gentlemen, which we accepted as often as our engagements would permit.
On such occasions we generally met a company of gentlemen and ladies of
superior social and intellectual accomplishments. We must say, that it
is a great self-denial to refrain from a description of some of the
animated, and we must add splendid, parties of colored people which we
attended. The conversation on these occasions mostly turned on the
political and civil disabilities under which the colored population
formerly labored, and the various straggles by which they ultimately
obtained their rights. The following are a few items of their history.
The colored people of Jamaica, though very numerous, and to some extent
wealthy and intelligent, were long kept by the white colonists in a
state of abject political bondage. Not only were offices withheld from
them, and the right of suffrage denied, but they were not even allowed
the privilege of an oath in court, in defense of their property or their
persons. They might be violently assaulted, their limbs broken, their
wives and daughters might be outraged before their eyes by villains
having white skins; yet they had no legal redress unless another white
man chanced to see the deed. It was not until 1824 that this oppressive
enactment was repealed, and the protection of an oath extended to the
colored people; nor was it then effected without a long struggle on
their part.

Another law, equally worthy of a slaveholding legislature, prohibited
any white man, however wealthy, bequeathing, or in any manner giving his
colored son or daughter more than L2000 currency, or six thousand
dollars. The design of this law was to keep the colored people poor and
dependent upon the whites. Further to secure the same object, every
effort, both legislative and private, was made to debar them from
schools, and sink them in the lowest ignorance. Their young men of
talent were glad to get situations as clerks in the stores of white
merchants. Their young ladies of beauty and accomplishments were
fortune-made if they got a place in the white man's harem. These were
the highest stations to which the flower of their youth aspired. The
rest sank beneath the discouragements, and grovelled in vice and
debasement. If a colored person had any business with a white gentleman,
and should call at his house, "he must take off his hat, and wait at the
door, and be _as polite as a dog_."

These insults and oppressions the colored peo