Outalissi; a Tale of Dutch Guiana

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Chapter XIV. The Trial.

‘Christians accursed! they left of all my tribe
Nor man, nor child, nor thing of living birth,
No! not the dog that watch'd my household hearth,
Escaped that night of blood upon our plains!
All perish'd! I alone am left on earth!
To whom nor relative, nor blood remains,
No! not a kindred drop that runs in human veins.’
     Campbell.

On the morning following the fire, from some suspicions which attended its origin, and a rumour which reached the government, of the disturbance at Anne's Grove, martial law was proclaimed, and in a day or two following upon the accusation of Mr. Hogshead a court-martial was assembled for the trial of Mr. Schwartz and Outalissi, for ‘exciting and provoking the negro slaves within the colony to open revolt and rebellion against the authority of their lawful masters, managers, and overseers, and aiding and assisting in such revolt and rebellion, contrary to their allegiance, and

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against the peace of their Sovereign Lord the King his crown and dignity.’ I shall not trouble my reader with the mockery of forms employed on this occasion. Absolute power was never known to be baffled in its purposes for want of form, and this opportunity of indulging the infidelity and antipathy which prevailed in the colony against Christianity, in the person of one of its ministers, was not to be lost. I shall only say, that in order to give an impression of legality to their proceedings they made the chief justice of the colony, one Mr. Van Yaruu, a very worthy man, as I have been informed, a colonel of the militia-staff, and most unaccountably prevailed on him to be president, or senior member of the court.

After the arraignment was gone through, the first evidence adduced was the private journal of Mr. Schwartz, from which were read the following select extracts.

‘July 6, 1817. - While at dinner at half past three o'clock Lucinda came in with a sorrowful countenance. Lucinda is a member of the church, and much affected with the Gospel. She is an old woman, and though her manager tells her not to come to church, she tells him she will come, even if he cuts her throat for it.’

‘August 30, 1817. - The negroes have com-

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plained to me lately of excessive labour, and very severe treatment. I told one of their overseers that I thought they would work the people to death.’

‘September 13, 1817. - This evening a negro belonging to Mr. Kuster came to me, saying, the manager was so cruel to him he could not bear it. According to the man's account, some time back, two or three years, he with a few others made a complaint of the same thing to the fiscal, on which account the manager has taken a great dislike to him, and scarcely ever meets him without cursing him as he passes by. The punishment which he inflicts upon him is dreadfully severe; for every little thing he flogs him. I believe Ned to be a quiet harmless man. I think he does his work very well. A manager told me himself that he had punished many negroes merely to spite Mr. Wilberforce. I believe the laws of justice which relate to the negroes are only known by name here, for while I am writing this the driver is flogging the people, neither manager nor overseer near.’

‘March --. - While writing this my very heart flutters at hearing the almost incessant cracking of the whip. Having just finished reading Mr. Walker's Letters on the West Indies, I have thought

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much of the treatment of the negroes, and likewise of the state of their minds. It appears to me very probable that ere long they will resent the injuries done to them. I should think it my duty to state my opinion respecting this to some of the rulers of the colony, but am fearful from the conduct of the fiscal, in this late affair of the negroes being worked on Sundays, that they would be more solicitous to silence me, by requiring me to criminate some individual, than to redress the wrongs done to the slaves, by diligently watching the conduct of the planters themselves, and bringing them to justice (without the intervention of missionaries) when they detect such abuses of the law as frequently take place.’

‘November 17. - Yesterday evening we had not more than fifty at chapel; indeed I cannot expect many more till the coffee and cotton are gathered in. The people have scarcely any time to eat their food - they have none to cook it, eating for the most part raw yellow plantains. This would be bearable for a time, but to work at that rate, and to be perpetually flogged, astonishes me that they will submit to it.’

‘November --. - Jackey of Dochfour, and Peter of the Hope, came into the house evidently much depressed in mind, to relate what they con-

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ceived an unexampled case of persecution, it was in brief, that their respective managers, under a show of friendly familiarity, accosted the Christian negroes with taunting jokes, on the subject of religion, in presence of the heathen negroes, representing that their profession was only hypocrisy, and that a trifling consideration would prevail with them to abandon it, for which they ought to be treated with scorn and contempt. By diabolism some of these poor negroes had been provoked to adopt language in a manner said to be disrespectful, and for this insolence they had been repeatedly flogged and confined in the stocks. The complainants wanted to know what they were to do in such a case. I advised them accordingly.’

‘May --. - Whilst at breakfast this morning I received a communication from the Burgher Captain, the substance of which is, to persuade the planters not to allow the slaves to attend chapel on Sunday, without a pass, and in an indirect manner, not to allow them to come at all in the evening, and even on a Sunday to send an overseer with the slaves, as judges of the doctrines we preach. The circular appears to me designed to throw an impediment in the way of the slaves receiving instruction, under colour of a desire to meet the wishes of his majesty's government.’

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‘June --. - Isaac of Triumph came in to ask whether the Governor's new law, as he called it, forbid the slaves meeting together on the estates to which they belonged, in an evening, for the purpose of learning the catechism. Their manager, he said, had threatened to punish them if they held any meeting. I informed him that the law gave the manager no such power, and that it had nothing to do with that subject.’

‘July --. - Mr. Elliott, another missionary, has just left our house: he came merely to see us. I was glad to hear he had at length commenced evening preaching once a week on the coast, on a Thursday evening. It appears the same impediments are thrown in the way of instructing the negroes on the west coast as on the east, and it will be so as long as the present system prevails, or rather exists.’

‘July --. - Mrs. de Florimant and her two daughters called to take leave of us: they are going to Holland. Hogshead the manager came with them. His conversation immediately turned upon the new regulations expected in the British West Indies. He declared that if he was prevented flogging the women, he would keep them in solitary confinement without food, it they were not punctual with their work. He, however, com-

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forted himself in the belief that such a project could never be carried into effect in this colony, and in this I certainly agree with him. The rigours of negro slavery, I am afraid, can never be mitigated - the system must be abolished.’

Extracts of this sort might be multiplied ad infinitum from the journal of every honest man in Surinam who keeps a journal.^* I will not therefore weary my readers with any more, but only say, that by constructive ingenuity in the use of private papers, although containing merely the plainest truths in the simplest language, by the admission of hearsay evidence, and the intimidation of the gospel-shaken courage of some Christian negroes to bear false witness, the charges comprised in Mr. Schwartz's arraignment were quite proved to the satisfaction of the Court, and he was ordered to proceed with his defence.

Dressed in his usual simple, unaffected manner, with an expression of stern composure, but not the slightest appearance of passion or defiance in his countenance, Mr. Schwartz, as if he was speaking from some internal prompting, without the power of deviation, shortly addressed the Court as follows:

‘Mr. President Van Yaruu, and Gentlemen of the Court. In the first place I protest against

* See note N.

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the jurisdiction of a military court to try a civil subject for any language or action expressed or committed before the proclamation of martial law, which if it could give retrospective authority to such proceedings for a single day, might do so equally for the whole period of a man's life. I protest also against the admission of hearsay evidence, and much more against the admission of such evidence when in favour of the prosecution, and its rejection when in favour of my exculpation; and, lastly, against any charges derived from the prosecutor's discretional construction of my private papers. Having thus from a sense of duty to my wife and children, and after St. Paul's example in appealing to Cæsar, stated these preliminary objections, in order to avail myself of such protection as the laws of my country may afford me, which is the birthright of every subject; I disclaim in so doing the slightest intentional disrespect to the Court, being entirely without personal feeling on the subject, firmly believing that they can have no power over me except it be given them from above; and that if it should please my divine master, who has done me the great honour to employ my life in his service, here to terminate my feeble but cheerful and earnest endeavour to walk worthy of so

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high a vocation, he will overrule my death to be of still more service to Him than my life.

‘I have no other defence than to prove that my instructions to the negroes upon all occasions have been in strict conformity to the doctrines and directions of the religion which I am appointed to teach. That by showing the contrast of the lives and conversations of the whites with the laws and institutions of Christ, those instructions may have had the effect of lowering the whites in the estimation of their slaves, I dare not for a moment deny; for if Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold I would not even to save my life utter a falsehood, or go beyond what I believed to be the word and will of God. If, for example, I preached to the negroes the observance of the sabbath, and that God is no respecter of persons, and the whites treat its observance with derision, the negroes must conclude either that I am imposing upon them for a divine commandment what is not a law of God, or that the whites are bad men, or at least in that particular, objects of the Almighty's displeasure. The same argument will apply to every precept in the Decalogue, and every principle of Christianity, and there is no way of avoiding the possibility of such a consequence from instructing your slaves

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in Christianity, but by a reformation here in Surinam upon Christian principles of your whole social edifice. The heaviest penalties are denounced by inspiration against those who preach mutilated gospels. I dare not do it; indeed it would be vain, because such gospels would be utterly incomprehensible as a restorative dispensation for the re-impression of the moral image of his Maker on the fallen soul of man, and I have one of the highest authorities of the Church of England, viz. that of Bishop Horsley, for saying, that to do any good, and notwithstanding the liability of some things hard to be understood to be wrested by the unlearned and unstable to their own destruction, the 'WHOLE Gospel with all its mysteries must be laid before all congregations.' Unless the whole edifice of God's Christian temple be reared together in the human heart, the connexion of its parts with each other cannot be comprehended, or its grace, symmetry, and loveliness appreciated as they deserve. I shall prove that in my professional intercourse with your slaves I have never by word or action exceeded my bounden duty as a Christian minister in endeavouring to lay in their minds the foundation of this comprehensive building, and having done that, I confess I shall not be

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very careful of the issue of this trial, for although for the sake of my family I sometimes feel a human wish to live, it would ill become the confidence in that parental providence, in which I have lived and walked up to this day, to doubt its extension to my orphan children, and their widowed mother, my beloved companion through this vale of trial, my fellow-labourer indeed I may truly call her in Christ's vineyard, for but for her heaven-vouchsafed support I might perhaps myself sometimes have sunk under the burden and heat of the day; whether, therefore, to myself the issue of this trial be life or death - Te Deum laudamus!’

When Mr. Schwartz was about to call his witnesses, he was desired by the Court to withdraw, and upon his return he was informed, that such a line of defence as he had adopted was quite inadmissible; that they (his judges) sat there as a court of military and colonial policy, and not of polemics; and that unless he could prove that his preaching had in no way either directly or indirectly contributed to the revolt, his proving merely that he had preached nothing but the doctrines of Christianity could not avail him.

Mr. Schwartz bowed, and said that he had no other defence to offer.

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‘But before you leave the Court, Mr. Schwartz,’ said Mr. Van Yaruu, ‘I must beg you to answer a few plain questions which I ask, really that we may know a little what we are about, in the toleration here of this modern spirit of Evangelism.

We are living upon suppositos cineres, and must suppress the uncontrouled circulation of any inflammatory matter, be it what it may. If you thought the introduction of Christianity amongst the negroes would produce revolution, would you continue to preach?’

‘Most assuredly,’ said Mr. Schwartz, ‘I would preach it at the risk of any possible temporal consequences, or I should not deserve the name of a Christian missionary.’

‘Do you think,’ continued Mr. Van Yaruu, ‘that revolution will be the consequence?’

‘That,’ replied Mr. Schwartz, ‘depends upon whether his Netherlands Majesty's government is Christian or Infidel, of which you are better judges than I am. If there are no channels prepared by government for the flood of light which must accompany the progress of Christianity, I think it may.’

‘If you were sure revolution would ensue in this colony from the introduction of Christianity

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amongst the slaves, would you still persist in preaching it?’ said Mr. Van Yaruu.

‘If,’ said the undaunted martyr, ‘the pile of moral enormity, of which your social edifice is composed, stood like the house of Dagon upon pillars, and I were sure that preaching Christianity would have the same effect as that produced by Sampson in removing one of them, I would continue to preach it, although I buried myself in the ruins of the system which it overthrew.’

‘But,’ said Colonel Van Yaruu, ‘the negroes in the West Indies do not feel the degradation of their situation, as you would make the people in Europe believe?’

‘Then be easy!’ said Mr. Schwartz; ‘they will not have recourse to violence to escape it.’

‘But you make them feel it,’ observed the president.

‘It is impossible,’ said Mr. Schwartz, ‘to preach Christianity without. The simple question therefore at last is, whether Revelation be of God or man; if of the latter, it will come to nought; but if of the former, ye cannot overthrow it. But upon this question, gentlemen, you must, like every other man, decide for yourselves. I presume not

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to enter into it with gentlemen of your education and abundant sources of information.’

Mr. Schwartz was then remanded to his prison (a low, damp, wretched cell, over a sink of water, with the boards of the floor gaping half an inch asunder), and told by the Court, that he should be acquainted with the decision in the course of the evening. The members at the same time affecting to shudder at the notions he had expressed of the paramount claims upon his exertions and life of the service of Revelation (which gave him a pretty clear intimation of what that decision would be), as if, had the noble martyr felt otherwise, he could have really been a believer in the divine authority of Revelation, or as if, had he spoken otherwise, he would not have been a dissembler.

The next person brought before the Court, and the only negro of whom I shall here give any account, was Outalissi. Nothing could be finer than the contrast between the carriage of the Christian martyr and the patriot of nature. REVENGE was considered by the former as a species of sacrilege, a daring and impious innovation of the expressly served prerogative of God; indeed, from habitual reference, in all his conduct, to the indisputable direction of some unerring authority, he seemed

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incapable of admitting resentment or any egotistical feelings into his motives; he was perfectly self-possessed and composed, but his serenity seemed derived, like that of Elisha and his servant, from the rampart of horses and chariots of fire, with which the eye of faith disclosed to him that he was girdled, and not from the consciousness of any resources within himself; persecution aimed at him seemed to recoil upon itself, not from reverberation against his fortitude, but from his inobviousness to the blow, like striking at a ghost. His animal body was certainly present, and appeared tangible, but his most intimate sensibilities seemed to be disblended from it, and merely to sit over it in discipline and regulation of conduct.

‘Though round his breast the rolling clouds were spread,
Eternal sunshine (seemed already to have) settled on his head.’

Very different was the air of the noble representative of original man, as he approached the bar of the Court; revenge was to him not only a legitimate human passion, but an imperative duty, an exercise of piety, and there was a sullen smile of exultation upon his face at the success which had attended his pursuit of it. Pride in his port, defiance in his eye, he looked as if aristocracy was

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an institution of nature, and he was a peer of the first rank.

No animal that I ever saw approaches man in beauty of conformation, where the symmetry evidently intended by nature is perfectly developed. Where this is the case in Europe, it is not distinguishable through the burlesque of the European costume, and from some cause or other,^* it is certainly not generally (although, perhaps, oftener) seen unimpaired amongst the unluxuriated children of nature, but in the present case it was so. Nothing could be more imposing than the appearance of Outalissi, his figure was quite equal to that of the Apollo Belvidere, and he stood before the Court with as much naked majesty of person, but more human impetuosity of character in his face; the expression of his countenance indeed was one of perfect self-possession and composure, as well as that of Mr. Schwartz; but Outalissi's composure arose evidently not from the absence of passion, but the intenseness of self-controul - exultation, disdain, and conscious self-sufficiency, and fortitude of nerve to conceal every emotion of weakness that could give the slightest triumph to his Christian judges, under any tortures which they might

* See Note O.

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inflict, seemed the ascendant feelings. And when (after his arraignment was read to him, charging him with being concerned with the other disciples of Mr. Schwartz in the proceedings at Anne's Grove, and also with the destruction of Paramaribo, and the evidence, such as it was, gone through), Mr. Van Yaruu, the president, said, ‘Outalissi, you have heard what has been witnessed against you; what have you to say in your defence?’

The noble prisoner, without either insolence or abjectness, but in a tone of great energy, and the simple and impressive eloquence of truth, expressed himself to the following effect: -

‘A band of Christian sailors, not many moons ago (of one of whom I had saved the life and nursed and sheltered him in my peaceful cabin, and who was thus enabled to discover it to his companions,) coming upon us by surprise at midnight, when we were defenceless and unarmed, set fire to my much loved village, and in the confusion seized and bound the unhappy and unoffending inhabitants; I alone escaped their hands at first, but afterwards became their prey, by a stratagem of the most cruel perfidy - they bribed me to surrender myself, by a promise which they have since confessed that they never meant to have fulfilled of releasing my aged mother, but she

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would not be persuaded to accept either life or liberty without mine; thanks, however, to the Great Spirit, she soon obtained the best sort of release, by death; and the Christian slave traders, after committing every outrage and violence upon the other women and children, and murdering the sick and disabled, transported all the wretched survivors, including myself, to irredeemable slavery in your pestilential swamps here; every inmate of my hearth, even my faithful dog, having been first destroyed by them, - there runs not a drop of Outalissi's blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge, and I have sought, and in some degree, although not adequately, found it; I DID destroy your town, and I rejoice that I have so far appeased the spirits of my fathers, and wiped out at least some of the indignities suffered by them from Christians, in the person of their son. Had I not been disappointed of the support I had depended on, my vengeance would have been ampler still; as it was, many lives were in my power, but single victims were not worthy of my deep-stung indignation. Do not think I spared them from fear, Outalissi never knew fear, and now would not turn upon his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Outalissi? Not one; but I have no Christian thirst for blood, I

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am not a Christian, and was not induced to any thing which I have done by Mr. Schwartz, whom I believe (although he has had the misfortune to be born in a Christian country) to be a good man, and in spite of his Christian prejudices to be worthy of the care and love of the Great Spirit - the just and common father of us all.’

Upon this speech, which was uttered with the utmost moderation, i.e. without any thing like bravado or insolence, although with great energy and firmness by one of the finest looking negroes that was, perhaps, ever seen; Mr. Hogshead, who was in Court, breaking through all decorum, called out - ‘Rascal! that is not what we want to know; we do not care about your indignities or injuries, or your cursed humbug about African villages, and peace, and hearths, and dogs, or any thing else that belonged to you; the only chance you have of saving your life is, to give us a list of all the others whom you and that d--d white hypocrite, Mr. Schwartz, prevailed on to be concerned with you in this rebellion; and if you will not do it without, the torture shall make you confess crimes as black as yourself, as well as those of your hateful accomplices.’

To which Outalissi, who now swelled in every

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vein with indignation and contempt, replied, ‘Christians,’ which he always considered the most opprobrious name by which he could address any one, ‘the tigers have trembled for these hands,’ holding them up, ‘and dare you think to threaten me with your wretched instruments; no, I despise the utmost tortures you can now invent, as much as I do the pitiful wretch who threatens to inflict them.^* You shall not extort from me the name of a single person that was engaged with me; although I now declare to you (because I know by so doing that I shall drive a dagger through your coward soul) that they were more in number than their Christian tyrants.’

Mr. Van Yaruu upon this, after very properly reproving Mr. Hogshead for his indecorum in interrupting the prisoner's defence and violating the solemnity of the Court, asked Outalissi if he had any thing more to say; and, upon his declining, remanded him back to the same dungeon with Mr. Schwartz; where, in the course of the evening, the verdict of guilty, and sentence of death were communicated to both of them, and they were ordered to prepare for execution on the following

* See Stedman, vol. ii. pages 209, 210. - Editor.

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day, before which, however, they were told, that the rack would probably be employed upon both of them at the place of execution, if they did not in the mean time give up the names of their accomplices.