Reasons for establishing a registry of slaves in the British colonies : being a report of a committee of the African Institution ; published by order of that society

yr X

REASONS

FOR ESTABLISHING

A REGISTRY OF SLAVES

IN THE

BRITISH COLONIES

A REPORT OF A COMMITTEE

AFRICAN INSTITUTION.

PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THAT SOCIETY.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY ELLERTON AND HENDERSON,

JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET.

SOLD BY J, IIATCHARD, BOOKSELLER AND PUBLISHER,
190, PICCADILLY.

1815.

A

710

'^ff^'

REASONS,

arc. &v.

SECTION I.

The fatal Effects of an illicit Importation of Slaves

into the British Colonies.

JLF there remained in this country any difference
of opinion on the subject of the slave trade, in
one point at least we should be unanimous. The
Abolition, to produce any salutary effects, must
be a reformation in practice, as well as in law.

Let it be supposed that negroes from Africa
are clandestinely brought into our sugar islands
and there held in slavery, and it will be plain,
that, to the extent of this practice at least, the
abolition laws are worse than useless.

The same crimes are committed, the same mi-
series are inflicted in Africa, and a still greater
destruction of human life must take place on
the passage, not only from the circuity which
may be necessary to elude detection and seizure,
but from the absence of those legislative regula-

B

2

tions which mitigated the letharious horrors of
the voyage, while the commerce was permitted
bylaw. The smuggler, having to risk the for-
feiture of his ship as well as cargo, in a prohibited
trade, will take care that the tonnage is as scan-
tily proportioned as possible to the number of the
captives on board. He has now the temptation of
reducing by that means, not only the expense, but
the legal perils of the adventure, in their propor-
tions to his possible gains.

There is also less chance than before of his
being restrained in such barbarous practices,
either by humanity or prudence. Tlie British
slave trader cannot now be a man whom preju-
dice, early habit, and reputable example, may have
seduced into crimes repugnant to his general prin-
ciples and feelings, and who may therefore be
expected to soften as much as possible, in their
execution, the cruel methods of confinement and
coercion which are essential to the trade; neither
can we expect from him that cautious and calcu-
lating regard to self-interest, which may sometimes
have supplied, in such points of conduct, the
want of humanity, in a prudent and experienced
trader.

The poor Africans who may now be carried
into slavery by British hands, must be commit-
ted to men not only hardened by the habits of
oppression, but reckless of public shame, con-^
lemptuous of all authority, human or divine, and

s

addicted to the most desperate hazards, for the
sake of lawless gain.

It is, in a word, by felons, by the sanie descrip-
tion of characters that break into our houses at
midnight, or rob us on the highway, that Africans
smuggled by British subjects must now be drag-
ged from their native shores, and carried across
the Atlantic.

That one of the consequences will be increas-
ed severity of treatment, especially in respect of
the close and crowded confinement on board, does
not rest upon conjecture. It is fully attested by
experience. The contraband slave traders of
America notoriously crowd their ships beyond
any example to be found in the same commerce
while it was allowed by their laws,
y Several shocking instances of this inhumanity
have come under the cognizance of our prize
courts. The same dreadful distinctions also have
marked the cases of ships under Portuguese and
Spanish colours, which have been proved, or
reasonably presumed, to belong to British or
American smugglers.

These, however, are not the only, nor the worst,
evils which would flow from a contraband im-
portation into our colonies. It would be fatal to
one of the dearest hopes of abolitionists, the melio-
ration of the treatment of those unfortunate fellow^
creatures, our West-Indian slaves.

As it is impossible suddenly to break their

fetters, without danger of calamitous coiise*
quences, not only to their masters but themselves,
we must suffer them to remain, for some consider-
able period, in their present state of bondage. The
most extreme and abject slavery that ever de*
graded and cursed mankind, must yet continue
to be the reproach of the freest and happiesi
empire that ever the sun beheld.

But who is there so dead to the impulse of hu-
man sympathy, who so regardless of the claims
of justice and mercy, who so unconscious of his
duties as an Englishman, a Christian, and a Man,
as not to deplore that cruel necessity, and to
desire to give to its duration the narrowest limit
that humanity itself will allow ?

Here there neither is, nor ever has been,
any controversy in Parliament since the subject
was first brought to its notice. All have pro-
fessed to regard colonial slavery as an evil which
we were bound to terminate, as a reproach which
we were called on to wipe off, though the nature
tf the case would not permit us to do so in any
but a slowly progressive course.

The advocates of a gradual abolition, and the
few who refused even to prescribe any term to
the slave trade, professed themselves to be as
earnest in their desire to reform, by all safe means,
and ultimately to abolish the slavery of our co-
lonies, as Mr. Wilberforce himself The only
questions were, whether an immediate abolition

of the African slave trade was the best meaft
to that desirable end ; and whether a temporary-
continuance of the trade was not even necessary
to prepare the means of mitigating the labour,
preserving the numbers, and ultimately improv-
ing into freedom the state of the colonial negroes.

The speeches of eminent statesmen, the writings
of the colonial party, the votes and addresses of
Parliament, and the official correspondence of
ministers with the colonial governors, might all
be appealed to in proof that such has always
been the unanimity of sentiment on this very
interesting head.

What are the means then that can be devised
for the attainment of a reformation so dear to the
wishes, and so necessary to the honour, of our
country ?

They can only be of two general kinds; com-
pulsory or persuasive. Regarding the end as
one which Parliament is bound, in some way, to
attain, it must either be accomplished by direct
legislation, accompanied with coercive sanctions,
or by such parliamentary measures as may incline
those who have the power of meliorating the lot
of the slaves, to engage willingly in that beneficent
work.

The mode of direct legislation, by Act of Par-
liament, would be obviously attended with great
difficulties, and was therefore by all parties de-
clined, or at least postponed. It was the unani-

6

moiis opinion that the indirect course was the
best, as far as the work was to be prosecuted by
any parliamentary means. But on a subordinate
question, the difference of opinion was great. It
was thought by the party which opposed the Abo-
lition of the slave trade, that without that great
measure, and without any statute directly acting
on the colonial system of slavery, the necessary
reformation might be attained, and the sla?e trade
itself even eff'ectually suppressed, by influencing
the assemblies to reform their own laws, and to
pass acts for improving the moral and civil state
of their slaves. For this purpose it was thought
enough to communicate the sense of Parliament
by means of addresses to the Crown, and to obtain
in consequence, official recommendations from
the Crown to the Assemblies.

On the other side, the advocates for an im-
mediate Abolition maintained, that while the
slave trade subsisted, the colonial assemblies
would never seriously and effectually engage in
the desired work of reformation.

Nor was it to Acts of Assembly in any case, that
Abolitionists professed chiefly to look for the melio-
ration of the state of the slaves. They did not de-
cline indeed, on the contrary they earnestly desired,
the enactment of meliorating laws. In some cascSj,
the existing oppression arises not from the abuse
of a master's powers, but from the direct and im-
mediate operation of the colonial laws themselves j

and therefore, a repeal of those laws is the effect-
ual and only relief. But those evils which consti-
tute, beyond all proportion, the largest share of
the miseries of slavery, flow from misadmini-
stration of discretionary private powers, with
which the master himself and his agents are
necessarily intrusted, wherever that relation sub-
sists ; and to controul the exercise of these by
public laws, is as impossible as it would be to
prevent by the interposition of the courts in this
country, evils that flow from the wickedness, the
imprudence, or negligence of parents; or to heal
the infelicities of conjugal life.

In all such cases, the interference of the magi-
strate, unless directed to a separation of the parties,
is for the most part, not only impotent but mis-
chievous. It inflames, rather than mollifies, the
bad passions whose action it can but for a moment
restrain.

For these reasons, it has always been felt by
the best-informed friends of that oppressed race,
that the bad treatment of the slaves in our
colonies can never be effectually prevented by
the direct operation of a law, whether passed
by their interior legislatures or by Parliament,
that is to be enforced by the civil magistrate.
The laws to which alone they have looked with
confidence for that purpose, are such as will ope-
rate in the mind of the master ; inclining him
powerfully for his own sake, to promote the hap-

piness, and improve the condition of his slaves,
and to submit to any present sacrifices that may
be necessary for their conservation and native
increase.

Such are the laws for the Abolition of the Afri-
can slave trade. To them their promoters have
confidently looked, not only for the deliverance
of Africa from the horrors of that traffic, as far as
Great Britain can effect it, but for the future pro-
gressive deliverance of our colonial slaves from a
most cruel and destructive bondage.

Accused by their opponents of meditating a
general emancipation, they denied the charge.
But it was denied only in the insidious meaning
of the imputation itself. They did not aim at an
emancipation to be effected by insurrection in the
West Indies, or to be ordained precipitately by
positive law : but they never denied, and scrupled
not to avow, that they did look forward to a future
extinction of slavery in the colonies, to be accom-
plished by the same happy means which formerly
put an end to it in England ; namely, by a benign,
though insensible revolution in opinions and man-
ners, by the encouragement of particular manu-
missions, and the progressive melioration of the
condition of the slaves, till it should slide insen-
sibly into general freedom. They looked in
short, to an emancipation, of which not the slaves,
but the masters should be the willing instruments
or authors.

in regarding the abolition of the slave trade
as a first, an essential, and even a singly-sufficient
mean to this beneficent end, they relied not upon
untried theories, nor solely upon the known and
universal springs of human action, but on all the
experience that history records on this subject.
In every country in v^^hich slavery has been mi-
tigated in its kind, or ceased to exist after having
once extensively prevailed, the supply of foreign
slaves has first been cut off.

Till the almost universal extent of the Roman
Empire had precluded the former copious influx
of vendible bondmen, captives in foreign wars,
the slavery of Rome was not softened or re-
trenched 5 but, on the contrary, became progres-
sively more cruel and extensive. But when,
under Augustus and his early successors, pri-
soners of war became scarce, the Roman masters
began of necessity to bend their attention to the
care and preservation of the slaves which they
already possessed*.

Their condition vi^s soon after materially im-
proved by law. Christianity, under Constantine
and his successors, hastened the process by its^
benevolent spirit ; but the reformation was already
begun. Stipendiary service was progressively
substituted for servile labour in the towns j the
riiodified slavery of the adscripti glebiS succeeded
to it in the country; manumissions became eji-

* See Gibbon's Roman History, 1st vol. cap. 2, and Hume's
Essay on Population.

C

10

tremely frequent; and before the dissolution of
the empire, the number of persons held in pure
slavery became comparatively small, though the
institution itself was never expressly abolished.

In modern Europe the case was similar. The
practice of reducing a conquered people to sla-
very, and of selling prisoners of war, had every
where ended, before the slave laws were re-
formed, or the servile condition was materially
softened in practice or reduced in its extent'.

In England, not only the sale of prisoners, but
every other source of bondage, except that of
procreation by bondmen, had ceased in law before
the slavery, or villeinage, once comprising so large
a portion of our English ancestors, began to
decline.

A case perfectly in point has not arisen since
the opprobrious renovation of slavery in the
Western World. The African markets have been
too recently, and too imperfectly and uncer-
tainly shut against some of the colonies before
supplied from them, to afford a specimen ; but it
is undeniable, that the colonies which have had
for a century or more the largest and most regu-
lar supplies from Africa, are those in which the
treatment of slaves, and their condition by law,
are notoriously the worst.

The Spanish colonies, from the want of capital
or enterprise in their merchants, and from the
jealousy of their government, have had in general
an extremely scanty and precarious supply;

II

and there it is that negro slavery is mitigated
in the greatest degree, and manumissions are
by far the most frequent. But in the island
of Trinidad, Spain, by opening a free port to
foreign merchants, and encouraging anxiously
the importation of negroes, obtained a plen-
tiful slave market; and there, in consequence,
her humane regulations soon became a dead
letter, and the treatment of slaves fell to
the harsh standard of the Dutch and English
islands.

There is nothing in these facts, or in the prin-
ciples of action which they illustrate, that is at all
extraordinary. We are not surprised to see a man
take more pains to preserve the trees in his plea-
sure-grounds, than those in his woods. It is
because the former, if suffered to decay, cannot
be soon or easily replaced ; whereas the timber
market may supply the coarse uses of the
latter.

Is it objected that humanity makes a difference,
where sentient beings, and children of Adam, are
the subjects ? Be it so ; but he who supposes
humanity alone to be as powerful and steady an
impulse, as humanity and self-interest united,
knows little of mankind in general, and less of
the masters of slaves. The friends of colonial
reformation, then, have reasonably placed their
hopes in the effects of the Abolition Acts, more
than in all other means that can possibly be
devised.

12

But to hopes so precious in the eye of huma-
nity, a contraband slave trade must be fatal.

This is sufficiently plain, perhaps, from the
obvious nature of the case. A law that is in
many instances violated or eluded, may neverthe-
less, in part produce the direct and immediate
effect vphich the lawgivers designed. An Act
imposing an import duty, for instance, may be
often evaded by clandestine importation, but still,
in proportion as it is executed, the intention of
raising a revenue is accomplished ; but a collate-
ral or secondary good, which is to grow out of the
primary effect of a law, may be wholly lost even
by its partial evasion.

In the present case it is necessary to the effect
desired, not only that the primary object should
be fully attained, bqt that its full attainment should
be certain, known, and foreseen. It is not the
prohibition of the slave trade by law, but the
consequent inability to supply hereafter any defi-
ciency in the requisite number of slaves by any
other means than native succession and increase,
that is to operate m the mind of the master. He
is expected to change his system, not because the
importation of African slaves is illegal, but be-
cause he knows that they are not> and believes
that they will not hereafter be imported. It is not
the penalties of the Act, but the actual waiit of aj
slave market, his fear of which is to* influence his
conduct, and make him submit to all necessary
sacrifices for the preservation of his gang.

IS

But if the Abolition Acts are known to be
already evaded by smuggling (and, supposing such
evasions to exist in a small island, they cannot in
a general way be unknown to the community at
large), there is an end to this salutary apprehension.
The planter may reasonably calculate, that if
such abuses are not effectually prevented at this
period, they will not be checked hereafter, but
that they will rather progressively increase, and
will always be proportionate to the actual demand
for slaves. He may therefore safely proceed in
his present system; secure that, whatever the
effects of it may be in future, he shall not be with-
out a resource.

It may be objected perhaps, by those who have
not well considered the case, that there must at
least be a great advance in the price of negroes
unlawfully imported, from the perils to which the
smuggler must expose his property and his per-
son ; and that the high price of slaves, or even
the prospect of it, may operate powerfully on the
mind of the master in the salutary way desired,
though he does not see or apprehend a total stop
to the importation.

That there will be an advance in price, is pro-
bable ; that it will be extremely great, may well be
doubted; for it will be seen, in the course of these
observations, that there will, as the law now stands,
be the greatest facilities in smuggling without any
serious risk of seizure or conviction. But no sup-

u

posable advance in the price of slaves will suffice
to deter the planters in general from pursuing their
present course, and engage them to submit to all
the sacrifices which are necessary, in order effec-
tually to adopt what has been called the breeding,
in opposition to the biiyingy system. To raise the
price of Africans by duties on their importation,
was one of the substitutes formerly proposed for
the immediate abolition of the trade. On gene-
ral commercial principles the plan was specious,
its object being to diminish, and, ultimately,
stop importation, by the comparative cheapness
of breeding. But this is a case to which the or-
dinary maxims and expedients of commercial
policy cannot be safely applied. The authors of
that plan did not know the great sacrifices which
must be made at the outset, by a planter who
would keep up or enlarge a declining gang by
means of native increase. A great diminution of
labour, especially among the females, is essential
to that change: so are a more liberal and expen-
sive sustentation of the slaves in general, a more
chargeable care of infants and invalids, and some
other additions to the annual disbursements upon
an estate of which the produce is to be at the same
time diminished.

It was not known or considered, how few
planters, comparatively, are in circumstances to
afford such improvements, or have even the pre-
sent capacity to make them. The concurrence of

15

their mortgagees, and of other creditors, must often
be necessary: for the case in very many instances
is, that the average difference between the present
annual expenses of an estate, and the net pro-
ceeds of present crops, will barely suffice to keep
down interest on the incumbrances, and enable
the planter thereby to retain possession of his
estate.

It is idle to tell men in such circumstances, of
benefits to be attained, or savings to be made,
fifteen or twenty years hence ; and yet they must
wait so long at least, before they profit or save
through the labour of children yet unborn, and
by means of regulations which are to prepare for
the obtaining, as well as the preserving, a large
native increase.

Besides, the hope of distant advantages, and
the cautious, calculating, patient views of the
economist in the walks of European agriculture
or commerce, have little or no place in the ardent
and adventurous mind of a West India planter.
He has staked his capital or credit, and with it
his health and his life perhaps, on a game over
which chance has far more influence than pru-
dence. It is a game, too, at which the chances are
greatly against him. Sugar planting is a lottery
in which there are many blanks to a prize ; but
then the prize is very splendid; he may attSLin
to great opulence, and in a very few years. This
is the irresistible excitement by the effect of

16

which men are drawn into the hazardous specula*
tion of buying or settling sugar estates ; and when
such dazzling objects are in view, and such risks
incurred, slow-growing, and distant gains or hopes
can have little to attract or deter.

The sugar planter, whether he buys or inherits
his estate, possesses a property which is the sport
of fortune, and has not therefore such inducements
as other landholders have, to make sacrifices
for its future improvement. The best settled
sugar plantation is exposed to such extreme
vicissitudes, that the fruits of patient self-denial
may be lost, or the waste of improvidence repaired
in a single season.

Hence the peculiar rapidity with which such
patrimony is often spent ; and hence a strong
temptation to neglect the suggestions of prudence
in the case we are considering. Convince the
proprietor, if you can, that by planting ten acres
less this year than before, and consequently dimi-
nishing his consignments by ten hogsheads of
sugar in the next year, he may save three times
the value in the price of slaves to be purchased^
fifteen years hence : what then ? " I shall lose," he
might truly reply, "250/. in my next yearV income,
which will oblige me to submit to the painful re-
trenchment of my present comforts; perhaps, for
instance, the laying down my carriage : and, aftet^
all, the sacrifice may prove to have been either
unnecessary or fruitless. Hurricanes, epidemic

17

diseases, droughts, or other causes, may ruin my
estate long before the period you mention ; or
good crops and good markets may so enrich me
within the same time, that the laying out even 1 000/.
in slaves will require no unpleasant sacrifice, and
put me to no inconvenience. Either of these
changes is far more probable than that matters
should go on in such an equable course, with pro-
perty of that precarious kind, as to secure to me
the distant benefit you propose."

In fact, the experiment in question has been
sufficiently tried. The price of African slaves in
the West Indies had risen before the Abolition to
three times its former average j yet the buying
system was confessedly adhered to in preference
to the breeding *.

For these reasons, and for others which might
be adduced, it is in vain to expect such voluntary
reformation, by masters in general, as the Aboli-
tion of the slave trade is calculated to produce,
unless the trade be totally abolished in practice as
well as in law.

Then, indeed, we may reasonably expect that
the independent planter will be willing, and the
needy planter enabled, to make all such present
sacrifices as are necessary to secure a native suc-

* See a very important pamphlet, by Mr. Mathison, a
planter of Jamaica, entitled, " Notices respecting Jamaica,"
published by Stockdale in 1811;- in which some of these views
are very impressively opened, though for a dilFerent practical
purpose.

D

IS

cession and increase. To neglect or postpone
them, will be seen to be certainly ruinous to the
master's property, and consequently to the secu-
rity of his creditors and mortgagees. The latter,
therefore, will not only concur in, but require
and stipulate for, every measure that is essential
to the preservation of the gang. The planter's
credit will absolutely depend on his being able to
shew that his estate is well stocked with healthy
slaves, and that, by the most recent returns of
births and deaths among them, their numbers are
not declining.

But to these salutary ends it is necessary, for
the reasons assigned, that the Abolition shall not
only be, but be generally known to be, an efficient
and permanent law.

If the hope of a future resource by contraband
trade be not finally suppressed, the necessary in-
fluence on the minds of the planter and his creditors
Avill not be obtained, the breeding system will not
be decidedly adopted, and the oppressions which
diminish population will not be reformed.

If we have thus far reasoned justly, the clear con-
clusions are, that the illicit importation of slaves
must wholly disappoint the hopes of humanity in
our colonies, as well as in Africa ; that the trade
will be even more barbarous and destructive to
its immediate victims, than it was while permitted
by law; and that the unfortunate colonial negroes
will gain nothing by the change.

The event, as to the latter, perhaps, will be more
than negative evil. In many cases, they mav
find in this abortive law an aggravation of their
lot. It will serve as an excuse to such tenants for
life, and other temporary owners of a plantation,
as ought to keep up the numbers of their slaves,
for omitting to do so, and casting on a reduced
gang the same work that belonged to its former
complement. The check of reproach also will
be removed from those absolute owners of estates
who, from their avarice or necessities, are tempted
to practise the same species of oppression.

In these, and many other cases, the law may
serve as a pretext for evil, rather than an instru-
ment of good. It is clear, at least, that nothing
will have been gained, except (what is indeed in-
estimable) the deliverance of the mother country
from the guilt and shame of the slave trade ; and
even this will be lost, if having the power to make
the Abolition effectual in practice, we now should
refuse to do so.

m

SECTION II.

The Acts of Parliament already passed are insvffi-
cientfor the Prevention of these Mischiefs,

Such being the pernicious consequences which
would certainly flow from a contraband slave trade
in the British colonies, the inaportant practical
question is, whether Parliament can and ought to
do more at present than has been already done for
the prevention of so great a mischief.

To determine this, it is necessary to inquire^

1st, Are the existing laws effectual ?

2dly, If not, are there any means of greater
and surer efficacy in the power of Parliament?

5dly, If such means can be suggested, is there
any good reason why they should not be imme-
diately employed ?

In the first place then, let us consider whether
the laws in being can be relied upon for effec-
tually and certainly preventing the introduction
of slaves into the British colonies by a contra-
band trade ; and for so cutting off the hope of that
resource, as to induce our planters in general to
meliorate the state of their slaves, in the degree
necessary to their preservation and native increase.

If it can be shewn, in point of fact, that slaves
have already beeu clandestinely imported into

SI

aqy of those colonies, since the Abolition Acts
were passed, this question will be at once decided
in the negative. A law which has already been
evaded, may be evaded again; unless indeed,
the facility of committing the offence be now
lessened, or the means of prevention enlarged. In
this case there has been no such favourable change.
On the contrary, the termination of war has
opened extensive new facilities to the smugglers,
and diminished greatly the preventive powers of
the Government. Slaves may now be brought
from Africa under foreign and friendly flags, with
plausible foreign destinations, in such a course as
to sweep almost the very shores of our islands.
They may also be deposited in foreign colonies
within three or four hours' sail of our own. On
the other hand, we shall in time of peace pro-
bably not have one-fourth of the number of ships
of war (those only guardians of our abolition laws
in the West Indies) that has hitherto been sta^
tioned among our islands, ever since the Acts
were passed. Besides, the right of visitation and
search exists only while our flag is belligerent.

The actual existence of slave smuggling there-
fore, since that period, would prove a Jortiori its
possibility in future. But the converse of the
proposition is not true. If such smuggling has
not hitherto been carried on, this by no means
proves that we have now a sufficient security
against it in the laws already passed*

That African negroes have been illicitly im-
ported into some, if not all our islands, since the
year 1808, and even since the offence was made
felony, there is abundant reason to conclude.

Direct information of such practices has been
several times transmitted to the friends of the
Abolition in England, from different quarters.
The particular modes, too, have been pointed out,
viz. the running the poor captives on shore at night
from a neighbouring foreign island ; or the carry-
ing them in small numbers from a more distant
port in the dresses of Creole negroes, and under
the pretended characters of sailors or passengers.

Many smuggled slaves were brought by these
modes from the Swedish island of St. Bartholomew,
and dispersed among the British colonies in the
Leeward Island government; and more especially
in St. Croix, then in his Majesty's possession^
In the latter island, the practice was so extensive
and notorious that the Collector of the Customs
found himself bound to take public notice of it,
and advertised rewards for the discovery of the
importers.

Letters and personal communications from
gentlemen of respectability, to the Secretary and
General Committee of the African Institution,
would suffice to remove all doubt of the existence
of such offences, to some extent at least, if it
were not a necessary precaution with that body,
to conceal the names of individuals resident

23

in, or connected with, the "West Indies, who send,
them, from humane motives, useful information.
The transmission of it might otherwise danger-
ously expose the authors to popular odium or
private resentment in that country.

To demand the highest evidence of such of-
fences when consummated by actual importation,
namely, the judicial conviction of the smugglers,
would be to assume that legal prc^ofs of the crime,
and prosecutors bold enough to explore and bring
them forward, might have been found within the
islands where the slaves have been landed. But no
man Vv^ho knows the West Indies, or who will reason
from the well-known laws and manners of that
country, will expect either of these requisites
there.

In a place where nine persons out often of the
whole population are incompetent to give testi-
mony against a free man, a smuggler must be
heedless indeed to put himself in the power of
any witness. In landing the slaves, and deliver-
ing them upon a plantation by night, it would
cost much more trouble to incur, than to avoid,
the risk of envploying a free agent, or enabling a
free spectator to prove the true nature of the
transaction. Boatmen, and all other descriptions
of persons whom it might be necessary to em-
ploy as inferior agents in such offences, are inva-
riably of servile condition.

As to informers for penalties under the laws of

24

trade, not being officers of the Navy or Custom-
house, officially bound to make seizures, it is a
character of which perhaps, one specimen only
has been found in the British West Indies within
thirty years. About that time ago, a man was
bold enough .to inform, in one of the most impor-
tant and most polished of the Leeward Islands, in
a case of prohibited importation. He was imme-
diately seized, tried publicly by a self-constituted
court, convicted of the foul offence of being an
informer, and sentenced to tarring and feather-
ing, and perpetual banishment. Accordingly, in
contempt of his privileges as a white man, he
was stripped to the skin, covered with tar and
feathers, and carried, with a drum beating the
rogues' march, at mid-day, through all the streets
of the town, no magistrate or peace-officer daring
or choosing to interfere. He was next put on
board an American ship then passing the har-
bour, and carried off as a convict to the distant
island of Jamaica, from whence he could not re-
turn to his home without going first to North
America. He had the hardihood, nevertheless,
in a few months to return ; called on the Govern-
ment for redress; and the Attorney-General was
ordered to prosecute the judge of the mock tri-
bunal, and the immediate executioners of the
sentence. He did so, with much zeal, for the ho-
nour of the Government ; but to no effect. Not
a witness but the prosecutor himself, could be

25

found, to depose to facts which one half the
free population of the island had seen; and the
jury, some of whom could probably have con-
firmed him as eye-witnesses, chose to disbelieve
him, and found a, verdict of, not guilty. The man,
who had been kept in the gaol for his security
during tJie prosecution, was glad at the end of it,
to become a voluntary exile for life*.

After such an example, it will hardfy be
thought that prosecutors are easily found in a
West-India island, upon laws so unpopular there,
as the acts for the abolition of the slave trade.

There, nevertheless, have been seizures, by
officers of the customs, of slaves unlawfully
imported ; and many cargoes of negroes from
Africa seized at sea have been condemned in the
prize courts, several of which were reasonably
presumed to be British property. A direct desti-
nation from Africa to a British port, of course, did
not appear, and could not well be suspected ;
but that many of the slaves were destined to be
circuitously and clandestinely brought to our
colonies, cannot be reasonably doubted.

It is, however, still more decisive, that there

* The official report of this case is, probably, still to be
found among the papers in the office of Secretary of State for
the Home Department. The informer's name was Smith : the
pi'osecution was under the title of the King v. Allason and
others, in the Court of King's Bcncji and Common Pleas of St.
Christopher. The case arose in or about the year 1785.

E

26

have been numerous condemnations in the WesS^
Indies of small vessels, with each a few negroes-
en board, seized in the neighbourhood of our
islands, and prosecuted under the Abolition Acts.
A list of thirty West-Indian condemnations under
these acts, as returned to the House of Commons,
is printed in the eighth Report of the African
Institution; and it will be found, on referring to-
it, that in sixteen of those cases, in which the
sentences were acquiesced in, or confirmed on
appeal, the numbers of slaves were so small that
they do not average above four to each vessel.
They must, therefore, have been chiefly engaged
in the smuggling trade from the foreign islandsi
that has been already described, as twenty
times the number of slaves would hardly have
sufficed to yield profit enough for an Africaa
voyage*.

* It may be necessary to caution the reader against a palpable
mistake in these returns. All the slaves comprised in them,
without exception, are described as Creole Slaves. This can-
not possibly be true ; because the far greater part of them were
captured on the coast of Africa, and condemned at Sierra
Leone. Probably the officers Avho made out the returns from
ihe West Indies took the descriptions from the claims, which
naturally, though untruly, following up the fraudulent pre-
tences v/e have described, called the slaves, Creoles, The
returns from Sierra Leone, when added to them for the infor-
mation of Parliament, may have been arranged, from inadver-
tency, under the same running title of " Creole Slaves con*-,
f^iemned."

27

There is a colony, in which the copious actual
introduction of slaves by contraband means, is not
only reported on good authority, but may be de-
monstrated from public facts, ofTicially attested,
more conclusively than by many convictions.

In Trinidad, by the last official returns, prior
to the abolition of the slave trade, the number of
slaves did not exceed 20,000; being but a small
increase from 1805, when their numbers are
stated by Sir William Young, from returns of
that date, to have been 19,709- The intermediate
loss, by an excess of deaths beyond births, must
have nearly equalled the whole numbers imported^
though there can be no doubt that these, in
1806 and 1807, had been unusually large. Ne-
vertheless, from the 1st of January, 1808, when,
legal importation from Africa ceased, the slave
population there appears to have rapidly in-
creased. The returns for 1810, being 20,729;
and for 1811, 21,288.

In the following year, preparations were made,
by his Majesty's Government, for registering in
public books of record the names and descriptions
of all the slaves in the island, for the important
purposes of precluding the illicit increase of their
numbers. An order of the King in Council for
establishing such a registry, of which we shall
bave occasion to speak more fully hereafter, was
passed on the 26th March, 1812 ; and in the year

28

1813 *, blank books for containing the regi^
stry were prepared in this country, and trans-
mitted to the island j it having been found that
books proper for the purpose could not be pro-
cured on the spot. From inattention to the re-
turns of the later years, or from their not having
then been received by Government, it was at that
time computed, that the numbers to be registered
would not exceed 17 or 18,000, and the register
books were, therefore, fitted to contain not more
than 20,000 names and descriptions of slaves.
Long after their arrival, and when the returns
were for the most part made, the registrar, an in-
telligent gentleman long resident in the island,
supposed that the numbers would not exceed that
amount, and that his books would consequently
contain them.

What was the result ? The books were found
insufficient : new delays were consequently incur^
red ; additional books were sent from England 5
and by the month of December, 1813, when the
original registration was completed, no less than
twenty-jive thousand seven hundi^ed and seventeen
slaves were found to be returned on oath, with their
names and descriptions, as owned and resident in
Trinidad; and were registered accordingly.

To conceive adequately the proper inference

* TLe delay had arisen from accidents which it wouW te
tedious, and is needless, to explain.

Q9

arising from these facts, as to the extent of the
importation subsequent to the abolition of the
slave trade, we must take into account the pro-
bable loss on the former stock, by the balance
of mortality compared with native increase.
This, in Trinidad, has been dreadfully great,
from the notorious bad effects of opening
new lands in the West Indies on the health of
the slaves, and from the great inequality of num-
bers between the two sexes on estates recently
settled. It appeared from official information
transmitted to his Majesty's Government, that the
decrease of numbers, by the excess of deaths be-
yond births, had in a year or years prior to 1805,
amounted to the enormous rate of 14 per cent,
per annum.

Nor will our estimate, from such premises, of
the extent of the contraband trade that must have
prevailed, be materially affected by the consi-
deration that some slaves may have been lawfully
brought Trom other British colonies. It would be
a large allowance to suppose 1000 may have
been so brought from the 1st of January, 1808,
when the Abolition took effect, to the month of
December, 1813, when the original registry was
completed. The planters of other colonies had
in general no slaves to spare, and were not likely
to strip their estates of labourers that could not
now be replaced.

If such lawful importations had been large.

30

fact must have been notorious, because slaves
sent from one British colony to another, since 1st
January, 1808, must have been cleared out and
entered at the Custom-houses : but the only
explanation attempted in the island, was, that
the former returns, made annually under a Spa-
nish law, must have been deficient. This is
easily said ; but they were adopted as authentic
hy successive governors and commissioners in
their reports of the population. Besides, our
inference partly rests on a comparison of these
very returns with each other.

We have not the same means of demonstrating
that like abuses have taken place in other islands.
Jf we had similar returns even to compare, the
result would perhaps not be strong enough
to manifest either that smuggling had, or that it
iiad not, prevailed : for unless the difference were
very large, a decrease might be accounted for
hy the balance formerly usual on the side of
mortality ; and a small increase, on the other
iiand, might be explained by supposing a reverse
of that balance.

It is indeed probable, that in some or most of
the British colonies, the numbers clandestinely
imported have hitherto been very small, when
compared with their whole stock of slaves. In
fact, the old islands, if we except Jamaica, dealt
but little in the African market for their own use
for several years prior to the Abolition j and the

31

low prices of West-India produce, with the Frencli
system of continental exclusions, would have since
afforded our planters little temptation, and scarcely
any means, to recruit their gangs by purchase,
even if the trade had been open and safe.

After all, it is not the actual degree of illicifc
slave trade, as has been already shewn, that con-
stitutes its mischievous tendency in our colonies
in the preventing improvements 3 so much as its
known practicability, and the consequent expec-
tation of &ueh a resource when wanted. Neither
would the mischief be prevented, if the abuse
were known to exist only in a single island. This
would be enough, as the law stands, for the ef-
fectual and open supply of all the rest. It would
also be felt, that what was easily done at St. Vin-
cent's or Dominica, could be imitated, in case o£
need, at Jamaica or St. Kitt's.

Upon the same principle, if it could be still
doubted whether this detestable species of smug-
gling has any where taken place, the colonial
mischiefs which have been pointed out would
nevertheless in a great degree arise from a general
consciousness among our planters, that they have
a potential resource in the clandestine importa-
tion of slaves, whenever their future necessities
may require it.

The existing laws must therefore be very ineffec-
tual to many of their important and interesting pur-

3^

Jibses, unless their inherent efficacy is known and
felt throughout the British West Indies. It would
not be enough that, whether from present con-
venience or any other cause, a voluntary obe-
dience was paid to them; it is indispensibly
necessary that they should be regarded as forming
a compulsory and inevitable rule of future actions
in order to add to present obedience, immediate
preparation for their future and permanent conse-
quences. We want, as has been already shev/n, not
only a primary and. present, but a secondary and
future effect. The former may be provided by
the immediate observance of the law; but the
latter only by a conviction in the master's breast
that it cannot hereafter be eluded.

If a general opinion, of the inefficiency of
these laws would clearly preclude present refor-
jnation in the colonies, that evil would scarcely
be less certain, though the opinion were that of a
majority only, or of any considerable proportion
of the resident planters ; for it might be shewn
that such changes in the existing system as are
necessary to the maintaining the present black
population in point of numbers; and still more
such changes as may raise its moral and civil
character, so as to clear the way for future and
gradual emancipation, must be general, in
order to be adopted by individuals, without great
prejudice to themselves, and offence to the com*

munity around them. This is not hard to coropre-
liend, if we suppose sugar-planters to be, what
they really are, rival manufacturers, carrying on
the same expensive process, and supplying the
same market with the article they make. It is
evident that, in such cases, improvements which
materially increase the expense of the manufac-
tory, without adding to the value of the article,
or augmenting the gross returns, cannot be
adopted by a few of the manufacturers, without
the concurrence of the rest ; or persisted in even
by a majority of them, if a considerable minority
should stand out.

If, for instance, a cotton-manufacturer, who
employs a number of children, should be dis-
posed to build and support a school and chapel
for their education and religious improvement,
to provide them with separate apartments suit
ed to their ages and sexes, and with proper
inspectors of their conduct, so as to guard them
from the moral contagion to which their crowded
and promiscuous intercourse might expose them,
and ultimately to provide for their honest and
profitable employment in some other line of
business, when they were no longer fit for his
purpose ; it is plain that he could not afford such
liberal and humane improvements, unless the/^
were to be adopted at the same time by all, or
nearly all, his competitors in the same manu-

F

54

facturing linev The addition they would make
to the expense of his establishment, and to his
future annual charges, would otherwise disable
him from selling his cotton goods so cheap as the
Same articles might be sold by others; and sinee
competition must m general fix the market-price
at the minfmum of fair and necessary profit, his
manufactory would soon become a losing or
ruinous business.

If, on the contrary, all who supplied, or could
laiwfully supply, the same market, were disposed
to concur in the improvements, it is plain that
they might be safely made, however chargeable
they might be to the manufacturers in general.
The new expense would raise in an equal de-
gfefe the market price of the article, and would
fall on the pirrchasers Or consumers.

The British planters, if unanimous, would
have the same happy facility. They possess a
monopoly of the home market for their produce ;
and it Will tdke Off all they ought to make. Let
them limit their sugar-planting to the fair capacity
of their gangs, after such a retrenchment of labour
a^s is necessary to maintain native population;
and they will want no market but the British ;
in which they have not any competition to fear,
Except from each other. Their common increase
o'f expense, therefore, being in proportion to th«
quantity of their produce, will fall, not on th^m-

35

selves, but upon, those who for such a purpose
will cheerfully bear it, their fellow-subjects in
Europe.

This reasoning, it may be objected, assumes
that the expense of the improvements will be a
loss J whereas the charge of such melioration of
the treatment of slaves as may be necessary to
maintain their numbers by native increase, will"
be compensated by saving the expense of future
purchases of such property.

It may be so ; but if the change of system can-
not be effected without a temporary increase of
expenses and diminution of returns ; and if the
future benefits are not to be derived until a period
beyond the ordinary range of West Indian spe-
culations, we cannot expect that the present in-
convenience will be encountered willingly for the
sake of the distant good. That the breeding is
permanently more costly than the buying system,
is a proposition which we do not maintain ;
though it was an opinion held and acted upon
by many Planters before the abolition of the
trade*.

The obstacles to a reformation that is not
general in the same colony, are not wholly,
however, of a commercial kind. If the difliculty
we have glanced at were surmounted, the laws of
the place would present many others j and its
manners still more.

♦ See Mr. Mathison's pamphlet before referred to, p. 12, &c.

3d

Here we have the clearest and most melancholy
proof of the inefficacy of the Abolition Acts, as
to the interesting and necessary object of colonial
reformation.

What benefit have the slaves in any one island
yet derived from the Abolition Acts, and from the
favourable disposition in the Government and
Parliament of Great Britain ? In their legal con-
dition, certainly none at all. They are still the
absolute property of their master ; still fed, and
clothed, and vrorked, and punished, at his discre-
tion J a few ostensible regulations excepted, which
were demonstrably futile, and have confessedly
proved to be useless. Still this extreme bondage
is hereditary, and perpetual ; and still the slaves
are daily subjected by law to hardships and mise-
ries, against which even the champions of the
colonial system have exclaimed, as cruel and
needless aggravations of their lot. They are still
liable to be sold at the suit of the master's credi-
tors, as well as by the voluntary act of the master
himself; to be stripped from the domain, and
exiled for ever from their homes, their families,
and friends, without the imputation of a fault.

The inexorable maintenance of this last ac-
knowledged grievance, is the more worthy of ob-
servation, becauseParliament was accused of being
its author, and was called on by the colonial party
to reform it. The change of that part of the colo-
nial code was accordingly prepared for by the

37

repeal of part of the statute 5tli Geo. II. cap. 7,
which was untruly represented as having given
birth to this cruel branch of the law of slavery ;
but which certainly stood in the way of its re-
formation. At the instance of the late Mr. Bryan
Edwards, the Act 37 Geo. III. cap. 1 19, was passed
for that purpose ; and it was expected that the
colonial assemblies, following up the same prin-
ciple, would repeal their own Acts, which made
slaves liable to be severed by sale from the plan-
tation to which they belong.

That reformation was afterwards specifically
and earnestly recommended by Government, in.
consequence of a parliamentary address ; but not
one colonial legislature, out of thirteen which
exist under his Majesty's dominion in the West
Indies, has yet thought proper to comply ! The
slaves are every where still subject in this instance
to a most needless, unjust, and unmerciful aggra-
vation of their lot, peculiar to the bondage of
the British colonies, though eighteen years ago it
was reprobated by all parties in Parliament, and
renounced by the British Legislature. Not a
voice has ever been raised iu its defence; not an.
apology has ever been offered for adhering to it;
yet still, in contempt of the recommendations of
Parliament, the odious oppression is maintained.

The same is the opprobrious truth as to every
pther legal reformation that is necessary to pro-
mote the native increase of the slaves, and melio-

rate their condition. Nothing, in short, has even
been, ostensibly attempted, but that which the
assemblies have admitted to be impracticable,
and which every reflecting mind must perceive t&
he so — the protection of slaves against domestic
oppression in the exercise of the master's power.
For this idle purpose, indeed, mock laws have
heen made, have been laughed at, and forgot;
and men who dare not complain, v/ho are incom-
petent to prosecute, and whose evidence cannot
be received in any court, against any free person,
are referred to the law for redress, when in the
bosom of the master's domain, they are not suffi-'
ciently fed, are worked to excess, or receive
more than a limited number of lashes at any one
time HI

Even against the more cruel wrongs of strangers
the assemblies admitted that these poor beings
are not practically protected by law; because
their evidence, and the evidence of all their com-
panions, is rejected*. Yet in no island has this
legal impediment yet been removed.

* See the Privy Council Report on the Slave Trade, part 3 ;
title, Grenada and St, Christopher's, A. No, 4. ** Those
who are capable of the guilt," say the Council and Assembly
of Grenada, " are in general artful enough to prevent any but
slaves being witnesses of the facts" (facts of gross and wantoa
cruelty by free persons toward slaves), *' and the danger of
admitting the testimony of slaves to affect the life or fortune of
a free person is so obvious," &c. *' As the matter stands,
though we hope the instances in this island are at this day

39

Insular laws, whose policy plainly depends on
the permanence of the Slave Trade, also remain
unrepealed. Many of them, for instance, discou-
rage the breeding system, instead of favouring
it; and that in no small degree. In most colonies
the revenues raised for public or parochial pur-
poses, are chiefly raised by a poll tax upon slaves,
which attaches on them from the birth to the
grave, without any allowance for infancy, or for
other disability to labour for the master, either
through infirmity or age. The planter, therefore,
who has the largest proportion of native slaves,
bears, in comparison with his^ ability, the heaviest
share of the public burdens. If a mother should
be released from field labour on account of her
pregnancy, or her duties as a nurse, the master
is nevertheless rated for her and for her infants
too. If feeble life is kindly cherished after the
hope of productive labour has ceased, the poll
tax still continues, and operates in effect as a
discouragement to humanity and justice.

In another instance, loudly demanding the
attention of Parliament, the assemblies have
not only continued, but in some colonies have
very recently originated, laws calculated to

not frequent, yet it must be admitted with regret, that tbe,
persons prosecuted, and who certainly were guilty, have
'Escaped for want of legal proofs."

40

perpetuate slavery, by obstructing manumis-
sions.

One of the most efficacious means, not merely
for the gradual disuse of slavery, but for the
encouragement of good conduct among those who
are still held in that state, is to make enfranchise-
ment the prize of great individual merit. It is the
strongest excitement to industry and self-govern-
ment that a master, or a human law-giver, can
possibly hold forth. It has therefore been much
in use in every country, ancient or modern, in
which slavery has prevailed. It has every where
been encouraged by the laws, and in a variety of
cases ordained by them as the reward of public
merit.

In Greece, in Rome, and still more in England,
the modes of manumission were varied and mul-
tiplied, both by the legislature and by the judicial
expositors of the laws, so as not only to facilitate
the master's beneficence, but almost to ensnare
him into it.

He was also supplied by the Greek and Roman
laws with very powerful motives for manumitting
his slaves in the valuable and honourable rights
of the Jus Patronatus over his Freedmen.

In England, if it be asked what cause most
powerfully contributed to the dissolution of the
degrading bondage of our ancestors, the answer
must clearly be, the extreme favour shewn to

41

individual enfranchisements by the judges and
the laws. That baneful growth of foreign con-
quest or early barbarism, villeinage, had nearly
overspread the whole field now covered with
the most glorious harvest of liberty and social
happiness that ever earth produced, and where
not one specimen of the noxious weed remains ,
yet it was not ploughed up by revolution, or
mown down by the scythe of a legislative aboli-
tion; but was plucked up, stalk by stalk, by
the progressive hand of private and voluntary
enfranchisement. Slavery ceased in England
only because the last slave at length obtained
his manumission, or died without a child.

Even the sordid and odious slavery to which the
injured Africans have been reduced in the New
World, has not been every where unaccompanied
by the consolatory hope of its future extinction by
the same means. In the Spanish and Portuguese
colonies, in the former especially, manumissions
are greatly encouraged ; and a right of self-redemp-
tion also given to the slaves, upon terms as easy
and as equitable as the nature of their state allows.
The consequence is, that in most of the colonies
of Spain, the negroes and mulattoes still in sla-
very, are inferior in number to the free inhabi-
tants. In Cuba even, where enormous importa-
tions from Africa have taken place during the last
twenty years, the free population, by the latest
official returns, amounted to 388,000 ; while the

c

42

^lat^es were no more in number than 2l2,00(y.
That this is the effect of manumissions, is undeni-
able 5 for of the 388,000 free inhabitants, 114,000
are negroes or coloured persons. In the returns
for the Havannah and its suburbs, the different
colours are distinguished ; and it appears that the
free negroes ^^reatly exceed the free mulattoes ;
the former being 1 6,604, and the latter only
9,743; which makes it probable, that the manu-
missions have been recently very copious. The
slaves were no more than 28,728^ *.

In what country accursed with slavery, then, is
this sinking fund of mercy, this favour of the laws
to human redemption, taken away ?

¥/here, by an opprobrious reversal of legislative
maxims, ancient and modern, do the lawgivers
rivet, instead of relaxing, the fetters of private bon-
dage, stand between the slave and the liberality
of his master by prohibiting enfranchisements,
and labour as much as in them lies to make that
dreadful, odious state of man, which they have
formed, eternal ?

Shame and horror must not deter us from re-
vealing the truth : It is in the dominions of Great
Britain. This foul and cruel abuse of legislative
power has been reserved for Assemblies boastful
of an English Constitution, and convened by the
British Crown.

* These returns are dated the 20th July, 1811, and were
officially made to the Cortes.

43

Can the case be further aggravated ? Yes : in the
obstinate rejection of better principles, in a per-
verse opposition to the voice of a liberal age, and
in the contumacy of these petty lawgivers to-
wards the mother country which protects, and the
Parliament that has power to controul them. The
insular laws alluded to, which in many or most
of our colonies restrain, and virtually prohibit,
manumissions, have all originated within a very few
years. They have in their odious principle even been
innovations on the former slave codes, which freely
permitted, though they did not hold out positive
inducements to, enfranchisement by the act of the
master ; and some of these cruel innovations have
been made, since the time that humane reformatio^
of the colonial slave laws was the unanimous wish
of Parliament, declared in votes and addresses to
the Crown, and officially made known to the As-
semblies,

• '[Further aggravation still, may seem scarcely
possible; yet such is to be found in the hypocrisy
of some of these iniquitous laws. With the frau-
dulent design of concealing from European eyes
their true principle, they avoid the positive pro-
hibition of enfranchisement, but lay a tax upon it,
heavy enough to insure, generally speaking, the
same effect ; and pretend that the object is to pre-
vent free coloured persons becoming chargeable
to their parishes, or the public. The pretence h

not only false, but inconsistent with notorious
truth. In the few islands in which a poor rate is
ever known, the objects for relief are exclusively
white persons ; and the authors of these laws might
be challenged to shew a single instance of a free
coloured person being relieved as a parish pauper
in any part of the West Indies. In fact, persons
of that class have so many resources, from their ca-
pacity of sustaining labour without inconvenience
from the heat of the climate, and from their mu-
tual sympathies, connections, and attachments,
that absolute indigence is rarely, if ever, known
among them.

Others of these acts have spoken of dangers,
from the enfranchised persons becoming indigent
or idle, in a more general way, as if they went on
a principle of police. But in neither of these
cases is the tax so applied, as to prevent the miS'
chiefs pretended to be feared. It is to go into the
insular treasury for general public purposes. The
freed person may be in want, or be idle, and dis-
solute, just as naturally, and with as little remedy,
as if no duty had been laid on his enfranchisement.
The only difference is, that by all the amount of
the duty, his own ability, or that of his patron, to
protect him from future want, is reduced. If he
could himself pay or raise the sum imposed, there
can be no doubt he would do so to obtain his free-
dom; and the law would then guard him from in-

4.5

digence, by taking from him all that he possessed*
or obliging him to borrow on the credit of his fu-
ture labour!

This cruel mockery must enhance the pain of
the oppression*.

* The Legislature of Grenada in its first Act of this kind,
passed in 1797, thought that decency, if not justice, required
a deviation from this general course; and therefore, in im-
posing a tax of 100/. on manumissions, allowed an annuity of
10/. for life to the freedman. But by another Act of 1806,
it threw off this troublesome mask, repealing all the clauses
and parts of clauses which related to the annuity, and retaining
the tax of 100/. without any allowance whatever ! At the same
time, consistently and fairly enough, it altered the preamble,
so as clearly to shew that the considerations of police recited
in the first Act were mere pretences, and boldly to avow
hostility to freedom alone as its true motive.

As this is a curious case, and will throw light on the
true motives of the other colonial legislatures, we subjoin the
preamble as it stood in the Act of 1797, and print in Italics
the part left out by the Act of 1806.

" And vjhereas the manumitting end setting free slaves diS"
eased, blind, aged, or otherwise disabled from working, without
making provision for their sustenance and comfort, ought to
be prevented, as it obliges them to ramble about and beg for
subsistence, ivhich frequently compels them to the necessity of
robbing and stealing, and leads them to other bad practices to
support themselves" (no relief from poor rates pretended here);
" and whereas it is also necessary to discourage the two fre-
quent and indiscriminate manumission of slaves without a
siifficient provision being made for their support."

The tax, the reader is desired to observe, is not imposed on
the manumission of " diseased, blind, aged, or disabled''
slaves, only, but of any slave whatever. It was very proper^
therefore, in the Grenada assembly to repeal the whole of the

46

The master, then, who would improve the moral
conduct of his slaves, and render their lot more
cheerful, by the all-powerful prospect of freedom,
as a reward to superior merit, or who would con-
fer that reward for the past services of some faithful
and useful slave, as an example to the rest, would
find himself in this point, as in others, opposed by
the insular law. He must, on the manumission,
sacrifice a large sum of money in addition to the
value of the slave. In some colonies, in one of
them at least, this iniquitous tax is as high as
500/., in others 300/., and it is not known to be in
any place less than 100/. currency.

Nor is there any exemption from this charge
in any case whatever. The father cannot without
paying that oppressive tax release his own off"-
spring from slavery; nor the husband redeem
his wife, so as to become the father of freemen,
instead of wretches to be driven like cattle for
life.

Such pitiable cases must frequently arise under
these shameful and merciless laws. Nothing is
more common than for free blacks and mulattoes
to be the husbands and fathers of slaves. In such
cases, they were often known to labour with in-
credible patience and perseverance to raise money

preamble, except what is above printed in common type, tQ-
gether with the annuity clauses.
See Mr. Smith's edition of the Acts of Grenada, pp. 3^0, 32t,

4^

for purchasing the freedom of the wife and chil-
dren. But now, that heart-stirring object must be
hopeless J and the sad effects on moral character, as
well as on domestic happiness, may be easily
conceived.

Had there been any honest or rational principle
in these laws, exceptions might have been ex-
pected for encouraging exemplary good conduct
in the servile state, or increasing native popula-
tion. It has often been proposed, for instance^
as a happy mean of promoting the latter object,
to enfranchise a mother who has borne, and raised
to maturity, a given number of children. The
most intelligent colonists have recommended this
expedient j and some masters, perhaps, had begun
to practise it. But now such means of improver
ment are effectually taken away.

The colonial legislatures, if they had regarded
the Abolition as effectual, would also have been
anxious to promote the religious instruction of
their slaves. However adverse or indifferent, in.
general, to the cause of Christianity, they would
have desired to take the benefit of its influence,
in the restraint of polygamy, and other practices-
adverse to the interests of population. But no
Act of Assembly can b'^ shewn which has redeemed
our islands, in any degree, from the reproach of
their former gross neglect in regard to this sacred
duty : on the contrary, laws have been passed
aggravating that sin by positive obstructions to

the pious purpose of a master who should desire
to reform the morals and manners of his slaves
"by the means which Christianity affords. In
some of our colonies at least, and Jamaica in
particular, laws have been passed opposing positive
prohibitions to the only attainable means of re-
ligious instruction and worship; and though the
royal negative has been properly applied as often
as such Acts of Assembly have been transmitted
for his Majesty's allowance, their temporftFji
operation and renewal, aided by means of per-
secution which have been craftily resorted to
under other and still subsisting laws, have very
materially checked the charitable zeal of those
who would have communicated freely the bene-
ficent light of the Gospel to the poor pagan bonds-
men of our colonies.

Other instances of a spirit directly opposite to
the spirit of the Abolition might be adduced;
but we must avoid all unnecessary details; and it
would be singly enough to say, that the grievous
oppression before noticed as condemned by Mr.
B. Edwards, and the colonial party in the British
Parliament, has no where yet been removed. It
is a sufficient indication of the fact we wish to
establish that plantation slaves are not yet in any
island annexed to the estate they cultivate, so as
X\o longer to be liable to be severed from it by
(execution at law^

Though humanity had failed to recommend

49

such a measure, common policy would have im-
periously dictated its adoption upon the prohi-
bition of the slave trade, if that commerce had
been regarded as really and finally cut oiF. To
strip a plantation of its slaves, would have been
seen to be remediless waste. Justice to credi-
tors, to heirs, to the planters themselves, would
have prescribed the immediate repeal of laws
which not only permit, but direct, that the slave
shall be sold separate from, and prior to, the lands
and buildings. In islands where they are, in law,
personal estate, and go as such in cases of intes-
tacy to the administrator, provisions would have
been made, if not to reverse that rule, at least to
modify it, for the protection of the heir at law; as
by enabling him, for instance, to retain them, on
payment of the value, to the personal representa-
tives. In one or two of our islands, this case was
so provided for a century ago, as between the heir
and younger children : the expedient, therefore,
was well known to the assemblies. Formerly, it
was for mutual convenience only : now it has be-
come matter of necessity ; not only in that parti-
cular case, but in all others, where a planter dies
intestate. Yet nothing has been done. Heirs
have been left every where at the mercy of the
personal representatives, as well as that of the
creditors.

A hundred cases might be instanced, in which
consequences the most unjust, and the most re-

H

50

pugnant to acknowledged policy, must flow from
this single neglect of legislative duty, if the Abo-
lition is supposed to be effectual. Lessors, for
instance, might be ruined by their lessees ; for it
was a common agreement, that the latter should
be bound only to account for the value of the
slaves at a price settled by appraisement, when
they were not forthcoming at the end of the term.
Various contracts of different kinds, and many
settlements and trusts were founded on similar
views ; namely, that as importation always sup-
plied a copious slave market, gangs could always
be easily recruited, enlarged, or replaced ; and that,
therefore, payment of the value was equivalent
to the specific restitution of such property. Nu-
merous, therefore, were the calls for new legisla-
tive regulation and protection of private rights,
if those views were reversed by the Abolition.

But they were not reversed or altered in the
minds of the assemblies. They knew, indeed,
that Creole or native gangs were rarely to be ob-
tained at any price, in many islands not at all,
even while planters had the African market open
to replace the labourers they might sell. They
must have seen, therefore, that such purchases
would now be quite impracticable, if that market
were really shut ; but they relied on the contra-
band resource ; and therefore only were supine^
Such considerations were not overlooked by them.
Some of the most intelligent colonial advocates^,

^1

in opposing the Abolition in Parliament, pointed
out these very effects on contracts, trusts, and
family settlements, as strong arguments ab incon-
vejiienti against that measure. It was not their
business to point out the remedial expedient of
annexing the slaves to the soil, or the other legal
regulations by which such inconveniences might
be in a great degree prevented; but these were
too obvious, and too important to have escaped
the notice of West-Indian lawgivers, if they had
been willing to conform to the Abolition, when
enacted by Parliament, or had felt that it was
necessary so to do.

Others, of the same party in the controversy,
avowedly took a different view, and that to which
the assemblies have practically adhered: they
maintained, that smuggling could not possibly be
prevented, and inferred, that the legal prohibi-
tion was vain. In reference to such Acts of Par-
liament as have been already passed, or any other
ordinary means of preventing contraband impor-
tation, the proposition, if not the consequence,
was true. The opinions here maintained, and
the belief that slaves have not ceased to be im-
ported into our islands, to the extent of the actual
demand for them, are so far in unison with argu-
ments which the colonies advanced, or adopted
before the experiment was made.

If, then, great inconveniences have not been felt,
from the causes adverted to, in the absence of

52

remedial laws, and if loud calls have not been
made on the assemblies by injured creditors, and by
trembling heirs and reversioners, to protect them
from ruinous waste, it may fairly be inferred that
illicit importation has prevailed j and that there
Ms existed in our colonies, little or no fear of
the slave market being irretrievably lost.

Every unrepealed law adverse to the breeding
system, every unrestrained oppression that impairs
the health, shortens the lives, or diminishes the
prolific powers of the negroes, points to the same
conclusion. They collectively afford evidence of
the strongest kind, that the assemblies do not re-
gard the Abolition as effectual, but still look to
Africa for the supply of their wasting population.

SECTION III.

There is one only effectual Mean of preventing
the illicit Importation of Slaves into the British
Colonies; which is that of a Public Registry.

The first of the three inquiries proposed, need
not be pursued any further. More might be said,
but more cannot be necessary, to prove that the
Acts of Parliament already passed are not effec-
tual for the purpose of preventing the introduc-

53

tion of slaves into our colonies by clandestine
means. That such mischievous abuses have been
practised during the operation of those laws, has
been sufficiently proved ; that they may be prac-
tised hereafter with still greater facility, has also
been shewn ; and it has been demonstrated upon
undeniable premises, that an expectation of such
supplies in future, prevails in the British West
Indies, and, by its pernicious influence on the
minds of the planters and the assemblies, frus-
trates the happy tendency of the Abolition to
meliorate the lot of the slaves.

Let us proceed, then, to the second of the pro-
posed inquiries, Whether any means of greater and
surer efficacy are in the power of the British Par-
liament P

The Acts in question seem to have done as
much, or nearly as much, as was in the power of
the Legislature to do, for the extinction of the
slave trade in all its branches, except one. To
carry it on from British ports, or from Africa in
British ships, and in general to prosecute the trade
at sea, or in any foreign part of the world, on
account of, or by the agency of his Majesty's
subjects, is made as difficult and dangerous to the
parties, as Parliament could possibly make it.
The penalty of death can only be superadded ;
and this, though by no means too severe, on
the ordinary principles of criminal law, for the
nature of the crime, would probably, from the

54

scruples of prosecutors and courts, be less effeC"
tual than the existing penalty of transportation.

But that branch of the trade in respect of
which we had the highest and the most inte-
resting duty to perform, was the importation of
slaves into our own colonies. Here the legis*
lature had also the greatest cause to fear there
would be eager and persevering efforts to elude
its prohibitions; and that the former sanctions
of restrictive trade laws, would not be found
effectual. Yet here, and here only, the preven-
tive and remedial powers of Parliament have
not hitherto been fully employed.

As a British statute has no force in a foreign
colony, we cannot enact that the people of Cuba
or Martinique, shall not receive slaves brought
to them in breach of our laws ; or shall not detain
them in slavery ; still less can we give effect t©
such an enactment, by regulations to be enforced
in those islands. If a cargo of slaves from Africa
should be carried, on British account, on a voy-
age to the Havannah, all that we can do is, to
intercept them on the passage, if we can : if
that opportunity be lost, the case, as far at
least as concerns the poor injured Africans, is
remediless. But if the slave trade continues
to be sanctioned by foreign governments, irj
time of peace, such cases will be open to two
very consolatory reflections; first, that we are.
jpot guilty, as a nation, of the crimes of British

55

subjects, which our laws did not permit, and could
not possibly prevent ; and secondly, that those
crimes are not likely to be very numerous, or to
add materially to the general ravages of the slave
trade. For the carriage of slaves by or for ac-
count of British subjects, being hazardous to the
ship and cargo, while the carriage of them by
and on account of foreigners, is safe from all fiscal
and war risks, the profit of the former, to the bad
men engaged in it, must soon be annihilated by
the competition of the latter. It must at least be
reduced to too low an ebb, to leave an adequate
temptation to the British contraband traders ; who
must add their own personal dangers from the
law, to that of the capture and confiscation of
their property.

But if illicit importation into our own colonies
takes place as the law now stands, we shall have
no such consolation. Independently of the secon-
dary evils which have been noticed, every slave
brought thither will be one more victim added to
the multitude that British avarice has made.
Parliament will, therefore, not be guiltless, unless
we can truly affirm, that it possesses no means
within those colonies of prevention and remedy
beyond those penal and other sanctions with
which the general prohibitions of the slave trade
are at present armed, in other parts of the
world.

Without anticipating the question, whether

56

further means would be effectual, it may be easily
shewn, that untried means are yet to be found. The
acts in existence, for instance, contain no practical
provisions for the cases of negroes unlawfully im-
ported into our colonies, but not seized and con-
demned for that cause; so as to prevent their being
kept in a wrongful slavery, within the British
dominions, for life.

Perhaps a reader unacquainted with colonial
laws and customs, will be ready to exclaim, " What
new provision of that sort can be wanted ? Have
we not courts of law," it may be asked, ** in these
colonies ? How then can a man be held there in
an illegal slavery for life, without his own con-
sent?"

A man the most conversant with the laws of sla-
very now existing, or that ever did exist upon earths
except that of negroes in the western world, might
be posed with the same apparent difficulty. He
would conclude, that the oppressed African had
only to invoke the civil magistrate, in order to
obtain immediate redress, and severely to punish
the oppressor. Such a man would know the anxious
care with which the awful question of slave or
free has been provided for, in point of evidence
and trial, by every slave code, ancient or mo-
dern, of which the historian or the lawyer is
informed. Tlie presumption of law was every
where in favour of freedom; the otms probandi
was every where cast upon the master ; the forms

SI

of judicial Investigation and rules of judgment,
were calculated to favour the claim of liberty so
greatly, that it was next to impossible such a
claim, when well founded, should fail of success.
It may be supposed then, that the "West-Indian
master would be called on to shew his titles and
that when it appeared to be derived under a con-
traband importation, the negro would at once
be enlarged, and compensated in damages for his
extorted labour, his false imprisonment, and the
other wrongs he had received.

Unluckily, however, these remedies, and the
right of even alleging the wrong in a civil action,
are barred in the British West Indies by one short
objection which the complainant cannot remove :
" The man is a slave."

The ancient lawgivers had weak nerves in
framing their slave-codes when compared to our
British assemblies. Instead of giving the slave?
a right of invoking the civil magistrate against
all men but his master, and in some cases against
the master himself, the assemblies have disabled
their slaves from applying to the law for relief in
any case, against any free person whatever. They
cannot be heard as complainants, prosecutors, or
witnesses; except against persons of their own
unhappy condition.

** But here," it may be replied, **you are on a
question of slave or free. The complainant
denies that he is in law a slave; and therefore it

I

would be absurd as well as unjusC, to turn him
away on the ground of his slavery, "^ non valet
exceptio ejusdem cujus petitur dissolatio,* is a
maxim not of any particular code, but of univer-
sal law; because a plain rule of eternal reason and
justice/* •

Very true ; but the colonial courts have still one
short rejoinder: ^' His skin is blacks

The assemblies here again have improved
wonderfully upon the slave codes of all other
countries and timeSo They have absolved the
master from the troublesome duty of proving his
title. They have reversed the universal pre*-
sumption of other laws , placing it, not in favour
of freedom, but against it. They have cast the
burthen of proof on the weaker and helpless
party. The English lordj when trying the ques-
tion of villeinage with his alleged villein or slave^
was obliged even to bring into court the near
relations of his opponent to prove the hereditary
condition. The West-India master need produce
only the alleged slave himself. His condition is
recorded on his face.

This comparison between ancient and modern
lawgivers is, we should admit, in one respect
more favourable to the former in the apparent,
than the true conclusion to which it leads. Thei?
slave-codes, on the whole, were certainly far less
illiberal and harsh than those of the West-India
islands I but in their care to prevent free men

59

from being wrongfully reduced to slavery, the
ancient legislators had motives and feelings from
which lawgivers in the new world, in forging
fetters for the unfortunate Africans, have been
exempt. If the former had suffered the rights of a
master to be wrongfully assumed over a free per-
son without providing a remedy for the wrong,
they themselves, their friends, or their posterity,
might have been victims of such injustice. Tlie
voice of the free part of the community would
have exclaimed against the dangerous defect.
But assemblies of white men, elected by white
men alone, had no danger to fear for them-
selves or their constituents from maxims of law
that exposed negroes to oppression. As slave
masters, and purchasers in the African market,
it was convenient to them that their titles
should not be disturbed by claims of freedom.
As men tinctured with creolian prejudice, they
had little tenderness for the freedom of the Afri-
can race. They rather wished that every black man
were in fact, as well as by legal presumption, a
slave.

In this, and other instances, negro slavery is a
source of great injustice, from the same peculi-
arity that has given birth to most of its practical
aggravations; the strong and repulsive corporeal
distinctions between the slaves and the free
members of the community in which they live.
It not only destroys sympathy, and increases the

60

contempt every where inspired by a servile state,
but facilitates oppressive legislation.

While an ordinary title to slaves in our colo-
nies, was a purchase made of them in the yard of
a Guinea factor, there was, we should further
admit, some slight apology for reversing the rule
of other slave codes in the way that has been
noticed. It might have been modified, at least,
without further blame than such as arose from
the nature of the slave trade itself. The title of
the seller in Africa, could not be traced and
verified on the other side of the Atlantic. It
must have depended in point of right, so to speak,
not only on facts arising in Africa, but on African
law. It might have been excusable, therefore, to
require of the master of a native African claim-
ing to be free, to prove only his purchase from
the Guinea factory and that the negro was one
of a cargo previously brought from Africa in a
slav^ ship; leaving it open to him to impeach that
title if he could, by shewing that he had been
wrongfully carried from the coast. In other
words, the legal presumption should have gone
no further than this, that prima fade every negro
exported from Africa, as a slave, was actually
in that condition by the law of the country from
which he came. To extend it further, was clearly
to outstep the necessity of the case. |n applying
the presumption of slavery, therefore, to every
man with a black skin, whereyer born, and in

61

whatever way he came into the master's posses-
sion, the assemblies were guilty of a harsh inno-
vation, for which no excuse could be alleged,
even while the slave trade was permitted by
law.

But however far the rule might have been
defensible at that period, the Abolition, if sin-
cerely acquiesced in by the assemblies, would
have plainly prescribed to them to pass a law
for its immediate repeal.

The case was now radically changed. Instead
of importation from Africa raising a presumption,
of lawful slavery, it was to constitute in future a
clear title to freedom.

In respect of past importations, indeed the rule,
reduced to the dimensions already suggested, might
have been specially retained. Proof of a purchase
under an importation from the slave coast, prior to
January 1808, might have been allowed to esta-
blish prima facie the condition of slavery. But
thenceforth, no legal right to hold a negro in
bondage, could arise by any means whatever out
of the British West Indies; consequently the right
itself could always admit of proof within the
master's power. The failure of such proof, there-
fore, must warrant the conclusion, that the condi-
tion has been unlawfully imposed.

To continue the general presumption of law,
still, on the other side, what is it but virtually

62

to witlisfancl and frustrate the enactments of the
Bntish Parliament B

Let us look at a particolar and very probable
case, that may arise on the Abolition, Act 47th
Geo. III. cap. SQ, sec. 7. Native Africans, when
tmlawfully imported or carried as slaves, are, after
seizure and condemnation, to be apprenticed, of
otherwise provided for by a guardian ; but they
a^e to be free. Creble negroes, the subjects of a
like offence, are, after condemnation, to be free
whbout any such temporary restraint. In both
cases, their title to the rights of free men, in the
British territory to which they are carried, is not
only the necessary effect, but the express ordina-=
tion of the statute. Yet what would be the effect
of the insular law, if any of these men, or the issue
of the women, thus enfranchised by Parliament,
were afterwards held in slavery in a British island?
They could not stand in judgment to assert that
statutable right. If asserted for them, by Habeas
Corpus, at the instance of some bold and generous
patron, their colour is a presumption of slavery
which he could not repel, unless volunteer wit-
nesses of the same character would come forward
to prove by affidavit all the necessary facts. He
would then have to work up against the wind and
tide of local prejudice, at a heavy expense ; and
nfter all, without the good will of a bench of slave
masters, could not hope for success. The onus.

probandi resting upon him, any flaw in his evi-
dence as to identity, or otherwise, would be deci-
sive against him ; and if the decision were unjust,
he could have no appeal.

If a condemnation under which the enfran-
chisement arose, were recent indeed, and in the
same island, some facilities of proof might be ex-
pected ; at least where the negro had been in the
charge of a public guardian, whose official cha-
racter would naturally prompt him to furnish a
voluntary affidavit, and protect him from resent-
ment in that offensive service ; but still, the gene-
rous patron must be found, and a serious expense in-
curred, before the case could be brought at all to
judicial notice.

The cases, however, which are most likely to
arise, and vi^hich unquestionably at this momenb
exist, in most if not all of our islands, are those of
Africans clandestinely imported, who never have
been seized and enfranchised by condemnation,
and therefore can have no evidence of their right to
freedom (which they nevertheless clearly possess)
unless they could prove the offence of which they
have been the victims.

If these men could lawfully implead their
oppressor, and if in such a suit or upon any com-
plaint on their behalf, before a competent tribunal,
he were bound to prove his right to detain them
in slavery, they might probably obtain relief ; for

64

without the aid of perjurious testimony,8ind forgery
too in most cases, he could not make out his title.
But the iniquitous rule in question delivers
him from all these embarrassments. They are
Macks ; and the presumption of law absolves him
from the task of proving either his title, or their
condition.

As to the act of contraband importation, how are
they to prove it, even if they could compel the at-
tendance of witnesses for the purpose ? Their fel-
low-sufferers are not competent, from the same opi^
pressire rule j for though free in law like them-
selves, they must be presumed to be slaves. Being
negroes, they cannot be sworn as witnesses till
their own freedom is established. The white per-
sons, if any, who know the facts, are not only
friends or dependants, but most probably accom-
plices, of their opponent.

It is plain then, that in this most probable and
ordinary case, relief would be in general hopeless.
Accordingly with all the reasons that have beeni
noticed for concluding, that the illicit introduction
of slaves has been large in some colonies, and has
taken place in some degree in them all, no instance
of legal redress to any of the sufferers has yet
been heard of; nor any application to a court
or magistrate on their behalf.

If negroes entitled to freedom under the Abo-
lition Acts were delivered even from the hands of

65

their private oppressors, as they would be in cases
of seizure and condemnation, their freedom would
still be in extreme and constant peril, while this
iniquitous presumption of law, and some practical
rules that are founded upon it, remain unrepealed.
To such a cruel extreme does the principle pre-
vail in Jamaica and most other colonies, that a
negro is presumed to be, and is dealt with as, a
slave, even when nobody lays claim to him as
master. Such persons are actually taken up,
seized and sold upon that presumption only,
and upon the no less inequitable inference
drawn from it, that they are fugitives, and
of a character dangerous to the police. By
positive law a negro, who has no master, may be
apprehended by any white person and carried to
the nearest gaol. The gaoler, or deputy provost-
marshal, is then required to advertise him, with
his bodily description : and if he be not claimed by
some master who can prove his property within a
limited time, the prisoner is to be publicly sold
as a slave, and the price lodged in the colonial
treasury, to be paid over to the master if he
afterwards appears, otherwise to be applied to
the public service.

No exception is mad^ in those acts in favour
of negroes claiming to be free; nor any means
whatever provided to enable them to prove their
liberty. If a man were to be sold with his deed
of manumission in his hand, it would be per-

K

66

fectly consistent with the law; and the purchaser
would nevertheless have a good title to hold him
in slavery for life.

Nor are these acts a dead letter. On the con-
trary, they are in very frequent use ; as every man
who reads the West-India newspapers must know.
In the Jamaica Gazettes especially, it is quite
common to see notices from the deputy provost-
marshall's office in respect of negroes thus
dealt with, who are advertised to be sold, unless
claimed by somebody that can prove his property
as master.

In the greater part of those ordinary cases, or
nearly the whole of them, it may fairly be inferred
that the unfortunate prisoner alleged himself to
be a free man ; because if he had confessed himself
a slave he would presumably also have told to
whom he belonged, or given such further account
of himself as would have led to the discovery of
the master. Men claiming their freedom there-
fore, and found in the actual possession of it, and
contradicted by nobody, are sold into slavery by
the police, merely because they are black. The
only additional requisite is a non-claim which
tends to make it highly probable that they are
lawfully free.

What is to guard negroes imported in a clan-
destine slave trade from being victims of these
most unjust and inhuman laws? They might be
imported even with that very view; for these acts

67

present an obvious and easy course by which the
smuggler or his vendee might contrive to gain a
good title, in contempt of the Britlsth statutes.

Surely the abrogation of laws like these, is one
mean at least which ought to be tried for the more
effectual abolition of the slave trade.

But here a difficulty may, perhaps, suggest it-
self, as to the execution of any measure whatever,
adapted to such an end, within the British islands.
If such be the hostility to those laws in the minds
of the colonists in general, and if judges and
others concerned in the administration of public
justice are too much infected with, or overawed
by, that popular feeling, to execute the laws with
impartiality in cases of contraband importation,
and of slavery wrongfully imposed ; how, it may be
asked, are those evils to be prevented by any new
enactments that are to be executed in the West
Indies by the colonial courts ?

*' Reverse," it may be said, "the unjust and op-
probrious maxim that is here complained of; place
the presumption of law where it ought to be, on
the side of freedom ; provide for the convenient
trial of the question slave or free; and lay the o?itis
proba7idi in it on the master; still, if that question
must be tried by a colonial court and jury, there
will be a strong leaning on the master's side;
and in the clearest case of freedom, the party un-
justly held in bondage may obtain no relief."

68

The conclusion, in regard to any measure which
depends for its efficacy solely on forensic proceed-
ings in the colonies, is right. Much, indeed, would
be done to lessen the evil by those improvements
in the law. There are limits beyond which local
prejudices, however powerful, will not always be
able easily to warp the administration of public
justice. In flagrant cases, a sense of what is due to
character, or even sometimes higher principles of
conduct, may turn the scale in favour of the
oppressed. Besides, means might be found to
review, by appeal, decisions manifestly unjust.
Every lawyer at least will feel the vast importance
of the difference between the present state of
things, and one in which the negro could put the
alleged master on the proof of that right which
he assumes, in the form of an issue at law. It is
even the more important on account of the dis-
favour which he has to expect from the court.

Still, however, partiality would operate, we
admit, in a great and mischievous degree. It is
highly desirable, therefore, in this and every view,
that means should be devised, if possible, to make
the true condition of the colonial negroes matter of
public, notorious, and conclusive evidence; such
as can never be wanting to prove a true case, and
cannot be fabricated to support a false one.

It is a still greater desideratutn that the means
so to be provided should be calculated to act in

69

general without the direct and active aid of any
court or magistrate. The regulations on thi^.
subject should be such as may, if possible, ensure
their own execution.

There are means, happily, by which all these
desiderata may be supplied, and perfect obedience,
to the abolition laws, within our islands, effec-
tually secured.

The means are not hard to fmd. They have
been already devised, by his Majesty's Govern-
ment. They have been established by law in
three of our sugar colonies. In one, they have
been carried into full execution. These means
are no other than the establishing throughout,
the British West Indies, a public registry of slaves,
with regulations similar to those which are con-
tained in an instrument before alluded to, the
Order of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent
in Council for registering the Slaves in Trinidad.

A short explanation of the general plan of that
registry, and the leading provisions of the Order
in Council which established it, will furnish nearly
all that it is necessary to add under the present
head of inquiry.

General Plan of a Registry of Slaves.

The general object of this plan is to obtain a
public record of the names and descriptions of all
persons lawfully held in slavery in each respective

70

island. For this purpose, it is obviously necessary,
in the first place, that full and accurate returns
should be made of the existing stock of Slaves.
These, which are required to be made as soon as
conveniently may be after promulgation of the
law, are called the original returns, and the record
which is to be made of them the original registry.
But the individuals composing this unfortunate
class will be progressively changed, by deaths,
by births, by enfranchisements, and by importa-
tion from other British colonies (if that practice
be still permitted). It is necessary, therefore,
that the original registry should be periodically
corrected and enlarged, by new returns of all
such changes as have taken place since the last
preceding registration.

Annual returns have been thought not too
frequent for this purpose. It is, therefore, re-
quired that within a limited time after a given
day in each year, new returns shall be made,
specifying all such subsequent changes ; and that
by these the records of the original registry shall
be from time to time corrected and enlarged ; so
that they may always exhibit, immediately after
the last annual returns are recorded, an account
and specification exactly corresponding with the
stock of slaves at that time existing in the colony.

Such a registry being formed, and perpetually
kept, in a public office within the colony, is to
be hereafter the necessary evidence of the servile

71

condition of persons resident within the island to
which it belongs. No negro or mulatto is to be
hereafter treated, sold, or conveyed, as a slave,
unless he has been duly registered as such. On
the question of slave or free, the absence of the
party's name and description in the registry, is
to be conclusive evidence of his freedom.

In framing records that are to have these im-
portant consequences, great care must be taken
to secure their fulness and precision, their truth,
their accuracy, and their duration.

To these ends, every owner of slaves in the
colony is required, on pain of the loss of his pro-
perty in them, to make his return of them upon
oath, in a prescribed form, and with a variety of
specifications, such as are best calculated to pre-
vent any future incertitude as to their identity.
Their sexes, names, ages, statures, and other cor-
poreal distinctions, are to be set forth, truly and
carefully, in schedules annexed to the returns:
These are all to be inserted in the books of record,
and the slaves are tcJ be registered under the
names of the different plantations or owners to
whom they respectively belong. Any change
of property in them is to be notified in the next
annual return, and the registry is to be corrected
accordingly.

Provisions are made for correcting or supplying
involuntary errors or omissions, during sush a

72

limited period as will enable owners, whether
present in, or absent from the colony, to discover
and repair the errors or defaults of their agents j
but after that period no alteration in the original
dr annual registries, is to be allowed.

Special exceptions, however, are made, and
carefully guarded from abuse, in favour of owners
under temporary disabilities; and of parties having
property or interests in slaves of which they are
not in immediate possession.

In the latter case, the general nature of the
expedient is to transfer to the parties out of
possession, e, g. mortgagees, or parties having
reversionary interests, the title forfeited by the
party in possession ; and to cast on them also the
duty of repairing his default by a proper registra-
tion within a limited time*.

- * The non-registration of any slaves by mortgagors in pos-
session, the abuse most likely to happen, is, perhaps, not
guarded against in the Trinidad Order so strongly as others.
The mortgagee becomes entitled to immediate possession, and
is to hold the unregistered slaves irredeemably without any
allowance for their value in a future account; but it would
have been better if the equity of redemption of the whole
mortgaged premises had been forfeited.

The same principle, perhaps, ought to have been extended
to forfeitures by other defaulters, having limited interests in
possession, who omit to register part only of the slaves ; and
to the avoidance also of an entire conveyance of slaves, or
l^and and slaves together, where some only of the slaves are
unregistered. By the Trinidad Order it is void as to the
fatter only.

IS

To protect still better the rights of infants, and
other incompetent persons, an official inquest is
superadded, to discover and supply any defaults
of their guardians or trustees.

A variety of other provisions are made, to pre-
vent, as much as possible, any particular injustice,
hardship, or inconvenience to which individuals
might be exposed by the errors or defaults of
others.

The danger of fraudulent alterations and inter-
polations in the registry, and of the destruction or
mutilation of the registry itself, by fire or other
means, wilful or accidental, is guarded against by
a special provision, which, in other important
respects also, is essential to the plan. Exact
duplicates are to be made of the books of original
registry, and full abstracts are to be formed of
the subsequent annual returns : and both are to
be transmitted, promptly and carefully, to his
Majesty's principal Secretary of State for the colo-
nial department in England, in whose office they
are to remain ; and the entries in these are to be
continued by the periodical corrections and addir
tions which the abstracts from time to time supply.
It is obvious that a separate public office in
London would be a fitter depository for this
duplicate registry ; as it will be necessary to allow
of frequent searches in itj and the colonial de-
partment is already but too much overcharged
with business in proportion to its official esta-

L

74 ' ■

blishments. But the King in Council had not the
power of establishing by the royal authority a
register office, with proper regulations, in this
country.

The books, and duplicates, and abstracts, are
all to be certified in the most solemn manner by
the Registrar, and verified bj his oath before the
Governor J whose hand and seal of office are
further to authenticate these important records.

The severest penalties are annexed to any act
of forgery or fraud on the part of the Registrar
or his clerks ; and anxious provisions are made
for his independency, and for exempting him as
much as possible from local influence.

Persons convicted of holding or attempting to
hold in slavery, any negro unlawful!}' imported,
by means of any fraudulent return, or entry, are^
besides a severe penalty, incapacitated afterwards
to hold or possess any slaves. -' ^

Extracts from the books certified by the^^^ie-
gi^trar are declared to be prima facie evidence of
the registration of the slaves contained in them ;
but liable to be corrected by production or exa-
mination of the books themselves. Such evidence
is made necessary to the establishment of the
master's title, not only as between himself and
a negro claimed as his slave, but in any action
brought for the recovery of such property be-
tween free persons.

In proceedings under this law, it is to bene ex-

75

oeption to the person of the plaintiff, or prosecutor,
that he is a slave, when his right to freedom may
depend on the event of the suit^ and the evidence
of indifferent witnesses being, or alleged to be,
slaves, may be admitted, subject to all just objec-
tions to their credit.

Such is the general outline and effect of this
new law at Trinidad ; by an extension of which^
with a few amendments, to our colonies at large,
all the desiderata before indicated will be fully
supplied. Every mean of evading the Abolition
Acts which has been shewn to be left open by the
existing laws, will, by such a measure,be precluded.
The suppression of the slave trade, so far as
respects importation into the British colonieSj
will be effectual and complete. What is still
better, the mischievous hope of a future supply
from illicit importation, will be extinguished ;
and the beneficent effects which the Abolition is
fitted to produce upon the treatment of the slaves,
will in consequence be realised and secured.

'It is evident that such a law will prevent
the illicit introduction of slaves into the Bri«
tish colonies, far better than the severest penal-
ties denounced by a prohibitory statute ; for it
will take away all the advantages of the crime.
No property in the injured Africans can be ac«
quired or transferred to others. No length of
time can ever give a right of o\^nersbip over
tbem, or their offspring. No valid security upon

76

them can be created. Every mortgage or convey-
ance, of which they are the subject, will be void
in law*.

To put them on a plantation, and mix them
with a registered gang, will produce consequen-
ces fatal even to the security and alienability of
the property with which they are so blended.
The gang will no longer correspond with the
recorded list and descriptions — the future annual
returns must thenceforth be for ever false and per-
jurous; or a discovery ofthe offence will be made.
If the estate is to be sold or mortgaged, there will be
a similar dilemma. The smuggled negroes must
be excepted, and the fraud and perjury which
had been practised in that way disclosed ; or else
the conveyance will be vitiated, and a forfeiture
ofthe property incurred.

The hazards incident to offences against the
laws now in existence, will at the same time be
multiplied. If a prosecutor be found, or if the
complaints of the negroes wrongfully enslaved,
be brought in any manner to judicial notice,
a reference to the public register will at once
conclusively shew that the complainants are free
men in point of law. They must, therefore, be
discharged ; and will become competent witnesses
to bring home to their oppressor the felonious
crime which he has committed. If he was not

* See the last note. The amendment there suggested is
assumed to be made in some of the following remarks.

77

concerned in the importation, but purchased
them of the smugglers prior to the last annual
return, the crime of perjury under the Register
Act at least may be brought home to him by
their evidence.

Besides, a planter thus offending, would not
only have to expose his own property to forfeiture,
and himself to an infamous judgment by his own
personal returns ^ he must also, when an ab-
sentee (the most ordinary case of West India
proprietors), find agents willing to sacrifice their
consciences, and expose themselves to public in-
famy, by swearing to false returns on his behalf,
in order to bear him out in the crimes he has
committed. To attornies and managers of that
profligate character, he must commit the care of
a valuable estate; for in his absence the annual
returns must be made on his behalf by the same
representatives who are intrusted with the pos-
session of the estate and slaves. Men capable of
such offences are not likely to be very provident
for the sake of others; yet it may sometimes be
a further consideration, deterring from the crime,
that the executors and trustees and other posthu-
mous representatives of the offender must also be
men of profligate principles, willing to commit
perjury in the custody and administration of his
property : for otherwise discovery and forfeiture
must infallibly take place at his decease.

73

The last and most important of the desiderata
which we noticed, then, will by such means be hap-
pily supplied. The sanctions of aRegister Act have
an inherent self-dependent efficiency; a power of
exacting obedience to the rules prescribed, with-
out the intervention of any colonial court, or
executive officer to enforce them. From re-
gard to his own interest, from the fear of losing
his power over his own property, and even the
property itself, the owner of slaves will be
careful to have them duly returned, and to make
the registered evidence of his title always cor-
respond with the existing state of the gang.

The inquiry secondly proposed is thus brought
to a satisfactory close. There are means in the
power of Parliament, not only more effectual than
any which it has yet employed, but such as have
a sure and sufficient efficacy to prevent the
clandestine importation of slaves into our colo-
nies. All the mischiefs that have been shewn to
be the melancholy fruits of that abuse, or of the
expectation of it, may be easily precluded. Par-
liament has only to do in our colonies at large,
what the Crown has already done at Trinidad, St.
Lucie, and the Isle of France,

79

SECTION IV

The Objections that may be raised to an Act of
Parliament for registering the Slaves in the Bri'
'^ tish Colojiies, considered.

It remains only to consider the last subject of in-
quiry proposed, " whether the means which have
been suggested are of such a kind, that there is
any just reason why they should not be imme-
diately adopted?" ;,; .w^^u viuJ iioi.i

The objections which inay be raisred' against
the establishing a registry of slaves in all our
colonies on the pirinciples which have now been
indicated, are partly the same which were made
in the case of Trinidad ; and partly those which
may be drawn from the different constitutions and
laws of other colonies.

The former may be dispatched with a more
summary consideration than the latter ; because
as they were, after very patient and full delibera-
tion, over-ruled by his Majesty's Government, a
presumption against them fairly arises on that
ground ; and because also, they have now in part
received a practical refutation.

The measure, in the first place, was truly said
to be one that offered great violence to the popu-
lar feelings in Trinidad j and the same objection

80

may no doubt be raised with equal truth in respect
of Jamaica, and all other sugar colonies. Un-
derstanding, as we here must, by the people, not
the population at large, but the small minority
who have white complexions, it is probable that
their voices would be pretty strongly, and pretty
unanimously, opposed to a measure of this kind.
But if this were a valid objection, we ought not to
have passed the Abolition Acts ; for it is impossible
that a more general, or a more violent opposition,
can be raised among the white colonists, against a
register act to enforce the Abolition, than that
with which they combated, the Abolition itself.

The popular voice in every country certainly
deserves great respect from the legislature j for
the grand object of all good laws, is the happi-
ness of the people at large ; and though a com-
munity may sometimes widely mistake the proper
means of its own happiness, this, among a polished
and intelligent people, is more likely to be the
exception than the rule. Besides, it is one species
of infelicity to have laws imposed upon us which
we greatly dislike.

But the case is very different, when one order
in a state has interests distinct from, and opposite
to, those of the rest, and opposition comes frona
that order alone: more especially when that
order comprises, like the white class in our colonies,
a very small proportion only of those whose welfare
may be affected by the law in question. Nor is

SI

the opposition of such a particular order, deseirv-
ing of the more respect, because the great majority,
comprising all other classes, is silent, when that
silence is known to be not a matter of choice,
but a necessary consequence of the strict and des-
potic subordination in which they are held. In
such a case, the legislature is bound to consider
whether the silent majority have really an interest
in the adoption of the measure opposed. If sOj
dum tacent clamant; their incapacity to speak for
themselves, is equivalent to a host of petitions :
the popular voice is virtually on that side.

To deny this, would be to adopt the principles
of West-Indian legislation, and to suppose that
laws ought to be made for the sake of the privileged
order alone.

The measure was also represented in the peti-
tions and remonstrances from Trinidad, to be ob -
jectionable in point of expense. The charges of
the registry were provided for in the Order in
Council by some very moderate fees to be paid on
returns and official certificates; and in the general
disposition to quarrel with the measure at large,
the produce of these fees was magnified by the
complainants beyond all bounds of probability.
Such an objection as this, however, if well
founded, might have been easily obviated without
sacrificing any thing essential to the plan of a
registry itself. It need not, tlierefore, be further
noticed liere.

M

82

The personal duties imposed on the awners
were also complained of as unreasonably onerous*
It is natural enough for men to be averse to any
species of trouble the object and fruits of which
they dislike. But surely it is not too much ta
require of one man to write a few lines once a
year, in order that another may not be unlaw-
fully compelled to drudge for him under the whip
for life.

All that these gentlemen are called upon to
do, is less than every housekeeper in England
must perform every year, not merely for the pur-
pose of ascertaining his property and establish-
ment, but for the unpleasant further purpose of
paying taxes upon them. Printed blank forms in
be distributed by the registrar in the West Indies,
may be filled up by a man who has many slaves^
in less time than a gentleman in this country can
make his returns for the property tax, the
assessed taxes, and the returns under the militia
acts.

In truth, the new personal duties would be less
onerous than those which are already imposed in
the coloniesjby subsisting laws, for which they might
be made the substitute. At present, in most of our
islands, annual returns of slaves are required for the
purposes of internal revenue; and in some of them,
the hew meliorating acts have required annual
returns of the births and deaths on each plantation,
with many other specifications^ as checks on the

83

inhumanity of masters. That these laws have not
been, and were never meant to be obeyed, is an
answer to which the supposed objectors will per-
haps not choose to resort.

Precedents still fitter to silence such complaints
may be found among these insular laws. An act
of Grenada, for instance, dated in 1786, obliges
all free negroes, mulattoes, and other coloured
persons to do the same identical acts for the public
manifestation of their numbers, persons, and con-
^ dition, that are here in question in respect of the
slaves. They are compelled to return for regi-
stration in a public office, their names, places of
abode, ages, sexes, and colour, and those of their
children, and moreover the nature of their claims
to freedom*. Upon what principle can it be
decently denied, that the same publicity ought to
be given to the condition of the same race of
men, when held in slavery ? If such precautions
are proper to prevent the unlawful assumption of
freedom, surely the unlawful privation of it, ought
not to be guarded against with less care ; espe-
cially as the latter, is by far the more probable
mischief.

To all objections of this class we might also
oppose the positive advantages which the owners
of slaves will obtain by a registry, in the greater
security of their property, and the facility of prov-
ing their titles.

* Printed Acts of Greuada, No. 51. § 1, 2.

84

To fair creditors and incumbrancers, the ad-
vantage will be still greater. Already the registry
at Trinidad has been found, in this respect, to
produce a very salutary though unforeseen effect,
by bringing to light the true property in slaves,
which their owners had bought in other persons'
names, with a view to protect them from their
creditors, and to withdraw them from the estate,
when the mortgagees should assert their right to
the possession. Frauds of that kind have been
frequent in all the islands, when the slaves have
been mortgaged with the land, with covenants
from the debtor, that all after-born and new-
purchased slaves shall be subject to the same
incumbrance. The mortgagor in possession has
often so managed as to elude those agreements ;
and when compelled at length to resign the estate
to the mortgagees, has stripped it of its most valua-
ble slaves. To such bad practices, peculiarly
ruinous to the securitv of the creditors since the
abolition of the slave trade, a general register
would be the most effectual bar.

The penal and remedial sanctions, which are
provided by the Orders in Council, for Trinidad,
and which are essential to the plan of a registry,
have also been subjects of objection.

To deprive the master of his property in a
slave, which he omits to register, has been thought
too harsh. But if such provisions are severe^ or
unreasonable^ how many of our English statutes

85

ought to be repealed ? The Navigation Act, for
instance, of the present reign, which does such
honour to the name of Lord Liverpool, and all
the acts for registering ships which preceded it,
must be regarded as oppressive. Various trouble-
some acts, forms and solemnities are prescribed by
these statutes, as to the registration of a ship, the
obtaining a certificate from the custom-house, the
recital of the certificate upon any subsequent
transfer, and the official correction of it upon any
•changes of ownership or construction : and if these
acts are not performed, or these solemnities are
not fully and accurately observed by the owners,
they not only lose the necessary evidence of their
title, but the property itself, if employed in pri-
vileged British navigation, and all the other pro-
perty found on board, are in most cases forfeited
and lost.

So the purchaser of an annuity, who gives the
fullest value for it, and under the fairest circum-
stances, forfeits the whole, unless he take care to
have it registered within a limited time, accord-
ing to the strict requisitions of the Annuity Act.

Is the liberty of a man and all his posterity, of
less value than the privileges of a ship, or the pro-
perty of a spendthrift ?

It would be endless to cite the examples of a like
severity, that are to be found in our statute books.
AVhat, for instance, are all the important provisions
of the statute of frauds, against parol agreements

8d

and trusts, and wills not duly attested, but so many
forfeitures imposed on those who suffer by the
avoidance of the contract trust or devise, because
they, or the parties under whom they claim,
omitted to perform certain positive acts required
hy the law ?

The sufficient defence of all such enactments,
is, that they are necessary to important political
or judicial ends; and that no man can suffer by
them, but through a default that might easily
have been avoided. It is, however, a further de^
fence in general, and strictly applicable to the
case before us, that in precluding the assertion of
rights not legally evidenced, the law proceeds on
a fair presumption, that they do not really exists
The object is not to take away interests justly
acquired, but to prevent the fraudulent acqui-
sition, or claim of them to the prejudice of
others.

The ship, for instance, when not duly registeredj,
is presumed not to be really intitled to the privi-
leges of British navigation in respect of her con-
struction and ownership ; but a foreign vessel frau-
dulentl}'- usurping those privileges. So here, the
unregistered negro may justly be presumed not
to be the property of the asserted master, but a
free man wrongfully enslaved.

The assemblies, if they bring forward such un-
reasonable complaints, might also be referred to
their own acts for registering deeds and wills. In

87

most or all the islands, this is required to be done;
and in the very troublesome and expensive mode
of an enrolment at length in a public office, within
a limited time; and the penalty of any default is the
loss of the estate granted or devised; in some cases
absolutely, and in all so far as the giving a prefer-
ence to purchasers or mortgagees, claiming under
a subsequent but registered title. These acts also
extend to slaves; and that even in colonies in
which slaves are personal estate; so that in truth a
general registry on the principles here proposed,
would do little more than provide a clearer speci-
fication of the registered property, and extend the
same protection to personal freedom which the co-
lonial laws have given to property; and on the
same principle, that of excluding frauds by pubr
licity of title.

A register act of this kind, it is true, explodes
tliat more than barbarous maxim, that unprece-
dented despotism, born of the African slave trad&
and colonial legislation, which presumes a man's
slavery from the colour of his skin ; but at the
same time, it gives a new and very convenient
species of evidence to the true master, for the
proof not only of the servile condition, but of his
own property in the slave.

If through perverseness or negligence, he wilt
not provide that evidence, in the simple and easy
way prescribed to him by the law, it is just, and
it i;» necessary, that he should be debarred from

8S

exercising the rights of an owner. It is impose
sible to be more tender of those rights, without
leaving in extreme jeopardy, the far more valua-
ble rights of free men, who have committed no
default at all.

The enfranchisement of unregistered slaves^
considered as a loss to the contumacious or
negligent owner, can require no further defence.
But an objection has been started to this course
on the ground of local policy. It has been pre-
tended that the enfranchisement of slaves by the
operation of a register act, would be dangerous
to the peace and safety of the colonies, by in-
creasing too much the numbers of the free co-
loured class, in proportion to the whites.

Among the decisive answers which may be
given to this objection, that which a well informed
advocate of the poor Africans would be most de-
sirous to give, and which might well be singly
relied upon, is that the political principle
assumed is radically vicious and absurd. Though
a simultaneous enfranchisement of the whole, or
any large proportion of the slaves in any colony,
might certainly be attended with much public
inconvenience and danger, the progressive increase
of the free coloured people, in their proportion
to the whites on the one hand, and to the slaves
on the other, is so far from being adverse to the
public peace and security, that it is in truth the
best and only certain way to maintain them.

89

There is no point in which the self-interested
and prejndiced feelings of the white colonists
are more demonstrably at war with common sense
and experience than in their violent adherence to
the opposite opinion. The history of the Spa-
nish colonies alone might serve to convince any
thinking man that the larger proportion there is of
that middle class, the safer an island is from in-
ternal convulsions and foreign conquest; as well
as the more valuable to the manufacturing coun^
try from which it derives its supplies.

It is absolutely necessary, unless negro slavery
is to be eternal, that those who legislate for the
British West Indies should soon come to a right
conclusion on this important point; to which end
no more is wanting than that they should not take
their opinions from the foolish prejudices and noisy
clamours of a small self-interested colonial mino-
rity, but from the clear voice of reason and experi-
ence. If manumissions are to be still discouraged
and restrained by the colonial codes, slavery can
end only by terrible revolutions, or by dangerous
experiments at best ; for the only tried, safe, and
convenient way to get rid of that odious institu-
tioD, is progressively to increase the middle class
by individual enfranchisement, according to the
examples, before adverted to, of other nations and
times.

But as it is not convenient here to expose in
an adequate manner, the false and preposterous

N

90

policy of keeping down the free coloured popu-
lation, it may be right to repel the objection last
stated, by another answer, which rests on no con-
troverted ground. The shortest reply to it is this :
The subject of pretended inconvenience would
)iot in fact arise. The number of negroes enfran-
chised by a register act, would be as small in
proportion to the whole black population, as
the number of ships condemned here for want
of a register, is to our whole commercial
marine.

Masters will not be such enemies to their own
property as to refuse or omit to comply with the
requisitions of a register act when they see that
it is become an operative law, and know what
will be the legal effects of their default.

Here also experience has confirmed the sug-
gestions of reason. In Trinidad an opposition
the most general, strenuous, and violent was made
to the execution of the Order in Council, from
the moment of its promulgation. The opposition
was countenanced even by persons in authority
there; and many of the largest proprietors, if not
a great majority of their body, pledged themselves
by public declarations and mutual agreements,
that they would never make the prescribed re-
turns of their slaves for the purpose of registra-*
tion. Nothing could be more apparently hope-
less than a general compliance; yet before the
expiration of the time first limited by public

91

notification, a very great majority had sent in
their returns to the registry.

It was thought necessary by the local govern-
ment to enlarge that time, on account of impe-
diments and causes of delay not foreseen by the
framers of the law; and before the extended
period had elapsed, all the defaulters complied.
It is not known at least that any one owner of
slaves ultimately stood out; though a few returns
came so late that it was supposed they could
not be registered consistently with the general
regulations of the law, unless under a special
power given to the governor in cases of involun-
tary default.

If, however, there were any probability that a
large number of negroes might become entitled
to freedom for non-registration, and if that were a
real political evil, it is still absolutely necessary to
the general principle of a register act, and to the
effectual suppression of the slave trade, that they
should be enfranchised. It would be monstrous
to presume them to have been unlawfully en-
slaved, and yet not to set them free ; and it would
open a door for fraudulent expedients by which
the albolition and register acts might both be
eluded. Above all, it would tend to diminish
very much the self-executing energy of the law.

The cases of default, by tenants for life, by
mortgagors in possession, and other masters, hav

92

Jng a limited or qualified interest, are capable of
another remedy, and the remedy ought to be such
as will not prejudice the rights of persons not in
possession, or incapable of making the return.
The general nature of the provisions made by the
Trinidad Order for cases of those descriptions,
has been already indicated. In thdm, enfranchise-
ment is no immediate consequence of the default;
yet it must ultimately be made such, if the default
be riot retrieved, within a reaisonable time, on the
part of the jiarties interested in remainder or
reversion; fdr otherwise frauds might easily be
committed, subversive of the general object.
These special cases, it must be admitted, are
father of delicate and difficult treatment; since
ia period must be allowed within which the condi-
tion of the unregistered negro is equivocal. He
cannot be immediately set free ; for that would
be to prejudice the party having an interest dis"
tinct from the estate of the defaulter : but neither
ought he to be left in the possession of the latter ;
who, having lost the rights and interests, could
hot safely be trusted with the powers of a master;
and who, before the slave could be claimed by
the party ne^it entitled, or enfranchised by his
default, might remove him, perhaps, out of the
reach of the law. ? )9«94l98 9«lri'

The only expedient that could be fdund by the
framers of the Orders in Council for Trinidad^

93

was to confide persons in this doubtful state to
the special protection and keeping of the local
government.

In this respect the provisions of that law may
admit, perhaps, of improvement ; or, perhaps,
the best course that can be devised, may be liable
to equal objection. Few subjects of legislation are
so tractable that a good general object can be at-
tained without some partial inconveniences j and
how much less likely is this to be the case with
the unnatural and corrupting institution of sla-
very. Laws which are designed to regulate, or
even to reform it, must inevitably be attended
with many difficulties, while they permit the sta.te
in any degree to remain. In all such cases we
must be content with expedients which contain
the largest promise of practical good, with the
least admixture of unavoidable inconvenience
and defect.

The only objection which remains to be noticed,
is that which will demand the most attention ;
because, as it had no relevancy to the cases of
Trinidad, St. Lucie, or the Isle of France, it has
not yet been practically over-ruled by his Ma-
jesty's Government; and because also it affects
to stand upon ground of great general impor-
tance,— the constitutional limits of the jurisdictioo
of Parliament over the British colonies.

94

Errors which are very gross and palpable, may
nevertheless deserve a careful refutation, when
they take post upon sacred principles; and are
likely, if admitted, to draw after them very mis-
chievous results.

The objection in substance is, that, admitting
the propriety and necessity of establishing in all
our colonies, a registry of slaves, such as has been
established in Trinidad, it ought not to be done by
Act of Parliament; because it is matter of regula-
tion within the colonies, which constitutionally
belongs to the colonial legislatures alone.

There are some champions of the colonies,
however, who think it prudent to take narrower
ground, and soften this objection into matter of
prudential, rather than constitutional principle.
They hold, that whether Parliament has the right
of internal legislation or not, the exercise of it in
this case would not be expedient. The same
persons, also, affect to talk of the imprudence of
stirring nice constitutional questions ; and hint,
by allusions to the case of the American Revolu-
tion, that there is no small danger of resistance.

The first remark on these objections is, that if
the views of their authors are correct. Parliament
should not only stop, but turn back; for it cannot
be forgotten, that the same objections were raised
and the same apprehensions excited, to avert the
abolition of the slave trade. That excellent and
most popular measure was represented by the

95

same persons as an invasion of the constitutional
rights of the colonies; and a wrong to which they
would never submit. Afterwards, indeed, when
the general Abolition Act had passed, the
assemblies prudently shifted their ground, af-
fecting to consider the act rather as a prelude
to some intended attack on their legislative
rights, than an actual invasion of them. It was
felt that though the slave trade was lost in
theory, it would be saved in practice, if Par-
liament could be deterred from giving effect to
its own prohibitions as to maritime trade, by
auxiliary regulations on shore.

But without prejudice from the motives of the
objectors, let us fairly examine the merits of the
objection itself; first, in a constitutional view;
and secondly, as it affects to raise a question of
political prudence.

An exclusive right of internal legislation in the
assemblies, would amount to that political soli-
cism, imperium in imperio ; as was clearly shewn
in many arguments still extant, which our quarrel
with the North- American colonies produced.
Many, indeed, of the zealous champions of those
colonies admitted, that such a right would be a
virtual independence ; and they, therefore, dis-r
claimed any pretension to it, until independence
itself was asserted.

The exclusive right of the colonies to impose
taxes on themselves, stood on very different prin-

96

ciples, and was well maintained by argument,
as well as by arms. But most of those who stre-
nuously asserted the latter, were careful to dis"
tinguish it from the former; and admitted that
internal legislation by Parliament, except for the
purpose of raising a revenue, could not be ra-
tionally questioned. Among those was the illusr
trious Chatham, that determined enemy to the
American war.

A slight degree of reflection will suffice to shew
the extravagant consequences that would flow
from a contrary doctrine.

The power of giving laws, is not merely essential
to sovereignty, but is sovereignty itself. The
lawgiver is in effect the sovereign. Nor is
there any sound difference, in this respect, be-
tween a general legislative authority, and the ex-
clusive possession of that which the colonial ad-
vocates call internal legislation. They who can
alone prescribe the lex loci, are the sovereigns of
the place. The Berlin Decree was the law of
France, though it related to maritime commerce,
and was opposed at sea by the irresistible navy
of England. To allow this claim, would be to
place the sugar islands in the same relation to
us as Hanover ; but with this, to us, most unjust
and degrading difference, that we are bound to
sustain and protect, though not allowed to govern,
theni.

Are we told that we may regulate their iiay.i'»

97

gation and trade ? By what right ; and by what
means? If their colonial constitutions have given
to their assemblies the sole power of framing
laws for their respective islands, let the excep-
tions be shewn of their ports, their dock-yards,
or their trade. Let it be shewn also, how our
navigation or trade acts are or can be enforced,
without numerous official establishments, and
auxiliary regulations, provided by the same au-
thority, which are to operate on shore.

Is it replied, that the exception extends to such
local regulations as are necessary to give effect to
those laws ? Then there is an end of the prac-t
tical question. A registry of slaves is a regulation,
and a necessary regulation, to effectuate the Aboli-
tion Act, which is a law of navigation and trade..

The claim being liable to such answers in point
oi principle, how stands it as to precedent .^ If the
parliamentary authority in question may fairly
rest, like every other constitutional rule, upon
ancient, continued, and unquestioned practice, the
case is not less clear on this ground, than on
the principles of reason and justice.

From the first settlement of our colonies, Pai*-
liament has not ceased to exercisa a general ju-
risdiction over them ; and this without opposition
or complaint. Until the practice was extended
to the invidious and dangerous purpose of direct
taxation, no objection was ever made, or none so

O

§8

audible as to have reached the ear of historians.
Many instances of the practice might be pointed
out which were even solicited by the colonies
themselves.

To enumerate the various acts of Parliament
w^hich have been passed at different periods, le-
gislating for his Majesty's colonies in America
and the West Indies, for purposes both external
and internal, would be a very tedious work; but
the reader may be requested to open the volumes
of our statutes, from the Restoration downwards,
to examine their indexes under the titles, Colonies
and Plantations, and to find, if he can, a single
book in which precedents of the practice in ques-
tion do not occur. Yet numerous are the in-
stances in which acts expressly extending to the
colonies, are not to be found by such a summary-
mode of research. It has been common to extend
the operation of an act to his Majesty's colonies
and plantations in America, by a clause, which,
not being noticed in the title of the act, has
escaped the observation of the editors of the
Statutes at large. '

" It is no objection to say that these acts were
chiefly made to regulate the external trade and
navigation of the colonies. Such have certainly
been the purposes which have most commonly
invited the exercise of the jurisdiction in question.
Parliament, erroneously and most unfortunately

99

thought, that matters of interior jurisprudence,
and police, in general, might be safely lefl to
local and subordinate legislatures.

If such ill-judged abstinence had been invari-
able, and had now become an obligatory rule ;
if the right of the supreme legislature could be
lost by disuse; still it would not avail the objector,
in the case before us; because, for the purpose of
enforcing exterior commercial restrictions, a<
least, Parliament has always copiously exercised
its right of legislation, as well within the colonies
as without; and such is the object of the registry
in question.

The e are not wanting, however, many instances
ofstatut.oe hich have altered or introduced rules
of law within the colonies, in matters not at all
of a maritime nature, and where there was no
purpose of either restraining or regulating trade*.

* Such is the statute 5th Geo. II, cap. 7, before referred to,
which, besidesthe subjecting lands, and tenements, and slaves to
be sold by executions, and making them assets for the satis-
faction of simple contract debts, obliges the colonial courts to
receive evidence of debts not admissible by the laws of this
country. No law is of more frequent use in the West Indies ; yet
Mr. Bryan Edwards, the champion of the assemblies, when he
obtained, in 1797, a repeal of a particular clause of this act,
did not complain of, but by plain implication admitted, the
authority of the rest.

Such also are the statutes, 25 Geo. II. cap. 6, which ex-
tended to the colonies, the provision for proving wills attested
by interested witnesses ; 14 Geo. II. cap. 37; prohibiting stock

100

It would, to be sure, be a strange boundary
line of constitutional legislation by the supreme
power, that should divide its lawful from its un-
lawful exercise, by the nature of the subject;
and yet our objector must contend for this, and
more. As the Abolition Act is of a commercial
nature, he must also deny the fitness or necessity
of a registry to give effect to that law, and must
anaintain that the power of Parliament is circum-
scribed not only by the nature of the object, but
by the suitableness or necessity of the means.

Subordinate authority, though of a legislative
nature, may be so limited; as in the case of
corporation bye-laws; but who is to decide, in
the case of the Parliament, whether it ^rzeeds the
limits of its jurisdiction ? Are the courts of law
in the colonies to adjudge that a British statute
is not binding in respect of its subject, or its prac-
tical means, when the King, Lords, and Commons,
have held the reverse ? Or, supposing an appeal,
is the King in his Privy Council to reverse that

subscriptioiis, transfers, &c. there ; the 12th Geo. III. cap. 20,
which provides for the case of persons standing mute upoti
arraignment in the criminal courts of the colonies; the 13th
Geo. III. cap. 14, which enables aliens to lend money on real
estates tlrere, and regulates the mode of enforcing their mort-
gages in the colonial courts; the 14th Geo. III. cap. 79, which
gives validity to mortgages of estates there, though made in
England, at more than our legal interest, and which expressly
directs the registration of such mortgages within the colonies;
with other acts that might be added.

101

rule, which, as one of the co-estates in Parlia-
ment, he has concurred in ordaining ?

These difficulties were softened, if not solved,
in the case of taxation, by a distinction drawn
from the anomalous nature of a tax act, and from
the first principles of our free constitution. " Tax-
ation" (argued Lord Chatham) " is no part of
the governing or legislative power. Taxes are a
voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone.
In legislation, the three estates of the realm are
alike concerned; but the concurrence of the
Peers, and the Crown, to a tax, is only necessary
to clothe it in the form of a law. The gift and
grant is of the Commons alone."

If this be not quite satisfactory, how much less
so, the distinction between an act of Parliament
which compels the registering of a ship built in
the colonies, and an act of Parliament which
compels the registering of a negro born there;
between the declaring that Africans shall not be
bought or held in slavery within a West-India
island, and providing a mean there to enforce
the prohibition ?

Some of the many precedents which never
were the subjects of complaint, approach closely
to the specific purpose of a registry of slaves.
In point of analogy they cannot well be
closer.

A naval officer, for instance, has been consti-
tuted in every island, to assist and check the go-

102

vernors and colonial custom-houses in executing
the laws of navigation and trade*. The whole
system almost, of fiscal police, as administered in
port or on shore by officers of the customs in
England, has been extended to the colonies by
Stat. 7 and 8. Will. III. cap. 22, § 6, and other
more modern statutes. Stronger still, special
jurisdictions have been constituted there, un-
known to English law, and subversive of the trial
by jury, in all cases of seizures under these sta-
tutes. To surmount those difficulties in their
execution, which restrictions offensive to popular
feelings, and adverse to local interests, could not
fail to meet, means of that extraordinary kind
have been devised and followed up from the 8th
year of William III., to the present period. The
Abolition Acts 46 Geo, III. cap. 52, § 17, and
47 Geo. III. cap. 36, § 13, pursued in this re-
spect, but did not exceed, the str^ong precautions
of very numerous former statutes, many of them
passed in the present reign, and subsequent to
the American war.

Why the establishment of vice-admiralty reve-
nue courts, should be tacitly acquiesced in, and
the inoffenive measure of a registry, when di-
rected to the same end, objected to, cannot be
easily explained ; except on the true hypothesis,
that the end is extremely disliked, and the regis-r
try known to be the only effectual mean.

* 15 Car. II., cap. 7, § 8 ; 7 and 3 Will. Ill, cap. 22, § 5,

103

Sinee principle and practice, both thus clearly
support the legislative authority in question, what
objection to it, on legal or constitutional ground,
can remain to be answered ?

We are aware but of one ; and that is an ob-
jection resting upon a mistake as to historical
fact, which a reference to the statute-book will
remove ?

Some persons, when told that such a doubt
has been raised, have inclined for a moment
to adopt it, from an imperfect recollection
of ihe grounds of the American quarrel, and
of the concessions that were fruitlessly made on
the part of Great Britain. " Did we not," such
persons have asked, " assert a general legislative
authority over the colonies, and did we not after-
wards expressly renounce it?"

To answer that question satisfactorily, and to
put all doubts on this score for ever at rest, it
may be proper to state all that Parliament has
ever done, or declared in the abstract, on this
constitutional question.

The assemblies having taken upon them, prior
to the 7th and 8th Will. III. cap. 22, to pass certain
acts militating against the provisions of our navi-
gation and trade laws, it was by the 9th section
of that statute enacted and declared, that " all
laws, bye-laws, usages or customs, in any of
the plantations, against the provisions of this
or any other act of Parliament made, or to be

104

hereafter made, so far as such acts shall relate to
and mention the said plantations, are illegal,
null and void, to all intents and purposes what-
soever."

Thus the law stood, in point of express general
rule, and thus it was invariably held and acted
upon, till the Stamp Act, and other tax-bills, had
given rise to the dispute with the North-Ameri-
can colonies. The controversy then turned, as
has been already observed, not on the general
right of parliamentary legislation, but on that of
imposing taxes; and so the act next mentioned in
its preamble recites. But Parliament, thinking it
best to maintain the particular, as a branch of
the general right, passed as a pledge of its firm-'
ness the general Declaratory Act (6 Geo. III.
cap. IS), asserting, that " the King's Majesty, by
and with the advice and consent of the Lords
spiritual and temporal, and Commons of Great
Britain in Parliament assembled, had, hath, and
of right ought to have, full power and authority
to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and
validity to bind the colonies and people of Ame-
rica, subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in
all cases whatsoever."'

In consequence of the events of war, between
the passing of this act, and the year 1778, it w^as
thought necessary, for the •sake of conciliation,
to recede from, or §,t least partially to qualify,
this assertion of legislati've authority. The A^t

18 Geo. III. cap. 12, was therefore passed; which,
without repealing the Declaratory Act, enacts or
promises, " that, after the passing of this act, the
King and Parliament of Great Britain will not im-
pose any duty, tax, or assessment whatever, pay-
able in any of his Majesty's colonies, provinces,
and plantations in North America or the West
Indies; except only such duties as it may be
expedient to impose for the regulation of com-
merce : the net produce of such duties to be
always paid and applied to and for the use of
the colony, province, or plantation in which
the same shall be respectively levied, in such
manner as other duties collected by the authority
of the respective general courts, or general assem-
blies of such colonies, provinces, or plantations,
are ordinarily paid and applied." This Act also,
in its preamble, recites the right of taxation by *
Parliament as the only subject in dispute.

Unfortunately, this concession was ineffectual j
not, however, because it was too sparing, but be*
cause it came too late to have the desired effect.
In America, the republican party and the friends
of French connection had prevailed; and if Par-
liament had in that act renounced the right of
making laws to bind the colonies in any case
whatever, that virtual abdication of sovereignty
over them would not have averted their express
jnd open independence.

After the statement of these facts from the sta-

106

tute book, it may be thought, perhaps, that ail
our former reasoning was superfluous. The rigfet
in question, far from haying been shaken by any
parliam=entary concession, as some persons have
erraneously suppt^ed, has been perseveringly
asserted and maintained* by Parliamefvt, even^
under circumstances of the greatest difficulty, by
its express and repeated declarations, as well a&>
by its uniform practice..

The political prudence of now adapting the
proposed measure by Act of Parliament, is the^
only remaining point which we proposed^ to con-
sider.

It having been shewn that a registry of slaves is-
the necessary mean of giving effect to the aboli-
tion of the slave trade, ought Parliament imme-
diately to exercise that right which it clearly pos-
sesses, by establishing such a registry in all aur
colonies ?/

Since the measure is proper in itself, the only
question can be, by what authority it ought to be
effected. And as the King has no authority to^
enact laws for colonies in which representative
legislative assemblies exist. Parliament must
either do the work itself, or leave it to the colo-
nial assemblies.

To the latter course, there are many decisive-
ebjections; and among themrtiie disposition whicb

107

has been shewn to prevail in those petty bodies,
and with the planters who elect them. The work,
if left to them, certainly will not be done. The
Crown may recommend ; but we have seen that its
recommendations are fr^iitless. Parliament may
express its wishes by addresses, or in any other
way short of actual enactment ; and that wish will,
us before, be treated with contempt.

Should the fear of the mother country taking
the work into her own hands, now produce a less
openly contumacious spirit than before, the fruit
would be no better than ostensible and impotent
4aws. Registries would be establislied perhaps;
but on such a defective plan, and with such inade-
quate legal sanctions, that the desired effect would
be lost, and the system itself would be brought
into discredit; nay, would be made perhaps a
^over for those very frauds which it was designed
to prevent. Besides, the authority that makes the
Isiw can repeal it. If a registry w€re established
by act of assembly, the colonists might naturally
therefore expect from their own representatives,
some future suspensions or.relaxations of its rules;
and we have shewn how essential it isthat a law to
preclude the illicit importation of slaves, should
be regarded as one of sure and perpetual force.

The assemblies, in the next place, are not only
avej-se to the work, but unequal to it.

If, after the remarks that have been here offered,
a favourable disposition could be supposed in

IG8

those bodies, th^r constituents, and the white
colonists in general, would not suffer them to act
upon it. They are not independent enough of
the voice of the little societies for which they re-
spectively legislate, to adopt, with safety to their
seats, or even without danger to their persons
perhaps, a highly unpopular law.

Another cause of their impotence is still clearer,
and might be singly decisive. The separate co-
lonial legislatures want that comprehensive juris-
diction, which is necessary to give full effect to
the proposed registry, as a general system.

Each of those bodies can make laws for the
colony only over which it presides : an act of
Grenada has no force in Montserrat, nor an act of
St. Kitts in Jamaica. We have now thirteen dif-
ferent colonies in the West Indies, including the
Bermudas, which have their separate representa-
tive assemblies and councils, forming, with the
governor, their interior legislatures 5 and in each
of these colonies, the acts of the other twelve are
as impotent as the laws of France.

How incompatible would this be with the per^
fection of the plan in question, even in a single
colony, much more with its uniformity in all !

The legislature of Nevis, for instance, having no
power to ordain that the slaves in the neighbour-
ing islands of St. Kitts, Montserrat, or Antigua,
shall be registered according to rules adopted by
itself} could take no security that slaves should

109

not be fraudulently put on the registers of those
islands, to be transferred by exportation to its
own. Nor could it, on the other hand, declare,
that negroes, cleared out as slaves from either of
those islands, shall not be imported into Nevis,
British statutes, as well as royal instructions, must
be repealed, before precautions like that could be
taken, by one colony disposed to adopt the re-
gistering system, against its fraudulent evasion
through importations from other British colonies;
if they should choose to reject it, or to adopt it
in an insecure or evasive mode.

Still less could the remedies be extended into
another jurisdiction. A St.Vincents register act
could not appoint that an offence against itself
might be punished in the courts of Grenada, if
the offender were found in that island; or that a
negro enfranchised in consequence of non-regis-
tration in St.Vincents, should be free if carried
to Dominica.

In these, and other views, there would be 9
natural repugnance in every island to take the
lead in the measure proposed; lest the rest should
not follow the example, or not with equal effect.
For, in that case, the good consequences to the
reforming colony would be greatly impaired,
while the inconveniences would be seriously felt.
Islands that continued to act on the old system,
would have very unfair advantages over those
which had exchanged it for the new.

no

Let it be supposed even that all the British
colonies were disposed to register their slaves, and
to do it simultaneously; still these difficulties
would be felt ; for what pledge could they give
to each other that such unanimity of intention
existed, and would produce a practical uniformity
in their respective laws ? What congress could
form a treaty between them for that purpose?
What power could guarantee its execution ?

Nor would the difficulty end here. If a per-
fect uniformity of laws could be assured to them,
and actually obtained ; if the order in council
for Trinidad were enacted totldem verbis in every
British colony; still a mutuallity of rights and
remedies under their respective register acts, and
a co-operation of their courts to enforce them,
could not be derived from the acts of their sepa-
rate and mutually independent legislatures. The
correspondence of their respective laws would not
obviate the practical objections before stated, so
as to make an offence against the register act of
one island punishable by the courts of another.

Besides, to make the system effectual and com-
plete, offences must be constituted, remedies
given, and establishments formed, beyond the
local limits of all those insular jurisdictions.
None of them, for instance, has j^ right to declare
that negroes shall not be carried on the high seas
as slaves, though brought from a British island, un-
less they shall first have been duly registered there.

Ill

*nd cleared out on the registrar's certificate ; or to-
enact, that, if so carried in a British ship, she shall be
liable to seizure at sea. Yet who can doubt, that,
supposing the registering system universal, this
would be a proper provision ?

Agam : a general public registry for colonial
slaves to be kept in a public office in Eng-
land, has been shewn to be an essential part of
the plan. AVithout it, British mortgagees and
creditors, or purchasers, would not be perfect-
ly safe. But it is obvious that Parliament alone
can create and regulate such an establishment
here. In the case of Trinidad, the want of it
has been imperfectly supplied by directions for
keeping the duplicate registry in the office of
the Secretary of State ; but no such expedient,
imperfect and inconvenient as it is, can be formed
by a colonial assembly, whose mandate the Secre-
tary of State cannot recognize, and is not bound
^o obey.

Auxitiary regulations, also, of decisive iufluence,
which might be easily grafted on such an esta-
blishment, and which ought to make part of the
system, can be ordained by Parliament alone.

A more effectual mean, perhaps, than any other,
of securing obedience to a register act, would
be to prohibit tlie lending money, by persons
resident in the United Kingdom, on the security
of West-India estate and slaves, unless the latter
*»haH appear by returns to the English office to

l^ave been duly registered. To this measure the as-
semblies themselves will hardly object as exceeding
the fair exercise of the authority of Parliament.

Without any further examples, it will be abun-
dantly clear that the limited local extent of the
colonial jurisdictions would alone make the as-
semblies unfit instruments of the work in ques-
tion, were they ever so willing, and in other re-
spects able, to perform it.

The legislatures of the Leeward Islands have
themselves admitted this species of unfitness, and
attempted a partial remedy for it, in a case rela-
tive to the same subject with the present.

When, in the year 1798, they were called on to
meliorate the condition of their slaves, and affect-
ed to listen to the call, they all, being five in num-
ber, represented to their common governor the
expediency or necessity of having, in such a case,
a uniformity or identity of laws j and requested,
that, for this end, a general council and assembly
of all the respective islands might be convened at
St. Christophers, though there had been no prece-
dent of such a measure since their separation into
different legislative bodies, about a century before.
That extraordinary general legislature was ac-
cordingly convened ; and passed an act for the
protection and preservation of slaves. Its pro-
visions, indeed, were for the most part illusory 5
but this cannot impeach the principle of the ex-
traordinary convocation itself. Now, the same

principle evidently would have led to the con-
voking a colonial legislature competent to make
laws for all the British West-India Islands collec-
tively, had that been possible. But no such legi-
slature having ever existed, and the comprehen-
sive povrer of Parliament alone being competent
to bind them all, the same reasons of convenience
plainly call for the exercise of that power in the
case before us.

The principle here indeed applies with much
greater force; for in the case of the Leeward
Islands, convenience alone, not necessity, demand^
ed the legislative union. There was nothing in
the proposed work that required the hand of a
legislature competent to regulate the mutual
intercourse of the colonies with each other,
to give powers of seizure at sea, or to create
establishments for any auxiliary purpose in
England.

This last argument, for the expediency of Par-
liamentary interposition, would be strong enough
to support even the constitutional right, if, after
what has been already offered, any doubt could
possibly remain on that point. When a legal
question arises between two colonies, which can
be determined by the Courts of neither, as in a
dispute about boundaries, the King in Council
exercises an original jurisdiction, though from
the constitution and practice of that Court very

Q

114

inconvenient, merely because there is no other
resort*.

But if it be asound consitiitional maxim,that there
must always reside somewhere a judicial juris-
diction, the same may be affirmed of the legislative
A want of power, therefore, in the assemblies,
would serve to demonstrate the constitutional
power of Parliament.

But resting the right upon the other and irrefra-
gable reasons that have been offered, we have
here at least a consideration of expediency, which
it will be impossible to repel. It cannot be denied,
that the registry may be made much more effec-
tual by the means which have been already
indicated, or that uniformity and mutuality in
our colonial institutions on this subject are
highly desirable, if not indispensably necessary;
and these are desiderata which Parliament only
can supply.

It is, perhaps, superfluous to add, as a further
consideration, the great inconveniences that would
probably flow from delay; and the length of time
that must elapse before it would be possible to
obtain the concurrence and co-operation of thir-
teen different colonies. It is at this moment,
when peace and the revival of foreign slave trade
make illicit importation far more easy than
before, that a register act is most urgently
wanted, in order to secure the effect, to obtain the

'* Penn, and Lord Baltimore, — 1 Vezey, 446.

115

benefits^ and demonstrate the sincerity, of our
own reformation.

Nor is it less necessary to prevent reasonable
discontent in our newly-acquired colonies. The
registries of Trinidad, St. Lucie, and the Isle of
France, will become fruitless of any good conse-
quences, unless we either establish similar insti-
tutions in the other British colonies, or prohibit the
carrying of slaves from the latter to either of the
former J a restriction which would be disadvan-
tageous and unjust to the islands where registries
are established by the Crown. In other, and im-
portant respects, the distinction would be inju-
rious, as well as invidious, to those new colonies;
and it is not too much to say, that, unless the
system be now made general, the Orders in
Council for registering slaves in the ceded French
islands, at least, ought to be repealed. For all
these reasons, the expediency of an immediate
parliamentary interposition is not less apparent
than the constitutional right.

The task we proposed to ourselves is now fully,
though feebly, accomplished. A general registry
of the slaves in the British colonies, has been
shewn to be necessary to the guarding them from
a contraband slave trade j to the maintenance

116

of their agriculture by innocent means ; arid
to the preservation of the interesting hope that
their opprobrious slavery will be henceforth
so mitigated in practice, as to prepare the means
of its future extinction. It has been further
shewn, that this measure is clearly within the
constitutional authority of Parliament; that it may
most conveniently be taken by that authority;
and that it neither will, nor effectually can, pro-
ceed from any other.

The question is not. By whom shall the law be
passed? but. Shall the m.easurebe adopted at all?
Will you make it impossible that men shall
be held in bondage, under the British Crown,
contrary to law ? Or shall man-stealers be en-
couraged to pursue their felonious and inhuman
crimes, by the facility of holding their victims^
when brought into our colonies, in perpetual and
hereditary slavery ?

Surely it is enough, after these observations, to
appeal to principles on which all British subjectsare
now happily agreed ; to the same moral principles
upon which this country, to its immortal honour,
has abolished the slave trade; and which we have so
generously laboured to inculcate on other nations.
A registry of slaves is in truth a plain, practical
corollary from the abolition. In limiting the
lawful sources of slavery to existing titles and
their hereditary fruits, we virtually bound our-
selves to take care that this limitation shall be

117

effectual within all the British dominions. Wc
may not be able to obtain the same moral re-
formation in foreign territories ; but it would be
opprobrious not to secure itin ourown. As philan-
thropists, we must deplore the continuance of the
slave trade by other countries^ but as moralists,
it should cost us as much deeper regret, if even a
small number of unfortunate Africans were car-
ried into slavery by British subjects, and kept in
bondage for life, within the dominions of his Ma-
jesty, through means which we had the power to
exclude.

Humanity, also, would soon have reason
to regard the latter mischief, with more concern
than the former. If a general registry be
not speedily established, the abolition will be
fatally prejudiced in the eyes of foreign powers,
who will carefully watch the effect of the
experiment we have made. The existing stock
of slaves in our islands, instead of being kept
up and increased by natural means, through a
meliorated treatment, will, by perseverance in
former habits on the part of their masters, be
rapidly reduced; unless smuggling on a large scale
should supply the want of legal importations. In
the one case, our new system will be discredited
by the ruin of our colonial agriculture j in the
other case, by the inefficiency of our laws. In
either case, foreign governments will be deterred
from following our example. They will ascribe

lis

the failure, not to the defect of our mearig^
but to the impracticability of our object; and
the British Abolition, instead of delivering Africa
from the slave trade, may rather tend to make
its ravages eternal.

Let the system, then, that has been wisely
begun by his Majesty's Government, be immedi-
ately followed up by Parliament. It is due to
half a million of human beings, whose bondage
we are bound to alleviate : it is due even to those
benevolent masters who may otherwise possess the
will, without the power, to reform existing abuses i
it is due to Africa, which has so deep an interest
in the credit of the British Abolition : and, above
all, we owe it to ourselves ; to those high princi-
ples of public conduct which have exalted us
among the nations of the earth, and recommend-
ed us, as we may humbly hope, to the protection
and favour of Heaven.

THE END.

£i]«rton and Henderson, Printers*
Johnsoa's Courts Lendun.