History of the British Colonies: Possessions in the West Indies

velope those resources a more generous mercantile code must be adopted; the interest of an enormous public debt,

of interpretation gave rise to animosities between them; and these animosities were augmented by political party spirit, according as they were royalists or partizans of the French revolution; so that disturbances took place, and blood was shed.

In the year 1791, the people of colour obtained from the Assembly in France another decree in explicit terms, which determined that they were entitled to all the rights of citizenship in all the French islands, provided they were born of free parents on both sides. The news of this decree had no sooner arrived at the Cape, than it produced an indignation almost amounting to phrenzy among the whites. They directly trampled under foot the national cockade; and were with difficulty prevented from seizing all the French merchant ships in the roads. After this the two parties armed against each other; camps were formed, and, it is to be deplored, that terrible massacres and conflagrations followed; the reports of which, when brought to the mother country, were so terrible, that the Assembly in the same year abolished the decree in favour of the free people of colour.

When the news of this last act reached St. Domingo, it occasioned as much irritation among the people of colour as the news of the passing of it had produced among the whites; and hostilities were renewed between them, so that new battles, massacres, and burnings took place, which compelled the Conventional Assembly to retrace their steps. They sent out commissioners; who, after several attempts at pacification, emancipated such blacks as were willing to range themselves under the banners of the Republic; and in 1794, the National Convention emancipated the whole remaining slave population, who immediately betook themselves to courses of industry. In these transactions it must be evident, that the slaves in the first instance were the mere engines employed by their owners, by whom they were hurried on to excesses. If afterwards they found a cause properly their own, and in any instance prosecuted it with cruelty, it should be recollected that they had not been educated in the principles of civilized society. Their whole experience in the colonies had been limited to the contemplation of but one motive for human action, and that motive was fear. They had witnessed great excesses of cruelty practised by white men upon blacks; and when the ebullitions of their own rage and resentment, for injuries long endured, had burst all the restraints of law, and they knew that the foe they had raised up would, if triumphant, resort to still more execrable cruelties than he had formerly practised, what wonder that in the use of power they should be implacably cruel, thus following the example of their white oppressors,

(£28,000,000 yearly) as well as a portion of the current expenses of the nation, must be levied on some other sources, instead of causing them to fall so heavily as they now do on our colonial produce. Again, I repeat, we must bring the trade of our transmarine possessions as nearly as possible to that of a coasting traffic. Why should an Englishman settling in any part of the empire be burthened with enormous fiscal duties on the produce of his skill and industry, for the benefit of some more favoured portion of his fellow subjects? In the hope, therefore, that the present era of social liberty is but the prelude to a state of commer. cial freedom, when the rich and varied products of our colonies will be unsubjected to heavy fiscal restrictions and legislative enactments, I close my labours on the Second who certainly were not less so? The very worst part of the conduct of the blacks on St. Domingo, in their struggle for their liberties, is many shades less dark and diabolical than that of the cool calculating slave trader, who navigates his vessel, freighted with fetters, manacles, thumbscrews, and scourges, to the shores of an unoffending people, and, after drawing numbers of them into his toils by employing the most satanic arts, sacrifices the lives of nearly half of his cargo of human beings that he may secure the others in a distant region, in a state of irremediable bondage. The outrages of men struggling to regain their lost liberties. have too much of virtue in them to admit of any comparison with such transactions as those of the slave trader.

The inhabitants of St. Domingo have since, as might naturally be expected, experienced some revolutionary struggles; but although they are in the very midst of slave colonies belonging to several European nations, they are at this moment an independent negro state, under a republican government, over which a native mulatto chief presides, and are daily increasing in population (it is now 1,000,000, having doubled itself in 25 years) and improving in power, in intellectual cultivation, and all the arts of civilization. Boyer, the President of the Republic of Hayti, has thrice, viz. in 1814, 1816, and 1823, offered to compensate the former proprietors for their losses; but France wished to stipulate for sovereignty, and to this the Haytians of course would not consent. One million francs have been presented to Lafitte by the St. Domingans, for the losses he may have sustained by his projected Haytian loan.

Volume of the History of those Possessions, which I cannot help believing have been attached by Almighty Providence to Britain, for the purpose of working out more than has yet been done, the salvation and happiness of the human race.

The enlightened and ingenuous reader, who does me the honour to accompany me through the unavoidably monotonous details necessary to a due understanding of the first connected view of the British Colonies that has ever been laid before the public, is requested to suspend a definitive opinion on my mercantile and colonial policy, until the appearance of the fifth volume, in which will be developed the principles of ancient and modern colonization, and an exposition of the future line of conduct and government which England must inevitable pursue amidst the extraordinary events which surround and influence her small domestic, and vast transmarine Empire.

For the generous manner in which so many Editors of the public Press have unbiassedly cheered me on to complete an undertaking the mere preparation for which has cost me years of peril and privation abroad and at home, I return my sincere thanks; few can imagine the difficulties which I have had to surmount in proceeding even thus far; indeed notwithstanding the possession of no ordinary degree of energy, I should have sunk beneath the pressure of unremitted daily and midnight toil, had I not been supported by the consciousness that my country will reap some benefit from my sacrifices, and that I owe a duty to society, to extend by every possible exertion, social and commercial freedom, and thus tend to lessen the number of wretched and indigent throughout the world. With reference to the utility of statistical tables of population, trade, and finance, or to the value of geological descriptions, and geographical delineations of our colonies, it may be sufficient to observe, that I mistake the spirit of the mercantile age in which I live, if correct facts and practical conclusions are not more desired by the mass of well informed society, than theoretical views and lengthened abstract disquisitions, which lead to-Nothing. It may have suited the genius of a bygone generation,--or be adapted to the taste of a few members of the present, to busy themselves in such procedures as extracting sun-beams from cucumbers, forgetful that even if successful, the question of cui bono? is with less difficulty answered. For me (and I think I have merely stamped on my mind the impress which gives form and pressure to the progress of civilization and Christianity,) it is enough to know that the great mass of the race of human beings in which my destiny is cast, are poor, ignorant, and wretched; and that extended commerce relieves want-that competence annihilates ignorance-and that knowledge is virtue, and power, and happiness.

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