Out of the sugar, thus clarified with blood, the glittering frosted-work of colonial splendor rose.  A few great planters debauched the housekeeping of the whole island.  Beneath were debts, distrust, shiftlessness, the rapacity of imported officials, the discontent of resident planters with the customs of the mother-country, the indifference of absentees, the cruel rage for making the most and the best sugar in the world, regardless of the costly lives which the mills caught and crushed out with the canes.  Truly, it was sweet as honey in the mouth, and suddenly became bitter as wormwood in the belly.

Let us glance at the people who were thus violently torn from the climate, habits, diet, and customs which created their natural and congenial soil, from their mother-tongues, their native loves and hatreds, from the insignificant, half-barbarous life, which certainly poisoned not the life-blood of a single Christian, though it sweetened not his tea.  What bitterness has crept into the great heart of Mr. Carlyle, which beats to shatter the affectations and hypocrisies of a generation, and to summon a civilized world to the worship of righteousness and truth!  Is this a Guinea trader or a prophet who is angry when Quashee prefers his pumpkins and millet, reared without the hot guano of the lash, and who will not accept the reduction of a bale of cotton or a tierce of sugar, though Church and State be disinfected of slavery?[E] It is a drop of planter’s gall which the sham-hater shakes testily from his corroded pen.  How far the effluvia of the slave-ship will be wafted, into what strange latitudes of temperance and sturdy independence, even to the privacy of solemn and high-minded thought!  A nation can pass through epochs of the black-death, and recover and improve its average health; but does a people ever completely rally from this blackest death of all?

[Footnote E:  Latter-Day Pamphlets, No.  I. pp. 32, 34; No.  II. pp. 23, 25, 47; No.  III. p. 3.  “And you, Quashee, my pumpkin, idle Quashee, I say you must get the Devil sent away from your elbow, my poor dark friend!” We say amen to that, with the reserved privilege of designating the Devil.  “Ware that Colonial Sand-bank!  Starboard now, the Nigger Question!” Starboard it is!]

The Guinea trader brought to San Domingo in the course of eighty years representatives of almost every tribe upon the west coast of Africa and of its interior for hundreds of miles.  Many who were thus brought were known only by the names of their obscure neighborhoods; they mingled their shade of color and of savage custom with the blood of a new Creole nation of slaves.  With these unwilling emigrants the vast areas of Africa ran together into the narrow plains at the end of a small island; affinity and difference were alike obedient to the whip of the overseer, whose law was profit, and whose method cruelty, in making this strange people grow.