Rain Wrought by the Ignorant and Famishing Negroes - Bankrupt Planters with Houses Full of Servants Giving State Dinners and Starving Their Peer Laborers - The Fearful Result.
The following extrats from a private letter, written by a lady in Santa Cruz to a friend in New York, give some idea of the causes and result of the recent insurrection of negroes in that island:
You doubtless have heard of the fearful visitation to our beautiful but most unfortunate island. Ah, me! how often have I thought some dreadful result would come of the way most of us haved live here. Of course, as you well know, we leadies had not much in our power. We saw and knew that things were not as they should be; that the people were far worse off than when they were real slaves. But what could we do? Absolutely nothing.
You know what a state things were in before you left. The planters were almost bankrupt. For years they have been living on "Bureau" money, given them by Government, and I believe at last most of the states were in this way mortgaged up to their full value. At all events, the Bureau refused to make any more advances. This brought matters almost to a standstill.
Then the labor act was done away with and the laborers were supposed to work for their "keep" alone. You remember what sort of "keep" it was. Rotten herring and sour corn meal. I do not wonder that the poor creatures at length made up their minds that their position could not be worse. Miss S---- overheard them saying one night that if the labor act was done away with they would "burn all before them." Well, they have kept their word, for out of ninety estates we have only seven left. The whole island is a blackened ruin, with the exception og Christiansted and its immediate neightbourhood.
The taking away of the soldiers and dismantling the fort at Frederiksted hastened the end. The special police, on whom so much depended, were really the ringleaders in the insurrection. One man, a special policeman on an estate about in the centre of the island, was the chief worker in the whole affair. When caught he had a paper in his pocket with the whole plan, and the names of all his "officers" on it He, along with nearly two hundred others, was executed. Poor souls! I feel sorry for them. You know how badly they were treated - first-class laborers only getting, in the good times, twenty cents a day, and second-class ten cents. If it had not been for their bits of "provision ground," and the pigs and poultry they used to raise and carry to the market on Saturdays, I do know how they would have lived; and the sich were taken care of, while they were slaves, but after emancipation the sick houses all fell to pieces, for they were not used. Sick people stayed in their houses. Such houses! - close stone places, like prisons, with neither sunshine nor air in them; of, if very ill, they got a doctor's certificate and went in town to the hospital. Then the old people, past work, - poor creatures, glad to make themselves clothing out of old bags begged from the storekeepers in town. And the fearful sickness they had among the - leprosy, elephantiasis, and many other unknown in clod climates.
Besides all this misery, the negroes were often ill treated by the planters. I know cases where their money was stopped by the managers most unjustly, and cases where negro boyus were whipped to death - one because the horse which his master had entered for a race fell and cut its knees. He had the wretched boy held down over the heap of megrass, and he himself - a white man - whipped the boy to death. He was punished by a fine of $ 300. This was generally spoken of as very severe, and many people said it was wrong to fine the man such a large sum for such a small offence. In another case the man got off by leaving the island.
You know also how the planters in many cases lived - houses full of servants, dinners of four or five courses, wine and cigars of the best quality. That such a state of affairs could not last, any one with one particle of common sense might have known.
Our beatiful island, will it ever recover from this blow? What is to become of the hundreds of women and children left homeless and destitute? One white planter lost his life. He was murdered by the negroes. Some of the Danish soldiers were also killed by the infuriated negroes. Their revenge has been a complete and dreadful one.
I believe some of the negroes wished to leave the island when the labor act was abolished, but their passes were refused by the planters. You are, of course, aware that a laborer cannot leave an estate without a pass from the manager. If he is caught in town or on another estate he is arrested and punished. It would have been wiser to have let them go, for such a course might have saved our poor island. To think of the beautiful homes destroyed by the ignorant creatures in their mad despair!
What a pity we did not take warning by the loud complaints the people have so often uttered. I have seen them myself, when pay night came and there was no money for them, walking up and down for hours cursing and threatening, while the planters meanwhile were sitting inside playing cars and drinking choice wines. What will become of all the central factories now? I fear the money spent on them has been thrown away. Our poor little "Garden of the West Indies" lived and bloomed on through earthquakes and hurricanes, but I fear it has now received its death stroke.
When the Government sent for help English and French men-of-war came to the rescue, and the wretched negroes were hunted among the hills like deer. You may blame me, but I cannot help having some pity for them. As I write the sun is setting, and the sea around our island is like a sheet of pearl and gold. Where waving fields of sugar cane used to catch the gleam of the setting sun when he gave them his last kiss for the night, there is nothing but a vast expanse of ashes. The crop is all burned, and even the negro villages you used so greatly to admire are desolate.
These villages used to be very pretty, for the negroes had a beautiful fashion, handed down from old, old times, and, I believe, originally brought by them from Africa. Whenever a child was born on that day they planted a tree as near their house as possible. They had a superstition that, if the tree grew and flourished, the child would live and thrive; but if the tree faded and died, the little one should also perish. One could see the anxious mothers at sunset pouring water on the ground, and watching with eyes sharpend by affection the small green shoots beginning to spring up. Every on e had a different taste. Some choose one sort of tree, some another, and, as the custom is such an old and general one, our negro villages were a cluster of tall spreading tamarind, mango, or sapodilla trees, with here and there a lofty palm. Most of them have perished, so, after all, there does seem some truth in the old superstition. The palms that still remain seem to wave their heads mournfully over the blackened ruins of our one lovely isle. At times I feel as if it was only a fearful dream, but, alas! it is a dream from which one cannot awaken.
Do you remember Mount Stuart, with its garden, where flowers from all parts of the world flourished? It is all destroyed. A few estates near Christiansted still remain to tell the tale of former splendor - "Golden Rock," "The Hope", and some others.
We are all lost in doubt as to what will become of us. I suppose those who have means to do so will leave the island, and Santa Cruz will soom be like San Domingo - given up to be a wilderness.
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