mad for abolishing slavery.  The negroes of Jamaica were the most degraded and ignorant of all negroes he had ever seen.  He had travelled in all our Southern States, and the American negroes, even those of South Carolina and Georgia, were as much superior to the negroes of Jamaica, as Henry Clay was superior to him.  He said they were the most ungrateful, faithless set he ever saw; no confidence could be placed in them, and kindness was always requited by insult.  He proceeded to relate a fact from which it appeared that the ground on which his grave charges against the negro character rested, was the ill-conduct of one negro woman whom he had hired some time ago to assist his family.  The town negroes, he said, were too lazy to work; they loitered and lounged about on the sidewalks all day, jabbering with one another, and keeping up an incessant noise; and they would not suffer a white man to order them in the least.  They were rearing their children in perfect idleness and for his part he could not tell what would become of the rising population of blacks.  Their parents were too proud to let them work, and they sent them to school all the time.  Every afternoon, he said, the streets are thronged with the half-naked little black devils, just broke from the schools, and all singing some noisy tune learned in the infant schools; the burthen of their songs seems to be, “O that will be joyful.”  These words, said he, are ringing in your ears wherever you go.  How aggravating truly such words must be, bursting cheerily from the lips of the little free songsters!  “O that will be joyful, joyful, JOYFUL”—­and so they ring the changes day after day, ceaseless and untiring.  A new song this, well befitting the times and the prospects, but provoking enough to oppressors.  The consul denounced he special magistrates; they were an insolent set of fellows, they would fine a white man as quick as they would flog a nigger.[A] If a master called his apprentice “you scoundrel,” or, “you huzzy,” the magistrate would either fine him for it or reprove him sharply in the presence of the apprentice.  This, in the eyes of the veteran Virginian, was intolerable.  Outrageous, not to allow a gentleman to call his servant what names he chooses!  We were very much edified by the Colonel’s expose of Jamaica manners.  We must say, however, that his opinions had much less weight with us after we learned (as we did from the best authority) that he had never been a half dozen miles into the country during a ten year’s residence in Kingston.

[Footnote A:  We fear there is too little truth in this representation.]

We called on the Rev. Jonathan Edmonson, the superintendent of the Wesleyan missions in Jamaica.  Mr. E. has been for many years laboring as a missionary in the West Indies, first in Barbadoes, then in St. Vincent’s, Grenada, Trinidad, and Demerara, and lastly in Jamaica.  He stated that the planters were doing comparatively nothing to prepare the negroes for freedom. “Their whole object was to get as much sugar out of them as they possibly could.”