The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863

As to the present condition of the emancipated blacks, it is certain that the 7,340 freeholds which had been acquired in 1840, two years after emancipation, have considerably increased in number. I never heard of a negro freehold being given up,⁸ while I did know of continual purchases of land by the blacks, either to make new holdings or to extend old ones.

The parish of Hanover is one in which happily the various classes are in a good degree united in feeling. The Hanover Society of Industry prepared a report about three years ago, quoted by Mr. Underhill, which shows that in that parish about seven eighths of the people are on holdings of their own, of which 891 consist of 1 acre, 431 of 2 acres, and 802 average 5-¼ acres each. Each family on an average consists of 4½ persons, and cultivates something over an acre, securing an income of about £28. Those who own land are five times as numerous as those who only hire it. The annual value of produce from the small holdings, estimated at £28 for each (£2 less than the society's estimate), is about £60,000. There are, besides, 29 estates having 3,675 acres under cultivation, and employing 2,760 laborers, of whom two thirds are females.⁹ About one eighth of the population is at work upon them. These estates average 2,608 hogsheads of sugar, and 1,435 puncheons of rum. Of the whole area of the estates, 3,555 acres are in pasturage, and 28,552 acres inaccessible or ruinate. There are, besides, 151 small properties of 20 acres and upward. In six districts, comprising about one fourth of the parish, there were found 143 small cane mills, valued at £10 apiece, which turned out, in 1859, 455 barrels of sugar, worth about £900, to say nothing of the pork fattened on the refuse molasses. One district of the six, constituting the quarter of the parish examined, produced, in 1857, 146 barrels; in 1858, 227 barrels; in 1859, 261 barrels.

This is a pretty fair picture of what may be expected in parishes where the whites show some regard for the blacks; not very magnificent results, it is true, but showing the disposition of the people to procure land of their own, and their increasing disposition to add to the raising of provisions the cultivation of the great staple of the soil. The report of the Society of Industry bears the following testimony to their character: 'The peasantry are, generally speaking, industrious and well behaved, and are gradually becoming more comfortable in their worldly circumstances. In the town of Lucea there has been a decided increase in the amount of business within the last three years as compared with a number of years previously.' In Hanover, in 1845, there were 70 estates in operation. In 1860 there were only 29. The planters of this parish, however, do not lay the blame on the negroes, but attribute the decline to the mountainous character of the parish, which made it unprofitable to continue the estates after the great fall in the price of sugar.

Now the blacks of Hanover are just the same race as the rest of the negro population of the island. The only difference is that the whites of that parish, instead of treating them with contempt and neglect, have shown something of courtesy and care toward them. The numerous conversations which Mr. Underhill reports with the owners and managers of successful estates show how simple are the rules by which they secure success. To manifest a decent respect for the blacks, to be firm, but temperate and fair in dealing with them, to use the best improvements in machinery, and to exercise a strict economy of management—this appears to be the sum of the difference between prosperous and unprosperous plantations, provided of course that both are equally well situated for success.

Metcalfe, the writer's residence during most of his stay in Jamaica, is, like Hanover, a parish of small freeholders, but unlike Hanover, the blacks and the few whites are not on good terms. Excepting what has been done by missionaries, which is not a little, they are little indebted to any but themselves for their prosperity. And as one charged with their religious instruction, the writer can bear witness that for several years they have needed to be restrained from avarice more than to be stimulated to industry. A clergyman, a friend of mine, humorously complained that he had lost by stirring up his people to work, for that now they were so diligently employed upon their own places, that he could get scarcely anybody to work for him. The average number of acres owned by forty families, of which I made lists, is seven—a pretty fair estimate, I should judge, of the whole; and seven acres in Jamaica is equivalent in productiveness to a much larger amount here. One fourth had floored houses, and as large a proportion had sugar mills. Many of the families have one or two horses, worth commonly from £5 to £12 apiece. Not a few have mules, which are much more valuable; and nearly all the rest have donkeys. The proportion of floored and glazed houses, some of them shingled, is steadily though not very rapidly increasing; and I need not say that in that climate, and with their yet rudimentary ideas of comfort, a floor of earth is no indication of indigence.

The holdings vary from one to forty acres, but are more commonly from three to six. Almost every freeholder hires land besides, and a great deal of time is lost in going to distant pieces of ground. The wants of the people have increased faster than they reckoned on, and the land was bought up so rapidly around them that now they are subject to this disadvantage in making new purchases. In St. Ann, the Baptist congregations alone spent £10,000 in a few years in buying land.

The furniture of the poorer houses is miserably scanty; £3 would more than cover it. But the better houses, now multiplying year by year, boast their four-post bedsteads, often of the native mahogany, sometimes mahogany chairs, and corresponding articles. If a white family, on removing, expose their furniture to sale, it is caught up by the people with eagerness at almost any price asked. The very improvidence of the negroes stimulates their industry. They are exceedingly litigious, and exceedingly ostentatious on the few grand occasions they enjoy.¹⁰ These luxuries, especially the former, cost them dear, but their very expense makes it the more necessary to work to find the means of indulging in them. Remunerative labor is eagerly sought after. The magnificent road now building through the island and traversing the parish of Metcalfe, has a superfluity of workmen, notwithstanding the shameful unfairness with which they have often been treated by the superintendents. I have known the people go in numbers to an estate ten miles distant, and remain there for weeks, except on the Saturdays and Sundays, away from their homes, working hard at digging and embanking, because they could secure one and sixpence sterling a day. I have often had occasion to employ men on short jobs, and though not unfrequently obliged to wait some time before securing a workman, I never suffered delay because they were too idle, but because they were too busy to attend to me. During my residence among them their progress in industry became too marked to be overlooked. However negligent our observations, we could not fail to notice the increasing patches of cane in some quarters, the extending provision grounds in others, the multiplying houses of the better sort, the earlier hours of going to the field, and the later hours coming from it at night. A firm in Kingston, accustomed to sell the implements of negro labor, found the demand for tools increasing faster than they could supply it. And we were glad to find that they were becoming not merely more industrious, but more skilful in their industry. A friend, who had much to do with them, assured me that the young men greatly surpass their parents in forecast in the laying out of labor, and had got over the miserliness shown by the old people in providing means for carrying it on. He said a few years before he could not have sold a good tool, and now he could not sell a bad one. An old negro, he remarked, would groan over a sixpence extra in buying a tool; the young man would say: 'Come, let us have things in good style at the start, and our profits will soon pay for them.' Not that habits of industry are so confirmed that there are not a good many local and temporary relapses into the old careless ways. But the relapses are fitful, the advance is steady. Of course, with growing means their wants rise, and increasing wants in turn react happily upon their industry. The friend to whom I have several times 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 experiments. On the other hand, much that is now produced makes no figure in the markets of the world, because it is consumed by the people themselves, no longer kept, for the profit of masters, at the lowest point at which they could maintain an animal existence. And not only do they consume so much, but they have enough left to buy from abroad whatever their increased necessities cannot find at home. It was not so in the good old times. Then the money that was made was sent to England to be spent by noble and gentle landlords there, and little good did Jamaica get of it. So little indeed was the island thought of even by the residents as a place to spend money on, so much as a place to get money in that was to be spent in England, that, as Mr. Sewell remarks, good roads have begun to be built, to any considerable extent, only since freedom. Forlorn as Kingston is, it was always forlorn; and not till slavery was abolished did they think to introduce the water which is now supplied in such abundance to the city. A rude profusion of luxury was all the planters aimed at till they could get home to the refinements of the mother country. In a word, in time of slavery, Jamaica was simply an aggregation of sugar and coffee mills, kept running by a stream of human blood. Now it is a land whose inhabitants are free to live for themselves and for God, to enjoy the gifts of His hand, and to send into the markets of the world, not a surplus which has cost one hundred hecatombs of men each year, but a surplus which has cost no life, but whose rich fruits come back to cheer and adorn thousands of lives. Commerce may have lost by the change, and there may be some jewels the less in the coronets of English nobility, but we may be permitted to believe that Christ and humanity have no reason to grieve.

It must not be thought, however, that estates are going down as rapidly now as formerly. Indeed, for a few years, I question whether more have not been resumed than abandoned. In 1855 the value of exports of the four staples, coffee, pimento, rum, and sugar, was £786,429; in 1856, £814,659; in 1857, £1,141,472. I have not the statistics of the years following. This check to the ruin of the estates is a matter of rejoicing, for the entire abandonment of the island by the whites would be a great disaster. As Mr. Underhill well observes, the ascendency of the white man is needed to temper the enmity between the browns and the blacks. The former, who constitute about one fifth of the population, although sharing the wealth and intelligence of the whites, are regarded with strong dislike by the blacks. Hayti shows how dangerous it is to leave these two elements in a society without a moderating force. I cannot share the pleasure with which some anticipate the complete Africanization of the West Indies. European intelligence, European conscience, and European firmness of will are necessary to insure to the blacks the permanence of those rich blessings which emancipation has bestowed. The black man has the industry and is daily improving in the skill necessary to secure his material well-being; but for very many years to come, it would be a most disastrous thing for him, hazarding the loss of all that he has gained, to be deprived of either the religious or the political oversight of the white race. The planters of Jamaica are not distinguished by a very rigid morality or a very severe integrity, but their withdrawal would inflict incurable harm on intelligence, order, industry, and civilization. They may be contemptuously indifferent to the moral and intellectual improvement of the blacks, but they have no longer a lively interest in opposing it. By this time they are gradually becoming convinced that the spirit of slavery cannot be maintained when its power is gone, and are growing disposed, so far as they have dealings with the blacks, to deal with them on more equal terms. Bare justice may be the most they are willing to accord, but even that is a great gain. The journals in their interest no longer lavish on the freeholding blacks the abuse with which they once teemed, even after the writer went to the island. The planters are willing to admit, like those of Westmoreland in an appeal to the Assembly in behalf of immigration, 'that they do not find fault with the difficulty of getting labor, which is a necessary result of the easy acquisition of land,' The more candid are willing to say, as I heard a gentleman of their class observe: 'We do not complain of the negroes; they have done as well for themselves perhaps as any people would. But just because they are doing so well for themselves, they cannot be depended on to do well for us.' Hence the call for immigrant laborers; a just and reasonable call, if only the immigration is conducted with that rigid and conscientious care for the comfort of the immigrants for which Mr. Sewell gives the government of Trinidad credit, and if it is really voluntary. The fear that it will injure the negro, or that he dreads it, is wholly baseless. The negroes have remained utterly indifferent to the whole agitation of the subject, and are on perfectly amiable terms with the few coolies already introduced. Indeed it will be rather for their interest, as a negro remarked to Mr. Underhill, by giving them a better sale for their produce. The coolies now in the island appear to have done well. And the danger of overcrowding the population on a land teeming with tropical plenty, whose area of 6,400 square miles is occupied by but 441,000 inhabitants, is not a very imminent one, from any number within the means of the colony to introduce. And on the ability to procure foreign labor very much depends the hope of reviving the planting prosperity of Jamaica on a sounder basis, and in such a degree as is compatible with the substantial good of the whole population. It is true the population, relieved from the dreadful waste of slavery, is increasing. The census of 1844 showed a population of 377,433. That of 1861 showed one of 441,264, an increase of 63,831 in seventeen years. The immigration of coolies during that time has been between 18,000 and 20,000; the decrease of the whites, 3,000. The net increase by immigration then has been at the most 17,000, leaving 47,000 as the natural increase, or 12 per cent., in seventeen years. This is what remains after two terrible visitations of cholera, and one of small pox, all within eleven years, which together are computed to have swept off 40,000 persons. The increase would doubtless be much greater but for the loose living and careless habits of the negroes, and their almost entire destitution of medical attendance. There are now, it appears, but fifty qualified practitioners in the island, with no hopes of reinforcement.

The results of this census were very gratifying, and very unexpected. Such scanty means are there, ordinarily, of knowing the true condition of the country, that it was a prevailing impression that the population was decreasing. Had slavery continued, the present population would probably have been about 275,000. The difference of 165,000 in favor of freedom tells its own story. But the present necessities of the estates call for a more speedy augmentation of the laboring force than is furnished by natural increase alone.

I have omitted to mention in its proper place one gratifying sign that those minor industries which make so large a part of the prosperity of the wealthiest free communities, but which are neglected by the coarse labor of slaves, and have been particularly despised by the Jamaica planters, are now coming up in the island. Hitherto, sugar, rum, and coffee have been the all in all of prosperity to Jamaicans. But in 1838, the pimento export was 2,708,640 pounds; in 1858, 9,465,261 pounds. In 1838 the export of logwood was 8,432 cwt.; of fustic, 2,126 cwt.; of mahogany, 1,936 feet; of cocoanuts, 0; of honey, 0. In 1859, the export of logwood was 14,006 cwt.; of fustic, 2,329 cwt.; of mahogany, 35,000 feet; of cocoanuts, 712,913; of honey, 6,954 pounds. The ginger export has diminished from 1,834,120 pounds in 1841, to 709,620 pounds in 1858. This increase in the lesser articles of trade shows a brisker circulation in the capillaries of the social system, a sure token of reviving health. Indeed, before the writer left the island, that dreary uncertainty how affairs were turning, which prevailed for the first half of his stay, had given way to the returning cheerfulness arising from the feeling that Jamaica had touched bottom, and that henceforward, however slowly, her prospects were brightening. This cheerful feeling displays itself in a late report of Governor Darling to the Home Government, some paragraphs of which follow, quoted from Mr. Underhill's book, from which the writer has derived so large a part of the facts that he has had to take at second hand, and which he is glad again to commend as kindly, impartial, and full of carefully gathered and exactly appreciated information. His conjectural estimates of property, however, are exceptionable, as decidedly too high.

Governor Darling, himself a planter, says:

'The proportion of those who are settling themselves industriously on their holdings, and rapidly rising in the social scale, while commanding the respect of all classes of the community, and some of whom are, to a limited extent, themselves the employers of hired labor, paid for either in money or in kind, is, I am happy to think, not only steadily increasing, but at the present moment is far more extensive than was anticipated by those who are cognizant of all that took place in the colony in the earlier days of negro freedom.

'There can be no doubt, in fact, that an independent, respectable, and, I believe, trustworthy middle class is rapidly forming.... If the real object of emancipation was to place the freedman in such a position that he might work out his own advancement in the social scale, and prove his capacity for the full and rational enjoyment of personal independence, secured by constitutional liberty, Jamaica will afford more instances, even in proportion to its large population, of such gratifying results, than any land in which African slavery once existed.

 

'Jamaica, at this moment, presents, I believe, at once the strongest proof of the complete success of the great measure of emancipation, as relates to the capacity of the emancipated race for freedom, and the most unfortunate instance of a descent in the scale of agricultural and commercial importance as a colonial community.'

Governor Darling's words suggest the exact reason why Jamaica may be looked upon either as the most fortunate or the most unfortunate of the emancipated colonies. All depends upon the point of view. If the largest amount of individual well-being and the most favorable conditions of gaining independence and self-respect constitute a community fortunate, then Jamaica stands at the head of her island sisters. If immense wealth, centred in a few, constitutes a community fortunate, then Barbados is at the head. In Barbados the wealth of the planters is greater, in Jamaica the condition of the laborers is better. The late Mr. Sewell remarked to the writer that the common people in Jamaica had a more manly and self-respecting look than in any of the smaller islands which he had visited. It is much to be lamented that the divorce between the proprietary and the laboring interest was so complete in this island, and the consequent industrial anarchy so great. But even this was better than the depressed condition in which the peasantry of the smaller islands are kept by the hold that the planters have upon them. Manhood is a better crop than either sugar or coffee, and in the long run brings all other things with it. The article in the March number of the Atlantic Monthly for 1862, shows, in brief compass, what inestimable benefits have followed in the smaller islands from conferring the boon of personal freedom, even with so stringent a social dependence remaining. In Jamaica, freedom has been more complete, and the recoil of the social elements from each other more violent. The disaffection of the governing class has also been greater, and Freedom has been left to take care of herself.¹¹ But though thwarted and frowned upon, she is at the last justified of her children. Mr. Sewell has most happily hit the whole truth in a few lines: 'The crop' (of freedom), he says, 'appears in patches, even as it was sown, forcing itself here and there through the ruins of the fabric which disfigures still the political complexion of the island, and sorely cramps the energies of its people.' Governor Darling's words show how rapidly the crop, thus negligently sown, is forcing itself into prosperous and prevailing growth.