Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar / A Letter to the Members and Friends of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society

by J. Ewing Ritchie

“But this oppression did not long continue; for no sooner was the deed done, and the chain which bound the negro to his fellow-man irrecoverably snapped asunder, than it was found, even by the most sceptical, that free labour was decidedly more advantageous to the planter than the old system of slavery; that, in fact, an estate could be worked for less by free labour than it could when so many slaves, including old and young, weak and strong, were obliged to be maintained by the proprietors. Indeed, the truth of this assertion was discovered even before the negroes were free; for no sooner did the planters feel that no effort of theirs could prevent emancipation from taking place, than they commenced to calculate seriously the probable result of the change, and to their surprise found, upon mature deliberation, that their expenses would be diminished, and their comforts increased, by the abolition of slavery.”

Again, we are told, although there are some few persons who deny that free labour is less expensive than slavery, yet the general voice pronounces it a system beneficial to the country.

It has been proved to demonstration that estates which, under the old system, were clogged with debts they never could have paid off, have, since emancipation, not only cleared themselves, but put a handsome income into the pockets of their proprietors. Land was also increased greatly in value. Sugar plantations that would scarcely find a purchaser before emancipation, will now command from £10,000 sterling; [23] while many estates that were abandoned in days of slavery, are now once more in a state of cultivation, and the sugar-cane flourishes in verdant beauty where nothing was to be seen but rank and tangled weeds, or scanty herbage.

To put down slavery, then, we have only to let free labour have fair play. It is not the continuance of monopoly, but emigration, that is wanted. The first consequence of emancipation was the formation of a middle class where it had not before existed, which middle class was entirely subtracted from the agricultural population. 718,525 human beings were emancipated in our sugar colonies, including the Mauritius, of whom one-fourth were immediately absorbed in the formation of a middle class. Hence the deficiency in labour which at present affects the West India Islands. We believe, with Mr. Laird, [24] “that it is the quantity, not the quality, of labour that is wanting.” Indeed it has been shown that a free negro in Guiana creates double the amount of sugar that his enslaved countryman in Cuba does.

In many parts of the East labourers may be hired at three-halfpence and two-pence a day. From the evidence given before the West African Committee, we learn, that wages average from two-pence to four-pence a day in our three settlements on the coast of Africa. The cost of the slave in Cuba or Brazil equals this. Let the experiment be fairly tried, and it will soon be evident that slave labour must be driven out of the market. That becomes still plainer when we look at the actual condition of the slave-grown sugar. From Cuba every fresh post brings a continuance of bad news. There is a want of capital and skill—a blight rests upon the land—property and life are insecure. On March 6th, a statement appeared in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, giving an account of the wretched condition of the slaves. “We are credibly informed,” observes the editor, “that on some of the sugar plantations in Cuba the slaves are in a most miserable condition—not less than the half of a gang being sickly, covered with sores, and even cripples—the whip supplying virtue and strength, health and numbers. Unable to ‘trot’ to the field, they are placed on carts and carried to it, there to creep and toil by the help of the lash. No description can exhibit the neglect, cruelty, and inhumanity, with which they are treated. In crop-time they have no holiday—no Sunday—and no sleep!” The Times gave the following, as from Havanna, under date of February 17:—“A slaver, with 1200 negroes, has arrived on our coast. They have been offered at 340 dollars a-head, and our planters has determined to buy no more, and none of this cargo has been disposed of. No one is now inclined to encourage this abominable traffic, which begins to be considered as highly injurious to the welfare of the island. Several corporations and planters have given in reports favourable to the total abolition of the slave trade; it is understood these will be sent forthwith to the Spanish Government.”

The negroes have imbibed ideas of freedom which at no distant time will produce, by fair means or foul, a change in their condition. The planter already begins to perceive, that it is far better to be the employer of faithful and contented labourers, than the lord of men who feel their wrongs, and who wait but the first moment of revenge. Capital, the life-blood of industry, will never flow into a country till the capitalist has a pledge—a pledge no land of slaves can ever give—that the life he hazards, and the money he invests, are alike secure. Were the duty on sugar so reduced to-morrow as to put it in the power of the working man to consume as much as he required, an impulse would be given to the production of sugar which would create a demand for capital—which capital would alone be safely invested where labour is free. With a plentiful supply of labourers, no one can deny that Jamaica would be a far more eligible country for the capitalist than Cuba or Brazil; and hence the slave-trade dealers would be thrown for ever out of the markets of the world.

To put down slavery, then, we must under-sell the slave dealer. Emigration from the coast of Africa to the West Indies must be encouraged. At present wages in these islands are unnaturally high. They cannot, however, long remain so. We are glad to learn that the negroes are well off; but it cannot be expected that the West India monopoly should be continued merely that the emancipated slave may drink at his ease his Madeira or Champagne. It will be well for him if he prepares himself for the change that must shortly come. It is not to be expected that the proprietor who cultivates his estate at a loss, should continue to employ his capital without return. Unless there is a change, that capital must be withdrawn; and, thrown upon his own resources, the negro labourer will sink into a state of degradation hopeless and complete. [26a] Should it be found that the emigration scheme will not work well, it by no means follows that our only alternative is to continue the monopoly. A late writer, [26b] on the state of Jamaica, expresses it as his opinion that the resources of the island are not above half developed; he declares that the implements used in the cultivation of the cane are in the most primitive state imaginable; and that were but the improvements in machines introduced there, which have obtained elsewhere, there would be no need whatever for additional labourers.

This may be true of Jamaica, but it will not apply equally to other parts of the West Indies, where labourers are needed; and Africa is the quarter to which we must naturally turn for a supply. We find men in a state of practical slavery—sunk in the lowest scale of being; and we maintain the way to humanise them, to give them habits of industry and ideas of trade, is to bring them into contact with the advanced civilisation of the west. Thanks to the labours of the missionaries, they will find their emancipated fellow-countrymen intelligent, moral, and religious men. They will become subject to the same ameliorating influences—old things will be put away, principles of good will be formed—the savage will be lost in the advancing dignity of the man.

Let the West Indian proprietor, then, take the degraded savage and convert him into a useful member of society, and in the same manner let the free-trader go and convert the slave-owner into an honest man. In both cases a restrictive policy has been found to be fraught with inevitable ill. It were time that they both should retire. Our aim should be to create in slave states a public opinion against the vile system that stains the land, and not to excite feelings of enmity against ourselves because we exclude them from our market, and seek to brand them as outcasts from society. Not by such pharisaical modes of procedure shall we obtain our end. If we would do a man good, we must teach him to look upon us as friends, and not foes. We have no right to shut up a man in his guilt; and, as a nation is but an aggregate of individuals, the principles of action that obtain in the one case must be equally valid with respect to the other. We heap contumely and scorn on the heads of the American slaveholders, and refuse to do business with the merchants of Brazil, and by such conduct directly deprive ourselves of what influence for good we might otherwise have it in our power to wield. It is time that we turn over a new leaf; that we act more in accordance with Him who makes his sun to shine, and his rain to descend, upon the good and the bad; that we speak in friendship to our fellow-man, however degraded he may be, and win him over to the adoption of that which is just and true. Experience, the great teacher of mankind, has shown in a thousand instances that in our efforts to put down slavery by restrictive policy and armed suppression, we have, at the most lavish expenditure of treasure and life, done nothing but create misery and ill-will. It is the part of a wise man to abandon a plan which he sees has entirely failed. We may, by so doing, expose ourselves to the charge of inconsistency,—the stupid sneer, the unmeaning laugh, of men to whom experience may preach in vain, may be ours; but we shall have the consolation, the sure reward, of men who, seeking that which will promote the happiness of the family of man, when they find themselves in the wrong course, immediately abandon it for the right.

In the preceding pages we have endeavoured to advocate Free Trade, as the only one thing by which slavery can be destroyed. We now come to a subject of equal importance—the claims of our countrymen at home. We plead not for the Manchester warehouseman, cribbed, cabined, and confined by our wretched system of commercial policy, but we plead for the overtaxed and under-fed hard-working men and women of Great Britain. It is well to be tenderly alive to the concerns of the West Indian negro, but the charity that exhausts itself on them partakes of the same mongrel character as that sensibility which sheds floods of tears over the feigned distresses of the stage, and looks unmoved upon the miseries of a world. A reduction in the price of sugar would most certainly be an inestimable boon to the working man. Such a step taken by government would produce no increase in the consumption of sugar on the part of the middle or higher classes, but it would enable the poorer classes at once to use one of the most nutritious and essential articles of food. If you would preserve a man from drunkenness, make his home happy; let him have something better than the meagre fare which too generally awaits him. On the government which, by its interference, deprives the operative of the fair fruit of his labour, which drives him to the alehouse, to avoid the home rendered wretched by their accursed agency, rest the blame and guilt occasioned by the degradation and destruction of the body and soul of man. Different is the judgment of Heaven from that of the world. Could our voice reach the ears of our senators, we would ask them to pause ere they continued in a course of legislation which has been a fruitful source of vice—a course of legislation which, like the destroying angel, has spread death through the land. We would say to them, “Law-makers, see there the wretched slave of vice; the fault is not his, but yours. From your costly clubs, from your glittering saloons, flushed with revelry and wine, you have gone to the House, and, in the fulness of your power and pride, declared that his hearth should be desolate—that the crust he gnaws he should earn at the price of his life—that misery and want, like attendant handmaids, should follow on his steps; and if he has shrunk abashed from their presence—if his heart has failed him in the hour of need—if he has forgotten his manhood and his immortality—if he has joined in the hideous orgies of the drunken and the desolate—if he has sunk into the condition of the beast—the crime, and shame, and curse, be yours. And you may well shudder with an unwonted fear at the thought of the hour when Heaven shall require an account at your hands—when it shall be asked you why you laid on your brother a burden greater than he could bear, and why you blotted out the image of divinity that was planted there.”