Black people -- Jamaica; Jamaica; Slavery -- Jamaica
1st. He acknowledged he had written a letter to the Rev. Thomas
Pinnock, a Wesleyan missionary, asking him to help him in getting other
employment away from the estate. Surely quite the proper thing to do,
since he did not like the way the estate was conducted.
2ndly. In a letter written to the attorney of New Ground, he had said,
“The Lord reward you for the kindness you have shown me, and grant you
in health and wealth long to live!”
I really can't see that that called for tar and feathers.
3rdly. That he had said to a slave who had opened a gate for him at a
certain place, “The Lord bless you!”
4thly. That he had asked the drivers of the workhouse gang questions
respecting the offences of negroes of that gang. And surely _that_ was
harmless enough.
5thly. That he had made private remarks about the manner in which he had
seen Mr M'Lean the overseer treat the slaves.
Here one of the deputation, Dicken, who was overseer at Windsor, a
neighbouring estate, told him that he had two negroes at that moment in
the stocks; and added with a brutal oath, if he would come over in the
morning he would let him see them properly flogged.
I wonder how many unfortunates got an extra flogging, not because they
deserved it, but just to show those who were bent on helping the negro
that the other side, who were pledged to slavery and things as they
were, defied them and all their works.
The last accusation the young man declared had not a particle of truth
in it. He had never preached to 150 slaves at one time, though to all
the other offences he pleaded guilty.
It shows how high party spirit ran, how the planting class objected
to raising the status of the slave, when we find that these planters
managed to get that dangerous young man banished the island before he
had been there fourteen weeks. He was sowing the seeds of disaffection
in a soil already ripe.
“These extracts,” says Bleby, “show... the almost rabid hostility of
the planters to everything, and to every person who had the most distant
connection with the religious instruction of their slaves.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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