It may require the passing of several generations of negroes to determine their real capabilities under the uplifting influence of American institutions, for they have failed sadly in other emancipation countries. There were 6,000,000 Africans held as slaves on this continent, at the beginning of the century just closed. Only 883,602 of this number, were held in the United States; about 2,000,000 by Spain on the continent and West Indian Islands, about 900,000 by England on the continent and in the West Indies. The remainder were held by the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes and Norwegians in their various colonies. Their descendants have all been emancipated, some for a hundred years, some for only a few years, and they furnish fields for observing the experiments made with the negro as a part and parcel of the social, political, and economic affairs of those countries.
Emancipation occurred in Hayti in 1792, as an incident of the French Revolution, and the negroes rose and exterminated every man, woman and child of the white race in the island, with atrocious and revolting details unrecorded. They then set up a republic, a military despotism it was, and such it has remained. Splendid sugar and coffee plantations left untilled, grew up in wild growths, the rich resources of the island were consumed. For a brief space the orderly habits of the white race flickered, and then went out in darkness, eclipsed by a saturnalia of idleness and crime. Negro nature, left to itself, relapsed into barbarism.
“But,” says Froude, the most distinguished modern English historian, “behind the immorality, behind the religiosity, there lies active and live, the horrible revival of the West African superstition; the serpent worship, the child sacrifice, and the cannibalism. There is no room to doubt it.” A missionary assured me that an instance of it occurred only a year ago, within his personal knowledge. The facts are notorious. A full account was published in one of the local newspapers, and the only result was that the president imprisoned the editor for exposing his country.[11]
Bishop Kingsley, who visited the island in 1871, says: “The chief center of this detestable system (Obeahism or Vaudoux worship) is St. Vincent, where, so I am told by one who knows that island well, some sort of secret college or school of the diabolic prophets exists.... In Jamaica I was assured by a non-conformist missionary, who had long lived there, Obeah is by no means on the decrease, and in Hayti it is probably on the increase, and taking, at least until the fall and death of Salnave, shapes which when made public in the civilized world will excite more than mere disgust. But of Hayti I shall be silent, having heard more of the state of society in that unhappy place than it is prudent, for the sake of the few white residents, to tell at present.”[12]
Again he says: “The same missionary told me that in Sierra Leone also, Obeah and poisoning go hand in hand.” Ibid. p. 345.
Sir Spencer St. John, for twelve years the British Minister to Hayti, later Minister to Mexico, in a work entitled “Hayti, the Black Republic,” pp. 196-204, gives at length the horrible details of these practices, as brought out in a legal trial by the evidence, to which trial he was an eye witness. Several persons were charged with, and convicted of, cannibalism. A child being the victim, was first offered as a sacrifice, to propitiate the serpent. “In treating of the black,” says Sir Spencer, “and the mulatto, as they appeared to me during my residence among them, I fear that I shall be considered by some to judge harshly. Such, however, is not my intention. Brought up under Sir James Brook, whose enlarged sympathies could endure no prejudice of race or color, I do not remember ever to have felt any repugnance to my fellow creatures on account of difference of complexion. I have dwelt about thirty-five years among colored people of various races, and am sensible of no prejudice against them” (pp. 8 and 9). “All who know me know that I had no prejudice of color, and if I place the Haytian in general in an unenviable light, it is from a strong conviction that it is necessary to describe the people as they are, and not as one would wish them to be. The most difficult chapter to write was that on Vaudoux worship and cannibalism. I have endeavored to paint it in the least sombre colors, and none who know the country will think that I have exaggerated; in fact, had I listened to the testimony of many experienced residents I should have described rites at which dozens of human victims were sacrificed at a time. Everything I have related has been founded on evidence collected in Hayti, from Haytian official documents, from trustworthy officers of the Haytian government, my foreign colleagues, and from respectable residents, principally, however, from Haytian sources.”
Sir Spencer St. John is an Englishman, a gentleman, and in no way concerned with the race problem under discussion. His testimony should stimulate honest inquiry among conservative thinkers, and should sober fanaticism. While the negro of the Southern states has not fallen to the level of the Haytian, there is abundant proof in the history of every country where emancipation has taken place, that the negro race in every instance, when left to guide itself, and the prop of the white man’s rule withdrawn, has retrograded—reverted to the original type.
Retrogression, decay, vice and Voodoism are the same in Jamaica as in Hayti, modified now for the better, since it has been changed from a responsible colony, as classified in the British Colonial system, to a crown colony, and the elective franchise withdrawn from the negroes. The crown colonies are governed directly by the home government.
Emancipation began there in 1838 and was accomplished through the agitations of Exeter Hall. Jamaica is one of the most fertile spots on the earth’s surface; and tilled under the direction of Englishmen, it was a garden spot, producing vast quantities of coffee and sugar, yielding a large revenue to the government. Indolence followed emancipation, and the once beautiful plantations became waste places. Poverty and want prevailed, revenues failed, and the parliament appointed committees to investigate. The evidence taken showed that the negroes had quit work, the plantations had grown up in bush, and they had squatted in the forests and along the streams. The Exeter Hall Society made many excuses and explanations, and all failing to account for the negro’s degeneracy, they finally urged that he be given the right to vote, in order to encourage him; and under the tireless exertions of these fanatics, parliament enacted a universal suffrage law, with a proviso that the voter should own some real estate, but without specifying the amount. The land had been abandoned and had little value, and the Exeter Hall Society bought a tract of about 1,200 acres, and gave it in small parcels to the negroes until 50,000 of them were qualified to vote under the law, which was not passed anticipating such a result.
The negroes then had a majority over the whites, and speedily took charge of the government of the island, and nearly all white men left their property and the country. “That Jamaica,” says a British official, “was a land of wealth, rivaling the East in its means of riches—nay, excelling it as a market for capital, as a place in which money might be turned; and that it now is a spot on the earth almost more poverty stricken than any other, so much is known to almost all men.”