Status Updates From Journal of a West India Pro...

“I have now passed three weeks with my negroes...yet not one man or woman has come to me with a single complaint. On the contrary, all my enquiries have been answered by an assurance that during the two years of my absence my regulations were adhered to most implicitly, and that ‘except for the pleasure of seeing massa’ there was no more difference in treatment than if I had remained on the estate”
Please...

Have to chuckle that no matter how many small rewards Lewis gives his slaves in attempt to get them to work, they still run away, lie, steal, and malinger, all while playing to his vanity by telling him how much they love him. Lewis, like most white men of his day, couldn’t fathom that above all else their slaves resented them and would avoid forced labor by any means necessary

“Mackaroo has not only run away himself, but has carried his wife away with him. This is improving upon the profligacy of British manners with a vengeance. In England, a man only runs away with another person’s wife: but to run away with his own-what depravity!”
Ha!

Much as I don’t care for Mr. Lewis, I have to say that the black men and women on his plantation are definitely growing on me. He seems befuddled that they praise him to high heaven and say how much they want to work for him, then don’t work :)
Some wonderful subversion going on here from them

“The higher classes are all in the utmost alarm at rumors of Wlberforce’s intentions to set the negroes entirely at freedom; the next step would be, in all probability, a general massacre of the whites, and a second part of the horrors of St. Domingo”
More boilerplate stuff from white slave owners. Struggling to see exactly where Lewis is as progressive as he seems to have a reputation for being.