The daily exchange. [volume] (Baltimore, Md.) 1858-1861, 1858-08-07
As the free blacks of Jamaica do not tn

As the free blacks of Jamaica do not themS@
celebrate the anniversary of their emancipation
from slavery suppose that its observance by their
colored brethren in New York, and to the east
ward by the GARRISON and PILLsBURY faction of
abotonists, may be regarded as eminently right
and proper. Everybody knows that the material
interests of the British West India Islands have
suffered greatly during the past twenty years. that
the landed proprietors have been impoverished and
that the blacks themselves have derived solid
advantage, either physically OR morally, from the
costly sacrifice which England consented to make
in their behalf. CLARKsoN and WHEREFORE con-
tended that free grown sugar was Sweeter to the
palate of the humanitarian than that which was
the product of slave labor, and they expatated
eoquently upon the vast benefit that would accrue
to the planters from the conversion of indolen and
disconnected bondsmen into industrious and happy
freemen. The theory was a beautiful one but,
somehow or other when the erperimentum cruciS
came to be applied, it was discovered to be like
many other theories very benevolent in design,
very convincing in Speech or on paper, but practi-
cally injurious How emancipation has worked in
the West India Islands, is sufficiently attested by the
comparative poverty and wretchedness to which
ulOSe lSldiluS ldNt DteH TeuuCeuj ny tHt
ment of valuable sugar estates; by the general
poverty and neglect everywhere visible, and by the
strenuous efforts which have been made, and are
still making, to import laborers from Eastern and
Southern Asia, to take the place of the free blacks,
nearly all of whom have become indolent, inso-
lent and worthless. OF the utter incapacity of the
negro for self government, we need no more strik-
ing illustration than is presented to in the ebony
empire of Hayti; with its Dukes de MARMALADE, its
Marquises de PoMME DE TERRE, its Counts de RED
TERRIER; its tinsel pageantry, its breechess sol
diery and its dilapidated capital. But as
nearly all the statesmen and publicsts of
England have been taught, by bitter experience,
that the emancipation of the blacks in the West
Indies was too egregious blunder to permit of its
being glorifed by annual celebrations, it became,
of course, the bounden duty of American aboli-
tionists, and of the free negroes of the northern
and eastern cities, to rejoice over the ruin which
ulra-phlanthropy had wrought in some of the
fairest dependencies of the English Crown-aud
especially, as the occasion was one which gave the
jubilant speakers an opportunity for denouncng
slavery at the South, and for expressing their de-
cided opinion, that the guilt of this nation is
without parallel in the history of the world;
that its religion sanctifes the possession of slave
property; that the DRIED ScoTr decision is papa-
BILE violation of the Constitution of the United
States, and that this reign of terror-this martyr
age of colored ACCOMPLISHMENTS of them a
new baptism of energy for the present, and of
hope for the future. Upon their showing, we are
certainly in an awful condition.; but on the whole
we are rather inclined TO think that the negro
question is blessing in disguise. When we grow
sluggish and apathetc and the surface circulation
becomes languid; when the blood requires flip
and the brain stimulus when ''poppy and man
dragora, and all the drowsy syrups of the East"
soohe our senses into slumber no counter-rritant,
whether moxa mustard plaster, or Spanish flies,
is half so efficacious to rouse us to a knowledge
of what we are, what we ought to be, and what
at least, some eccentric people think we might
become as a verbal hagellation by WILLIAM LLOYD
GARRISON, or a solemn lecture on our duties and
responsibilities from that learned colored Theban
-FRED DOUGLAS.