New-York daily tribune. [volume] (New-York [N.Y.]) 1842-1866, 1860-06-16

as apprentices they had received for extra work;
nor could the planters very well object to rate Of
wages already sanctioned by use and the mutual
consent Of lsborers and employers. Yet they did
allege that what they had paid for extra work
ought NOT TO serve as criterion for the ordinary
value Of labor.
Connected with this question Of wages, arose
another not so easily satisfactorily disposed Of.
Tat was the question as to the conditions on
which the now free laborers were to continue to
occupy the houses and garden grounds which %
slaves and apprentices they had been pro-
vided with by their masters. Upon this
important subject, the Emancipation act had
omitted to make any provisions. The planters at
once set up a claim for rent. To that the laboers
did not object; but other conditions of occupancy
were coupled with it which became the occasbns
of great dissatisfaction, ard which, in their iti-
mate results, have contributed more than anything
else to the very thing they were intended to pre-
yent-that withdrawal Of labor from the pl,nta
tons of which, as ofthe consequences ofthe rec
labor system, the planters have all along made
such bitter complaints. Not content with being
paid certain money rent the planters insisted
that their tenants should be bound to labor on their
plantations exclusively, and that they should hbor
continuously to the extent-unless prevented BY
sickness-of the apprenticeship rule Of six tasks
week. These conditions the laborers regarded as
substantially depriving them Of their liberty, and
binding them TO the soil. The planters were not
able to enforce this claim for labor to any great
extent, but it produceda great uneasiness, andOa
the part Of the most industrious and intelligent
of the laborers, strong desire to place
themselves beyond this sort of control
by purchasing land and building houses Of
their own. 1t was at first attempted to
prevent this by refusing to sell them land. Butin
a colony where there were so many abandoned
plantations, not to mention the abandoned feds
attached to the plantations still cultivated, this
policy could not long be upheld. The result las
been the sprirgipg up of large number of villages,
scattered in different parts of the colony in which
large part of the native population is collected.
Only the smaller and least efficient portion of the
emancipated people still live on the plantations,
who are willing to do so. These villagers, beside
the houses which they occupy, generally in pos
session of tracts of land which they cultivate
mostly in provisions. The plantain, which
still remains the fayorite and staple food Of
the creole inhabitants, is now cultivated
almost exclusively by them. When not occupied
upon their own lands, they work for wages on the
plantations, but their labor cannot be counted
upon as regular and continuous. This collection
of the people into villages is attended also by the
inconvenience Of removing the labOrers to great
distance from the work to be performed. This
distance is quite great enough for those who live
on the plantations, az the cultivated fields are
often two, three and sometimes even four or five
miles from the sugar works and the houses. Labor
ers from the villages employed upon the neighbor-
ing plantations 60 still greater distances, employ
ing in this mere passing to and fro large part Of
their time and strength.
independently of this change in the locality and
residence of the population, which has only been
brought about gradually, and which, in the first
years of the emancipation, comparatively little
felt, the termination OF the apprenticeship could
not but greatly enhance that disproportion between
the amount of labor at the disposal Of the planters,
and the amount required to keep up the cultva-
tion-a dispropor!ion which, as We have seen, had
its origin prior to the emancipation and indepen-
IDENTIFY of it, in the constant diminution of the eff
fective aboring force of the population. Prior to
the emancipation, the planters were able to en-
gross, and to devote to single object the
entire labolng force of the colony, whatever
it might be. The colony was one vast sugar plan
tation-nothing more. The introduction Of the
fpe-labor system deprived the planters OF this
monopoly 1t at once created great many new
calls for labor in supplying the wants of the
cipated class, at the same time that it allowed a
choice to labor or not, of which many ayailed
themselves. Mothers with young children now
enjoyed an opportunity of Withdrawing to a GER
tain extent from the labors of the field, while the
opening of schools for the children came in direct
conflict with their employment in plantation labor