Emancipation of Slaves in the Dutch Colonies

By our last arrivals we have learned the final action of the Dutch Government in respect to the abolition of Slavery in its colonies.  No further importation of slaves is to be allowed at Japan and the neighboring islands. – Those already there are being nearly freed under progressive emancipation.  In the West Indies similar steps have been taken.  A Surinam paper says that all the slaves in the Dutch American possessions are to be free on the 1st of July 1863, on the following conditions:

1st.  An indemnity to be paid to the proprietors of each slave man, woman or child, of three hundred guilders, or about one hundred and twenty dollars United States money.

2d.  The slaves are to be subjected to a system of apprenticeship on the plantations for three years, and received for their labor a certain amount of wages; one-half of which is to be paid to the Government.

The Dutch possessions in America are Guinea, St. Eustatius, Curacoa, St. Martin and Saba.

Guinea contains a free population of fifteen thousand souls and thirty seven thousand five hundred blacks.  St. Eustatius, a Leeward island, has five thousand whites and twenty thousand blacks, and has been in the undisturbed possession of the Dutch since 1814.

Of the number of the slaves in the other colonies we have no account.  It is well know however, Curacua once carried on every extensive slave trade from the port of St. Barbara.

Thus steadily does the work of emancipation proceed throughout the world, to be followed up, beyond all question in some philanthropic and satisfactory form, by a similar movement in this country. – {N. Y. Post.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, June 7, 1862, p. 1