"stinking bush-niggers," as they call the aborigines, and keeping them in a state of servitude and degradation. Scarcely any alliances are contracted between the "Americans" and the native women, so that the civilised population is mainly recruited by fresh arrivals, such as the numerous emancipated Negroes from South Carolina in 1877. Left to itself, it would diminish from year to year, and finally become absorbed by the surrounding aborigines.
Slavery has been abolished only in name, for although the law pronounces severe penalties against purchasers of slaves, it does not prohibit the traffic in
"boys," whom the planters get from insolvent chiefs in the interior and keep in bondage. The missionaries, who are here relatively numerous, have founded several inland stations, where they buy orphans and bring them up in the American way, giving them the name of some United States patron, who pays for the education of his adopted child. Several of the tribes about the plantations have also been converted to various Protestant sects, and like their kinsfolk in the New World, hold those camp-meetings at which prayers, psalm-singing, and preaching or shouting are intermingled with groans, sobs, frenzied dancing, fits, and convulsions.
