No. 289.]

For the Christian Observer.

ADDRESS TO THE CLERGY OF THE

ESTABLISHED CHURCH, AND TO
CHRISTIAN MINISTERS OF EVERY

DENOMINATION.

THE subject to which your earnest attention is solicited is that of NEGRO SLAVERY as it subsists in the Colonies of Great Britain. The following is a concise view of its nature and effects, every circumstance in which stands fully established by the testimony of the colonists them

selves.

In the Colonies of Great Britain there are, at this moment, upwards of 830,000 human beings in a state of degrading personal slavery; the absolute property of their master, who may sell or transfer them at his pleasure, and who may brand them, if he pleases, by means of a hot iron, as cattle are branded in this country. These slaves, whether male or female, are driven to labour during the day by the impulse of the cartwhip, for the sole benefit of their owners, from whom they receive no wages; and in the season of crop, which lasts for four or five months of the year, their labour is protracted not only throughout the day, as at other times, but during half the night. Besides this, they are usually obliged to labour for their main tenance on the Sunday; and as that day is also their market-day, it is of necessity a day of worldly occupation, and much exertion. The colonial laws arm the master, or any one to whom he may delegate his authority, with a power to punish his slaves to a certain extent (generally that of thirty-nine lashes), for any CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 289.

These

offence, or for no offence. discretionary punishments are usually inflicted on the naked body with a cart-whip which cruelly lacerates the flesh of the sufferer. Even the unhappy females are equally liable with the men to have their persons thus exposed, and tortured, at the caprice of their master or overseer. The slaves, being in the eye of the law mere chattels, are liable to be seized and sold for their master's debts, without any regard to the family ties which may be broken by this oppressive process. Marriage is protected, in the case of slaves, by no legal sanction, and cannot there fore be said to exist among them; and in general they have little access to the means of Christian instruction. The effect of the want of such instruction, as well as of the absence of the marriage tie, is, that the most unrestrained licentiousness, (exhibited in a degrading and depopulating promiscuous intercourse,) prevails among the slaves; which is too much encouraged by the example of their superiors the Whites. The evidence of slaves is generally not admitted by the Colonial Courts, in any civil or criminal case affecting a person of free condition. If a White or free man, therefore, perpetrates the most atrocious acts of barbarity, in the presence of slaves only, the injured party is left without means of legal redress. In the Colonies of Great Britain, the same facilities have not been afforded to the slave, to purchase his freedom, as in the colonial possessions of Spain and Portugal. On the contrary, in many of our colonies, even the voluntary manumission of slaves by their masters has been obstructed, and in

B

some loaded with large fines. Many thousand infants are annually born, within the British dominions, to no inheritance but that of the hopeless servitude which has been described; and the general oppressiveness of which may be inferred from this fact alone, that while, in the United States of America, the slaves increase rapidly, there is, even now, in the British Colonies, though a more favourable climate to Negro life, no increase, but on the contrary from year to year a diminution of their numbers.

Such are some of the more prominent features of Negro Slavery, as it exists in the Colonies of Great Britain. Revolting as they are, they form only a part of those circumstances of wretchedness and degradation which might be pointed out, from their own official returns, as characterizing that unhappy state of being.

It is by no means intended to attribute the existence and continuance of this most opprobrious system to our colonists exclusively. On the contrary, the guilt and shame connected with it belong also to the People and Parliament of this country. But on that very account are we the more rigidly bound to lose no time in adopting such measures as shall bring it to the earliest termination which is compatible with the well-being of the parties who sustain the grievous yoke of colonial bondage.

In May 1823, the Government and Parliament of this country, having taken these evils into their consideration, resolved that the degraded Negro should be raised, with all convenient speed, to a participation of the same civil rights which are enjoyed by the other classes of his Majesty's subjects. In this resolution all parties, even the West-Indians, concurred. Ministers proposed to carry it into effect by a recommendation from the Crown to the Colonial Legislatures. Against this course, the leaders in the cause of abolition entered their protest. The

Colonial Legislatures, they said, were themselves the cause of all the evil that was to be redressed: to hope for effectual reform at their hands was vain and illusory: that reform could be brought about only by the direct and authoritative interference of Parliament a point which experience had abundantly proved. The Ministers of the Crown, however, thought it right once more to try the experiment, only intimating, that, if the Colonies contumaciously resisted, Parliament would be called upon to interfere. Accordingly they lost no time in urging the Colonial Legislatures to pass certain laws for giving effect to the Resolutions of Parliament. Those Legislatures have, however, resisted the call. Upwards of two years and a half have passed, and no effectual steps have yet been taken by them with a view either to the mitigation or extinction of slavery. On the contrary, the documents, laid before Parliament in the last session, prove that they are fully resolved not to comply with the requisitions of Government. What now remains, therefore, on the part of the public, but to implore Parliament at length to take upon themselves the task of terminating the evils of colonial bondage, and to proceed with all convenient speed to the accomplishment of their own resolutions?

It is our clear and indisputable duty, not only to do this, but to strain every nerve to effect, by all other lawful means in our power, the extinction of Slavery. And the obligation we are under thus to act will be strengthened, when we consider the large sums we are now paying annually-not less than a Million and a Half-to the slave-holders, in the shape of bounties and protecting duties on their produce; by which payments we are made the great and efficient upholders of that slavery which we condemn. We ought at least to claim to be freed from contributions, by which we are made to participate directly in its guilt. And if this boon should not be grant

ed to us, we have it still in our power to abstain from the purchase and consumption of articles which tend to implicate us in the maintenance of that hideous system.

As we cannot doubt that the resistance, on the part of the colonists, to the proposed reforms, will be powerful and persevering, it becomes necessary to call into action all proper means, both of diffusing a knowledge of the evils of colonial bondage throughout the land, and of exciting increased efforts for speedily putting a period to the state of slavery itself throughout the British dominions *.

In taking a view of the means which may be employed with advantage to bring about this result, it would be unpardonable to overlook the ambassadors of HIM who came to proclaim "peace on earth, and good will to men;" of HIM who claims it as his peculiar office to "bind up the broken hearted," "to preach deliverance to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound."-To the conscientious Christian Minister, of every name, we look, with confidence, for effective aid in behalf of the wretched Negro.

Should it be objected, that it would be a lowering of the dignity, or a desecration of the sacredness of the Christian pulpit, to employ it in the discussion of secular questions, it may be replied, that the present degraded and oppressed condition of 830,000 of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, with the brutish ignorance and heathen darkness consequent upon their cruel bondage, is by no means a mere secular consideration. If it be, then is a great portion of the instructions of our great Lord and Master of a secular kind: for on what subjects

* The greater part of what follows has been taken, by the author's permission, from a small work just issuing from the press, entitled," Letters on the Necessity of a prompt Extinction of British Colonial Slavery, chiefly addressed to the more influential Classes," published by Hatchard.

did he chiefly discourse, in his divine Sermon on the Mount, but on those of justice and mercy, of compassion and kindness? And what were the objects of his severest maledictions, but injustice, oppression, and cruelty; above all, hypocrisy,-the combination of a high profession of religion with the violation of its righteous precepts; long prayers and sanctimonious observances, with the "devouring of widows' houses," extortion, and oppression? What was the chief aim of his instructive parables-of the rich voluptuary and Lazarus; of the good Samaritan ; of the relentless fellow-servantand of his awful illustration of the Day of Judgment, but to inculcate lessons of compassion and sympathy, and to incite men to works of mercy and labours of love?

But it is losing time to attempt to obviate objections which have no real existence. The Christian pulpit is every where employed in pressing topics of an exactly similar nature, though of less urgent necessity than that in question. Is not a great proportion of the Charity Sermons which issue from the pulpit, preached for the establishment and support of infirmaries and hospitals; for the relief of temporal want, and the mitigation of bodily suffering?

But not only would the exposition of this subject from the Christian pulpit be in strict accordance with established precedent, but the consideration of it there would be pe culiarly appropriate. If righteousness, justice, and mercy, be essential parts of the Christian character; if all the Law and the Prophets be comprehended in the two commandments of loving God with all the heart, soul, and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves; then are we bound to manifest those qualities by the sympathy we feel for our Negro brethren, and by the exertions we make for their relief; then is it the indispensable duty of the Christian Minister to urge his hearers to combine their efforts for that purpose. He does not hesitate to urge upon

them their obligation to abound in every good work. But is it possible to conceive a work more consonant to the Christian character, than that. of administering relief to the most wretched and helpless of the human race, whom our own institutions have doomed to misery, barbarism, and bondage; and whose intense sufferings we ourselves are perpetuating and aggravating, both by the consumption of their sugar, and by the additional support we afford to the slave-system by bounties and protecting duties upon it? Unquestionably the guilt of its enormous and accumulated evils lies on every individual in the empire, who can raise his voice against it, and yet is silent. And more especially does this responsibility press upon every Minister of the Gospel, who, believing such things to exist, yet shrinks from denouncing and reprobating them, and from urging on his flock their solemn obligations with respect to them.

If it be true, that, in the Last Day, those who have not sympathized with, and aided, their suffering brethren, will be classed with the ene. mies of Christ, who "shall go into everlasting punishment;" can we suppose that those shall be deemed wholly guiltless, who, having had it in their power to contribute to put an end to such a frightful complication of misery and crime, have refused to unite in that work of justice and mercy? When "righteousness shall" at length "be laid to the line, and judgment to the plummet;" and when actions, which too many are apt to regard as indifferent or innocent, will be ranged, their motives and consequences being taken into account, in the column of crime; the part we may have acted respecting the poor Negro will assuredly not be left out of the awful estimate. Had the Ministers of the Gospel been always alive to the obligations which lay upon them as the preachers of truth and righteousness, Negro Slavery, that compound of injustice, impiety, and cruelty, could never

have gained that footing which it now possesses in this land of high Christian profession and of preeminent benevolence and refinement. And if they were now to exert themselves with becoming zeal and energy, that system, comprising every calamity and outrage which man has power to inflict upon his fellow-men, could not long subsist in a country where Christianity is recognized and established as a part of its fundamental laws; where temples for Christian worship are profusely scattered in every part of it; where its Ministers have free access to all ranks of the community; and where Religion lifts her mitred head in Courts and Parliaments, is suffered to raise her voice in the Palace as well as the Church, and to admonish the Legislature and the Monarch, as well as the People.

Why this deep crime and foul disgrace of our country should, with a few noble exceptions, have hitherto escaped the reprobation, and been imagined to lie out of the sphere, of the Christian Pulpit, it were useless to inquire. We rejoice in the hope that the illusion is rapidly dissipating, and that the time is at hand when the cause of the hapless Negro will be advocated in the right place, with the boldness and fidelity becoming Christian Pastors. Some distinguished Ministers of the Gospel have already set the example; and we anxiously desire that all, whether of the Establishment or belonging to the various religious bodies, may follow the noble precedent-not merely by adverting briefly and cursorily to the subject of slavery; not merely by describing the horrors of the system, and exciting the sympathy of their hearers for its unhappy victims; but by pointing out and pressing the adoption of the most effectual means of putting an end to it; and by shewing that every individual, however obscure his station, or humble his talents, may render important assistance, may do much, by his own example and influence, towards its final destruction.-He

may at least unite in petitioning Parliament to emancipate the slaves from their cruel bondage. He may testify to all around him his detestation of that bondage, by abstaining as much as possible from the use of those articles which are the produce of the tortures and agonies of his fellow-creatures. And he may at least address his earnest and unceasing prayer to the God of mercy, that He would listen to the sorrowful sighing of the oppressed, and that He would hear and answer the cry of those who are suffering from the cruelty and rapacity of men calling themselves Christians.

The preacher who is acquainted with the enormities of Negro Slavery will find it a subject fruitful of instruction, and bearing with important weight on the great fundamental truths and essential duties of Christianity. He may trace in its history, and in its effects especially on the masters, on the free-born sons of Christian Britain, who are unhappily engaged in administering this system, the state of hardness and insensibility at which the human heart may arrive, under the petrifying influence of an unrestrained passion for gain. He may point out the depths of wickedness into which men may plunge, when invested with unlimited power; the tremendous mass of bodily and mental anguish to which they can remorselessly consign their fellows; the monsters of cruelty and oppression they may become, when abandoned to themselves, when emancipated from the fear of human punishment and from the restraints of religion, unawed by the prospects of future judgment, and unsoftened by the love of God. In the development of this system he may awfully illustrate the natural tendency of human propensities, and the consequent necessity and infinite value of a Redeemer, and of that Divine Influence which can alone renovate our fallen nature, and from which alone proceed all the virtues and graces which adorn and beautify the human character, as well as all the

genuine fruits of righteousness which tend to improve and to bless mankind.

When he has once fairly entered on the subject, he will not find it barren and circumscribed. It will afford ample exemplifications of Christian duty; strong and varied appeals to the hearts and consciences of his hearers, especially those of the higher and more influential classes, to whom a wide field of interesting labour may be presented, in endeavouring to spread and to keep alive, among their friends and neighbours, a general interest and sympathy for the most deeply injured of the human race, and in shewing by what means relief may be most effectually administered. Thus would a fresh and powerful impulse be imparted to benevolence, and the warm glow of Christian Charity be circulated from bosom to bosom. Thus would the rich, according to Apostolic injunction, be admonished to "do good," to be "rich in good works." New sources of pure satisfaction would be opened to them, in exciting fellow-feeling and brotherly kindness in all around them; in tasting the luxury of beneficence; in proving that the pleasures of sympathy far surpass those of selfish enjoyment; that their own happiness is augmented in proportion as they are earnestly engaged in promoting the welfare of others, and those not of their own neighbourhood and country alone, but of the stranger, the poor captive in a distant land, of him who seems to have no human helper; and in thus inheriting "the blessing of those who are ready to perish," and the richer blessing of Him who hath declared that a cup of cold water alone, imparted in Christian charity, shall not lose its reward.

The preacher, by directing the moral perceptions and religious principles of his hearers to the subject of Negro Slavery, will shew them a great work of righteousness, of justice and mercy, in which all may