they could have so far
overcome their despotic habits and contempt for the negro as to treat
the laboring population with fairness, and what they value still more,
with decent respect. But still less could it be expected of the
overseers that they would exercise foresight and self-control enough to
retain the good will of the blacks. They had all the feelings of
slaveholders, aggravated by more direct contact with the slaves, while
their interest only bound them to make the most out of the estates
during their own term of employment, no matter if they took a course
that would ruin them eventually. Besides, an overseer must have been
often tempted to work on the fears of a proprietor, just after
emancipation, to persuade him to sell the estate to him; and many a one
would not hesitate to ruin the property to bring down its price to his
own means, knowing that the sale of the land or its conversion to
pasturage would reimburse him.

The various means by which the planters endeavored to keep the negroes
on the estates are too well known to require detail. Summary ejectments
of the refractory from their dwellings, destruction of their provision
grounds, refusal to sell them land except at exorbitant prices, were all
tried. But there is too much land in Jamaica, and too few people, to
make this game successful. There were abundance of thrown-up estates,
and especially of coffee properties in the mountains, whose owners were
only too glad to sell land at reasonable rates, and so this policy of
coercion simply wrought out an incurable alienation between a large part
of the proprietors and a large part of the peasantry. It must not be
supposed, however, that the tyranny was all on one side. If at
emancipation there was an unprincipled strife on the part of the
planters to get the better of the negroes, there was an equally
unprincipled and far more adroitly managed strife on the part of the
negroes to get the better of the planters. Long and close observation of
the emancipated black has satisfied the writer beyond all doubt that
laziness is not one of his prominent faults. Negligent, unthrifty,
careless of time, and sufficiently disposed to take his ease, he
undoubtedly is. But every year of freedom has shown an advance, and the
five years and a half of the writer's residence showed so unmistakable
an advance in regular industry, carefulness of time, skill in laying out
labor, and in the increase of the wants that stimulate i