“But in the majority of cases convictions are not to be expected.”
How strangely it reads in these days.
Before he closes his book he goes on to analyse the price of slaves, and arrives at the conclusion that the average price of all the slaves that have been imported into the West Indies may be estimated at about £40 sterling.
All the sorrow, all the woe, all the long drawn-out suffering, and yet each individual for his life might be counted as worth £40 sterling!
I have found no chronicler who describes the actual freeing in the same graphic way as Madden told us of the apprenticeship. I think we may be sorry for both sides.
We must pity the helpless black man who had been accustomed to guidance all his days, adrift in a land where he owned nothing, and had not the faintest idea either of the value of his services or the cost of his own upkeep. We may pity the planters who had to work their estates with labour in such an uncomfortable state of unrest.
For five and twenty years a sort of ominous peace reigned. Neither the planters nor their whilom slaves were content. There seems to have been a sort of feeling among the whites which is best represented as—“Well, you've got your freedom! Now are you as well off as when as slaves we took care of you!” And very often I am afraid they took care their black helots should not be as well off.
Not that the coloured people did not advance. They did. But their advancement was a threat. In the streets of untidy Kingston the coloured and black people met and grumbled and discussed local politics at all the street corners, the very conventicles where they went to pray were hotbeds of discontent. It is no good saying they were ungrateful. They were not. They had rights, but it always takes a long time to make those who will suffer in the conferring of a great benefit understand that in spite of their discomfort that benefit the good of the greater number, must be conferred. I can quite understand the black people vaguely wanting the rights they did not understand, to land, to better pay, to education, and the white people saying—“What are we to do for service? These people are clods. They cannot appreciate such privileges. Why make a fuss about them?”
A planter would say—“That man!” in tones of scorn, “why, I remember him a little yellow piccaninny, the son of my black mammy, and there he is in a high collar and tall hat in the Assembly, laying down the law to his betters. Damned impudence! In my father's time his back would soon have made acquaintance with the 'cat,' That would straighten him out!” And both coloured and white would be bitterer for the recollection.
I think there was a certain fear among the whites of the growing power among the blacks. A desire to keep the subject race in its place.