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
Indies they excelled.
In buying new negroes a practical planter having a preference for those of
some particular tribal stock might make sure of getting them only by taking
with him to the slave ships or the "Guinea yards" in the island ports a
slave of the stock wanted and having him interrogate those for sale in
his native language to learn whether they were in fact what the dealers
declared them to be.
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