" We have the same account of the
ameliorating Act of Dominica. "This Act," says Governor Prevost,
"appears to have been considered from the day it was passed until this
hour as _a political measure to avert the interference of the mother
country in the management of the slaves_." We, are informed also on the
same authority, that the clauses of this Act, which had given a promise
of better days, "_had been wholly neglected_." In short, the Acts passed
in our different Islands for the pretended purpose of bettering the
condition of the slaves have been all of them most shamefully
neglected; and they remain only a dead letter; or they are as much a
nullity, as if they had never existed, at the present day.
And as our planters have done nothing yet effectively by _law_ for
ameliorating the condition of their slaves, so they have done nothing or
worse than nothing in the case of their _emancipation_. In the year 1815
Mr. Wilberforce gave notice in the House of Commons of his intention to
introduce there a bill for the registration of slaves in the British
colonies. In the following year an insurrection broke out among some
slaves in Barbadoes. Now, though this insurrection originated, as there
was then reason to believe, in local or peculiar circumstances, or in
circumstances which had often produced insurrections before, the
planters chose to attribute it to the Registry Bill now mentioned. They
gave out also, that the slaves in Jamaica and in the other islands had
imbibed a notion, that this Bill was to lead to _their emancipation_;
that, while this notion existed, their minds would be in an unsettled
state; and therefore that it was necessary that _it should be done
away_.
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