The general testimony of planters, missionaries, clergymen, merchants, and others, was in confirmation of the same truth.

There is little reason to believe that the views of the colonists on this subject have subsequently undergone much change.  We did not hear, excepting occasionally among the missionaries and clergy, the slightest insinuation thrown out that slavery was sinful; that the slaves had a right to freedom, or that it would have been wrong to have continued them in bondage.  The politics of anti-slavery the Antiguans are exceedingly well versed in, but of its religion, they seem to feel but little.  They seem never to have examined slavery in its moral relations; never to have perceived its monstrous violations of right and its impious tramplings upon God and man.  The Antigua planters, it would appear, have yet to repent of the sin of slaveholding.

If the results of an emancipation so destitute of principle, so purely selfish, could produce such general satisfaction, and be followed by such happy results, it warrants us in anticipating still more decided and unmingled blessings in the train of a voluntary, conscientious, and religious abolition.

THIRD PROPOSITION.—­The event of emancipation passed PEACEFULLY.  The first of August, 1834, is universally regarded in Antigua, as having presented a most imposing and sublime moral spectacle.  It is almost impossible to be in the company of a missionary, a planter, or an emancipated negro, for ten minutes, without hearing some allusion to that occasion.  Even at the time of our visit to Antigua, after the lapse of nearly three years, they spoke of the event with an admiration apparently unabated.

For some time previous to the first of August, forebodings of disaster lowered over the island.  The day was fixed!  Thirty thousand degraded human beings were to be brought forth from the dungeon of slavery and “turned loose on the community!” and this was to be done “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”

Gloomy apprehensions were entertained by many of the planters.  Some timorous families did not go to bed on the night of the 31st of July; fear drove sleep from their eyes, and they awaited with fluttering pulse the hour of midnight, fearing lest the same bell which sounded the jubilee of the slaves might toll the death knell of the masters.[A]

[Footnote A:  We were informed by a merchant of St. John’s, that several American vessels which had lain for weeks in the harbor, weighed anchor on the 31st of July, and made their escape, through actual fear, that the island would be destroyed on the following day.  Ere they set sail they earnestly besought our informant to escape from the island, as he valued his life.]

The more intelligent, who understood the disposition of the negroes, and contemplated the natural tendencies of emancipation, through philosophical principles, and to the light of human nature and history, were free from alarm.