ABSTRACT
In many respects, little change in the manners and customs of the people during the early part of this period can be mentioned, as compared with those of the preceding one. But with the commencement of the century, and more especially after the peace of 1815 had made ocean travelling less perilous, a great improvement may be observed in the habits of the more respectable white people, in consequence of the greater number of families whose children were sent to England for education. Removed at a very early age from the debasing influences of a slaveholding colony into scenes of European delicacy and refinement, they not only received a superior education, judged by the standard of the day, but were spared the contaminating scenes too common on a plantation,
The creole child, trained in the colony, had almost invariably a little slave allotted as a servant. Both boys and girls were too apt to tyrannise over these dependants, and foolish parents in many instances encouraged, rather than checked, such exhibitions of youthful cruelty. Some of them even suffered their children to witness the punishments inflicted on the household or plantation slaves, never reflecting on the brutalising effects of such exhibitions, or on the fact that they ultimately became sources of amusement.
