plantations in the year 1650, we must suppose that in the year 1688 the
great number of _African-born_ slaves brought into the plantations in
chains, and compelled to labour by the terrors of corporal punishment,
might have made it appear necessary to enact a temporary law so harsh as
the statute No. 82; but when the _great majority_ of the Negroes were
become _vernacular, born in the island, naturalized by language_, and
_familiarised by custom_, did not _policy_ as well as humanity require:
them _to be put under milder conditions_, such as were granted to the
slaves of our Saxon ancestors?" Colonel Malenfant speaks the same
sentiments. In defending his plan, which he offered to the French
Government for St. Domingo in 1814, against the vulgar prejudice, that
"where you employ Negroes you must of necessity use slavery," he
delivers himself thus:--"[18]If all the Negroes on a plantation had not
been more than six months out of Africa, or if they had the same ideas
concerning an independent manner of life as the Indians or the savages
of Guiana, I should consider my plan to be impracticable. I should then
say that coercion would be necessary: but ninety-nine out of every
hundred Negroes in St. Domingo are aware that they cannot obtain
necessaries without work. They know that it is their duty to work, and
they are even desirous of working; but the remembrance of their cruel
sufferings in the time of slavery renders them suspicious." We may
conclude, then, that if a cruel discipline was _not necessary_ in the
years 1790 and 1794, to which these gentlemen allude, when there must
have been _some thousands of newly imported Africans_ both in St.
Domingo and in the English colonies, it cannot be necessary _now_, when
there have been no importations into the latter for _fifteen years_.
There can be no excuse, then, for the English planters for not altering
their system, and this _immediately_. It is, on the other hand, a great
reproach to them, considering the quality and character of their slaves,
_that they should not of themselves have come forward on the subject