2ndly. In a letter written to the attorney of New Ground, he had said, “The Lord reward you for the kindness you have shown me, and grant you in health and wealth long to live!”
I really can't see that that called for tar and feathers.
3rdly. That he had said to a slave who had opened a gate for him at a certain place, “The Lord bless you!”
4thly. That he had asked the drivers of the workhouse gang questions respecting the offences of negroes of that gang. And surely that was harmless enough.
5thly. That he had made private remarks about the manner in which he had seen Mr M'Lean the overseer treat the slaves.
Here one of the deputation, Dicken, who was overseer at Windsor, a neighbouring estate, told him that he had two negroes at that moment in the stocks; and added with a brutal oath, if he would come over in the morning he would let him see them properly flogged.
I wonder how many unfortunates got an extra flogging, not because they deserved it, but just to show those who were bent on helping the negro that the other side, who were pledged to slavery and things as they were, defied them and all their works.
The last accusation the young man declared had not a particle of truth in it. He had never preached to 150 slaves at one time, though to all the other offences he pleaded guilty.
It shows how high party spirit ran, how the planting class objected to raising the status of the slave, when we find that these planters managed to get that dangerous young man banished the island before he had been there fourteen weeks. He was sowing the seeds of disaffection in a soil already ripe.
“These extracts,” says Bleby, “show... the almost rabid hostility of the planters to everything, and to every person who had the most distant connection with the religious instruction of their slaves.”