Part 16

The exact proportions of the slave trade can be estimated only approximately. From 1680 to 1688 we know that the English African Company alone sent 249 ships to Africa, shipped there 60,783 Negro slaves, and after losing 14,387 on the middle passage, delivered 46,396 in America.

It seems probable that 25,000 Negroes a year arrived in America between 1698 and 1707. After the Asiento of 1713 this number rose to 30,000 annually, and before the Revolutionary War it had reached at least 40,000 and perhaps 100,000 slaves a year.

The total number of slaves imported is not known. Dunbar estimates that nearly 900,000 came to America in the sixteenth century, 2,750,000 in the seventeenth, 7,000,000 in the eighteenth, and over 4,000,000 in the nineteenth, perhaps 15,000,000 in all. Certainly it seems that at least 10,000,000 Negroes were expatriated. Probably every slave imported represented on the average five corpses in Africa or on the high seas. The American slave trade, therefore, meant the elimination of at least 60,000,000 Negroes from their fatherland. The Mohammedan slave trade meant the expatriation or forcible migration in Africa of nearly as many more. It would be conservative, then, to say that the slave trade cost Negro Africa 100,000,000 souls. And yet people ask to-day the cause of the stagnation of culture in that land since 1600!

Such a large number of slaves could be supplied only by organized slave raiding in every corner of Africa. The African continent gradually became revolutionized. Whole regions were depopulated, whole tribes disappeared; villages were built in caves and on hills or in forest fastnesses; the character of peoples like those of Benin developed their worst excesses of cruelty instead of the already flourishing arts of peace. The dark, irresistible grasp of fetish took firmer hold on men's minds.

Further advances toward civilization became impossible. Not only was there the immense demand for slaves which had its outlet on the west coast, but the slave caravans were streaming up through the desert to the Mediterranean coast and down the valley of the Nile to the centers of Mohammedanism. It was a rape of a continent to an extent never paralleled in ancient or modern times.

In the American trade there was not only the horrors of the slave raid, which lined the winding paths of the African jungles with bleached bones, but there was also the horrors of what was called the "middle passage," that is, the voyage across the Atlantic. As Sir William Dolben said, "The Negroes were chained to each other hand and foot, and stowed so close that they were not allowed above a foot and a half for each in breadth. Thus crammed together like herrings in a barrel, they contracted putrid and fatal disorders; so that they who came to inspect them in a morning had occasionally to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers to whom they had been fastened."

It was estimated that out of every one hundred lot shipped from Africa only about fifty lived to be effective laborers across the sea, and among the whites more seamen died in that trade in one year than in the whole remaining trade of England in two. The full realization of the horrors of the slave trade was slow in reaching the ears and conscience of the modern world, just as to-day the treatment of dark natives in European colonies is brought to publicity with the greatest difficulty. The first move against the slave trade in England came in Parliament in 1776, but it was not until thirty-one years later, in 1807, that the trade was banned through the arduous labors of Clarkson, Wilberforce, Sharpe, and others.

Denmark had already abolished the trade, and the United States attempted to do so the following year. Portugal and Spain were induced to abolish the trade between 1815 and 1830. Notwithstanding these laws, the contraband trade went on until the beginning of the Civil War in America. The reasons for this were the enormous profit of the trade and the continued demand of the American slave barons, who had no sympathy with the efforts to stop their source of cheap labor supply.

However, philanthropy was not working alone to overthrow Negro slavery and the slave trade. It was seen, first in England and later in other countries, that slavery as an industrial system could not be made to work satisfactorily in modern times. Its cost was too great, and one of the causes of this cost was the slave insurrections from the very beginning, when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrection in the West Indies, in North and South America, kept the slave owners in apprehension and turmoil, or called for a police system difficult to maintain. In North America revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the North, and this, with the growing scarcity of suitable land and the moral revolt, led to the Civil War and the disappearance of the American slave trade.

There was still, however, the Mohammedan slave trade to deal with, and this has been the work of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century ten thousand slaves annually were being distributed on the southern and eastern coast of the Mediterranean and at the great slave market in Bornu.

On the east coast of Africa in 1862 nineteen thousand slaves were passed into Zanzibar and thence into Arabia and Persia. As late as 1880, three thousand annually were being thus transplanted, but now the trade is about stopped. To-day the only centers of actual slave trading may be said to be the cocoa plantations of the Portuguese Islands on the west coast of Africa, and the Congo Free State.

Such is the story of the Rape of Ethiopia--a sordid, pitiful, cruel tale. Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.

FOOTNOTES:

Cf. Helps: Spanish Conquest, IV, 401.

Helps, op. cit., I, 219-220.

Helps, op. cit., II, 18-19.

Helps, op. cit., III, 211-212.

Theal: History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795, I, 476.

Ingram: History of Slavery, p. 152.

X THE WEST INDIES AND LATIN AMERICA

That was a wonderful century, the fifteenth, when men realized that beyond the scowling waste of western waters were dreams come true. Curious and yet crassly human it is that, with all this poetry and romance, arose at once the filthiest institution of the modern world and the costliest. For on Negro slavery in America was built, not simply the abortive cotton kingdom, but the foundations of that modern imperialism which is based on the despising of backward men.

According to some accounts Alonzo, "the Negro," piloted one of the ships of Columbus, and certainly there was Negro blood among his sailors. As early as 1528 there were nearly ten thousand Negroes in the new world. We hear of them in all parts. In Honduras, for instance, a Negro is sent to burn a native village; in 1555 the town council of Santiago de Chile voted to allow an enfranchised Negro possession of land in the town, and evidently treated him just as white applicants were treated. D'Allyon, who explored the coast of Virginia in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, used Negro slaves (who afterward revolted) to build his ships and help in exploration; Balboa had with him thirty Negroes, who, in 1513, helped to build the first ships on the Pacific coast; Cortez had three hundred Negro porters in 1522.

Before 1530 there were enough Negroes in Mexico to lead to an insurrection, where the Negroes fought desperately, but were overcome and their ringleaders executed. Later the followers of another Negro insurgent, Bayano, were captured and sent back to Spain. Negroes founded the town of Santiago del Principe in 1570, and in 1540 a Negro slave of Hernandez de Alarcon was the only one of the party to carry a message across the country to the Zunis of New Mexico. A Negro, Stephen Dorantes, discovered New Mexico. This Stephen or "Estevanico" was sent ahead by certain Spanish friars to the "Seven Cities of Cibola." "As soon as Stephen had left said friars, he determined to earn all the reputation and honor for himself, and that the boldness and daring of having alone discovered those villages of high stories so much spoken of throughout that country should be attributed to him; and carrying along with him the people who followed him, he endeavored to cross the wilderness which is between Cibola and the country he had gone through, and he was so far ahead of the friars that when they arrived at Chichilticalli, which is on the edge of the wilderness, he was already at Cibola, which is eighty leagues of wilderness beyond." But the Indians of the new and strange country took alarm and concluded that Stephen "must be a spy or guide for some nations who intended to come and conquer them, because it seemed to them unreasonable for him to say that the people were white in the country from which he came, being black himself and being sent by them."

Slaves imported under the Asiento treaties went to all parts of the Americas. Spanish America had by the close of the eighteenth century ten thousand in Santo Domingo, eighty-four thousand in Cuba, fifty thousand in Porto Rico, sixty thousand in Louisiana and Florida, and sixty thousand in Central and South America.

The history of the Negro in Spanish America centered in Cuba, Venezuela, and Central America. In the sixteenth century slaves began to arrive in Cuba and Negroes joined many of the exploring expeditions from there to various parts of America. The slave trade greatly increased in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and after the revolution in Hayti large numbers of French emigrants from that island settled in Cuba. This and Spanish greed increased the harshness of slavery and eventually led to revolt among the Negroes. In 1844 Governor O'Donnell began a cruel persecution of the blacks on account of a plot discovered among them. Finally in 1866 the Ten Years' War broke out in which Negro and white rebels joined. They demanded the abolition of slavery and equal political rights for natives and foreigners, whites and blacks. The war was cruel and bloody but ended in 1878 with the abolition of slavery, while a further uprising the following year secured civil rights for Negroes. Spanish economic oppression continued, however, and the leading chiefs of the Ten Years' War including such leaders as the mulatto, Antonio Maceo, with large numbers of Negro soldiers, took the field again in 1895. The result was the freeing of Cuba by the intervention of the United States. Negro regiments from the United States played here a leading role. A number of leaders in Cuba in political, industrial, and literary lines have been men of Negro descent.

Slavery was abolished by Guatemala in 1824 and by Mexico in 1829. Argentine, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Paraguay ceased to recognize it about 1825. Between 1840 and 1845 it came to an end in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecquador. Bolivar, Paez, Sucre, and other South American leaders used Negro soldiers in fighting for freedom (1814-16), and Hayti twice at critical times rendered assistance and received Bolivar twice as a refugee.

Brazil was the center of Portuguese slavery, but slaves were not introduced in large numbers until about 1720, when diamonds were discovered in the territory above Rio Janeiro. Gradually the seaboard from Pernambuco to Rio Janeiro and beyond became filled with Negroes, and although the slave trade north of the equator was theoretically abolished by Portugal in 1815 and south of the equator in 1830, and by Brazil in these regions in 1826 and 1830, nevertheless between 1825 and 1850 over a million and a quarter of Negroes were introduced. Not until Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 did the importation wholly cease. Brazilian slavery allowed the slave to purchase his freedom, and the color line was not strict. Even in the eighteenth century there were black clergy and bishops; indeed the Negro clergy seem to have been on a higher moral level than the whites.

Insurrection was often attempted, especially among the Mohammedan Negroes around Bahia. In 1695 a tribe of revolted slaves held out for a long time. In 1719 a widespread conspiracy failed, but many of the leaders fled to the forest. In 1828 a thousand rose in revolt at Bahia, and again in 1830. From 1831 to 1837 revolt was in the air, and in 1835 came the great revolt of the Mohammedans, who attempted to enthrone a queen. The Negroes fought with furious bravery, but were finally defeated.