FEBRUARY 3.
Whether it be the climate not agreeing with their African
blood (genuine or inherited), or whether it be from some defect
in their general formation, certainly negroes seem to hold their
lives upon a very precarious tenure. Some of my strongest
workmen, the very servants too in my own house, are perpetually falling
ill with little fevers, or
colds, or pains in the head or
limbs. However, the season is universally allowed to have been
peculiarly unhealthy for negroes; and, indeed, even for white
people, the deaths on board the shipping having been unusually
numerous this year; and in the barracks, which are scarcely a
couple of miles distant front my estate, the yellow fever has established
itself, and, as I hear, is
committing terrible ravages,
particularly among the wives of the soldiers. This morning
several negro mothers, belonging to Friendship and Greenwich,
came to complain to their attorney (who happened to be at my
house) that the overseer obliged them to wean their children too
soon. Some-of these children were above twenty-two months
old, and none under eighteen ; but, in order to retain the leisure
and other indulgences annexed to the condition of nursingmothers, the
female negroes, by their
own good-will, would
never wean their offspring at all. Of course their demanas were
rejected, and they went home in high discontent; one of them,
indeed, Dot scrupling to declare aloud, and with a peculiar
emphasis and manner, that if the child should be put into the
weaning-house against her will, the attorney would see it dead in
less than a week.
