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which West India slaves received, was communicated to them by slaves from the United States. When Dr. Coke landed in St. Eustatia, in 1788, he found, as his Journal says, that "the Lord had raised up lately a negro slave named Harry, brought here from the continent to prepare our way." The Baptists, now the great sect of Jamaica, owe their origin there to George Lisle, a slave preacher, who was taken thither from Georgia, by his tory master, at the evacuation of Savannah by the British in 1782.
But a cargo of slaves, on being landed in French St. Domingo, found there, towards the last days of the colony, twenty of their own to one of the white race. They were at once herded with the former. As their immediate overseers were mostly creole Blacks, many of them rarely, except at a distance, saw white people, of whom there were barely enough to conduct the business of the colony. The number of doctors was insufficient. The planters depended on importation rather than personal care to keep up their stock of slaves. This stock was often changed, in consequence of its being worked up. There was a constant renewal of the savage element by slave ships. The new slaves always found in St. Domingo the customs and superstitions they had left in Africa. They added freshness to them, and then all went on together, as nearly as possible, in the old African way. In fact, it might almost have seemed, had it been possible, as if parts of French St. Domingo had been covered with African sod, bearing with it its native life and growth, little disturbed by thetransfer. Hence vaudouxism, or serpent-worship went on, in full vigor, in spite of law and the police, and, to some extent, cannibalism, up to the very moment when the colony was suddenly blown to atoms by the over-generation of its own wickedness,—the Whites, who worked it, being thereby destroyed, or scattered to distant lands, with all their means and appliances of civilization. And as the Blacks, who remained in possession, shut the door against the return of the Whites, from fear of returning slavery, and still keep it shut, in consequence of a still remaining vague jealousy, thus barring out foreign improvements, it is not surprising that the superstitious and barbarous usages of St. Domingo still prevail, to no small
