Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 151 pages of information about Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants.

Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 151 pages of information about Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants.

Another advertisement in the same paper, contains a very particular description of a Negroe man, called Jeremiah,—­and concludes as follows:—­“Whoever delivers him to Capt.  M——­ U——­y, on board the Elizabeth, at Prince’s Stairs, Rotherhithe, on or before the 31st instant, shall receive thirty guineas reward, or ten guineas for such intelligence as shall enable the Captain, or his master, effectually to secure him.  The utmost secrecy may be depended on.”  It is not on account of shame, that men, who are capable of undertaking the desperate and wicked employment of kidnappers, are supposed to be tempted to such a business, by a promise “of the utmost secrecy;” but this must be from a sense of the unlawfulness of the act proposed to them, that they may have less reason to fear a prosecution.  And as such a kind of people are supposed to undertake any thing for money, the reward of thirty guineas was tendered at the top of the advertisement, in capital letters.  No man can be safe, be he white or black, if temptations to break the laws are so shamefully published in our news-papers.

A Creole Black boy is also offered to sale, in the Daily Advertiser of the same date.

Besides these instances, the Americans may, perhaps, taunt us with the shameful treatment of a poor Negroe servant, who not long ago was put up to sale by public auction, together with the effects of his bankrupt master.—­Also, that the prisons of this free city have been frequently prostituted of late, by the tyrannical and dangerous practice of confining Negroes, under the pretence of slavery, though there have been no warrants whatsoever for their commitment.

This circumstance of confining a man without a warrant, has so great a resemblance to the proceedings of a Popish inquisition, that it is but too obvious what dangerous practices such scandalous innovations, if permitted to grow more into use, are liable to introduce.  No person can be safe, if wicked and designing men have it in their power, under the pretence of private property as a slave, to throw a man clandestinely, without a warrant, into goal, and to conceal him there, until they can conveniently dispose of him.

A free man may be thus robbed of his liberty, and carried beyond the seas, without having the least opportunity of making his case known; which should teach us how jealous we ought to be of all imprisonments made without the authority, or previous examination, of a civil magistrate.

The distinction of colour will, in a short time, be no protection against such outrages, especially as not only Negroes, but Mulatoes, and even American Indians, (which appears by one of the advertisements before quoted) are retained in slavery in our American colonies; for there are many honest weather-beaten Englishmen, who have as little reason to boast of their complexion as the Indians.  And indeed, the more northern Indians have no difference from us in

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Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.