest in the question. If the colonies should be ruined, the loss will fall, not upon the book-keepers, the overseers, the herd of needy emigrants who make up the noisy circles of Jamaica; but upon the Ellises, the Hibberts, the Mannings, men of the most respectable characters and enlightened minds in the country. They might have been excused, if any person could be excused, for employing violent and abusive language. Yet they have conducted themselves, not perhaps exactly as we might wish them, but still like gentlemen, like men of sense, like men of feeling. Why is this? Simply because they live in England, and participate in English feelings. The Colonists, on the other hand, are degraded by familiarity with oppression. Let us not be deceived. The cry which resounds from the West Indies is raised by men, who are trembling less for their property than for the privileges of their caste. These are the persons who love slavery for its own sake. The declarations so often made by the Parliament, by the Ministers, by the deadliest enemies of slavery, that the interests of all parties will be fairly considered, and that wherever a just claim to compensation can be established, compensation will be given, bring no comfort to them. They may have no possessions, but they have white faces. Should compensation be given, few of them will receive a sixpence; but they will lose the power of oppressing with impunity every man who has a black skin. And it is to these men, who have scarcely any interest in the value of colonial property, but who have a deep interest,—the interest of a petty tyranny, and a despicable pride in the maintenance of colonial injustice, that the British Parliament is required to give up its unquestionable right of superintendence over every part of our empire. If this were requested as a matter of indulgence, or recommended as a matter of expediency, we might well be surprised. But it is demanded as a constitutional right. On what does this right rest? On what statute? On what charter? On what precedent? On what analogy? That the uniform practice of past ages has been against their claim, they themselves do not venture to deny. Do they mean to assert, that a parliament in which they are not represented ought not to legislate for them? That question we leave them to settle with their friends of the Quarterly Review and the John Bull newspaper, who, we hope, will enlighten them on the subject of virtual representation. If ever that expression could be justly used, it would be in the present case; for probably there is no interest more fully represented in both Houses of Parliament, than that of the colonial proprietors. But for ourselves we answer, What have you to do with such doctrines? If you will adopt the principles of liberty, adopt them altogether. Every argument which you can urge in support of your own claims, might be employed, with far greater justice, in favour of the emancipation of your bondsmen. When that event shall have taken place, your demand will deserve consideration. At present, what you require under the name of freedom is nothing but unlimited power to oppress. It is the freedom of Nero.

“But we will rebel!” Who can refrain from thinking of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who, while raised sixty feet from the ground on the hand of the King of Brohdignag, claps his hand on his sword and tells his Majesty that he knows how to defend himself? You will rebel! Bravely resolved, most magnanimous Grildrig! But remember the wise remark of Lord Beelington—“courage without power,” said that illustrious exile, “is like a consumptive running footman.” What are your means of resistance? Are there, in all the islands put together, ten thousand white men capable of hearing arms? Are not your forces, such as they are, divided into small portions which can never act in concert? But this is mere trifling. Are you, in point of fact, at this moment able to protect yourselves against your slaves without our assistance? If you can still rise up and be down in security—if you can still eat the bread of the fatherless, and grind the faces of the poor—if you can still hold your petty parliaments, and say your little speeches, and move, your little motions—if you can still outrage and insult the Parliament and people of England, to what do you owe it? To nothing but to our contemptuous mercy. If we suspend our protection—if we recall our troops—in a week the knife is at your throats!

Look to it, that we do not take you at your word. What are you to us that we should pamper and defend you? If the Atlantic Ocean should pass over you, and your place know you no more, what should we lose? Could we find no other cultivators to accept of our enormous bounties on sugar?—no other pestilential region to which we might send our soldiers to catch the yellow fever?—no other community for which we might pour forth our blood and lavish our money, to purchase nothing but injuries and insults? What do we make by you? If England is no longer to be the mistress of her colonies,—if she is to be only the handmaid of their pleasures, or the accomplice of their crimes, she may at least venture to ask, as a handmaid, what are to be the wages of her service,—as an accomplice, what is to be her portion of the spoil? If justice, and mercy, and liberty, and the law of God, and the happiness of man, be words without a meaning, we at least talk to the purpose when we talk of pounds, shillings, and pence.

Let us count our gains. Let us bring to the test the lofty phrases of Colonial declamation. The West Indies, we are told, are a source of vast wealth and revenue to the country. They are a nursery of seamen. They take great quantities of our manufactures. They add to our political importance. They are useful posts in time of war. These absurdities have been repeated, till they have begun to impose upon the impostors who invented them. Let us examine them briefly.