The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866, page 199 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download200
mpt of the whites, and the distrust of the blacks, were more profound then now. An intelligent observer declared, in 1850, that the gap between the blacks and whites had been steadily increasing ever since emancipation. And ten years later the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society records, "that, as a general statement, there is no generous feeling in the relations between employer and employed. The negro can expect nothing but barest justice, and is happy if he gets that." Can there be any safety for the minority, when the majority, which numbers fifteen to one, has such a sense of injustice rankling in its breast? One wades through the late reprints of the Jamaica journals, column after column, page after page, filled with coarse invective, with bitter denunciation, with injurious suspicion; sees with what terrible relish the sufferings of these deluded people are recorded; marks how the heroism which goes to the scaffold without a tremor, and looks undeserved death in the face without a fear, is travestied; shudders to hear the planters, after thousands have been slain, yet cry for more blood; and then he puts the paper down and says, "Here in this language is material enough out of which to create a dozen bloody rebellions." How any race with the blood of the tropics boiling in their veins, with the traditions of old oppressions burning in their memory, can ever forget or forgive this language and these unbridled outrages is inconceivable. He is mad who does not see that the gulf of caste, too wide before, has widened and deepened almost unfathomably by the influence of the events of the last few months. He is mad, too, who thinks that Morant Bay, or the parish of St. Thomas in the East, with their unshrived dead, is a safer place for a white man to dwell in than it was six months ago.
It is too early to gather up all the lessons of this last of the almost innumerable outbreaks in Jamaica. They may never be gathered up. But one lesson stands out prominently, and that is, the safety of justice. W