ome tree the midnight orgy of magic and Fetichism. A
slave-climate gnawed at the bold edges of their characters and wore them
down, as the weather rusted out more rapidly than anywhere else all
the iron tools and implements of the colony. The gentler traits of the
African character, mirth and jollity, affectionateness, domestic love,
regard and even reverence for considerate masters, were the least
impaired; for these, with a powerful religiosity, are indigenous, like
the baobab and palm, and give a great accent to the name of Africa. What
other safeguard had a planter with his wife and children, who lived with
thirty slaves or more, up to six hundred, upon solitary plantations that
were seldom visited by the _marechaussee,_ or rural police? The root of
such a domination was less in the white man's superiority than in the
docile ability of those who ought to have been his natural enemies.
"_Totidem esse hostes quot servos_" said Seneca; but he was thinking of
the Scythian and Germanic tribes. A North-American Indian, or a Carib,
though less pagan than a native African, could never become so subdued.
Marooning occurred every day, and cases of poisoning, perpetrated
generally by Ardra negroes, who were addicted to serpent-worship, were
not infrequent; but they poisoned a rival or an enemy of their own race
as often as a white man. The "Affiches Americaines," which was published
weekly at Port-au-Prince, had always a column or two describing fugitive
negroes; but local disturbances or insurrectionary attempts were very
rare: a half-dozen cannot be counted since the Jolofs of Diego Columbus
frightened Spaniards from the colony. If this be so in an island whose
slaves were continually reinforced by native Africans, bringing Paganism
to be confirmed by a corrupt Catholicism, where every influence was
wanton and debased, and the plantation-cruelties, as we shall shortly
see, outheroded everything that slave-holding annals can reveal, how
much less likely is it that we shall find the slave insurrectionary in
the United States, whence the slave-trade has been excluded for nearly
two generations, and where the African, modified by climate, and by
religious exercises of his own which are in harmony with his native
disposition and enjoin him not to be of a stout mind, waits prayerfully
till liberty shall be proclaimed! If the slaveholder ever lived in
dread, it was not so much from what he expected as from what he knew
that he deserv