LXXXVIII. LETTERS on the Cultivation of the Otaheite Cane; the Manufacture of Sugar and Rum; the saving of Melasses; the Care and Preservation of Stock; with the Attention and Anxiety which is due to Negroes. To these Topics are added, a few other Particulars analagous to the Subject of the Letters; and also a Speech on the Slave Trade, the most important Feature in West Indian Cultivation. By CLEMENT CAINES, Esq. Svo. pp. 301.

HIS work is divided into thirty

Tletters, five additional Papers,

Speech on the Slave Trade, and a Prospectus of a work to be published, by subscription, entitled, The History of the General Council and General Assembly of the Leward Islands.

was

The author's design in this publication is thus expressed. "It with the hope of rendering other West India cultivators as prosperous

as himself, by laying before them the means of his own prosperity. It was too with the much superior hope of relieving the poor slaves from a part of their burdens and sufferings, and of rendering them more healthy, more happy, and more virtuous than can be expected from their present condition and treatment." Pref. p. 11.

The major part of these letters is occupied with minute instructions for the cultivation and management of a sugar estate, interspersed with hints for the relief of the negroes in their labour; and the latter part of them is applied to the circumstances of the in his twenty-second letter thus inslaves particularly, which the author troduces the subject." But the path which I have exhorted you to pursue, is most unfrequented and solitary. No body of men, scarce disinterestedly, toil for those who are does any single man, assiduously, and subject to his power; of whose concerns and welfare he is the deposi tary; for whose happiness he is acCountable; and whose misery fixes on him a stigma, that the loudest applause, and the most splendid renown, in vain attempts to efface.

"Not that instances of benevolent and untired anxiety for those committed to their care are unknown among planters. Examples of such great and rare virtues are to be found in this order of men; but never among others, whose fellow creatures lie at their mercy; never among men invested with a nation's power, or executing a nation's trusts. By such the people have been always pillaged, or sacrificed; generally both; first. robbed, and then seduced or driven to slaughter.

"Such was the conduct of the great Frederick, whose secretaries fell asleep at his side, while he, awake and watchful, planned the augmentation of his despotic power, and traced the route of his invading armies. While he converted his happy, peaceful villages into sleepless alarm posts. While he made his flourishing cities barren garrisons, his kingdom a camp, and his whole people a consuming soldiery.

"Such was the great reformer, the Czar Peter, who killed 1500 of his subjects' children, that he might try a naval experiment; who sacrificed 13,000 of his faithfullest guards to the indulgence of his vague and bloody

suspicions; who buried the population of an immense city, in laying the foundations of his new and capricious capital.

"In England too, what is now passing Not forcibly, indeed, and by violence, but legislatively, and by act of parliament. The rich are deprived of comforts, the poor of necessaries, that the trade of death, the casting of cannon, and the preparations for murder may not stop for want of funds--that no delay may occur in expeditions to distress the enemy-expeditions in which the sea-sickness of the troops inflicted more misery on the British, than descent and invasion did on the French -expeditions in which the nation's blood has been spilled abroad that her successes might be vaunted at home. "This is a subject, my dear, on which I cannot write either with coolness or brevity. The unseasonable objections which it has extorted from me you may, however, turn to account, by applying them to the situation of the slaves subjected to your authority. By acting the reverse of political masters in their treatment of the people; by respecting the rights, and consulting the feelings of the negroes under your command, in proportion as they are destitute of redress from your injuries, and incapable of appeal from your power." p. 131-134.

Letter XXIII. recommends to the planter the quality and quantity of food his slaves should have, which, the writer says, ought to be distributed three or four times a week, and condemus the practice of those who give to their slaves the provision for a week at one time; remarking, "that these inconsiderate gormandizing creatures will devour, or dissipate, whatever is given to them before half the time is expired, for which it is destined to be their support. During the remainder of it they are obliged to struggle with all the wretchedness of hunger and want. To balance these dreadful evils, endured by the slaves, what is the gain of the hardhearted master, who inflicts them. He avoids the repetition of a task that humanity would delight to perform and repeat. He saves a few contemptible minutes in the discharge of a duty that a good man would be happy to protract. And for what is he guilty of this pernicious saving, this unfeeling desertion of what his VOL. I.

station requires of him?-that he may join or receive a noisy drunken part at a mutton or turtle feast. Like an unworthy son of the church, who hurries over her service that he may quit her precincts; that he may leave the house of God, and seat himself at the edge of a dinner table; that he may cease to be a minister of heaven, to become the glutton of a sirloin, or the epicure of a haunch of venison." p. 139, 140.

Medicine, suitable food in sickness, and proper nursing under the immediate eye of the master, are next recommended. The peculiar diseases to which slaves are incident are named, and the method of cure which the writer found successful, and which he exemplifies in particular instances.

A particular attention to the morals of negroes is enjoined by the author, especially on the Lord's day, which being a day of rest, he observes, the slaves take the opportunity of perpetrating every vice. Drunkenness is a crime to which they are much addicted; and he therefore enforces the necessity of the watchful eye of the master at this time which is considered the most effectual restraint.

The improper conduct of managers is particularly noticed, and thus introduced. "It is very extraordinary that no man should be conscientious or moral in situations where his conscience ought to be most awake, and his morality most strict. But strange as this assertion may seem, it expresses one of the most universal truths that ever was uttered: a truth which embraces all ranks in the state, is applicable to all professions, and verified by every individual in his business and calling. And although general rules are said to be confirmed by exceptions, this admits of fewer exceptions than any general rule that can be laid down.

"The offences too, by whose perpetration conscience is not roused, which she witnesses without emotion, and sees without noticing, are not only most atrocious but most aggravated. The murders, which she contemplates with indifference, are always aggravated by breach of trust; so too are the robberies and the falsehoods. All shocking crimes : simply and of themselves sufficient to make nature shudder; yet conscience Xx

with facility and exactness, an account of every transaction upon a West Indian estate.

Many of our readers will, we doubt not, be gratified to find in a West India planter an advocate for the immediate and total abolition of the slave trade, and which is contended for with much energy of argument in the speech at the end of this work, and which originated in the following resolution, entered into by the General Council of the Leeward Islands, and sent to the General Assembly for their concurrence, the 7th of March, 1798. "Resolved, that an abolition of the slave trade, (supposing it to be practicable) a trade sanctioned, as it has been by repeated statutes and royal proclamations, and forming, as we affirm it does, the very basis of our colonial system, would be oppressive to the British planter, destructive to the sugar colonies, and consequently to the British revenue; and of no benefit to the Africans themselves." p. 249.

In speaking to this resolution the author states his opinion to be, that "the slave trade ought to be abolished-It ought to be abolished immediately-It ought to be abolished for the sake and benefit of the planter." p. 251.

That our readers may form an opinion of the author's reasoning, we extract the following paragraphs as specimens of the whole.

"Could I, like other men, have beheld the wretched Africans exposed to sale by hundreds, in our Guinea-yards, and satisfied myself with saying, it is so, and it must be 50 could I have reflected on the misery which they suffer, when torn from the country where they were born, and the greater misery of their passage across the ocean, which separates them from it for ever-could I have witnessed their deaths, which almost glut the grave, after their arrival among us, and the melancholy worse than death which mark their path to it could I have witnessed the barrenness of our Creole women, whose forms are moulded to fecundity, the loss of our children at the instant of their birth, the mortality among our ablest slaves, their decay and death in the time of manhoodcould I have witnessed all this, and have satisfied myself with saying, it is 50, and it must be so, I should not

on the present day, and in the present meeting, have stood up an advocate for abolishing the slave trade. But, blessings on my eccentricity, it would not suffer me to see and to think like other men, nor to speak in union with their contented apathy." p. 256, 257.

"The horrors of a separation from the country in which the Africans are born, this trade certainly is the parent of. But consider, Mr. Speaker, how unmitigated their horrors are, how aggravated beyond the example of every other exile.

"The wretched African has no interval allotted, previous to his departure, in which he can make a preparation for his journey, or provide a defence against the evils of the way. No tender adieus, no consolatory leave-takings set him forward on his road, or beguile the tediousness of the passage with recollections that soothe while they pain. Banishment is mercy to his lot. He is not banished; he is literally torn from his country, and from every thing which it contains that is dear

to him.

"Children at play are caught up by those who steal men. The weary labourer is bound while asleep, and awakes to captivity from competence and freedom. Wives in vain stretch out their arms after their husbands; and the eyes of the husband in vain linger for the grief and form of his wife.

"Not that all are free who are brought to the West Indies from Africa. Many are slaves in their own country. But some are not so; and so susceptible is wretched man of misery, that a single free born African may realize in his individual bosom greater woes than all I have described." p. 258,259

"I have directed, Mr. Speaker, four Africans, purchases lately made by myself, to be brought here to-day. The first is a huge skeleton, who lives in my kitchen, and wallows in victuals; but neither plenty nor excess can put an ounce of flesh upon his bones. The second has never raised his head, or smiled, since I purchased him. There he is. Melancholy has marked him for her

own.

The third is a woman-the sickly victim of obstructions created during her passage, lest the value of her purchase should be diminished.

These, and an experience which the grave now covers, determine me never again to contribute to this horrid trade. So may the great Father of mankind prosper those who are dearest to me, so may he bless my children, as I here swear, I will not! "The fourth, Mr. Speaker, is a boy: his father, who had a numerous offspring, and but little clothes to give them, sold him in exchange for a piece of cloth. Youth, thoughtlessness, the frame of an infant Hercules, render him superior to the evils of slavery. If this shocking trade is still persevered in, it should then be confined to children, who are too young, and too inconsiderate, to brood on the reverse which has overtaken them. But no, it must be abolished. Though the father sold him, who knows the pangs the mother felt at their separation. Children leave behind them miseries and regret equal to what the grown exile carries with him, and in his bosom. This trade must, Mr. Speaker, be abolished, unless every tender fibre of the human heart is to be explored, that torture may be lodged in it." p. 265, 266.

The writer states that advantages will accrue to the planter from the abolition of the slave trade, and thus concludes his speech.

"That the consequences of this trade are such as have been described we must acknowledge, Mr. Speaker, if we connect effects with causes, and trace the calamities which the West Indian world has endured, and with which we are threatened, to their source.

"It was the eager and boundless prosecution of the African trade, which, in St. Domingo, filled with negroes every situation that ought to have been occupied with men complexioned like the planter:-that stationed a conspirator wherever an ally ought to have been found:-that crowded with enemies every avenue through which succour could arrive in time of alarm and danger. It was in St. Domingo, that the standard of revolt was first uplifted; that it waved over the most flourishing colony upon earth, and gave the signal to her mass of blacks to fall upon and butcher the whites. Instantly they set at nought her twenty thousand inilitia, bid defiance to her regular forces, and the shipping in her har

bours; ravaged her fields, sacked her towns, and left her inhabitants weltering in their blood.

"Such were the dire effects of the African trade on St. Domingo: and in the Leeward Islands, Mr. Speaker, it is the same trade which menaces us with the same horrors. For it is this trade, with its dangerous facility of procuring slaves, and the treacherous submission of their demeanour, that has multiplied the lurking assas sins, till they swarm wherever the planter turns his eyes; it is this trade, that has excluded from his employment, and driven from his society, his white brethren; — it is this trade which has cut him off from succour and from hope, when destruction is at hand: when death stares him in the face, and indignities worse than death threaten to precede it.

"Hear then, thou thoughtless planter, these indignities which aggravate the pangs of death, and shudder at the horrid trade which engenders them, although thou dost not fear to die. For it is true, that heroism, nay obstinacy, can endure, despise, and provoke all that savages can inflict on ourselves, when they make a sport of pain. But there are other suilerings, there are wounds which can be inflicted through those we love, and have reared, which pierce our noblest principles and most cherished sentiinents before they reach ourselves, and such wounds agonize beyond endurance. What hero, nay, what savage, could endure to see the massacre of his children, or the dishonour of his wife, to be taunted with, and called on to witness the foulest of stains, and the most afflicting of cruelties, at the instant that he was expiring. But such has been frequently, and recently has been the fate of the West Indian planter in consequence of the African trade, in consequence of his being encom passed with blacks, whom his African purchases had gathered round him.

"Let him then abandon this dangerous and horrid trade, if he wishes not to be crushed by the calamities that hang over him; if he wishes not to sink into the grave childless and dishonoured; if he wishes to die in peace, and in the arms of his family." p. 285-288.

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