THE ANTI-SLAVERY REPORTER. No. 71.] NOVEMBER, 20, 1830. [Vol. iii. No. 23. I. STATE OF LAW AND MANNERS IN JAMAICA ILLUSTRATED. 1.-TESTIMONY OF THE REV, JOHN THORPE ;-2. CASE OF ELEANOR MEAD;-3. ST. GEORGE'S COUNCIL OF PROTECTION, AND THE REV. MR. HANNA;-4. CASE OF GEORGE ANCLE, BELONGING TO J. MORANT, ESQ. -5. ST. ANDREW'S SESSIONS, A NEW CASE OF PERSECUTION; CONCLUDING REMARKS. II. SLAVE TRADE AND SLAVERY OF THE MAURITIUS. I. STATE OF LAW AND MANNERS IN JAMAICA ILLUSTRATED. 1. Testimony of the Rev. John Thorpe. THE Rev. John Thorpe, now the Curate of Wigginton, in the county of Oxford, occupied the situation of Curate in the parish of St. Thomas in the East, in Jamaica, under the Rev. Mr. Trew, the Rector, from 1826 to 1829. At several public meetings, and especially at Cheltenham on the 7th of October last, he has taken occasion to bear his testimony to the nature and effects of colonial slavery as it exists at this moment in this the largest slave colony in his Majesty's dominions. Those who have the happiness of knowing the sound judgment and unimpeachable integrity of this pious and exemplary clergyman, and the spotless character he has borne both at home and abroad, will best appreciate the value of that testimony, the substance of which we shall now lay before our readers with an entire conviction of its truth, derived not only from the confidence we repose in his deliberate statement of facts, but from the perfect agreement of that statement with the mass of evidence on the same subject which has already appeared in our pages. Mr. Thorpe said that his views of slavery arose from his constant residence in an agricultural part of the island of Jamaica. In stating those views and the facts by which they were supported, he disavowed all hostility to the Planters, many of whom he respected-his enmity was to the system, which, with a corrupt foundation, was upheld by corrupt means. He would premise that the law regards the slave as a mere chattel-he may be bought, sold, transferred, levied upon, or bequeathed. The Jamaica Gazettes teem with advertisements announcing the sales of negroes, many of whom have been seized by virtue of the Deputy Marshal's writ, and some given to pay arrears of taxes due by the estate to which the slaves may belong. Few owners reside on their properties, but manage them by an attorney (or land agent), who has the general care of several-under him is an overseer (or bailiff) for each estate-under the overseer are book-keepers-and under these as many drivers as there are gangs of negroes. The drivers are blacks, the others whites. Such are the actual managers-now for their mode of management. This briefly is compelling the slaves to work by the cartwhip, an instrument with which a very severe wound may be inflicted. Indeed it lacerates the flesh most terribly. The law allows the whites, except the book-keepers, to order thirty-nine lashes to be inflicted, on any slave, provided the effect of former punishment shall not remain, and ten to be given by the drivers, if in their opinion the punishment is called for. The mode of administering it is, by holding the victim down on the ground, and as he lies extended, the lashes are inflicted on his bared body. After this, which may be called the legal flogging, the poor wretch, Mr. T. has understood, is not unfrequently scourged with the prickly branches of ebony, quantities of which are collected for this atrocious purpose.-Mr. T. knew an overseer in the neighbourhood, who having neglected his business, was reproved by the attorney, which so irritated him, that he sought amongst the slaves under his charge, some objects on whom to wreak his vengeance. Three were singled out, and received a tremendous punishment. They complained to the attorney; who, on inquiry, found them blameless in the matter. The overseer was dismissed; but he was appointed to another and a larger estate. On passing through a town, Mr. T. heard cries: he went to the spot and found a negress tied up by the hands, while a driver was flogging her on asking the white man, who stood by, what was her fault; he replied " he did not know-his employer had sent her there to be flogged."-A brother clergyman left Mr. T.'s house early one morning, and missing his road, unexpectedly arrived at an estate where he saw the overseer occupying himself with flogging a number of women."--Mr. T. knew of a slave who from severe punishment died. The coroner's inquest sat. It was endeavoured to be proved that he died from disease: but the case was so barefaced, that the coroner and jury, themselves planters, gave a verdict of wilful murder. The man was brought to trial and was acquitted,-from what cause he could not precisely say; but he believes, from the inadmissibility of the evidence of the negroes, who alone witnessed the fact. Mr. T. afterwards saw this man with a party of his fellow-overseers, received into their society as if nothing had happened.-In every parish there is a workhouse, or more properly a gaol; the receptacle of negroes convicted of idle or refractory conduct, and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour. He never could forget his sensation on entering, soon after his landing, one of these miserable abodes. The filth was disgusting-the dens dark, while their wretched inmates driven out, and arranged on each side for inspection, in their half naked state,-their wild stare,-and woeful appearance-scarcely resembled human beings. But the workhouse is not for these only, but any owner or his deputy may send a negro there, when anxious to give him a severer punishment than ordinary, with an order to that effect, which never fails to be executed, and generally without any inquiry being instituted as to the offence.He knew a carpenter slave who being pressed by his attorney to labour in the field, refused, on the ground of its being unusual thus to employ a tradesman, his age and infirmities being superadded; and stated that if he would allow him, as he had formerly done, to hire himself out by the day, he would bring any reasonable wages he required. The attorney would not swerve from his purpose, and the slave persisting in his refusal was confined in the workhouse, and twice severely flogged; besides being worked with the gaol gang, who, chained together in pairs by a collar fastened to the neck, repair to their daily labour attended of course by the driver, who is not sparing of his cart-whip. Mr. T. saw him use it on one poor infirm fellow, who, not keeping up the trot at which they were going, in changing the scene of their labour, received this sensible hint from his merciless taskmaster.-One observation he must be allowed to make; many overseers might be humane and abhor an act of cruelty; what he complained of was, the intrusting of arbitrary power to men of like passions with ourselves; and he adduced these facts as its necessary results. For let it be remembered that the case he had mentioned, came incidentally to his knowledge, and afforded a fair specimen of what is constantly recurring, and what must recur so long as this uncontrouled power, the very essence and support of slavery, is committed to the planter.-Such facts served to lift up the curtain with which the planters studiously veil the cruelties of their system, and to expose to our view some of its terrible enormities, the full amount of which are known only to Him who maketh inquisition for blood, and who forgetteth not one cry of these poor oppressed Africans. -Much is said of the careful attention paid to the sick; he believed it to be true on properties possessing a humane attorney or owner; but he had seen hospitals which, from their heat and effluvia, he should deem far more likely to create disorders than to cure them. Some of the sick were lying on benches made for their reception, others on the floor, with no covering but their tattered clothes, and no couch but the bare boards. Then their aged people are made watchmen, some of whom suffer great privations, and who live on remote and scattered parts of the estate, in miserable sheds, not so good as gypsy tents, to guard the provisions and sugar canes of the property; while even their hoary hairs, in case of supposed offence through neglect or otherwise, do not protect them from the merciless lacerations of the cart-whip.-He knew one, formerly a valuable slave, who was sent to a distance, and almost starved, that he might be prevented preaching to his fellows.-The slaves, divided into gangs, each gang attended by a driver and his cart-whip, work from the earliest dawn of the morning to the decline of day, averaging about thirteen hours daily throughout the year; out of which time half an hour is allowed for breakfast, and two hours in the middle of the day; but this time he had known abridged under a press of business, and much of it was consumed in going from and to the scene of their often distant labours. It was not, however, of their daily labour he complained so much as that, during the crop time, which lasts generally about six months of the year, this labour is protracted on most estates through every alternate, and on others where slaves are more numerous, through every third night. This is a cruel part of the system, and must tend to shorten life; especially as, when heated by labour, they are exposed to the chilling and unwholesome night air and heavy dews, which not unfrequently engender decline and hasten death. -Another crying evil of the system is, that a slave cannot manumit him self, even though through industry he may have saved a sufficiency for his ransom. If he be a respectable and faithful slave, he is told he cannot be spared; and even where a slave is permitted to purchase his freedom, he is often obliged to obtain another to fill up his place.-It may be asked, what compensation has the negro? His owner allows him weekly six salt herrings, a woman the same, a child three, with a few yards of coarse woollen and linen cloth yearly, barely sufficient to cover them, with a hat for the men, and a handkerchief for the women. Then a certain portion of land, generally unavailable for other purposes (certainly for sugar canes), on which the slave is to cultivate his vegetable provisions; only twenty-six days in the year are allowed him for this cultivation, which obliges him to trespass on the Sabbath. It sometimes happens that the negroes raise a little poultry, and occasionally kill a pig, which, with their surplus provisions, they bring to the market to sell or barter for salt meat, fish, or better clothing than their allowance affords. The decrease of the negro population is most fearful; but can we be surprised that the rigorous exaction of labour, through 13 hours of every day, and for 5 more making 18 hours a day during half of the year, with no rest on the Sabbath to recruit wasted strength, besides the attention to domestic concerns, which must increase fatigue and abridge the hours of repose-can we be surprised that this exhaustion of strength should produce as its result misery and death? It is proved, by authentic documents, that the maroons of Jamaica rapidly increase and what does this show but that, within the atmosphere of freedom, the principle of animal life is vigorous and prolific, while within that of slavery it sickens, and withers, and dies.-The market day in Jamaica is the Sabbath;-the consequent desecration of this holy day is awful. Often had he returned from an almost empty church, and passed the market, where hundreds of slaves were collected, merged in all the secularities of life, and indulging in all the vices of their corrupt nature. After stating this, the degraded state of their morals may be easily imagined. Marriage is comparatively unknown, and illicit intercourse prevails. In a recent report of a society established in his parish, for the religious instruction of the slaves, it is mentioned as a cause of exultation, that, during the two past years, since the society had existed, the number of legitimate children had increased, so that they were then in the proportion of one to nine of the whole black population. This one fact speaks volumes, and this debased state of morals is fostered by the evil example of the whites, who almost all live in sin. The white planter lives at the great house of the estate, where reside also a number of females of colour, most of them belonging to the property. The licentiousness prevailing in consequence, he need not depict; but he would excite the sympathy of the females before him in behalf of their degraded sisters, who were constrained by their bonds to dwell in these haunts of iniquity, and became, from a moral necessity, the victims of their master's passions; who, by withholding instruction, concealed from them the guilt of their conduct, while they hid their atrocities from the people of England by specious names. And to undeceive many, he would observe, that a housekeeper is considered a necessary appendage to a white man's establishment, an individual whom, in England, we should designate by a far more just though more opprobrious title.-If such, then, be their moral, what must be their religious state? True, the Gospel has visited the heart of many a negro, but their numbers bear no comparison to the mass of the uninstructed; and how should they, when religious instruction is so much discouraged? In his parish, the most improved in the whole island, there were indeed 54 estates permitting the ministers of the established church to communicate religious instruction; but, with the exception of three, stipulating that it should be merely oral, and in all cases appointing one half hour once a week during the noontide, a time when, from weariness and hunger, few could avail themselves of it. In fact, as a Jamaica proprietor, well acquainted with the operation of this system, told him," It was a mere farce." But even this instruction, thus limited and deficient, was actually denied to 11,451 slaves, on 46 estates in the parish, who enjoyed no opportunity of instruction whatever. Nor can the negro receive instruction to any practicable extent on the Sabbath. One of the members of the House of Assembly stated, "that the slave must work on that day or starve; "and the scantiness of Mr. T.'s congregation, amounting, on an average, to only 80 out of 6000 at least, while at the same time they were anxious for instruction, confirms the statement.—Remember, then, the slave is considered as a chattel, liable to the cruelty of the cart-whip, and the chains of the workhouse;-that he endures excessive and unrequited toil,-that he cannot manumit himself; that he is demoralized and brutalized,—and then acknowledge that slavery is a monster, whose existence ought no longer to be allowed.-The Rev. gent. then observed, that what he had seen of the industry of the negro when employed for himself, fully proved that free labour was practicable, and that, were the negro freed, he would not starve as some feared. He also related an affecting anecdote of a female slave, who, having been stolen in Africa, and sold in Jamaica, was under the usual treatment of the planter, hateful, hating, dishonest, and revengeful; she became the property of a clergyman, under whose mild treatment and Christian instruction her dispositions altered, exhibiting all the faithfulness, tenderness, and sympathy, of which the heart is capable. 2. Case of Eleanor Mead. In the Reporter, No. 64, (p. 345,) we gave an account of the treatment, by a lady of Jamaica, Mrs. Earnshaw, of an elderly mulatto slave, named Eleanor Mead, the mother of nine children, who for some trivial offence had been severely lacerated with the cart-whip, in the presence and by the order of her mistress; a daughter being compelled to assist in holding her parent, prone on her stomach, to the ground, while the driver, a male, inflicted on her bared hips, according to the uncontradicted evidence of the slaves present, 58 lashes, being 19 more than even the liberal law of Jamaica allowed. Our readers will, probably, recollect the various other digusting circumstances which served to mark the grossness of manners, and the perfect hebetude of feeling, even in ladies, which result from the every day practices of slavery. The magistrates to whom Eleanor complained having no evidence but |