Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It Would
Cease Only When The Relation Between The Deaths And Births Of Slaves
Should Be Such That Even The Effects Of Enfranchisement Would Be
Counterbalanced.
The whites and free men now form two-thirds of the
whole population of the island, and this increase marks in some degree
the diminution of the slaves.
Among the latter, the women are to the
men (exclusive of the mulatto slaves), scarcely in the proportion of
1 : 4, in the sugar-cane plantations; in the whole island, as 1 : 1.7;
and in the towns and farina where the negro slaves serve as domestics,
or work by the day on their own account as well as that of their
masters, the proportion is as 1 : 1.4; even (for instance at the
Havannah),* as 1 : 1.2. (* It appears probable that at the end of
1825, of the total population of men of colour (mulattos and negroes,
free and slaves), there were nearly 160,000 in the towns, and 230,000
in the fields. In 1811 the Consulado, in a statement presented to the
Cortes of Spain, computed at 141,000, the number of men of colour in
the towns, and 185,000 in the fields. Documentes sobre los Negros page
121.) This great accumulation of mulattos, free negros and slaves in
the towns is a characteristic feature in the island of Cuba.) The
developments that follow will show that these proportions are founded
on numerical statements which may be regarded as the limit-numbers of
the maximum.
The prognostics which are hazarded respecting the diminution of the
total population of the island, at the period when the slave-trade
shall be really abolished, and not merely according to the laws, as
since 1820, respecting the impossibility of continuing the cultivation
of sugar on a large scale, and respecting the approaching time when
the agricultural industry of Cuba shall be restrained to plantations
of coffee and tobacco, and the breeding of cattle, are founded on
arguments which do not appear to me to be perfectly just. Instead of
indulging in gloomy presages the planters would do well to wait till
the government shall have procured positive statistical statements.
The spirit in which even very old enumerations were made, for instance
that of 1775, by the distinction of age, sex, race, and state of civil
liberty, deserves high commendation. Nothing but the means of
execution were wanting. It was felt that the inhabitants were
powerfully interested in knowing partially the occupations of the
blacks, and their numerical distribution in the sugar-settlements,
farms and towns. To remedy evil, to avoid public danger, to console
the misfortunes of a suffering race, who are feared more than is
acknowledged, the wound must be probed; for in the social body, when
governed by intelligence, there is found, as in organic bodies, a
repairing force, which may be opposed to the most inveterate evils.
In the year 1811 the municipality and the Tribunal of Commerce of the
Havannah computed the total population of the island of Cuba to be
600,000, including 326,000 people of colour, free or slaves, mulattos
or blacks.
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