ndustry, that
his early misgivings as to the capacity and disposition of the freed
negro to take care of himself were finally put to rest. But a
disposition to take care of himself and a disposition to be faithful to
the interests of others are two very different things. At emancipation,
the negroes' stimulants to making money were very strong. In the first
impulse of their zeal they were everywhere erecting chapels and schools,
raising large sums for the support of their ministers and schoolmasters;
they were everywhere building houses, buying land, and laying the
foundation of that settled well-being which time has continually made
firmer. Then, too, money was plentiful, sugar bore a high price, and,
notwithstanding the churlishness of many planters, more, perhaps, were
eager to retain their hands by offering the highest possible wages, and
even higher in many cases than the estates would bear. Nor were the
blacks at all averse to making money. But though the Jamaica negro does
not object to work, he dearly loves to cheat. The keenest Yankee that
ever skinned a flint, cannot approach him in trickiness. This native
trait has been sharpened to the utmost by the experience of slavery,
which left him with the profound conviction that 'Buckra'[7] was fair
plunder. The poor fellow could not be very severely blamed for thinking
thus, for certainly he had been fair plunder for Buckra from time
immemorial. Accordingly, the first few years after emancipation appear
on many estates to have been passed in a continual struggle on the part
of the negroes to see how much they could get out of the planters and
how little they could give in return. They knew they had the whip hand
of massa, and they were not slow to profit by the knowledge. They would
saunter to their work at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, dawdle
through it with intensely provoking unfaithfulness till three or four in
the afternoon, and then would raise a prodigious uproar if they were not
paid as liberally as if they had done an honest day's work. The poor
planter meanwhile was at his wits' end. It was of no use to turn them
off and hire another set, for, like the fox in the fable, he knew he
should only fare the worse. If the estate was large enough to stand the
strain for two or three years, and the manager was a man of self-control
enough to keep his temper, and firmness enough to persevere in a
winnowing of the whole region round about, treating them meanwhi