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FROUDACITY (1889)
J.J. Thomas

WEST INDIAN FABLES BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
EXPLAINED BY J. J. THOMAS


Contents


Preface by J.J. Thomas

BOOK I.

Introduction: 27-33
Voyage out: 34-41
Barbados: 41-44
St. Vincent: 44-48
Grenada: 48-50

BOOK II.

Trinidad: 53-55
Reform in Trinidad: 55-80
Negro Felicity in the West Indies: 81-110

BOOK III.

Social Revolution: 113-174
West Indian Confederation: 175-200
The Negro as a Worker: 201-206
Religion for Negroes: 207-230

BOOK IV.

Historical Summary or Résumé: 233-261, end



FROUDACITY

PREFACE

[5] Last year had well advanced towards its middle--in fact it was
already April, 1888--before Mr. Froude's book of travels in the West
Indies became known and generally accessible to readers in those
Colonies.

My perusal of it in Grenada about the period above mentioned
disclosed, thinly draped with rhetorical flowers, the dark outlines
of a scheme to thwart political aspiration in the Antilles. That
project is sought to be realized by deterring the home authorities
from granting an elective local legislature, however restricted in
character, to any of the Colonies not yet enjoying such an advantage.
An argument based on the composition of the inhabitants of those
Colonies is confidently relied upon to confirm the inexorable mood of
Downing Street.

[6] Over-large and ever-increasing,--so runs the argument,--the
African element in the population of the West Indies is, from its
past history and its actual tendencies, a standing menace to the
continuance of civilization and religion. An immediate catastrophe,
social, political, and moral, would most assuredly be brought about
by the granting of full elective rights to dependencies thus
inhabited. Enlightened statesmanship should at once perceive the
immense benefit that would ultimately result from such refusal of the
franchise. The cardinal recommendation of that refusal is that it
would avert definitively the political domination of the Blacks,
which must inevitably be the outcome of any concession of the modicum
of right so earnestly desired. The exclusion of the Negro vote being
inexpedient, if not impossible, the exercise of electoral powers by
the Blacks must lead to their returning candidates of their own race
to the local legislatures, and that, too, in numbers preponderating
according to the majority of the Negro electors. The Negro
legislators thus supreme in the councils of the Colonies would
straightway proceed to pass vindictive and retaliatory laws against
their white fellow- [7] colonists. For it is only fifty years since
the White man and the Black man stood in the reciprocal relations of
master and slave. Whilst those relations subsisted, the white
masters inflicted, and the black slaves had to endure, the hideous
atrocities that are inseparable from the system of slavery. Since
Emancipation, the enormous strides made in self-advancement by the
ex-slaves have only had the effect of provoking a resentful
uneasiness in the bosoms of the ex-masters. The former bondsmen, on
their side, and like their brethren of Hayti, are eaten up with
implacable, blood-thirsty rancour against their former lords and
owners. The annals of Hayti form quite a cabinet of political and
social object lessons which, in the eyes of British statesmen, should
be invaluable in showing the true method of dealing with Ethiopic
subjects of the Crown. The Negro race in Hayti, in order to obtain
and to guard what it calls its freedom, has outraged every humane
instinct and falsified every benevolent hope. The slave-owners there
had not been a whit more cruel than slave-owners in the other
islands. But, in spite of this, how ferocious, how sanguinary, [8]
how relentless against them has the vengeance of the Blacks been in
their hour of mastery! A century has passed away since then, and,
notwithstanding that, the hatred of Whites still rankles in their
souls, and is cherished and yielded to as a national creed and guide
of conduct. Colonial administrators of the mighty British Empire,
the lesson which History has taught and yet continues to teach you in
Hayti as to the best mode of dealing with your Ethiopic colonists
lies patent, blood-stained and terrible before you, and should be
taken definitively to heart. But if you are willing that
Civilization and Religion--in short, all the highest developments of
individual and social life--should at once be swept away by a
desolating vandalism of African birth; if you do not recoil from the
blood-guiltiness that would stain your consciences through the
massacre of our fellow-countrymen in the West Indies, on account of
their race, complexion and enlightenment; finally, if you desire
those modern Hesperides to revert into primeval jungle, horrent lairs
wherein the Blacks, who, but a short while before, had been
ostensibly civilized, shall be revellers, as high-priests and [9]
devotees, in orgies of devil-worship, cannibalism, and obeah--dare to
give the franchise to those West Indian Colonies, and then rue the
consequences of your infatuation! . . .

Alas, if the foregoing summary of the ghastly imaginings of Mr.
Froude were true, in what a fool's paradise had the wisest and best
amongst us been living, moving, and having our being! Up to the date
of the suggestion by him as above of the alleged facts and
possibilities of West Indian life, we had believed (even granting the
correctness of his gloomy account of the past and present positions
of the two races) that to no well-thinking West Indian White, whose
ancestors may have, innocently or culpably, participated in the gains
as well as the guilt of slavery, would the remembrance of its palmy
days be otherwise than one of regret. We Negroes, on the other hand,
after a lapse of time extending over nearly two generations, could be
indebted only to precarious tradition or scarcely accessible
documents for any knowledge we might chance upon of the sufferings
endured in these Islands of the West by those of our race who have
gone before us. Death, with undiscriminating hand, had gathered [10]
in the human harvest of masters and slaves alike, according to or out
of the normal laws of nature; while Time had been letting down on the
stage of our existence drop-scene after drop-scene of years, to the
number of something like fifty, which had been curtaining off the
tragic incidents of the past from the peaceful activities of the
present. Being thus circumstanced, thought we, what rational
elements of mutual hatred should now continue to exist in the bosoms
of the two races?

With regard to the perpetual reference to Hayti, because of our
oneness with its inhabitants in origin and complexion, as a criterion
for the exact forecast of our future conduct under given
circumstances, this appeared to us, looking at actual facts,
perversity gone wild in the manufacture of analogies. The founders
of the Black Republic, we had all along understood, were not in any
sense whatever equipped, as Mr. Froude assures us they were, when
starting on their self-governing career, with the civil and
intellectual advantages that had been transplanted from Europe. On
the contrary, we had been taught to regard them as most unfortunate
in the circumstances under which [11] they so gloriously conquered
their merited freedom. We saw them free, but perfectly illiterate
barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual resources of which their
valour had made them possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit
and technical details of a highly developed national existence. We
had learnt also, until this new interpreter of history had
contradicted the accepted record, that the continued failure of Hayti
to realize the dreams of Toussaint was due to the fatal want of
confidence subsisting between the fairer and darker sections of the
inhabitants, which had its sinister and disastrous origin in the
action of the Mulattoes in attempting to secure freedom for
themselves, in conjunction with the Whites, at the sacrifice of their
darker-hued kinsmen. Finally, it had been explained to us that the
remembrance of this abnormal treason had been underlying and
perniciously influencing the whole course of Haytian national
history. All this established knowledge we are called upon to throw
overboard, and accept the baseless assertions of this conjuror-up of
inconceivable fables! He calls upon us to believe that, in spite of
being free, educated, progressive, and at peace with [12] all men, we
West Indian Blacks, were we ever to become constitutionally dominant
in our native islands, would emulate in savagery our Haytian fellow-
Blacks who, at the time of retaliating upon their actual masters,
were tortured slaves, bleeding and rendered desperate under the
oppressors' lash--and all this simply and merely because of the
sameness of our ancestry and the colour of our skin! One would have
thought that Liberia would have been a fitter standard of comparison
in respect of a coloured population starting a national life, really
and truly equipped with the requisites and essentials of civilized
existence. But such a reference would have been fatal to Mr.
Froude's object: the annals of Liberia being a persistent refutation
of the old pro-slavery prophecies which our author so feelingly
rehearses.

Let us revert, however, to Grenada and the newly-published "Bow of
Ulysses," which had come into my hands in April, 1888.

It seemed to me, on reading that book, and deducing therefrom the
foregoing essential summary, that a critic would have little more to
do, in order to effectually exorcise this negrophobic political
hobgoblin, than to appeal to [13] impartial history, as well as to
common sense, in its application to human nature in general, and to
the actual facts of West Indian life in particular.

History, as against the hard and fast White-master and Black-slave
theory so recklessly invented and confidently built upon by Mr.
Froude, would show incontestably--(a) that for upwards of two hundred
years before the Negro Emancipation, in 1838, there had never existed
in one of those then British Colonies, which had been originally
discovered and settled for Spain by the great Columbus or by his
successors, the Conquistadores, any prohibition whatsoever, on the
ground of race or colour, against the owning of slaves by any free
person possessing the necessary means, and desirous of doing so; (b)
that, as a consequence of this non-restriction, and from causes
notoriously historical, numbers of blacks, half-breeds, and other
non-Europeans, besides such of them as had become possessed of their
"property" by inheritance, availed themselves of this virtual
license, and in course of time constituted a very considerable
proportion of the slave-holding section of those communities; (c)
that these [14] dusky plantation-owners enjoyed and used in every
possible sense the identical rights and privileges which were enjoyed
and used by their pure-blooded Caucasian brother-slaveowners. The
above statements are attested by written documents, oral tradition,
and, better still perhaps, by the living presence in those islands of
numerous lineal representatives of those once opulent and flourishing
non-European planter-families.

Common sense, here stepping in, must, from the above data, deduce
some such conclusions as the following. First that, on the
hypothesis that the slaves who were freed in 1838--full fifty years
ago--were all on an average fifteen years old, those vengeful ex-
slaves of to-day will be all men of sixty-five years of age; and,
allowing for the delay in getting the franchise, somewhat further
advanced towards the human life-term of threescore and ten years.
Again, in order to organize and carry out any scheme of legislative
and social retaliation of the kind set forth in the "Bow of Ulysses,"
there must be (which unquestionably there is not) a considerable,
well-educated, and very influential number surviving of those who had
actually [15] been in bondage. Moreover, the vengeance of these
people (also assuming the foregoing nonexistent condition) would
have, in case of opportunity, to wreak itself far more largely and
vigorously upon members of their own race than upon Whites, seeing
that the increase of the Blacks, as correctly represented in the "Bow
of Ulysses," is just as rapid as the diminution of the White
population. And therefore, Mr. Froude's "Danger-to-the-Whites" cry
in support of his anti-reform manifesto would not appear, after all,
to be quite so justifiable as he possibly thinks.

Feeling keenly that something in the shape of the foregoing programme
might be successfully worked up for a public defence of the maligned
people, I disregarded the bodily and mental obstacles that have beset
and clouded my career during the last twelve years, and cheerfully
undertook the task, stimulated thereto by what I thought weighty
considerations. I saw that no representative of Her Majesty's
Ethiopic West Indian subjects cared to come forward to perform this
work in the more permanent shape that I felt to be not only desirable
but essential for our self-vindication. [16] I also realized the
fact that the "Bow of Ulysses" was not likely to have the same
ephemeral existence and effect as the newspaper and other periodical
discussions of its contents, which had poured from the press in Great
Britain, the United States, and very notably, of course, in all the
English Colonies of the Western Hemisphere. In the West Indian
papers the best writers of our race had written masterly refutations,
but it was clear how difficult the task would be in future to procure
and refer to them whenever occasion should require. Such
productions, however, fully satisfied those qualified men of our
people, because they were legitimately convinced (even as I myself am
convinced) that the political destinies of the people of colour could
not run one tittle of risk from anything that it pleased Mr. Froude
to write or say on the subject. But, meditating further on the
question, the reflection forced itself upon me that, beyond the mere
political personages in the circle more directly addressed by Mr.
Froude's volume, there were individuals whose influence or possible
sympathy we could not afford to disregard, or to esteem lightly. So
I deemed it right and a patriotic duty to attempt [17] the enterprise
myself, in obedience to the above stated motives.

At this point I must pause to express on behalf of the entire
coloured population of the West Indies our most heartfelt
acknowledgments to Mr. C. Salmon for the luminous and effective
vindication of us, in his volume on "West Indian Confederation,"
against Mr. Froude's libels. The service thus rendered by Mr. Salmon
possesses a double significance and value in my estimation. In the
first place, as being the work of a European of high position, quite
independent of us (who testifies concerning Negroes, not through
having gazed at them from balconies, decks of steamers, or the seats
of moving carriages, but from actual and long personal intercourse
with them, which the internal evidence of his book plainly proves to
have been as sympathetic as it was familiar), and, secondly, as the
work of an individual entirely outside of our race, it has been
gratefully accepted by myself as an incentive to self-help, on the
same more formal and permanent lines, in a matter so important to the
status which we can justly claim as a progressive, law-abiding, and
self-respecting section of Her Majesty's liege subjects.

[18] It behoves me now to say a few words respecting this book as a
mere literary production.

Alexander Pope, who, next to Shakespeare and perhaps Butler, was the
most copious contributor to the current stock of English maxims,
says:

"True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learnt to dance."

A whole dozen years of bodily sickness and mental tribulation have
not been conducive to that regularity of practice in composition
which alone can ensure the "true ease" spoken of by the poet; and
therefore is it that my style leaves so much to be desired, and
exhibits, perhaps, still, more to be pardoned. Happily, a quarrel
such as ours with the author of "The English in the West Indies"
cannot be finally or even approximately settled on the score of
superior literary competency, whether of aggressor or defender. I
feel free to ignore whatever verdict might be grounded on a
consideration so purely artificial. There ought to be enough, if not
in these pages, at any rate in whatever else I have heretofore
published, that should prove me not so hopelessly stupid and wanting
in [19] self-respect, as would be implied by my undertaking a contest
in artistic phrase-weaving with one who, even among the foremost of
his literary countrymen, is confessedly a master in that craft. The
judges to whom I do submit our case are those Englishmen and others
whose conscience blends with their judgment, and who determine such
questions as this on their essential rightness which has claim to the
first and decisive consideration. For much that is irregular in the
arrangement and sequence of the subject-matter, some blame fairly
attaches to our assailant. The erratic manner in which lie launches
his injurious statements against the hapless Blacks, even in the
course of passages which no more led up to them than to any other
section of mankind, is a very notable feature of his anti-Negro
production. As he frequently repeats, very often with cynical
aggravations, his charges and sinister prophecies against the sable
objects of his aversion, I could see no other course open to me than
to take him up on the points whereto I demurred, exactly how, when,
and where I found them.

My purpose could not be attained up without direct mention of, or
reference to, certain public [20] employés in the Colonies whose
official conduct has often been the subject of criticism in the
public press of the West Indies. Though fully aware that such
criticism has on many occasions been much more severe than my own
strictures, yet, it being possible that some special responsibility
may attach to what I here reproduce in a more permanent shape, I most
cheerfully accept, in the interests of public justice, any
consequence which may result.

A remark or two concerning the publication of this rejoinder. It has
been hinted to me that the issue of it has been too long delayed to
secure for it any attention in England, owing to the fact that the
West Indies are but little known, and of less interest, to the
generality of English readers. Whilst admitting, as in duty bound,
the possible correctness of this forecast, and regretting the oft-
recurring hindrances which occasioned such frequent and, sometimes,
long suspension of my labour; and noting, too, the additional delay
caused through my unacquaintance with English publishing usages, I
must, notwithstanding, plead guilty to a lurking hope that some small
fraction of Mr. Froude's readers will yet be found, [21] whose
interest in the West Indies will be temporarily revived on behalf of
this essay, owing to its direct bearing on Mr. Froude and his
statements relative to these Islands, contained in his recent book of
travels in them. This I am led to hope will be more particularly the
case when it is borne in mind that the rejoinder has been attempted
by a member of that very same race which he has, with such eloquent
recklessness of all moral considerations, held up to public contempt
and disfavour. In short, I can scarcely permit myself to believe it
possible that concern regarding a popular author, on his being
questioned by an adverse critic of however restricted powers, can be
so utterly dead within a twelvemonth as to be incapable of
rekindling. Mr. Froude's "Oceana," which had been published long
before its author voyaged to the West Indies, in order to treat the
Queen's subjects there in the same more than questionable fashion as
that in which he had treated those of the Southern Hemisphere, had
what was in the main a formal rejoinder to its misrepresentations
published only three months ago in this city. I venture to believe
that no serious work in defence of an [22] important cause or
community can lose much, if anything, of its intrinsic value through
some delay in its issue; especially when written in the vindication
of Truth, whose eternal principles are beyond and above the influence
of time and its changes.

At any rate, this attempt to answer some of Mr. Froude's main
allegations against the people of the West Indies cannot fail to be
of grave importance and lively interest to the inhabitants of those
Colonies. In this opinion I am happy in being able to record the
full concurrence of a numerous and influential body of my fellow-West
Indians, men of various races, but united in detestation of falsehood
and injustice.

J.J.T.

LONDON, June, 1889.



BOOK I: INTRODUCTION

[27] Like the ancient hero, one of whose warlike equipments furnishes
the complementary title of his book, the author of "The English in
the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses," sallied forth from his home
to study, if not cities, at least men (especially black men), and
their manners in the British Antilles.

James Anthony Froude is, beyond any doubt whatever, a very
considerable figure in modern English literature. It has, however,
for some time ceased to be a question whether his acceptability, to
the extent which it reaches, has not been due rather to the verbal
attractiveness than to the intrinsic value and trustworthiness of his
opinions and teachings. In fact, so far as a judgment can be formed
from examined specimens of his writings, it appears that our [28]
author is the bond-slave of his own phrases. To secure an artistic
perfection of style, he disregards all obstacles, not only those
presented by the requirements of verity, but such as spring from any
other kind of consideration whatsoever. The doubt may safely be
entertained whether, among modern British men of letters, there be
one of equal capability who, in the interest of the happiness of his
sentences, so cynically sacrifices what is due not only to himself as
a public instructor, but also to that public whom he professes to
instruct. Yet, as the too evident plaything of an over-permeable
moral constitution, he might set up some plea in explanation of his
ethical vagaries. He might urge, for instance, that the high culture
of which his books are all so redolent has utterly failed to imbue
him with the nil admirari sentiment, which Horace commends as the
sole specific for making men happy and keeping them so. For, as a
matter of fact, and with special reference to the work we have
undertaken to discuss, Mr. Froude, though cynical in his general
utterances regarding Negroes-of the male sex, be it noted-is, in the
main, all extravagance and self-abandonment whenever he [29] brings
an object of his arbitrary likes or dislikes under discussion. At
such times he is no observer, much less worshipper, of proportion in
his delineations. Thorough-paced, scarcely controllable, his
enthusiasm for or against admits no degree in its expression, save
and except the superlative. Hence Mr. Froude's statement of facts
or description of phenomena, whenever his feelings are enlisted
either way, must be taken with the proverbial "grain of salt" by all
when enjoying the luxury of perusing his books. So complete is his
self-identification with the sect or individual for the time being
engrossing his sympathy, that even their personal antipathies are
made his own; and the hostile language, often exaggerated and unjust,
in which those antipathies find vent, secures in his more chastened
mode of utterance an exact reproduction none the less injurious
because divested of grossness.

Of this special phase of self-manifestation a typical instance is
afforded at page 164, under the heading of "Dominica," in a passage
which at once embraces and accentuates the whole spirit and method of
the work. To a eulogium of the professional skill and successful
[30] agricultural enterprise of Dr. Nichol, a medical officer of
that Colony, with whom he became acquainted for the first time during
his short stay there, our author travels out of his way to tack on a
gratuitous and pointless sneer at the educational competency of all
the elected members of the island legislature, among whom, he tells
us, the worthy doctor had often tried in vain to obtain a place. His
want of success, our author informs his readers, was brought about
through Dr. Nichol "being the only man in the Colony of superior
attainments." Persons acquainted with the stormy politics of that
lovely little island do not require to be informed that the bitterest
animosity had for years been raging between Dr. Nichol and some of
the elected members-a fact which our author chose characteristically
to regard as justifying an onslaught by himself on the whole of that
section of which the foes of his new friend formed a prominent part.

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