nce among us of the exultation which awaited its failure. So many
thousands of the citizens of the United States, without counting
slaveholders, would not have suffered their prophesyings to be
falsified, if they could have found whereof to manufacture fulfilment.
But it is remarkable that, even since the first of August, 1834, the
evils of West India emancipation on the lips of the advocates of
slavery, or, as the most of them nicely prefer to be termed, the
opponents of abolition, have remained in the future tense. The bad
reports of the newspapers, spiritless as they have been compared with
the predictions, have been traceable, on the slightest inspection, not
to emancipation, but to the illegal continuance of slavery, under the
cover of its legal substitute. Not the slightest reference to the rash
act, whereby the thirty thousand slaves of Antigua were immediately
"turned loose," now mingles with the croaking which strives to defend
our republican slavery against argument and common sense.

The Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, deemed it
important that the silence which the pro-slavery press of the United
States has seemed so desirous to maintain in regard to what is strangely
enough termed the "great experiment of freedom," should be thoroughly
broken up by a publication of facts and testimony collected on the spot.
To this end, REV. JAMES A. THOME, and JOSEPH H. KIMBALL, ESQ., were
deputed to the West Indies to make the proper investigations. Of their
qualifications for the task, the subsequent pages will furnish the best
evidence: it is proper, however, to remark, that Mr. Thome is thoroughly
acquainted with our own system of slavery, being a native and still a
resident of Kentucky, and the son of a slaveholder, (happily no longer
so,) and that Mr. Kimball is well known as the able editor of the Herald
of Freedom, published at Concord, New Hampshire.

They sailed from New York, the last of November, 1836, and returned
early in June, 1837. They improved a short stay at the Danish island of
St. Thomas, to give a description of slavery as it exists there, which,
as it appeared for the most part in the anti-slavery papers, and as it
is not directly connected with the great question at issue, has not been
inserted in the present volume. Hastily touching at some of the other
British islands, they made Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, successively
the objects of their deliberate and laborious stu