Sugar, Rum, Coffee,
hhds. puncheons. lbs.
——— ————— ———-
In the three years
ending with 1802,
the average exports
were, of 113,000 44,000 14,000,000
Whereas those of the three years ending with 1829 were only 92,000 34,000 17,000,000
The system which looked to depriving the cultivator of the advantage of a market near at hand, to which he could carry his products, and from which he could carry home the manure and thus maintain the powers of his land, was thus producing its natural results. It was causing the slave to became from day to day more enslaved; and that such was the case is shown by the excess of deaths over births, as given in a former chapter. Evidence of exhaustion was seen in every thing connected with the island. Labour and land were declining in value, and the security for the payment of the large debt due to mortgagees in England was becoming less from year to year, as more and more the people of other countries were being driven to the work of cultivation because of the impossibility of competing with England in manufactures. Sugar had declined to little more than a guinea a hundred-weight, and rum had fallen to little more than two shillings a gallon;[37] and nearly the whole of this must have been swallowed up in commissions and interest. Under such circumstances a great waste of life was inevitable; and therefore it is that we have seen importations of hundreds of thousands of black men, who have perished, leaving behind them no trace of their having ever existed. But on whom must rest the responsibility for a state of things so hideous as that here exhibited? Not, surely, upon the planter, for he exercised no volition whatsoever. He was not permitted to employ his surplus power in refining his own sugar. He could not legally introduce a spindle or a loom into the island. He could neither mine coal nor smelt iron ore. He could not in any manner repay his borrowings from the land, and, as a matter of course, the loans he could obtain diminished in quantity; and then, small as they were, the chief part of what his commodities exchanged for was swallowed up by the exchangers and those who superintend the exchanges, exercising the duties of government. He was a mere instrument in their hands for the destruction of negro morals, intellect, and life; and upon them, and not upon him, must rest the responsibility for the fact that, of all the slaves imported into the island, not more than two-fifths were represented on the day of emancipation.
Nevertheless, he it was that was branded as the tyrant and the destroyer of morals and of life; and public opinion—the public opinion of the same people who had absorbed so large a portion of the product of negro labour—drove the government to the measure of releasing the slave from compulsory service, and appropriating a certain amount to the payment, first, of the mortgage debts due in England, and, second, of the owner, who, even if he found his land delivered to him free of incumbrance, was in most cases left without a shilling to enable him to carry on the work of his plantation. The slaves were set free, but there existed no capital to find them employment, and from the moment of emancipation it became almost impossible to borrow money on mortgage security. The consequences are seen in the extensive abandonment of land and the decline of its value. Any quantity of it may be purchased, prepared for cultivation, and as fine as any in the island, for five dollars an acre, while other land, far more productive than any in New England, may be had at from fifty cents to one dollar. With the decline in the value of land the labourer tends toward barbarism, and the reason of this may be found on a perusal of the following paragraph:—
"They have no new manufactories to resort to when they are in want of work; no unaccustomed departments of mechanical or agricultural labour are open to receive them, to stimulate their ingenuity and reward their industry. When they know how to ply the hoe, pick the coffee-berry, and tend the sugar-mills, they have learned almost all the industry of the island can teach them. If, in the sixteen years during which the negroes have enjoyed their freedom, they have made less progress in civilization than their philanthropic champions have promised or anticipated, let the want I have suggested receive some consideration. It may be that even a white peasantry would degenerate under such influences. Reverse this, and when the negro has cropped his sugar or his coffee, create a demand for his labour in the mills and manufactories of which nature has invited the establishment on this island, and before another sixteen years would elapse the world would probably have some new facts to assist them in estimating the natural capabilities of the negro race, of more efficiency in the hands of the philanthropist than all the appeals which he has ever been able to address to the hearts or the consciences of men." Bigelow's Jamaica, p. 156.
The artisan has always been the ally of the agriculturist in his contest with the trader and the government, as is shown in the whole history of the world. The first desires to tax him by buying cheaply and selling dearly. The second desires to tax him for permitting him to make his exchanges, and the more distant the place of exchange, the greater the power of taxation. The artisan comes near to him, and enables him to have the raw materials combined on the spot, the producer of them exchanging directly with the consumer, paying no tax for the maintenance of ship-owners, commission merchants, or shopkeepers.
In a piece of cloth, says Adam Smith, weighing eighty pounds, there are not only more than eighty pounds of wool, but also "several thousand weight of corn, the maintenance of the working people," and it is the wool and the corn that travel cheaply in the form of cloth. What, however, finally becomes of the corn? Although eaten, it is not destroyed. It goes back again on the land, which becomes enriched; and the more that is taken from it; the more there is to be returned, the more it is enriched, the larger are the crops, and the greater is the ability of the farmer to make demands on the artisan. The reward of the latter increases with the growth in the value of the land and with the increase in the wealth of the land-owners by whom he is surrounded; and thus it is that all grow rich and free together, and that the community acquires from year to year power to resist attempts at taxation beyond that really needed for the maintenance of the rights of person and property. The greater the power to make exchanges at home, the greater will always be found the freedom of man in relation to thought, speech, action, and trade, and the greater the value of land.
The object of the policy pursued toward the colonies was directly the reverse of all this, tending to prevent any diversification whatsoever of employments, and thus not only to prevent increase in the value of land, but to diminish its value, because it forbade the return to the earth of any portion of its products. It forbade association, because it limited the whole people to a single pursuit. It forbade the immigration of artisans, the growth of towns, the establishment of schools, and consequently forbade the growth of intellect among the labourers or their owners. It forbade the growth of population, because it drove the women and the children to the culture of sugar among the richest and most unhealthy soils of the islands. It thus impoverished the land and its owners, exterminated the slave, and weakened the community, thus making it a mere instrument in the hands of the people who effected and superintended the exchanges—the merchants and the government—the class of persons that, in all ages, has thriven at the cost of the cultivator of the earth. By separating the consumer from the producer, they were enabled, as has been shown, to take to themselves three-fourths of the whole sales of the commodities consumed, leaving but one-fourth to be divided between the land and labour that had produced it. They, of course, grew strong, while the sugar-producing land and labour grew weak, and the weaker they became, the less was the need for regarding the rights of either. In this state of things it was that the landholder was required to accept a fixed sum of money as compensation for relinquishing his claim to demand of the labourer the performance of the work to which he had been accustomed. Unfortunately, however, the system pursued has effectually prevented that improvement of feeling and taste needed to produce in the latter desires for any thing beyond a sufficiency of food and a shirt. Towns and shops not having grown, he had not been accustomed even to see the commodities that tempted his fellow-labourers in the French Islands. Schools not having existed, even for the whites, he had acquired no desire for books for himself, or for instruction for his children. His wife had acquired no taste for dress, because she had been limited to field labour. Suddenly emancipated from control, they gratified the only desire that had been permitted to grow up in them—the love of perfect idleness, to be indulged to such extent as was consistent with obtaining the little food and clothing needed for the maintenance of existence.
Widely different would have been the state of affairs had they been permitted to make their exchanges at home, giving the cotton and the sugar for the cloth and the iron produced by the labour and from the soil of the island. The producer of the sugar would then have had all the cloth given for it by the consumer, instead of obtaining one-fourth of it, and then the land would have increased in value, the planter would have grown rich, and the labourer would have become free, by virtue of a great natural law which provides that the more rapid the augmentation of wealth, the greater must be the demand for labour, the greater must be the quantity of commodities produced by the labourer, the larger must be his proportion of the product, and the greater must be the tendency toward his becoming a free man and himself a capitalist.[38]
As a consideration for abstaining from converting their own sugar and cotton into cloth, it had been provided that their products should enjoy certain advantages in the ports of the mother country; and the understanding at the date of emancipation was that the free negro should continue in the enjoyment of the same privileges that had been allowed to the slave and his master. It was soon, however, discovered that the negro, having scarcely any desire beyond the food that could be obtained from a little patch of land, would not work, and that, consequently, the supply of sugar was reduced, with a large increase of price, and that thus the ship-owner suffered because of diminished freights, the merchant because of reduced consumption, and the government because of reduced revenue. Instead of obtaining, as before, one-fourth of the product, the cultivator had now perhaps one-half, because the taxes did not rise with the rise of price. Nevertheless, the land-owners and labourers of the island were weaker than before, for all power of association had disappeared; and now it was that the trader and the government discovered that if they would continue to draw from the sugar producers of the world their usual supplies of public and private revenue, they must resort again to slave labour, putting the poor free negro of Jamaica, with his exhausted soil, on the same footing with the slave of Brazil and Cuba, on a virgin soil; and this, too, at a moment when the science of Europe had triumphed over the difficulty of making sugar cheaply from the beet-root, and Germany, France, and Belgium were threatening to furnish supplies so abundant as almost to exclude the produce of the cane. They, too, had the sugar-refinery close at hand, whereas the poor free negro was not permitted to refine his product, nor is he so even now, although it is claimed that sugar might still be grown with advantage, were he permitted to exercise even that small amount of control over his labour and its products.