referred, and who, being both a
missionary and a proprietor, is placed in a pretty impartial equipoise
of judgment, remarks that if some of those at home who imagine the
Jamaica negro as lying lazily in the sun, eating bananas, could see the
bill of fare of a good many black men, and compare it with what they
were used to eat in time of slavery, they would probably be rather
astonished. His estate is not large, but I remember that he has been
unable for several weeks in the height of the sugar season to put up a
barrel of sugar, on account of the people's buying it off in small
quantities as fast as it was made. The many families that have small
mills, of course, supply their own wants fully before they sell, and
they commonly prefer selling the surplus among their neighbors to taking
it down to the exporters. Thus it appears that the diminution in the
exports of Jamaica is not wholly owing to the decrease of production.
Mr. Underhill says he was assured by an overseer that the present
consumption of sugar by the people of Jamaica was much greater
proportionately than its use by the English, and there can be no doubt
of this. It was very different in slavery. Undoubtedly there is less
produced, much less, for production is diminished by the want of the ten
thousand men a year that were used up to keep it at its highest point.
Naturally, freemen prefer their own lives to the extra hogsheads of
sugar that can be turned out by sacrificing them. It is also diminished
by the steady fall in the price of sugar, which has made a difference
between 1815 and 1850 of seventy-five per cent., rendering the
inveterate extravagance of old management ruinous. It is diminished
because slavery ruined confidence and good will between owners and
laborers. It is diminished because an immense amount of labor has been
diverted to the establishment of the homes, churches, and schools of a
prosperous yeomanry. It is diminished because the growth of family life,
though feeble and struggling, has withdrawn from the field wholly, or in
part, thousands of women and children. It is diminished because higher
than bodily necessities now consume time that was once rigorously denied
to them. And lastly, it is diminished because the alienation caused by
slavery has thrown upon themselves thousands of the emancipated bondmen,
formerly accustomed to labor only as mechanical implements, to acquire
skill, economy, and thrift by a long course of untutored exper