The island of Cuba:

Dedication

TO THE RIGHT HON. SIR JAMES STEPHEN.

To one officially connected with colonial affairs for upwards of a quarter of a century ; who brought to bear on them a vast experience, united with consummate ability and strong sense of the obligations of imperial power towards the interests of humanity and justice, combined with an indefatigable zeal in the discharge of public duties of the most arduous description ; who, so far as it was practicable, in a position environed with many trammels and restraints, followed in the footsteps of his illustrious kinsman, William Wilberforce, on many memorable occasions ; to one, I may add, who, amidst the toil and turmoil of the business of a great colonial empire, found leisure to devote to literary pursuits of the highest order, and to the illustration of the great truths and principles of that Divine philosophy which teaches men of all creeds to be charitable, just, tolerant, and forbearing to one another,

I INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME.

Introduction

Memoranda made in Cuba in the years 1836- 7-8-9, respecting slavery and the slave-trade, the state of society, commerce, religion, and education in that island, when the author filled the office of Superintendent of liberated Africans, and for a large portion of that period, the appointment of Acting Commissioner of Arbitration in the Mixed Court of Justice at the Havana, furnish chiefly the matter of this volume. That which is contained in the Appendix comprises all the statistical information of a late period, from official documents and other authentic sources, that has reference to the changes our West India Islands have undergone since the abolition of slavery ; returns, also, showing the comparative state of agriculture and commerce, prior and subsequent to emancipation ; the exports from other colonies where slavery exists, of late years, and especially from Cuba.

All information in regard to that colony, the bearing on our West India possessions of its prosperity, and in respect to the progress, efficiency, and extent of our efforts for the abolition of the slave-trade, that is calculated to throw a light on

VI INTRODUCTION.

" the West India question," will be found in this volume. The desire of the author is to state facts, and to leave his readers to form their own opinions with respect to them, and to place before the public the results of his own experience in the British West Indies, in Cuba, and on the western coast of Africa, in various official situations— and in the United States, in a private capacity ; an experience extended over a period of eight years, with the view, solely, of enabling others, more competent than he feels himself to be, to devise plans, or procure measures to be adopted, for remedying evils of great magnitude now impending over our colonies.

The present state of those islands makes the subject of the slave-trade and slavery, in the Spanish colonies and the Brazils, one of deep interest for us, and one that must very soon engage the attention of statesmen in this country.

If the present state of things in our colonies should endure for two years longer, without any effective efforts to ameliorate their condition, the cultivation of sugar must be totally abandoned in them.

To prevent this result, we must look to one of the three following occurrences —

1st. The re-imposition of the old differential duties on foreign sugars.

2nd. Our West India colonies being placed in a condition, both as respects capital and labour, to compete with the slaveholding and slave-trading colonies of Spain and the Brazils in the sugar markets of Europe.

INTRODUCTION. VII

3rd. The extinction of the slave-trade in the Spanish colonies and the Brazils.

All schemes for the object in question that have not those ends in view are illusory.

In regard to the first proposition, the obvious impracticability of any attempt to re-impose the old sugar duties leaves little to be said.

Whether the West India proprietors were fairly dealt with or not, in altering those duties at a period when the experiment of free labour in our colonies had not had sufficient time afforded to solve the question of its advantages or disadvantages, is not now the question.

The real question is, the practicability or impracticability of re-imposing those duties.

The probability is, that free-trade principles have been pushed to an extreme extent by the advocates of that system. But the circumstances of the nation would have led to the downfall of the old system of restriction on trade, and monopolies for the benefit of peculiar interests, if Mr. Cobden or Sir Robert Peel had never existed. It so happens that the advantage of the alteration in the sugar duties has been brought home more closely to the pocket intelligence of the people of England than the benefits arising from the alteration in the laws affecting the price of corn.

The advantage of cheap sugar in England has now been made too generally known to admit of a return to the old system of protection. The country would not stand a repeal of the sugar law, nor of the corn law. Both were necessary

Vlll INTRODUCTION.

consequences of Sir Robert Peel's first change in the tariff. There was a time when a sanctimonious pretence might have passed off in Parliament for a great moral purpose, but that time is gone by. If we find no immorality in wearing slave-grown cotton and eating slave-grown rice, none will be found in using slave-grown sugar.

We must, then, look to some other means of removing the evils under which our West India colonies are now labouring.

The second proposition, that has reference to the condition of our colonies as influenced by the prosperity of slave-producing countries, is deserving of very serious attention. It is the habit of the West India body to say, that the great evil under which our colonies suffer is the want of labour. That, however, is not the fact. The want of capital is no less suffered from than the want of labour.

In Cuba and the Brazils there is no want of either, consequently our colonies are wholly unable to compete with them in the production of sugar.

Had the compensation money gone into the pockets of the proprietors in our colonies, things would have been in a very different state to what they now are there. But the twenty millions, of 1834, passed into the hands of the West India merchants, the mortgagees of two thirds of all the large estates in our colonies : into the hands of mercantile men, who were not exclusively engaged in West India affairs, but who had East India

INTRODUCTION. IX

Interests, Chinese interests, general mercantile interests, brokerage concerns, and money-market matters for the employment of their capital, as well as in West India investments, and who, moreover, had been engaged for a great many years in advancing money to a ruined proprietary, who were never again likely to be restored to a prosperous condition. Consequently, none of the compensation money was devoted to the acquisition of free labour, or the substitution of machinery for the great loss of manual labour, which the emancipation led to — the loss of female labour, and of that of children, arising from the employment of the women in domestic employments, and the sending of children to school, which took place to so large an extent after compulsory labour was abolished.

The good, then, that ought to have been derived from the compensation money was not obtained by our colonies, and want of capital, immediately after emancipation, began to be severely felt. In fact, the colonists felt it far more than they did before emancipation, for the merchants at home, when once the compensation money came into their hands, felt less disposed than ever to make advances, and in a great many instances obliged the impoverished, embarrassed colonists to look for other merchants to take charge of their estates.

In the meantime, Cuba and the Brazils profited by those unfortunate circumstances of our planters. They imported more slaves from Africa, the Americans poured capital largely into the A3

X INTRODUCTION.

former island, and brought a vast number of new estates into cultivation in that colony.

It is a folly to suppose that our West India colonies have been robbed of their prosperity by Government measures of a recent date, or even a remote one. The difficulties of them are of older dates than the years 1847, 1834, or 1807.

In a report of the committee of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, dated the 23rd November, 1792, on the sugar trade of that colony, we find this passage : — " In the course of twenty years, 177 estates in Jamaica have been sold for the payment of debts, fifty-five estates have been thrown up, and ninety-nine are still in the hands of creditors."

The report refers to a return made by the Provost Marshal, wherein it is stated that "80,121 executions, amounting to £22,563,786 sterling, had been lodged in his office in the course of twenty years."

In 1804, the House of Assembly issued another report, wherein it is stated, " that the West India merchants of England, holding securities on real estate in the colony, were generally foreclosing mortgages, filing bills in chancery, refusing to advance money to the planters, or giving the smallest accommodation to them — without judgments in ejectment, and release of errors, in order at a moment's notice to take out writs of possession, and enter on the plantations of the unfortunate proprietors." . . • " All kind of credit is at an end." . . . "A faithful detail (of their distress) would have the appearance of a frightful caricature."

INTRODUCTION. XI

In 1807 (before the slave-trade abolition measure came into operation), the House of Assembly of Jamaica made another report, wherein it was stated, that "within the last five or six years sixty-five estates had been abandoned, thirty -two sold under decrees of chancery, and 115 more respecting which suits in chancery were depending, and many more bills preparing." "The sugar estates lately brought to sale, and now in the Court of Chancery in this island and in England, amount to about one-fourth of the whole number in the colony."

In 1812, the case of the planters of Jamaica was recommended in a memorial to the King, in which it was stated, that " the ruin of the original possessors has been completed. Estate after estate has passed into the hands of mortgagees and creditors absent from the island, until there are large districts, whole parishes, in which there is not a single proprietor of a sugar plantation resident. The distress" it is added, " cannot well be aggravated" Now it must not be supposed that the foregoing statements were applicable to Jamaica alone ; for we ha,ve the testimony of Mr. Marryat. a gentleman deeply interested in West India property, given in his place in the House of Commons, in 1813, that " there were comparatively few estates in the West Indies that had not, during the preceding twenty years, been sold or given up to creditors." One quotation more will bring the history of the West Lndia distress up to the year 1832. In the address of the West India body to the British nation, signed by the most eminent of its members

XII INTRODUCTION.

resident in Great Britain, they say, " the alarming and unprecedented distress in which the whole British West India interest is involved" justified them in imploring Parliament " to adopt prompt and effectual measures of relief in order to preserve them from inevitable ruin" Viscount Goderich, then colonial secretary, in commenting on this subject, in a despatch, dated 5th November, 1831, observes, "The existence of severe commercial distress amongst all classes of society connected with the West Indies is unhappily too evident ;" and with great truth and justice his lordship said, "without denying the concurrence of many causes, it is obvious that the great and permanent source of distress, which almost every page of the West Indies records, is to be found in the institution of slavery. It is in vain to hope for long-continued prosperity in any country, in which the people are not dependent on their own voluntary labour for support — in which labour is not prompted by legitimate motives, and does not earn its natural reward." And again, " / cannot but regard the system itself as the perennial spring of those distresses, of which, not only at present merely, but during the whole of the last fifty years, the complaints have been so frequent and so just "

From the period of our abolition of the slave-trade, in 1807, to the year preceding the passing of the Emancipation Act, in 1833, the complaints of distress in the West India colonies were unremitting. But they varied nothing in their character from those we have referred to, from 1792 to 1807.

INTRODUCTION. Xlll

The insurrection in Jamaica, that preceded the Emancipation Act of 1833, brought the colony to the utmost distress it had yet reached. To it a very large portion of the injury to West India interests attributed to emancipation is really due.

The greatest mischief to them which arose from that measure was the high rate of wages that prevailed at the beginning of the new system in all the colonies, and the want of capital to meet that charge for labour. At one time, half-a-crown, three shillings, and even more, for job work, was paid for a day's work.

In Jamaica, wages now range from Is. to Is. 6d. per diem; in British Guiana, from Is. 4d. to Is. lOd. per diem; and in Trinidad, from Is. 3d. to Is. 8d. per diem, for able-bodied, good labourers. When work is done by the job, labourers earn much more. The rate of wages is, however, rather decreasing than rising, throughout the colonies. But there can be no question that, at the present price of sugar, the payment of such wages leaves production without remuneration.

That such wages enable the negroes to save money and invest it in land is obvious, from the fact that the number of freeholds purchased by them in Jamaica is nearly 20,000, and in British Guiana nearly 5,000, and in our other colonies in proportion. But the amelioration of the condition of the negroes of these colonies is best proved by the large increase in the export trade to the British West Indies and Guiana. We find the total declared value to have been, during the six years ending with 1833, £15,108,876,

XIV INTRODUCTION.

whilst during the six years ending in 1844, the amount was £17,990,823. And it must be borne in mind, the exports from the United States to our West India colonies had likewise very largely increased.

But the exports from our colonies have not increased — far from it — they have fallen off considerably. How could it be otherwise? Lord Stanley stated that, immediately previous to emancipation — " In all the islands there had been a general increase in the production of sugar, and a corresponding decrease in the amount of the labouring population." In Jamaica, he stated, the medium population, during three years ending June, 1832, was 327,464, and the average amount of sugar raised, 1,410,026 cwt., yet the slave population had fallen off, from 1826, to the amount of 6,929, and the production of sugar had increased, since the same term, 55,538 cwts.

All evils are referred to 1833, the year of the enactment of the great measure of emancipation ; but, again and again it ought to be repeated that, if the twenty millions of compensation money had been applied to the wants and necessities of the British West Indies in 1834, — the substitution of machinery as much as possible for manual labour, — the introduction of improved modes of cultivation and production, — much would have been done towards enabling those colonies to meet the competition of slave-labour in Cuba and the Brazils.

In Cuba, when the equipment clause of the new treaty of 1835 alarmed the slaveholders of that island for the continuance of the introduc-

INTRODUCTION. XV

tion of Bozal negroes, a great stimulus was given to legitimate industry : steam-engines were set up, on a great number of estates, and various improvements that shortened or lightened labour were had recourse to ; — Cuba had capital, and the energies that belong to prosperity, to do this. But the case was different with Jamaica. The twenty millions allotted to the slave-owners went into the pockets of the merchants in London and Liverpool, who were the virtual proprietors of the estates, and the colonies derived no benefit from it. The possible occurrence I have referred to, of our West India colonies being placed, with respect to capital, as well as to labour, in a condition to compete with the slaveholding and slave-trading colonies of Spain and the Brazils, requires to be considered with much attention and freedom from pre-conceived opinions. I have approached this question with a strong desire to divest my mind of all previous notions I have formed or may have expressed on it, and to look on the present position of our West Indian affairs as a new " situation," demanding new measures and modes of action, to meet a very grave emergency. The views I now set forth are the result of a comprehensive consideration of this subject. My experience in Jamaica, the year preceding emancipation,— in Cuba, from 1836 to 1840, — and likewise my acquaintance with matters connected with the slave-trade on the western coast of Africa, in 1841 — are, however, the main foundation on which any conclusion I come to must rest.

XVI INTRODUCTION.

The West Indians, then, assert that the great want of labour is the grand evil under which our colonies exist. This is the chief difficulty, and the Government is given to understand this evil is to be removed by large immigrations of free negroes, coolies, or Chinese, and some say of white people, into our colonies.

My belief is, I repeat, that want of capital, ever since emancipation, constitutes, at least, one half of the evil in question.

Let us suppose Jamaica to represent our emancipated West India colonies, and Cuba all the countries from which sugar produced by slave-labour is exported. It would not be sufficient, to restore the prosperity of the former, to equalise the number of labourers now annually introduced into both islands. Cuba has not undergone the ordeal of emancipation. That tremendous change has not shaken the foundations of her agriculture, commerce, and credit, or temporarily affected their stability. There are a vast number of affluent mortgagee proprietors in Cuba ; there is a great afflux of American capitalists into Cuba ; there is a very large commerce there with the United States, as well as with the mother country. In these respects there is no parity between Cuba and Jamaica, though it is quite true that in the former colony there are great fears entertained for the maintenance of slavery, and great cause for apprehension, for another insurrection like the last, even though unsuccessful, would involve the colony in inextricable embarrassment. The actual mercantile proprietors of Cuba, the mortgagees living

INTRODUCTION. XV11

in the Havana, Principe, and St. Jago, are not absentees, however, nor long engaged with the ruinous interests of ill-managed estates, nor deeply involved in other great commercial speculations. They are men well to do in the world, grasping, unprincipled men, possessed of capital, beyond the reach of small commercial panics, or agricultural crises. It is, therefore, idle to attribute the evils which our West India colonies labour under, to acts of government. It would be no less idle to imagine that all those evils are to be removed by the introduction of free men from Africa into those colonies.

Much good, doubtless, may be accomplished by augmenting the number of free labourers* there, and I think it possible to increase the number to an extent that would enable our colonies to hold on, till such time as the introduction of slaves into Cuba and the Brazils was put a final stop to.

It is needless to observe, I do not calculate on a very prolonged existence of the Cuban and Brazilian slave-trade, independently of any efforts made for its abolition by means of Mixed Commission Courts, cruising squadrons, and all the machinery of treaties with foreign powers for this object, — treaties which have hitherto proved most costly to this country, and calculated, perhaps in defiance of all efforts — even the untiring, most able, honest, and energetic efforts of the present Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs—to prolong the very evil they were intended to abolish or abate.

SY111 INTRODUCTION.

Their effect lias been only to regulate, by means of partial restraint, the importations of slaves into Cuba and the Brazils, which would otherwise have been excessive for a few years, and then must have proved fatal to slavery, a mortal cause of fear, and occasion of imminent peril to the security of the property in slaves. This fear and peril never becomes a permanent state of being, or one frequently recurring in slaveholding countries, without a fatal influence on the interests of slavery.

I believe that slavery cannot exist, however, under any circumstances, many years in Cuba and the Brazils ; and such is the nature of slavery in both, such the utter want of religious instruction, of habits of civilisation, of social improvement of every kind, of connexion by intermediate agents, such as teachers, preachers, or magistrates (appointed by the Crown), between slaves and masters, that in the event of the abolition of the slave-trade, any partial attempt at ameliorating slavery would prove fruitless, and then the inevitable final measure of total abolition of slavery would be of a very different kind from that of ours. It would be utterly vain to expect the settling down of that population of slaves, with all their African instincts, feelings, and passions fresh in them, and still racy of the soil from which they have been taken within a few years, into habits of order and industry, at all resembling those of the negroes of our West India colonies immediately previous to emancipation. The abolition of slaverv in Cuba and the

INTRODUCTION. XIX

Brazils would be looked upon by the negroes as a proof of the superiority of their power over that of their late masters. The motive for any modification of it would be confounded in their ideas with a conviction of an inability to prevent the abolition of slavery, and there would be no agency found in those colonies, no intermediate influence, like that of the missionaries of our islands prior to 1834, acting between slaves and owners, calculated to make a system of modified slavery work with any elements of endurance in it.

I repeat, that it is for such contingencies as the abolition of the slave-trade and of slavery in Cuba and the Brazils, we have to endeavour to place our colonies in a state fit to take advantage of these events — less distant, perhaps, than any persons, except individuals acquainted with those countries, may imagine. I see no means of putting our West Indian colonies in a state of ability to compete with them ; of preventing a vast number of the best estates in the island of Jamaica being thrown up, even within the next year ; and of enabling the proprietors to hold on, for the short term of years I have referred to, or a period that would be determined by the first war, European or American, but the introduction into those colonies of free labour on an extensive scale.

With respect to the views of Mr. Joseph Hume, there is nothing very new in them ; old pleas, of good intentions towards the people of Africa ; old pretexts for man robbing ; old plans for peopling plantations under colour of zeal for the promotion of the interests of civilisation and re-

XX INTRODUCTION.

ligion ; the old spirit of fraud and cupidity embodied in another form of hypocrisy. Mr. Joseph Hume would have the legislature rescind the law against the slave-trade. He would have our West India merchants send ships to Africa to purchase cargoes of slaves (who must necessarily be kidnapped, captured, carried away from their own homes and kindred, to furnish the man-markets on the coast for Mr. Joseph Hume's agents), to convey them to our colonies, and there convert them into free labourers, who could not, however, possibly escape from those colonies and get back to their own land for a great many years at least. There, Mr. Joseph Hume would have them called " free labourers ; " so that their " removal " from Africa would be entirely " for their benefit and advantage." What powers of face must this economist of other men's labour — this benevolent Trinidad proprietor — member of parliament — possess !

There is, indeed, nothing new in his plea for devastating the African continent, for devoting that unhappy country anew to the ravages of war, and its people to the plundering Razias and slave-hunts of the robbers and marauders, who sell their surviving victims on the coast to the European " ransom ers, " whom Mr. Joseph Hume, in the innocency of his nature, will have the dealers and chapmen in the flesh and blood of the stolen negroes — the agents on the coast for this traffic — considered.

It was " for the interests of religion " and the " benefit of the negro race " that Africa has been

INTRODUCTION. XXI

ravaged for 300 years. Religion and humanity, however, have not been much advanced by the ransomings which have taken place there. But, granting that those ransomings are to be of a bond fide character, what does it matter to Africa that they are so? The negroes that are stolen for us, and sold to us, are to be free in the West India colonies, — the condition of these persons is to be bettered in spite of them, and those colonies to be improved by means of them. But what does all this signify to Africa ? She is still to be desolated, in order that our colonies may again prosper. The war of thirty odd years with the giant crime of the slave-trade, and its hard- won victory, are to go for nothing, — the labours of Clarkson and Wilberforce are as dirt in the sight of Mr. Joseph Hume. All the interests of humanity put together are as a feather in the scale, in the opinion of that enlightened, political economist, compared with those of the free-trade principle applied to the commerce in the flesh and blood of his own species. Mr. Joseph Hume would buy that human commodity, called labour, in the cheapest market, as he would purchase bread stuffs, or any other merchandise, and dispose of it, to the best advantage, in those colonies in whose prosperity he is more or less interested, for the benefit, of course, of the labouring machines with two hands that he would have the Government sanction the forcible carrying away of from Africa.

Perhaps I have said too much on this subject ; but, taking into account the very extravagant

XX11 INTRODUCTION.

length to which free-trade doctrines are now occasionally poshed, and the violation of all notions of morality, which becomes familiar to one's ears when the interests of free-trade are thus illegitimately advocated, — considering how little importance is attached to human rights by those who hold such extreme opinions, — and how much, unfortunately, such extreme opinions begin to prevail,- — the few remarks I have made, on this mischievous project of Mr. Joseph Hume, may not be altogether needless.

I think the evils of our West India colonies are to be met without re-opening the slave-trade, or declaring war against Spain or the Brazils for their breach of treaties with us.

We may, by a well-conducted system of emigration, obtain a sufficient number of free labourers from the Kroo Coast, the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores, to enable our West India proprietors to carry on sugar cultivation for a few years longer, while slavery and the slave-trade do exist in Cuba and the Brazils.

We have a right to call on Spain and the Brazils for a bona fide execution of their treaties; to consider the existence of slavery in Cuba and the Brazils as an undeniable consequence of a flagrant violation of solemn engagements with us ; to look upon the present means of effecting our legitimate anti-slave-trade objects as insufficient for their ends ; to make our claims a question of compensation for the vast expenditure we have been put to, on the faith of engagements that have been broken.

INTRODUCTION. XX111

We have, moreover, a right to make our urgent claims troublesome, not only to the Spanish Government, but, through our agents in Cuba, continually perplexing and harassing to the Spanish authorities in Cuba; and, in respect to the Brazils, to pursue the same course in the slave-trading provinces of that empire.

But while we do this, it would be better for oiir interests and the character of our efforts against the slave-trade — which ought not only to be unsuspected, but above suspicion — to claim nothing in the way of a prohibition to aid and to abet the slave-trade from foreign powers, which British subjects likewise are not prevented from accomplishing.

So long as we seize the ships of Spain, Portugal, and the Brazils, under the equipment clause of the treaties entered into since 1835, — when we find a few shackles, planks, or boilers in them, or other articles calculated for the prosecution of the slave-trade, — and that we ship tons of those identical articles for slave-trading purposes, and other manufactures for those purposes alone, for the western coast of Africa, Cuba, and the Brazils, and sell them there to slave-traders well known to be engaged in that commerce only, — our efforts will be made under great disadvantage and with very indifferent success.