[British Guiana and Sir Henry Barkly, 1850.] Nine pages of cuttings from The Times and the Globe, by ‘NIGER’ - identified herein as Sir James Robert Carmichael - and ‘Jacob Omnium’ (Matthew James Higgins), on Governor Barkly and slavery.

A contemporary manuscript note to the present item reveals for the first time the identity of ‘Niger’, one of the two correspondents of whose letters it consists. (And minor manuscript corrections to the last of the four letters would seem to suggest the involvement of the author.) This is Sir James Robert Carmichael (1817-1883), 2nd Bart, who was intimately connected with British Guiana through his father Sir James Carmichael-Smyth (1779-1838). Having served from 1829 as governor of the Bahamas (where he abolished the flogging of female slaves), Carmichael-Smyth had been appointed governor of British Guiana in June 1833. According to Carmichael-Smyth’s entry in the Oxford DNB, he ‘arrived at Georgetown, Demerara, shortly before the emancipation of slaves, when much depended on the governor. Unmoved by the reckless hostility of a section of the planters, Carmichael-Smyth by a firm, impartial, and vigorous government won the confidence of the slaves. He so closely supervised every department of government that, as he himself observed, he could sleep satisfied that no person could be punished without his knowledge and sanction. Carmichael-Smyth died suddenly at Camp House, Georgetown, Demerara, of ‘brain fever’, after four days’ illness, on 4 March 1838; he was widely esteemed and his death much regretted.’ The other correspondent, ‘Jacob Omnium’, is Thackeray’s friend Matthew James Higgins (1810-1868), whose entry in the Oxford DNB states: ‘In 1838–9 he visited British Guiana, where he later inherited the Alliance estate after the death of his mother, and repeated the visit in 1846–7. This experience enabled him to keep his estate in good order during the critical period which followed the abolition of slavery, and to put the case for the West India planters in defence of the protective sugar duties. He wrote four effective pamphlets upon the difficulties of the sugar-producing colonies in 1847 and 1849.’ The material consists of eight long letters, in small print, to the Globe and The Times, laid down on nine foolscap 8vo pages over six leaves extracted from an album. The total length of text, in 7-inch wide columns, is 430 cm. In good condition, lightly aged and worn, on worn leaves. The first four letters, from ‘Niger’ to the editor of the London newspaper the Globe, are on the subject of ‘British Guiana and Governor Barkly’. These four are dated 29 and 30 January, 9 February and 2 March 1850. ‘NIGER’ is identified in a contemporary hand at the end of the first letter as ‘Sir J R Carmichael’. The last four letters are an somewhat intemperate exchange in The Times of two letters apiece between ‘NIGER’, writing from London on 30 October (headed ‘A WORD TO WEST INDIA PROPRIETORS’) and 12 November, and ‘JACOB OMNIUM’, writing from Lombard Street on 10 and 16 November. At the start of the first of his letters to the Globe, Carmichael states his position: ‘Mr Barkly has earned so high a reputation among men of all parties, both in his late position in Parliament, and in the discharge of his present arduous functions in Guiana, that he may well afford to despise the bitter revilings of disappointed faction; but the article in question contains allegations so unfair, ungenerous, and unscrupulous in their nature, that I consider the public should be made acquainted with the true state of the case at issue between the Morning Chronicle and the Governor of Guiana.’ This he proceeds to do, presenting a mass of detail, including some taken from ‘the lastest accounts’ he has received from ‘the West India mail’. In the first of his letters to The Times, Carmichael discusses ‘the treatment the unfortunate race of Africa hae met with at the hands of the white man’: ‘I have known a slave to be destroyed by torture, and a fine inflicted on the overseer as a punishment; but these, thank God, are tales of a bigone day. My only object in alluding to them is, to point out to the West India proprietors that they have been guilty of a great and sad dereliction of duty, of which they are now reaping the unavoidable punishment. They have treated the colonies as hotbeds from whence to forcec money into their pockets; they have forgotten what they owed to those whose toil supplied their wants and luxuries’. Higgins responds: ‘All that “Niger” says concerning the unhappy fate of the slaves in the British West Indies in bygone days may, for all I know, be most accurate. I cannot, however, divine why he has reverted to it. [...] Without disputing the accuracy of his picture of West Indian cruelty and West Indian mismanagement under the obsolete system of slavery, I submit that it is [...] unfair and irrelevant to endeavour to introduce it into the present question between Lord John Russell and the free-labour sugar-growers’. In his last letter Higgins complains: ‘Your correspondent, “Niger,” preserves a great advantage over me. He well knows who I am, the nature of my connexion with the colonies, and the habits of my family, and he very skilfully, and I think somewhat unhandsomely, turns the minutest points of that knowledge to his advantage, whilst he carefully preserves his own incognito, affording me no clue whereby I may infer what manner of man my assailant is.’ While acknowledging ‘Niger’ to be ‘a very able partisan’, Higgins concludes by accusing him of ‘doing his best to throw dust in the eyes of the British nation’. See Scan. I've yet to find an example of Carmichael-Smyth's handwriting to make a judgment on the signature. The setting out of the articles suggests a personal interest (even file copy).