English settlers, who fled to them for safety—and yet, white men, and free men, and christians, must keep such people slaves!!!! The black chief of a neighboring town, sheltered and protected the mistress with the children of the public school, from the white French! The loss of property was estimated at about $250,000. Sickness, from exposure, fatigue, want of shelter, accommodation, medicine, &c., followed and carried off, many of the poorer Europeans. But the extremity of the affliction, was blessed to the awakening among the settlers, of an humbler mind, and for some time, they evinced a greater extent of docility, industry and enterprise, than they had previously exhibited. The next four years, were years of prosperity.
The village of the generous refugees above mentioned, was called as I have stated, "Deserter's Town." Thus do civilized people, often the most barbarian of all, apply their own terms of reproach, to people less barbarous than they. Who were the barbarians in the case above? The Danes or the Africans? Yet the Danes, and the English, and the Americans, were honorable merchants! engaged in a lucrative trade, sanctioned by enlightened governments! But when a few of their victims, escaped providentially from their floating vehicles of despotism and of death, fly to unappropriated mountains and apply themselves peaceably to their own support, they are called "deserters." How honorable, indeed, the title, in such a connection!! and how ought our souls to bless the Lord, that they were not in the West Indies or the United States, since there, they would have been called "runaways," and all the tiger in the heart of the white man, would have been called into action to pursue them to bondage or to death.[1] Alas! if color could disgrace a people, how deep in the nethermost regions of shame, would that color be, which is called white in the United States; frequently with such utter recklessness of truth. White! Why, it is brown, sallow and yellow, as well as pale and ruddy; and frequently will you hear a man, decidedly the darkest and the least manly of
- ↑ Trelawney hunt, in the Appendix, No. II.
