consider the West Indies as their country; they cast
no wistful looks toward France.... In our colonies it is quite different;
... every one regards the colony as a temporary lodging place where they
must sojourn in sugar and molasses till their mortgages will let them live
elsewhere. They call England their home though many of them have never
been there.... The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the
Englishman never."[11] Absenteeism was throughout a serious detriment. Many
and perhaps most of the Jamaica proprietors were living luxuriously in
England instead of industriously on their estates. One of them, the
talented author "Monk" Lewis, when he visited his own plantation in
1815-1817, near the end of his life, found as much novelty in the doings of
his slaves as if he had been drawing his income from shares in the Banc of
England; but even he, while noting their clamorous good nature was chiefly
impressed by their indolence and perversity.[12] It was left for an invalid
traveling for his health to remark most vividly the human equation: "The
negroes cannot be silent; they talk in spite of themselves. Every passion
acts upon them with strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious,
their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their
love the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire. Yet
by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree, and I know
nothing more delightful than to be met by a group of negro girls and to be
saluted with their kind 'How d'ye massa? how d'ye massa?'"[13]

[Footnote 10: Lord Chesterfield, _Letters to his Son_ (London, 1774), II,
525.]

[Footnote 11: H.N. Coleridge, _Six Months in the West Indies_, 4th ed.
(London, 1832), pp. 131, 132.]

[Footnote 12: Matthew G. Lewis, _Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, kept
during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica_ (London, 1834).]

[Footnote 13: H.N. Coleridge, p. 76.]

On the generality of the plantations the tone of the management was too
much like that in most modern factories. The laborers were considered more
as work-units than as men, women and children. Kindliness and comfort,
cruelty and hardship, were rated at balance-sheet value; births and deaths
were reckoned in profit and loss, and the expense of rearing children was
balanced against the cost of new Africans. These things were true in some
degree in the North American slaveholding communities, but in the West
Indi