le with
decency, and paying them honestly and promptly, he would at last be able
to get a set of trusty hands, and give all the negroes of the
neighborhood such an understanding of him that they would be ready, if
they went to work for him, to leave off cheating, and honestly earn
their wages. A friend of mine took an abandoned estate in 1854, and
though for two or three years he was tortured like a bear at a stake, he
succeeded at last, by the most scrupulous fairness on his own part, and
by not tolerating the least dishonesty in a hand, in creating such a
public sentiment among his laborers, that for their own credit they
would themselves expose the dishonesty of a comrade. Now, he has as many
laborers, and profitable ones, as he needs. But how many planters could
be expected to have the principle or patience to carry out such a course
of discipline? The ruin of the estates, or rather the acceleration of
their inevitable ruin, is justly attributed, in large measure, to the
planters, to their imperious bearing toward the enfranchised blacks, to
their harsh expedients for keeping in dependence the large and much the
best class of blacks, who wanted to become freeholders, to the slackness
and unfaithfulness with which the wages of the people were often paid,
to the debasing influences of the plantation, which drove off the more
self-respecting, and to the waste, dishonesty, and shortsightedness
inevitable in the management of several hundred estates mainly by
middlemen. But on the other hand, it is not to be forgotten that the
African barbarian, brought a heathen from home, and plunged into the
deeper darkness of a compulsory heathenism, rigorously secluded by
jealous cupidity from every ray of intellectual, and, so far as
possible, of spiritual light, liable to cruel punishment if he snatched
a few hours from his rest or his leisure to listen to the missionary,
from whom alone he heard words of heavenly comfort or of human sympathy,
condemned to a lifetime of unrequited labor--it must not be forgotten
that he could not fail to come out from this school of supreme
dishonesty with its lessons so deeply imprinted on his mind that not one
generation or two would eradicate them, and that of all others he would
be most inclined to practise them upon the white man, whom, having
always known as a plunderer, he was only too glad to have an opportunity
to plunder in return. Had Jamaica been occupied by a resident
proprietary, atta