The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
African Slave Trade from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century.
Negroland, or Nigritia, is that part of the interior of Africa stretching from the great desert on the north to the unascertained commencement of Caffreland on the south, and from the Atlantic on the west to Abyssinia on the east. In fact, the entire interior of this great continent may be called the laud of the negroes. The ancients distinguished it from the comparatively civilized countries lying along the coast of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea by calling the latter Libya, and the former Ethiopia. It is upon Ethiopia in an especial manner that the curse of slavery has fallen. At first, it bore but a share of the burden; Britons and Scythians were the fellow-slaves of the Ethiopian: but at last all the other nations of the earth seemed to conspire against the negro race, agreeing never to enslave each other, but to make the blacks the slaves of all alike. Thus, this race of human beings has been singled out, whether owing to the accident of color, or to their peculiar fitness for certain kinds of labor, for infamy and misfortune; and the abolition of the practice of promiscuous slavery in the modern world, was purchased by the introduction of a slavery confined entirely to negroes.
The nations and tribes of negroes in Africa, who thus ultimately became the universal prey of Europeans, were themselves equally guilty in subjecting men to perpetual bondage. In the most remote times, every Ethiopian man of consequence had his slaves, just as a Greek or Roman master had. Savage as he was, he at least resembled the citizen of a civilized state in this. He possessed his domestic slaves, or bondmen, hereditary on his property; and besides these, he was always acquiring slaves by whatever means he could, whether by purchase from slave-dealers, or by war with neighboring tribes. The slaves of a negro master in this case would be his own countrymen, cr at least men of his own race and color; some of them born on the same spot with himself, some of them captives who had been brought from a distance of a thousand miles. Of course, the farther a captive was taken from his home, the more valuable he would be, as having less chance of escape; and therefore it would" be a more common practice to sell a slave taken in war with a neighboring tribe, than to retain him as a laborer so near his home. And just as in the cities of the civilized countries, we find the slave population often outnumbering the free, so in the villages of the interior of Africa the negro slaves were often more numerous than the negro masters. Park, in his travels among the negroes, found that in many villages the slaves were three times as numerous as the free persons; and it is likely that the proportion was not very different in more ancient times. In ancient times, the Garamantes used to sell negroes to the Libyans; and so a great proportion of the slaves of the Carthaginians and the Egyptians must have been blacks brought northwards across the desert. From Carthage and Egypt, again, these negroes would be exported into different countries of southern Europe; and a stray negro might even find his way into the more northern regions. They seem always to have been valued for their patience, their mild temper, and their extraordinary power of endurance; and for many purposes negro slaves would be preferred by their Roman masters to all others, even to the shaggy, scowling Picts. But though it is quite certain that negroes were used as slaves in ancient Europe, still the negro never came to enjoy that miserable preeminence which later times have assigned to him, treating him as the born drudge of the human family. White-skinned men were slaves as well as he; and if, among the Carthaginians and Egyptians, negro slaves were more common than any other, it was only because they were more easily procurable.
The Portuguese were the first to set the example of stealing negroes; they were the first to become acquainted with Africa. Till the fifteenth century, no part of Africa was known except the chain of countries on the coast of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, beginning with Morocco, and ending with Abyssinia and the adjoining desert. The Arabs and Moors, indeed, traversing the latter, knew something about Ethiopia, or the land of the negroes, but what knowledge they had was confined to themselves; and to the Europeans the whole of the continent to the south of the desert was an unknown and unexplored land. There were traditions of two ancient circumnavigations of the continent by the Phœnicians and the Carthaginians, one down the Red Sea, and round the Cape of Good Hope from the east, the other through the Straits of Gibraltar, and round the same cape from the west; but these traditions were vague and questionable. They were sufficient, however, to set the brains of modern navigators a-working; and now that they were possessed of the mariner's compass, they might hope to repeat the Carthaginian feat of circumnavigating Africa; if, indeed, Africa were circumnavigable. In the year 1412, therefore, a series of attempts was begun by the Portuguese, at the instigation of Prince Henry, to sail southward along the western coast. In every succeeding attempt, the bold navigators got farther and farther south, past the Canaries, past the Cape Verds, along the coast of Guinea, through the Bight of Biafra, down that long unnamed extent of coast south of the equator, until at last the perseverance of three generations succeeded, and the brave Yasco de Gama, in 1497, rounded the great cape itself, turned his prow northward, sailed through the Mozambique Channel, and then, as if protesting that he had done with Africa all that navigator could, steered through the open ocean right for the shores of India. The third or fourth of these attempts brought the Portuguese into contact with the negroes. Before the year 1470, the whole of the Guinea coast had been explored. As early as 1434, Antonio Gonzales, a Portuguese captain, landed on this coast, and carried away with him some negro boys, whom he sold to one or two Moorish families in the south of Spain. The act seems to have provoked some criticism at the time. But from that day, it became customary for the captains of vessels landing on the Gold Coast, or other parts of the coast of Guinea, to carry away a few young negroes of both sexes. The labor of these negroes, whether on board the ships which carried them away, or in the ports to which the ships belonged, being found valuable, the practice soon grew into a traffic; and negroes, instead of being carried away in twos and threes as curiosities, came to form a part of the cargo, as well as gold, ivory, and gum. The ships no longer went on voyages of discovery, they went for profitable cargoes; and the inhabitants of the negro villages along the coast, delighted with the beads, and knives, and bright cloths which they got in exchange for gold, ivory, and slaves, took care to have these articles ready for any ship that might land. Thus the slave-trade, properly so called, began. The Spaniards were the first nation to become parties with the Portuguese in this infamous traffic.
At first, the deportation of slaves from Africa was conducted on a limited scale; but about seventy years after Gonzales had carried away the first negro boys from the Guinea coast, an opening was all at once made for negro labor, which made it necessary to carry away blacks, not by occasional ship-loads, but by thousands annually. America was discovered in 1492. The part of this new world which was first colonized by the Spaniards, consisted of those islands scattered through the great gap of ocean between North and South America; which, as they were thought to be the outermost individuals of the great Eastern Indies, to which it was the main object of Columbus to effect a western passage, were called the West Indies. When the Spaniards took possession of these islands, they employed the natives, or Indians, as they were called, to do all the heavy kinds of labor for them, such as carrying burdens, digging for gold, &c. In fact, these Indians became slaves of their Spanish conquerors; and it was customary, in assigning lands to a person, to give him, at the same time, all the Indians upon them. Thus, when Bernal Diaz paid his respects to Velasquez, the governor of Cuba, the governor promised him the first Indians he had at his disposal. According to all accounts, never was there a race of men more averse to labor, or constitutionally more unfit for it, than these native Americans. They are described as the most listless, improvident people on the face of the earth, and though capable of much passive endurance, drooped and lost all heart whenever they were put to active labor. Labor, ill-usage, and the small-pox together, carried them off in thousands, and wherever a Spaniard trod, he cleared a space before him, as if he carried a blasting influence in his person. When Albuquerque entered on his office as governor of St. Domingo in 1515, he found that, whereas in 1508 the natives numbered 60,000, they did not then number 14,000. The condition of these poor aborigines under the Spanish colonists became so heart-breaking, that the Dominican priests stepped out in their behalf, asserting them to be free men, and denying the right of the Spaniards to make them slaves. This led to a vehement controversy, which lasted several years, and in which Bartholomew de Las Casas, a benevolent priest, figured most conspicuously as the friend of the Indians. So energetic and persevering was he, that he produced a great impression in their favor upon the Spanish government at home.
Unfortunately, the relaxation in favor of one race of men was procured at the expense of the slavery of another. Whether La Casas himself was led, by his extreme interest in the Indians, to be so inconsistent as to propose the employment of negroes in their stead, or whether the suggestion came from some other person, does not distinctly appear; but it is certain, that what the Spaniards spared the Indians, they inflicted with double rigor upon the negroes. Laborers must be had, and the negroes were the kind of laborers that would suit. As early as 1503, a few negroes had been carried across the Atlantic; and it was found that not only could each of these negroes do as much work as four Indians, but that, while the Indians were fast becoming extinct, the eo-roes were thriving and propagating wonderfully. The plain inference was, that they should import negroes as fast as possible; and this was accordingly done. "In the year 1510," says the old Spanish historian Herrera, "the king of Spain ordered fifty slaves to be sent to Hispaniola to work in the gold mines, the natives being looked upon as a weak people, and unfit for labor" And this was but a beginning; for, notwithstanding the remonstrances of 
Cardinal Ximenes, ship-load after ship-load of negroes was carried to the We Indies. We find Charles V. giving one of his Flemish favorites an exclusive right of shipping 4000 negroes to the new world — a monoply which that favorite sold to some Genoese merchants for 25,000 ducats. These merchants organized the traffic; many more than 4000 negroes were required to do the work; and though at first the negroes were exorbitantly dear, they multiplied so fast, and were imported in such quantities, that at last there was a negro for every Spaniard in the colonies; and in whatever new direction the Spun iards advanced in their career of conquest, negroes went along with them.
The following extract from the Spanish historian already quoted will show not only that the negroes were very numerous, but that sometimes also they proved refractory, and endeavored to get the upper hand of their masters: "There was so great a number of blacks in the governments of Santa Marta and Venezuela, and so little precaution was used in the management of them, or rather the liberty they had was so great, being allowed the use of arms, which they much delight in, that, prompted by their natural fierceness and arrogance, a small number of the most polished, who valued themselves for their valor and gayety, resolved to rescue themselves from servitude, and be- come their own masters, believing that they might live at their own will among the Indians. Those few summoning others, who, like a thoughtless brutish people, were not capable of making any reflection, but were always ready at the beck of those of their own color for whom they had any respect or es- teem, they readily complied. Assembling to the number of about 250, and repairing to the settlement of New Segovia, they divided themselves into com- panies, and appointed captains, and saluted one king, who had the most bold- ness and resolution to assume that title; and he, intimating that they should all be rich, and lords of the country, by destroying the Spaniards, assigned every one the Spanish woman that should fall to his lot, with other such inso- lent projects and machinations. The fame of this commotion was soon spread abroad throughout all the cities of those two governments, where preparations were speedily made for marching against the blacks, as well to prevent their being joined by the rest of their countrymen that were not yet gone to them, as to obviate the many mischiefs which those barbarians might occasion to the country. In the meantime, the inhabitants of Tucuyo sent succors to the city of Segovia, which was but newly founded; and the very night that relief ar- rived there, the blacks, who had got intelligence of it, resolved to be before- hand with the Spaniards; and in order that, greater forces thus coming in, they might not grow too strong for them, they fell upon those Spaniards, kill- ing five or six of them, and a clergyman. However, the success did not answer their expectation, for the Spaniards being on their guard, readily took the alarm, fought the blacks courageously, and killed a considerable number. The rest, perceiving that their contrivance had miscarried, retired. The next morning Captain James de Lassado arrived there with forty men from the gov- ernment of Venezuela, and, judging that no time ought to be lost in that affair, marched against the blacks with the men he had brought, and those who were before at New Segovia, Perceiving that they had quitted the post they had first taken, and were retired to a strong place on the mountain, he pursued, overtook, and attacked thern; and though they drew up and stood on their defense, he soon routed and put them all to the sword, sparing none but their women and some female Indians they had with them, after which he returned to Segovia, and those provinces were delivered from much uneasiness."
The Spaniards did not long remain alone in the guilt of this new traffic. At first the Spaniards had all America to themselves; and as it was in America that negro labor was in demand, the Spaniards alone possessed large numbers of negroes. But other nations come to have colonies in America, and as negroes were found invaluable in the foundation of a new colony, other nations came also to patronize the slave trade. The first recognition of the trade by the English government was in 1562, in the reign of Elizabeth, when an act was passed legalizing the purchase of negroes; yet, as the earlier attempts made by the English to plant colonies in North America were unsuccessful, there did not, for some time after the passing of this act, exist any demand for negroes sufficient to induce the owners of English trading vessels visiting the coast of Africa to make negroes a part of their cargo. It was in the year 1620 that the first negroes were imported into Virginia; and even then it was not an English slave-ship which supplied them, but a Dutch one, which chanced to touch on the coast with some negroes on board bound for the Spanish colonies. These negroes the Virginian planters purchased on trial; and the bargain was found to be so good, that in a short time negroes came to be in great demand in Virginia. Nor were the planters any longer indebted to the chance visits of Dutch ships for a supply of negro-laborers; for the English merchants, vigilant and calculating then as they are now, immediately embarked in the traffic, and instructed the captains of their vessels visiting the African coast to barter for negroes as well as wax and elephants' teeth. In a similar way the French, the Dutch, and all other nations of any commercial importance, came to be involved in the traffic; those who had colonies, to supply the demand there; those who had no colonies, to make money by assisting to supply the demand of the colonies of other countries. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, the African slave-trade was in full vigor; and all Europe was implicated in the buying and selling of negroes.
So universal is the instinct for barter, that the immediate effect of the new and great demand for slaves was to create its own supply. Slavery, as we have said, existed in Negroland from time immemorial, but on a comparatively limited scale. The effect of the demand by the European ships gave an unhappy stimulus to the natural animosities of the various negro tribes skirting the west coast; and, tempted by the clasp-knives, and looking-glasses, and wonderful red cloth, which the white men always brought with them to exchange for slaves, the whole negro population for many miles inland began fighting and kidnapping each other. Not only so, but the interior of the continent itself, the district of Lake Tchad, and the mystic source of the fatal Niger, hitherto untrodden by the foot of a white invader, began to feel the tremor caused by the traffic on the coast; and ere long, the very negroes who seemed safest in their central obscurities, were drained away to meet the increasing demand; either led captive by warlike visitants from the west, or handed from tribe to tribe till they reached the sea. In this way, eventually, Central Africa, with its teeming myriads of negroes, came to be the great mother of slaves for exportation, and the negro villages on the coast the warehouses, as it were, where the slaves were stowed away till the ships of the white meu arrived to carry them off.
European skill and foresight assisted in giving constancy and regularity to the supply of negroes from the interior. At first the slave vessels only visited the Guinea coast, and bargained with the negroes of the villages there for what quantity of wax, or gold, or negroes they had to give. But this was a clumsy way of conducting business. The ships had to sail along a large tract of coast, picking up a few negroes at one place, and a little ivory or gold at another; sometimes even the natives of a village might have no elephants' teeth and no negroes to give; and even under the most favorable circumstances, it took a considerable time to procure a decent cargo. No coast is so pestilential as that of Africa, and hence the service was very repulsive and very dangerous. As an improvement on this method of trading, the plan was adopted very early of planting small settlements of Europeans at intervals along the slave-coast, whose business it should be to negotiate with the negroes, stimulate them to activity in their slave-hunting expeditions, purchase the slaves brought in, and warehouse them until the arrival of the ships. These settlements were called slave factories. Factories of this kind were planted all along the western coast from Cape Verd to the equator, by English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese traders. Their appearance, the character of the men employed in them, their internal arrangements, and their mode of carrying on the traffic, are well described in the following extract from Mr. Howison's book on "European Colonies":
"As soon as the parties concerned had fixed upon the site of their proposed commercial establishment, they began to erect a fort of greater or less magnitude, having previously obtained permission to that effect from the natives. The most convenient situation for a building of the kind was considered to be at the confluence of a river with the sea, or upon an island lying within a few miles of the coast. In the first case, there was the advantage of inland navigation; and in the second, that of the security and defensibleness of an insular position, besides its being more cool and healthy than any other.
The walls of the fort enclosed a considerable space of ground, upon which were built the necessary magazines for the reception of merchandise, and also barracks for the soldiers and artificers, and a depot for slaves; so that, in tin; event of external hostilities, the gates might be shut, and the persons and the property belonging to the establishment placed in security. The quarters for the officers and agents employed at the factory were in general erected upon the ramparts, or at least adjoining them; while the negroes in their service, and any others that might be attracted to the spot, placed their huts outside of the walls of the fort, but under the protection of its guns. The command of the establishment was vested in the hands of one individual, who had various subordinates, according to the extent of the trade carried on at the place; and if the troops who garrisoned the fort exceeded twenty or thirty, a commissioned officer usually had charge of them. The most remarkable forts were St. George del Mina, erected by the Portuguese, though it subsequently fell into the hands of the Dutch; Cape Coast Castle, the principal establishment of the English; Fort Louis, at the mouth of the Senegal, generally occupied by the French; and Goree, situated upon an island of the same name, near Cape Verd. Most of these forts mounted from fifty to sixty pieces of cannon, and contained large reservoirs for water, and were not only impregnable to the negroes, but capable of standing a regular siege by a European force.
The individuals next in importance to the director or governor were the factors, who ranked according to their standing in the company's service. The seniors generally remained at headquarters, and had the immediate management of the trade there, and the care of the supplies of European merchandise which were always kept in store. The junior factors were employed in carrying on the traffic in the interior of the country, which they did sometimes by ascending the rivers in armed vessels, and exchanging various articles for slaves, gold-dust, and ivory, with the negroes inhabiting the neighborhood; and sometimes by establishing themselves for several months in a large town 01 populous district, and, as it were, keeping a shop to which the natives might resort for traffic.
The European subordinates of the establishment consisted of clerks, bookkeepers, warehousemen, artificers, mechanics, gunners, and private soldiers, all of whom had particular quarters assigned for their abode, and lived under military discipline. The soldiers employed in the service of the different African companies were mostly invalids, and persons who had been dismissed from the army on account of bad conduct. Destitute of the means of subsistence at home, such men willingly engaged to go to the coast of Africa, where they knew they would be permitted to lead a life of ease, indolence, and licentiousness, and be exposed to no danger except that of a deadly climate, which was in reality the most certain and inevitable one that they could anywhere encounter. Few of the troops in any of the forts were fit for active duty, which was of the less consequence, because they were seldom or never required to fight except upon the ramparts of the place in which they might be quartered, and not often even there. Hence they spent their time in smoking, in drinking palm wine, and in gaming, and were generally earned off by fever or dissipation within two years after their arrival in the country. A stranger, on first visit -any of the African forts, felt that there was something both horrible and ludicrous in the appearance of its garrison; for the individuals composing it appeared ghastly, debilitated, and diseased, to a degree that is unknown in other climates; and their tattered and soiled uniforms, resembling each other only in meanness, and not in color, suggested the idea of the wearers being a band of drunken deserters, or of starved and maltreated prisoners of war. Each company was in the practice of annually sending a certain number of ships to its respective establishments, freighted with European goods suitable for traffic; while its factors in Africa had in the meantime been collecting slaves, ivory, gumarabic, and other productions of the country; so that the vessels on their arrival suffered no detention, but always found a return cargo ready for them.
Though the forts were principally employed as places of safe deposit for merchandise received from Europe or collected at outposts, they were also generally the scene of a considerable trade, being resorted to for that purpose not only by the coast negroes, but often also by dealers from the interior of the country, who would bring slaves, ivory, and gold-dust for traffic. Persons of this description were always honorably, and even ceremoniously received by the governor or by the factors, and conciliated in every possible way, lest they might carry their goods to another market, They were invited to enter the fort, and were treated with liquors, sweetmeats, and presents, and urged to drink freely;-and no sooner did they show symptoms of confusion of ideas, than the factors proposed to trade with them, and displayed the articles which they were disposed to give in exchange for their slaves, &c. The unsuspicious negro-merchant, dazzled by the variety of tempting objects placed before him, and exhilarated by wine or brandy, was easily led to conclude a bargain little advantageous to himself; and before he had fully recovered his senses, his slaves, ivory, and gold-dust were transferred to the stores of the factory, and he was obliged to be contented with what he had in his moments of inebriety agreed to accept in exchange for them."
From this extract, it appears that not only did the managers of these factories receive all the negroes who might be brought down to the coast, but that emissaries, "junior factors," as they were called, penetrated into the interior, as if thoroughly to infect the central tribes with the spirit of commerce. The result of this was the creation of large slave-markets in the interior, where the negro slaves were collected for sale, and where slave-merchants, whether negro, Arabic, or European, met to conclude their wholesale bargains. One of these great slave-markets was at Timbuctoo; but for the most part the slaves were brought down in droves by Slatees, or negro slave-merchants, to the European factories on the coast. At the time that Park traveled in Africa, so completely had the negroes of the interior become possessed with the trading spirit, so much had the capture and abduction of negroes grown into a profession, that these native slave-merchants were observed to treat the slaves they were driving to the coast with considerable kindness. The negroes were, indeed, chained together to prevent their escape. Those who were refractory had a thick billet of wood fastened to their ankle; and as the poor wretches quitting their native spots became sullen and moody, their limbs at the same time swelling and breaking out in sores with the fatigue of traveling, it was often necessary to apply the whip. Still, the Slatees were not wantonly cruel; and there was nothing they liked better than to see their slaves merry. Occasionally they would halt in their march, and encourage the negroes to sing their snatches of song, or play their games of hazard, or dance under the shade of the tamarind tree. This, however, was only the case with the professional slave-driver, who was commissioned to convey the negroes to the coast; and if we wish to form a conception of the extent and intricate working of the curse inflicted upon the negroes by their contact with white men, we must set ourselves to imagine all the previous kidnapping and fighting which must have been necessary to procure every one of these droves which the Slatees carried down. What a number of processes must have conspired to bring a sufficient number of slaves together to form a drove! In one case, it would be a negro master selling a number of his spare slaves; and what an amount of suffering even in this case must there have been arising from the separation of relatives! In another case, it would be a father selling his son, or a son selling his old father, or a creditor selling his insolvent debtor. In a third, it would be a starving family voluntarily surrendering itself to slavery. When a scarcity occurred, instances used to be frequent of famishing negroes coming to the British stations in Africa and begging "to be put upon the slave-chain." In a fourth case it would be a savage selling the boy or girl he had kidnapped a week ago on purpose. In a fifth, it would be a petty negro chief disposing of twenty or thirty negroes taken alive in a recent attack upon a village at a little distance from his own. Sometimes these forays in quest of negroes to sell are on a very large scale, and then they are called slave-hunts. The king of one negro country collects a large army, and makes an expedition into the territories of another negro king, ravaging and making prisoners as he goes. If the inhabitants make a stand against him, a battle ensues, in which the invading army is generally victorious. As many are killed as may be necessary to decide that such is the case; and the captives are driven away in thousands, to be kept on the property of the victor till he finds opportunities of selling them. In 1794, the king of the southern Foulahs, a powerful tribe in Nigritia, was known to have an army of 16,000 men constantly employed in these slave-hunting expeditions into his neighbors' territories. The slaves they procured made the largest item in his revenue.
