On the 10th of October, 1811, the Chilian Congress decreed that every child born after that date, should be free. Likewise, the congress of Columbia emancipated all slaves who had borne arms in defence of the Republic, and provided for the emancipation, in eighteen years, of the whole slave population, amounting to nine hundred thousand beings.
September, 1829, saw immediate liberty granted by the government of Mexico to every slave in the realm.
Now, in all these cases not one single insurrection or bloodshed has ever been heard of as resulting from emancipation.
Even the thirty thousand Hottentots—the most ignorant, degraded people on the earth—who were manumitted at Cape colony, in July, 1823, gave instant evidence of improvement on being admitted to the rights and privileges of freemen. As a gentleman facetiously remarked, they worked far better for Mr. Cash than they had for Mr. Lash.
A statement in the South African Commercial Advertiser, of February, 1813, read as follows:
“Three thousand prize negroes have received their freedom—four hundred in one day. But not the least difficulty or disaster occurred. Servants found masters, and masters hired servants; all gained homes, and, at night, scarcely an idler was to be seen. To state that sudden emancipation would create disorder and distress to those you mean to serve, is not reason, but the plea of all men adverse to abolition.”
On the 1st of August, 1834, the government of Great Britain emancipated the slaves in all her colonies, of which she had twenty, viz., seventeen in the West Indies, and three in the East Indies. The numerical superiority of the negroes in the West was great. In Jamaica, there were three hundred and thirty-one thousand slaves, and only thirty-seven thousand whites.
Even by the clumsy apprenticeship system, where the stimulus of the whip was removed without being replaced by the stimulus of wages, the negroes were a little improved. They knew they would not be lashed if they did not work, and that if they did work they would not be paid for it. Yet, under such disadvantages as these, there occurred no difficulty, excepting in three of the islands, and even there they were slight and only temporary. Even the bitterest enemies of abolition have not yet been able to show that a single drop of blood has been shed, or a single plantation destroyed, in consequence of emancipation in all the British West Indies!
The journals of Antigua, where the apprenticeship system was not tried, but the stimulus of wages applied at once, say:
“The great doubt is solved, and the highest hopes of the negro’s friends are fulfilled. Thirty thousand men have passed from slavery into freedom, not only without the slightest irregularity, but with the solemn and decorous tranquillity of a Sabbath. In Antigua, there an two thousand whites, thirty thousand slaves, and four thousand five hundred free blacks.”