My Life and Times (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

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Excerpt from My Life and Times

Shortly afterwards, the Government offered my father the Magis tracy of the District of Stellenbosch, which he accepted, his term of office commencing on the rst of January, 1828. The salary attached to the oflice, 500, was a very liberal one for those days, and especially at Stellenbosch, where living was very cheap, it enabled him to live very comfortably. But after having held that position for about three and a half years, he was required by the Government to enforce one of the many regulations, considered extremely vexatious by the owners of slaves, the sole tendency of which was according to them to undermine their authority over their slaves, and to encourage insubordination. As a fact, slavery never obtained a very firm footing in the Cape Colony. This abominable and iniquitous system could not take root in the hearts of the Dutch and Huguenot stock, who valued individual liberty above all things. Under the Dutch East India Company but few slaves were imported. After the restoration of the Colony to the Batavian Republic, it looked, under the administration of Commissioner De Mist, as if the days of the slavery system were numbered in this Colony. But when the Cape again, and for good, came under British Rule, many cargoes of slaves were landed here, and were, of course, bought up by the Colonists, who were forced to do so by the chronic deficiency of labour. Yet slavery was as tolerable here as such a. System could be. The Negroes were well treated, and instances of cruelty were rare. Emancipation was by no means a terror to the Cape slave-holder. On several occasions it was publicly dis cussed, and gradual emancipation was favoured and recommended by the farmers themselves. Their idea was that all children of slaves born after a certain date should be declared free.

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