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Part One

THE AFRICAN BACKGROUND

Upper: A masterpiece of pre-historic African art found in South Africa and now in the Pretoria Museum. Done about 30,000 years ago and by flint instruments on rock.

Lower: Reconstruction of the skull of an African who lived in the same region about the same period and very likely the type of artist that made this drawing. Modern art critics marvel at the skill and accuracy of these Stone Age artists and declare that nothing finer has been done since. (See Sex and Race, Vol. I, pages 26, 35. 1942.

AFRICA’S GIFT TO THE WORLD

“Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.” (Out of Africa comes something always new) — Ancient Greek saying quoted by Pliny, Roman historian, 23-79 A.D.

“He who has drunk of the waters of Africa will drink again.” — Ancient Arab saying.

“I speak of Africa and golden joys.” — Shakespeare, II Henry IV, v. iii.

“There is Africa and all her prodigies in us.” — Sir Thomas Browne, English physician and author, 1605-1682.

“It is one of the paradoxes of history that Africa, the Mother of Civilization, remained for over two thousand years the Dark Continent. To the moderns Africa was the region where ivory was sought for Europe and slaves for America. In the time of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), as the satirist informs us, geographers in drawing African maps would fill in the gaps with savage pictures. Where towns should have been they placed elephants.” — Dr. Victor Robinson, Ciba Symposia, 1940.

“The African continent is no recent discovery; it is not a new world like America or Australia. … While yet Europe was the home of wandering barbarians one of the most wonderful civilizations on record had begun to work out its destiny on the banks of the Nile. …” (History of Nations, Vol. 18, p. 1, 1906)

To ancient Europe Africa was for fully two thousand years the civilized world. “How low the savage European must have looked to the Nile Valley African looking north from his Pyramid of Cheops,” says Professor Dorsey. When this Wonder of the Ancient World was some two thousand years old, Greece, first part, of the European continent to be touched by civilization, was a wilderness. Athens, later to become the leader in world culture, was as late as 1500 B.C., totally unknown. Civilization came to Greece from Egypt by way of the island of Crete, as Sir Arthur Evans, has shown.

And this civilization was Negroid. For this we have the word of Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), who travelled in Egypt and saw the Egyptians of his day. In Book Two, Chapter 57, he says they were “black” and in Book Two, Chapter 104, they were “black and wooly-haired.” The hair of the Ethiopian he said was “very wooly.” He adds that in other parts of the Near East he visited he saw other nations with the same racial characteristics as the Egyptians. “Several nations are so, too,” he said.

Two thousand years later another famous traveller, Count Volney, said on his visit to Egypt in 1787, that what Herodotus said had solved for him the problem of why the people were so Negroid in appearance and especially the Great Sphinx of Ghizeh, supreme symbol worship and power. Reflecting on the then state of the Egyptians compared with what they had been, he said, “To think that to a race of black men who are today our slaves and the object of our contempt is the same one to whom we owe our arts, sciences and even the very use of speech.” Of the blacks he saw in Upper Egypt among the ruins of the colossal monuments there, he said, “There a people now forgotten discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and wooly hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.” (Oeuvres, Vol. 2, pp. 65-68. 1825; Ruins of Empires, pp. 16-17. 1890).

Upper: The Sphinx as it looked in 1798. (From a drawing by Baron Denon). Lower: As it looks today. Note the pronounced Negroid features.

Two other famous European scholars of that time who saw the Sphinx, Baron Denon and Gustav Flaubert, were of the same opinion. Denon, who made a sketch of it in 1798 said, “The character is African … the lips are thick. Art must have been at a high pitch when this monument was executed.” (Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, vol. 1, p. 140. 1803). Flaubert said (1849), “It is certainly Ethiopian. The lips are thick.” (Notes de Voyage, p. 115. 1910).

With the rise of white racism, whose real aim was to justify the enslavement of the blacks, certain noted scholars denied that the Egyptians were black. They were pure white, such assert. But Herodotus saw them. They did not. Moreover what of the Negroid appearance of certain Egyptian rulers such as I have reproduced in Chapter Three of my Sex and Race, Vol. One? Other leading white scholars, however, are of the same opinion as Volney.

Volney wondered why Europe of his time with Africa so near knew so little about it. The answer is that with the rise of European power chiefly after the earlier Caesars, Africa lessened in importance until it became a land of fable and legend. The blacks and mixed bloods of the north-west part of the continent had a resurgence in the eighth century when the Moors invaded Europe but the rest remained unknown and almost forgotten.

This was true even of Egypt, which had the only remaining one of the Seven Wonders of the World. For instance, the Temple of Amen, most colossal structure of its kind ever built, Together with the adjoining buildings it surpassed in grandeur the Acropolis of Athens and the Foro Romano but was so buried by centuries of wind-blown sand that villagers lived in huts on the top of it entirely oblivious of the architectural marvels beneath their feet. As for the Sphinx all that was seen of its 194 feet length and its 66 feet height was the head and that was being cut off by the action of the sand.

Interest in Egypt was not revived until its invasion by Napoleon in 1798. As for the other buried and decayed civilizations further south as Meroe, Axum, Gida, Zymbabwe, Dhlo-Dhlo in Rhodesia, they were forgotten until our own times. More are being unearthed even now.

As late as Stanley’s time, what was said of Africa was mostly wild imagination. It sounded very much like what the most ancient travellers said of parts of Europe and Asia they visited. Thomas Jefferson actually believed that in Africa the ourang-outang preferred the black woman to his own species. Long after Columbus the legend of Prester John of Ethiopia, “mightiest monarch on earth” persisted. His realm was said to extend to India as well as the Middle East. He “surpassed in riches all other potentates and no less than sixty kings were his vassals.” Maps of Columbus’ time and much later showed Ethiopia extending as far south as the Dominion of South Africa. The South Atlantic, the unknown sea over which Columbus sailed to reach the new world, was known as the Ethiopian Ocean. The Persian Gulf was first known as the Ethiopian Sea. Arabia was then a part of Ethiopia.

As for West Africa, Songhay with its capital, Timbuctoo, which flourished in 1500 A.D., and was more advanced than most countries of Western Europe, was known only to rare schollars. Other civilizations as the Mandingo Empire, Yoruba, and Ife were totally forgotten. Ghana, one of the greatest, had its name corrupted to Guinea. Then the world’s richest producer of gold, its name was given to England’s largest gold coin — the guinea. All that part of Africa came to be known as the Slave Coast.

Prince Rahotep, about 3000 B.C., of Egypt.

Upper Tirhaqua (Taharka) Ethiopian ruler of Egypt and conqueror of Palestine, 525 B.C. (Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen). Lower: Egyptians of 1180 B.C. and their dress.

Interest in Africa was not really revived until the nineteenth century when warships of the so-called Barbary States dominated in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and forced the United States to pay tribute to them to sail those waters; also the seizure of Algeria by France in 1830. But it wasn’t until the 1870’s that the interest of the West, and principally of the United States, was really captured. What did this was Stanley’s search for Livingstone. Stanley’s sensational dispatches to the New York Herald and the English press aroused the European powers to the immense potentialities of this undeveloped continent and a race for Africa began that reminds one of that for America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Stanley’s tales and use of the term “Darkest Africa,” made it appear a land of wildest savagery. It was not until the 1910’s that a German scholar and explorer, Leo Frobenius, by his researches, restored humanity to the people of Africa, and changed the popular concept for those minds susceptible to change. In his principal work “Und Afrika sprach,” translated into English as “The Voice of Africa,” Frobenius urged:

“Let there be light!

“Light in Africa. In that portion of the globe to which the stalwart Anglo-Saxon Stanley gave the name of ‘dark’ and ‘darkest’. Light upon the people of that continent whose children we are accustomed to regard as types of natural servility with no recorded history.” But “The spell has ben broken. The buried treasures of antiquity again revisit the sun.” He gives abundant proof of rich archaeologic and other finds, which since have been supplemented by the Mond expedition in the Sudan; the researches of Professor L. S. Leakey in East Africa; and Professors Broom and Dart in South Africa. Leakey discovered remains of the Boskop Man, a Bushman type of some 30,000 years ago; and Broom and Dart types that go still farther back. Their researches appear to bear out what an earlier anthropologist, Prichard, said in his “Physical History of Man,” namely, “The primitive stock of men were probably Negroes and I know of no argument to be set on the other side.” Europe, itself, when it was still joined to Africa, was tropical and was inhabited by Negroes. Abundant evidence of them have been found as far north as Russia. I have given in my other books, principally the first volume of Sex and Race, what leading archaeologists have said on this together with pictures of their finds.

As regards the title, “Africa’s Gift to America,” it is fitting to recall, also, that Africa played a role, perhaps the chief role in the earliest development of America — a period that antedates Columbus by many centuries, namely Aztec, Maya and Inca civilizations. About 500 A.D. or earlier, Africans sailed over to America and continued to do so until the time of Columbus. This does not call for any particular stretch of the imagination. Africa is only 1600 miles distant from South America with islands in between among them St. Paul and Fernando Noronha. This also wasn’t as great a feat as that of the Polynesians (also a Negroid people) who crossed the Pacific to Easter Island, off the coast of Chile.

Most United States archaeologists will deny that Negroes could possibly have been here before Columbus even though figures with pronounced Negro features appear on the most ancient American monuments. They say that the American Indian is of Mongolian stock, having come by way of the Bering Strait. This might be true of the North American Indians but it certainly is not of those that lived below the Rio Grande.

If we say that the Negro wasn’t here before Columbus, why the typically Negro faces on the monuments? Deny that they were here and the only explanation left is that the American artist before Columbus dreamed up those features. Yes, one must either deny it or be forced to make an explanation as ridiculous as that made by Ignatius Donnelly in his book, “Atlantis,” published in 1882. Donnelly’s theory was that the New World was peopled from the western part of the Old, and in proof gives pictures of Negroes on the ancient monuments. He calls these “idols.” But to square with the doctrine of “Negro inferiority,” he says that these blacks were “slaves” brought from Africa since “Negroes are not a sea-going race.” If the blacks were “idols” the only conclusion left is that ancient Americans worshipped their slaves!

Mameluke and his children from a drawing by Baron Denon. The Mamelukes were the rulers of Egypt at Napoleon’s invasion in 1798. Note Negroid features of the children.

However, most South and Central American archaelogists do agree the Negroes were here before Columbus. I have given in two of my earlier books quotations from these Latin-American scholars and will repeat some of them:

C. C. Marquez says, “The Negro type is seen in the most ancient Mexican sculpture … Negroes figure frequently in the most remote traditions.” Riva-Palacio, Mexican historian, says, “It is indisputable that in very ancient times the Negro race occupied our territory (Mexico) when the two continents were joined. The Mexicans recall a Negro god, Ixtilton, which means ‘black-face’.”

Colonel Braghine says in “The Shadow of Atlantis” that he saw in Ecuador a statuette of a Negro that is at least “20,000 years old … Hitherto the ethnologists imagined that Negroes appeared in the New World only during our own epoch as slaves. Some statues of the Indian gods in Central America possess typical Negro features …”

N. Leon says, “The almost extinction of the original Negroes during the time of the Spanish conquest and the memories of them in the most ancient traditions induce us to believe that the Negroes were the first inhabitants of Mexico.”

As late as 1650 the South Atlantic was called the Ethiopic, or Ethiopian Ocean, and most of Africa as far as South Africa was called Ethiopia.

Columbus in his “third Voyage” tells of seeing Negroes and when Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513, he found Negroes in Panama. Peter Martyr, historian of the expedition, says “These were the first Negroes seen in the Indies.” Balboa found them at war with the Indians and thought they had sailed over from “Ethiopia.” A notable exception to the United States’ archaeologists and their denial that Negroes were here before Columbus was the late Leo Wiener, professor of philology at Harvard University. In his three-volume work “Africa and the Discovery of America,” he gives abundant proof that they were. He says, “The presence of Negroes before Columbus is proved by the representation of Negroes in American sculpture and design; by the occurence of a black nation at Darien early in the 16th Century and more specifically by Columbus’ emphatic reference to Negro traders from Guinea (Ghana), who trafficked in gold alloy of precisely the same composition and bearing the same name (Guanin), is frequently referred to by early writers on Africa.”

Professor Wiener, found that these Negro traders travelled as far north as New England. Their relics have been found in graves there, most notably a pipe with a Negro face.

It is even possible that Columbus had heard of the New World from Africans who had been brought to Spain and Portugal in his time. Furthermore, Columbus spent some time in West Africa just before he left Spain for America. The south-south-west direction he took might be a proof of this.

In the fifteenth century we find other of those periodic influxes of Africans into Europe which began under the Pharaohs. They came this time not as conquerors, like the Moors, but as slaves, principally in Portugal and Spain and as far north as England. The year is 1440 or 1442, fifty years before the discovery of the New World. Having proved so useful, it was inevitable that the Spaniards would bring them to the New World. In 1502 they are in the Caribbean. Their exportation continued until 1865 or later. In those three hundred and sixty-three years an estimated fifty millions were brought. Even a half of that would constitute a very substantial contribution. They were first brought to what is now the United States in 1512, and continued to arrive until 1861. In those three hundred and forty-nine years an estimated fifteen millions came. According to the testimony we shall present from many of the most prominent whites over those centuries the United States could not possibly have been the nation it became without them.

Elizabeth Lawson in her “Study Outline” of some of the early accomplishments of the African peoples names the following

Rock painting (still preserved); rhythmic music; imaginative and poetic folklore. By the Bushmen of South Africa.

Domestication of animals by the Hottentots of South Africa.

Agriculture, and a system of exchange using cattle, sheep, or goats as the medium of circulation. By the Bantu of South Africa.

Gold and silver mining; trade in precious stones; building construction (houses and fortifications); pottery; metal work. By the peoples in the region of the Great Lakes.

Agricultural system, law, literature, music, natural sciences, medicine, and schooling system. In the kingdom of Songhay.

Cotton weaving in the Sudan (as early as the eleventh century).

Leaving consideration of separate portions of the continent and considering Africa as a whole, we may say that the Africans were at one time the greatest metal workers of the world they were the first to smelt iron and use the forge. They were masters of the art of basketry, pottery, and cutlery. They made many contributions to dancing, music, and sculpture. According to some authorities, the stimulus to Greek art came from Africa.

The Negroes brought art and sculpture to prehistoric Europe. They invented many musical instruments, and created sculpture in brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite. They also had a glass factory.

Writing was known in Egypt and Ethiopia and to some extent elsewhere in Africa Over one hundred manuscripts of Ethiopian and Ethiopian-Arabic literature now exist. The Epic of the Sudan is considered by scholars as one of the world’s greatest classics. The Africans also had a rich folklore and store of proverbs, and such tales as the Uncle Remus stories have grown out of this folklore..

First known picture of Timbuctoo, capital of the mighty Songhay Empire of Africa founded 1490 A.D. Southern portion of the City. (Drawn by Rene Caille, French explorer in 1828).

Probably the most lasting and most important of the discoveries of ancient Africa was the smelting of iron, which Africa taught the rest of the world. Franz Boas says:

“It seems likely that at a time when the European was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented and adopted the art of smelting iron. Consider for a moment what this has meant for the advance of the human race. As long as the hammer, knife, the saw, drill, spade, and hoe had to be chipped out of stone or had to be made of shell or hard wood, effective industry and work was not impossible, but difficult. A great progress was made when copper found in large nuggets was hammered out into tools and later on shaped by smelting, and when bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life did not begin until the hard iron was discovered. It seems not unlikely that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing iron ore by smelting were the African Negroes. Neither ancient Europe nor western Asia nor ancient China knew iron, and everything points to its introduction from Africa.”

The great Mosque of Timbuctoo as it appeared in 1828.

Left: Southern part of the Great Wall of Zymbabwe, Rhodesia, South Africa. Built about 2000 B.C. Right: passage to the temple.

Upper parallel passage of Temple, Zymbabwe.

A chamber of the mighty Sun Temple of Amon at Meroe, ancient Ethiopia.

Pyramids of Meroe, Ethiopian civilization of about 3000 B.C. They are the tombs of kings. This region is now Sudan.

Lower left: Ruins of Dhlo Dhlo, one of 150 ancient buried cities of South Africa. Built about 500 B.C.

Loanga, capital of the Kingdom of Loanga, in the region of the Congo, West Africa, from I drawing made about 1650. This City was built before the coming of the white man.

Ruins of Southern Sudan (From Architeichlur der Stadte des Sudan, Tafel 98). (About 400 years old.)

Translation of the above in part: “The Great King, Monomotapa. Very powerful and rich in gold. Several kings are tributary to him. His territory comprises lower Ethiopia. … His empire is very large and has a circuit of 2,400 miles. His court is at Zimboae (Zymbabwe). There are women in his guard. … He has a great number of them in his army which give great help to the men. He also has a great number of elephants. His subjects are black, brave and swift runners, and he has very fast horses. Idolaters, sorcerers, adulterers, and thieves are severely punished.”

Massive head of Negro god from Mexico. Carved about 500 A.D.

Another of the five gigantic heads of Olmec deities. Weight about five tons. From full-size reproduction in the American Museum of Natural History, New York.

Negroes in America before Columbus: Upper left: Head of god from Tenochtitlan, Mexico. Right: Figure found in ancient Indian grave in Connecticut.

Lower left: Massive head from Yucatan (National gallery, Washington). Right: California Native before Columbus.

THE AFRICANS IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA THE FIRST EUROPEANS

“What would have been the fate of the New World had there been no Africa?” — Jose Antonio Saco, Spanish-American historian.1

“What would have been the fate of the Southern portion of the British American possessions had the African not come?” — J. W. DuBose.1a

At the founding of Santo Domingo its first town in 1496, the New World, from Canada to Argentina (excepting small areas in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru), was but one vast wilderness. Its most urgent need was labor — hard manual labor to fell forests, build roads, towns, and homes, grow crops, and work in the mines. Would the Spaniard have done these, asks Saco. He replied that they were adventurers in search of loot — gold, silver, precious stones — and were thus by nature unfitted for manual work. Besides, there seemed little reward then for industry of that kind. Robert Beverly of Virginia, writing as late as 1705, said, “The discouragements were enough to terrify any man.”² Life was tough. Forty-four of the Pilgrim Fathers died in their first winter in America and Governor Bradford said of the survivors, “scarce fifty remained and of these were only six or seven sound persons.” George Thorpe, a highly educated colonist thought, however, that despondency was the real cause. He said in 1621, “More do die here of the disease of the mind than of their body.”

But even if the Spanish newcomers were diligent, Spain, of herself, could have done little. What with her continuous wars, she hadn’t the immigrants to spare. The only labor available was that of the Indians, whose enslavement began at once. And there were millions of them. Could they have been counted on? The blunt truth is that the first colonists, Spaniards and English, were able to do little with them. First, they were unfitted by their mode of life for the hard work needed of them. The male Indian was a hunter not a laborer. Hard work was left to the women. As Duke de la Rochefoucald-Liancourt wrote as late as the 1790’s, “Among the Indians the husband does not work at all; all the laborious services are performed exclusively by the wife.”^2a There hadn’t been any need among them for such labor as the whites demanded. What Beverly said of the Virginia Indians was generally true of all Indians. “They had escaped,” he said, “the first curse, of getting their bread by the sweat of their brows; for, by their pleasure, alone, they supplied all the necessities; namely by fishing, fowling, and hunting; skins being their only clothing … living without labor and only gathering the fruits of the earth.” This would be even more true of those in the warmer regions, settled by Spain. Thomas Jefferson didn’t think very highly of them either. He said they were “useless, expensive, ungovernable allies.”³

The Spaniards considered Indians just one step above the beast. They called them gente sin razon. Finding them unwilling and useless laborers, they massacred them and fed their flesh to dogs. Las Casas’ account of this is one of the most horrifying of all documents on man’s inhumanity to man. They even sent Indians to be sold in Europe. Columbus, himself, took 400 for sale there in 1498.⁴

The early American whites were almost as cruel. Connecticut whites massacred the Pequot Indians. Infants were torn from their mother’s breast and hacked to pieces. The heads of the parents were chopped off and kicked about in the streets. Governor Bradford wrote, “It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same and terrible was the stink and stench thereof. But the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice and they (the whites) gave praise thereof to God.”

Less than a century and a half after Columbus, the Indians were virtually extinct in such older colonies as Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Jamaica. Saco thinks that had their exclusive use continued they would all have perished everywhere.

The failure of the Indian to fit into white civilization comes right down to our day. In 1958, when leaders, representing sixty-five tribes, met in a National Congress of American Indians in New York, one spokesman called his people “the sickest, poorest, least educated people in the United States today.”⁵ And at that, Indians are further advanced in the United States than anywhere else in the New World.

The Navajos of Arizona live in filthy log huts with dirt floors, smoke holes, and old kerosene drums for stoves. Those of Great Falls, Montana, live in awful squalor. The Indians in Nevada lived below the level of the poorest I saw in any part of North Africa. Of course, thanks chiefly to oil, there are wealthy Indians in Oklahoma. In Montana are well-to-do cattlemen. But the general standard of the Indian, as I saw it, even now in New York State, is no higher than that of the average northern Negro a century ago. Besides, of the millions of Indians who were in the United States at the arrival of Ponce de Leon in 1512, there were in 1950 only 343,910, of which a very small percentage is of original stock.

In all fairness, it must be said that it was largely the white man’s fault why the Indian didn’t get along with him or adopt his ways. The Indian to whom hospitality was a creed, welcomed the whites at first but soon found they had but one idea — loot. One of the first acts of the Pilgrim Fathers on touching American soil was to steal corn from them. Nathaniel Morton, their historian, tells how when the Pilgrims stopped at Provincetown and the Indians ran away, the Pilgrims, seeing “divers fair Indian baskets filled with corn” took them back to the ship as the Hebrew spies of the Bible did the grapes of Eschol.⁶ This was typical of all that followed. Mark Twain rightly said that the Pilgrims on landing “fell on their knees and then fell on the aborigines.” These “salvages,” as they called them, had no rights that a Christian European was bound to respect. Had the Pilgrims touched some European shore and seen there baskets of corn, wouldn’t they have considered that theft? Later they were to capture Indians and sell them as slaves in the West Indies.

As a result Indians all over the New World developed an apartheid psychology. Patrick Henry tried to overcome that in Virginia by proposing intermarriage, but nothing came of it. Over all the two Americans, Indians still live to themselves. The Indian reservations in America foster this apartness even thought most of the dwellers there are only traditionally Indian. For instance, the Shinnecock Indians of Long Island, among whom I have been, are indistinguishable from Harlem Negroes. According to Virginia law, an Indian is only so on the reservation. The real cause of the Indian’s backwardness is his pride of race — the feeling that he is the first American. One finds a parallel between him and the poor whites of the Tennessee mountains (the hill-billies) and the poor barefooted whites of some British West India islands. The wretched poor-whites of Barbados—the Red-Legs—are extremely proud of their descent from the Irish slaves sent there by Cromwell and keep off to themselves.

In short, events have proved Saco was right when he said that had Indian labor been depended on, the New World wouldn’t have been what it is.

THE NORTH EUROPEAN

Saco spoke chiefly of the South European and what he hadn’t done. What of the North European?

He, too, lived in a greater or less degree of comfort at home. Thus it was only the most adventurous and desperate who would tear themselves away to go to a wild land. The discouragements, to quote Beverly again, were “enough to terrify any man that could live easy in England from going to provoke his fortune in a strange land.”⁷

Gondomer, writing in 1612, said, “This colony (Virginia) is held in such bad repute that not a human can be found to go there in any way whatever.” He cites the case of two Negroes of London, brought before the Mayor for theft. The Mayor told them they could be hanged, but he would pardon them on condition that “they should go and serve the King and Queen in Virginia, they replied that they would much rather die on the gallows here and quickly than to die slowly so many deaths in Virginia.”⁸

The first Englishmen who went to Virginia had positively no intention of settling there. Such a land was no place of abode for them.^8a They had fancied America was like India with plenty of gold, diamonds, and silk, and expected to return laden with loot. Which they didn’t. They called themselves “gentlemen adventurers” and would have scorned the kind of labor that settlement demanded.

MOST EARLY SETTLERS WERE CONVICTS

If then the colony was to be peopled, how could it be? Stockholders in the Virginia venture found the answer. Use it as a place of punishment. Ship the convicts and others of England’s unwanted there. Why hang a strong man for stealing a shilling or breaking into a shop when you could use his labor? In 1611, Governor Dale urged James I to banish all condemned persons to Virginia. Before that they were shipped to India. But the voyage round the Cape was long and costly. America was so much nearer. Those from Oxford Gaol were sent and young people with previous criminal records.

And so as slavery lessened cannibalism, transportation to America made less work for the English hangman. One can imagine the rage of sadistic Chief Justice Jeffries, who used to send offenders to the gallows in droves, at this arrangement.

Later, the Committee of Trade of New York petitioned the authorities to send to New York all prisoners to be transported from Newgate Prison.⁹ It is doubtful, says Alexander Brown, if any other class of white labor could have been secured to open up Tide-water Virginia at that time than such as were sent.” And these were unsatisfactory.¹⁰ “It is a fact,” said the American Historical Review, “that the transportation of convicts was a regular and systematic pursuit through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”¹¹ An estimated 20,000 of these felons came to Maryland alone between 1737 and 1767, among them 115 on the York from Newgate Prison, March 22, 1739. Their names are given.¹²

Of course, all sent were not actual criminals. Some were debtors, others political dissidents, prisoners of war, labor agitators and the like. Some might have stolen only a loaf of bread or whitened farthings to make them look like sixpences. But a good many were murderers, robbers, forgers, counterfeiters, house-burners, highwaymen and the like. Most of these convicts came from Newgate Prison. A reading of Rayner and Crooks’ five - volume “Newgate Calendar” will give the type of usual criminal there at the time.

It cannot be denied either that deportation to America was England’s favorite way of getting rid of her loose women. The first ones sent were undoubtedly this kind. Narcissus Luttrell, writing in his diary, Thursday, November 17, 1692, tells of eighty such women being sent to Virginia. He mentions a ship “going for Virginia in which the magistrates had ordered 50 lewd women out of the houses of correction and 30 others who walked the streets after 10 at night.”¹³ Chambers mentioned another shipment of Scotch prostitutes in 1695.¹⁴

England didn’t care whether such women were given to whites or Negroes. In 1787, when 351 ex-slaves were being sent from England to Sierra Leone, West Africa, the authorities picked up all the loose women they could find on the streets of Portsmouth, some sixty of them, herded them aboard, and had them married to the blacks. An Englishwoman, Mrs. A. M. Falconbridge, who saw these women in Sierra Leone four years later, tells of them.¹⁵

Leading Englishmen and Americans protested vigorously. “It is a shameful and unblessed thing,” said Bacon, “to take the scum of people and wicked and condemned men to be the people with whom ye plant.” ¹⁶

The American Mercury, February 14, 1720, says of the arrival of “above 180” of these “malefactors” from the prisons of Newgate and Marshalsea, “These ways of transporting villains amongst such a flourishing people is to lessen our improvements and industries by filling the vacancies of honest men with tricking, thieving, and designing rogues who will hardly be brought to get their livelihood by such laborious and settled means.” The Mercury, October 29, 1720, lamented that the plantations “cannot be ordered to be better populated than by such absolute villains and loose women, as these proved to be by their wretched lives and criminal actions, and if they settled anywhere in these parts can only by natural consequence leave bad seeds amongst us.”

The Virginia Gazette, May 24, 1751, says “When we see our papers filled continually with accounts of the most audacious Robberies, the most cruel Murders and other infinite villainies perpetrated by the Convicts transported from Europe, what melancholy and what terrible Reflections must it occasion. … These are some of thy Favours, Britain. Thou are called the Mother Country; but what good Mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt them with infectious vices and to murder the rest.”

In 1753, Benjamin Franklin complained that English and German jails were being emptied in America. He wrote the London Chronicle in 1769, “Their emptying their jails in our settlements is an insult and a contempt, the cruelest that ever one people offered to another.” He threatened to send King George a cargo of rattlesnakes in return.

Chief Justice Stokes of the Colony of Georgia wrote, “The Southern colonies are overrun with a swarm of men from the eastern parts of Virginia and North Carolina, distinguished by the name of Crackers. Many of these people are descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times and inherited so much profligacy from their ancestors that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth.”¹⁷

So many desperadoes and others were sent that the American colonies came to be regarded as Australia was to be after 1787 or Devil’s Island in our time. The celebrated Dr. Samuel Johnson said in 1769, “They (the Americans) are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”¹⁸

Johnson was undoubtedly prejudiced against America. He hated slavery. In his “Taxation No Slavery,” he asked, “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” But James D. Butler, who went into the subject thoroughly, says Johnson wasn’t altogether wrong. “His research,” says Butler, “has filled him with surprise that our colonial convict element was so large. He is inclined to confess that English views on this matter have been more correct than those prevalent in America. He cannot wonder that Johnson, who was employed in editing the Gentleman’s Magazine, had hundreds of times chronicled the reprieve of gallows-birds that they might be made American colonists, should hold in low esteem the regions they pervaded and peopled. It seems more natural that he should speak as he did and declare that he could love everybody but an American.”¹⁹

In its May issue, 1747, this magazine reported that 887 convicts had been shipped to America to date that year.

Views as that of Dr. Johnson, naturally deterred the more respectable type of colonists. But many of the latter began to arrive, these mostly indentured servants, semi-slaves, who sold themselves for a number of years. The Germans and Pennsylvania Dutch, made especially good immigrants.

Another forced type of immigrant were the kidnapped, chiefly children, husbands and wives who were in the way, and heirs to fortunes and titles. One of the latter, James Annesley, tells how he was held as a slave in his “Memoirs of An Unfortunate Nobleman Returned from A Thirteen Years’ Slavery in America, 1743.” These latter were slaves for life.

France also sent her unwanted to the New World. Fleurian, an official, complained of the quantity of criminals being sent to Louisiana and on May 9, 1720, the French Council of State ordered that no more “vagabonds, criminals and cheats” be sent there. Instead they were to go “to the other colonies.” (Louisiana Hist. Quar. Vol. 1-3, p. 124. 1917-18).

It is clear from the foregoing that the earliest immigrants to the United States, English predominating, made up chiefly of a few aristocrats, “gentlemen,” debtors, kidnapped, political prisoners, prostitutes and the outright vicious, added up to a source of manual labor that left much to be desired.

PILGRIMS AS DRUNKS AND SODOMITES

Even the early pilgrims of New England though very pious, or were forced to appear so, weren’t all the hardworking, very desirable characters we’ve been led to believe. Governor Bradford, writing in 1642 of the severity of punishments in his colony, said, “And yet all this could not suppress the breaking out of sundry notorious sin, especially drunkenness and uncleanliness, not only incontinence between persons unmarried, for which many both men and women have been punished sharply but some married persons, but that which is even worse, sodomy. …”²⁰ Nevertheless Mayflower ancestry is still considered the highest in the United States.

The Saturday Evening Post, November 29, 1958, in an article, “Let’s Have Less Nonsense About the Pilgrims,” quotes Professor Morison of Harvard on the great amount of “bunk” written about them.

The very presence of Indians, badly armed, who could be forced to do the rough work, had a tendency to make even some of the most industrious colonists shiftless. The presence later of the Negroes made great numbers positively indolent. What Colonel William Byrd of Virginia said of this in 1736 will be given later.

England continued to empty her jails in America until 1783. That, however, was the year of America’s independence and when two shiploads of convicts arrived, she refused to let them land. As a result London’s Newgate Prison overflowed. Knapp and Baldwin say in Newgate Calendar, “The year 1783 which gave independence to America crowded the prisons to a degree never before known.” (Vol. 3, p. 124, 1824-28.)

Finally in this matter of colonization there was a factor more important than the type of immigrant, good or bad, which came. It is that Europe hadn’t the populatioh to spare. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) had left most of the nations, including England and France, weaker. The War of the Spanish Succession that followed depeopled Europe still more. One nearby continent had millions available, whose people could be dragged off with impunity, and who, though called heathen, were free from vice and crime, and needed neither bolt nor bar to protect their posessions from one another: Africa.

NOTES

1. Esclavitud de la raza africana, t. 1, pp. 77-78, 1879.

la. Life and Times of Yancey, p. 176. 1892.

2. Hist. and Present State of Virginia, para. 3.

2a. Travels in America, etc., Vol. 1, p. 156. 1799.

3. Ford II, 88. 1776.

4. Bolton and Marshall. Coloni. of N. America, p. 23, 1921.

5. N. Y. Times, March 3, 1958.

6. New England Memorial, pp. 40-41. 1926 ed.

7. Hist. and Present State of Virginia, para. 65.

8. Brown, Alex. First Republic in America, p. 219. 1898.

8a. Colonial Civilization of N. America, pp. 31, 33, 1949.

9. White Servitude in New Jersey. Americana, Vol. 15, p. 26, 1921.

10. Brown, Alex., p. 249.

11. Transportation of Convicts to the American Colonies, Vol. 23, p. 232. 1933-34.

12. Maryland Maga. of History. A List of Convicts Transported to America. Vol. 43, pp. 55-60. 1948.

13. Brief Hist. Relations (1678-1714), Vol 2. 1857.

15. Voyages to Sierra Leone, 1791-2-3, pp. 64-66. Utting, F. A. Sierra Leone, p. 81, 1931.

16. D’Auvergne, E. B. Human Livestock, p. 160. 1933.

17. Documentary Hist. of American Indus. Society, Vol. 2, p. 165, 1910.

18. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Vol. 3 p. 36. 1824.

19. British Convicts shipped to America, p. 33. 1896.

20. Hist. of the Plymouth Plantation, p. 459. 1898 ed.

AFRICA AS THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATION OF THE UNITED STATES

“The discovery of African labor was an American enterprise. It was the introduction of a hitherto unknown muscular force, proving on trial to be the most perfect agent of production then known to commerce … African labor fixed with eagerness the marvellous power in the varied and exhaustless wealth of the South.” — J. W. DuBose.

The United States, both as a colony and a young nation, wasn’t highly thought of in Europe. When Thomas Jefferson was president he offered to give a site in Washington to any European nation that would build a legation on it; none accepted. Many leading writers even considered the new nation hopeless, among them Count Gobineau, Sydney Smith, and James McSparran. Gobineau was expressing a sentiment long popular in Europe when he said “Americans represent the most varied specimens of the races of Old Europe of whom the least possible can be expected. They are the refuse of all the ages—Irish; Germans, often mixed-blood; some French; and Italians, who outnumber all the others. The mixture of all these degenerate types, gives, and will continue to give birth to new ethnic confusions. These mixtures have in them nothing good. Italian, Frenchman, Anglo-Saxon will amalgamate in the Southern States with the Indian, Negro, Spaniard and Portuguese already there. From such a mixture one can imagine nothing but horrible racial results—nothing but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most degraded beings.”¹ Still another writer called America, “the graveyard of the white race,” and American-born Bayard Taylor said an American is “an Anglo-Saxon relapsed into barbarism.”

In the Bible it was asked what good could come out of Nazareth. In a similar vein, Sydney Smith, celebrated writer and wit, asked in 1820, “In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or sleep in American blankets?”²

But less than a century after that, America was not only doing all it was said she couldn’t do, but had taken the lead of all the nations on earth. Indeed, the rise of America from a wilderness over which roamed Indians and buffaloes to world power; and from a people once so pressed by hunger that some were driven to cannibalism³ to a nation with enormous surpluses of food is nothing short of the miraculous. Britain took 1920 years to become the world’s foremost power—1643 years from Julius Caesar’s invasion, 55 B.C., to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; and another 277 years to Waterloo, 1815. The United States took only 353 years, that is, from the founding of St. Augustine, Florida, to the end of World War I.

Coming centuries later, America had, of course, the advantages of man’s knowledge accumulated since but she had also some terrific disadvantages, not the least of which was the long struggle with the Indians, which sometimes ended in massacre of the colonists as in Virginia in 1622. In spite of hardships greater than those met by colonists south of the Rio Grande, the British North American colonies, a little over a century after the founding of St. Augustine, took the lead in the New World. Cuba, Hispaniola, Mexico, Puerto Rico, were colonized before the United States. They, too, had the advantage of man’s accumulated knowledge. Why did they drop behind?

Those who attribute human advancement to “race” will say, America was a “white man’s land,” that her racial origin was North European. It is true that the Spaniards and Portuguese, pioneers in the lands to the south, were mixed with Africans from very early times and very much so after the Moorish invasion of 711 A.D., but why were the South Europeans at the top in 1492 and the Nordics so far below them? Also, why did the United States outstrip Canada, which has been and still is, more racially Nordic?

THE REASON FOR AMERICA’S ADVANCE

Why did America take the lead so early in the New World? The answer is Trade.

Trade in what? The reply to that sounds so utterly preposterous now that one must be bold to state it. However, there were those living then who did not hesitate to say it as well, as certain candid writers of our time. It was trade in Molasses. A pro-American bulletin of 1731 said, “The molasses trade is the most (if not the only valuable one) of New England.”⁴ And John Adams, second president of the United States, said, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence.”⁵ He added that Washington also thought highly of molasses. Which Washington certainly did. In 1776, he sent one of his slaves, Tom, by a ship-captain to be exchanged for molasses. (Washington, Writings of, Vol. 2, p. 211. 1889)

THE MOLASSES TRADE

Why molasses? Molasses meant rum. Why rum? Rum was for exchange of Africans on the African West Coast. In short, it was the sale of Africans in the New World—the Slave Trade—that laid the financial foundation of the United States. It was Africa’s great gift to America.

More will be said of this in the proper place.

THE COMING OF THE AFRICANS

Africa as a source of labor was discovered by the Portuguese in 1440, that is, for the period of which we are speaking. The first batch of Africans brought to Lagos, Portugal, sold readily, as Azurara, an eyewitness, tells us. They proved so useful and were brought in such numbers, that before long Southern Portugal was peopled largely by them and their mulatto offspring. Spain, Italy, France, and even England, were soon importing them, too. A century of almost continuous wars had depleted their populations.

When Columbus and the first Spaniards came, it was inevitable that Africans should be with them. But since there was no intention then of using them on a vast scale, only a few were brought in 1502. Since there were plenty of Indians, why bring in other labor? But as was said, Indian labor soon proved unsatisfactory.

The use of Negroes came about thus: Good Bishop Las Casas (1474-1566) seeing the Indians dying under the tasks imposed on them, suggested the Africans instead—a step that has made Las Casas go down in history as the father of the African slave trade. He lived to regret it bitterly. He said in his old age that had he known its consequences, “he wouldn’t have done it for the world.”⁶

Orders came to use Negroes instead. Herrera de Tordesillas (1559-1625) says “they were more useful. The work of one Negro was equal to that of four Indians.”⁷ That order was issued again ten years later. Africans became such a necessity that in 1540, when Charles V ordered their liberation, the command was ignored. Herrera tells of their great vitality as compared with the Indian. “They flourished in the Spanish Isles so well,” he says, “that they were thought to be nearly immortal as for some time no one had seen one die except by hanging. Like oranges they seemed to have found their natural soil.”⁸

The labor of the Africans now became the most important single factor in the development of the New World. On them fell the crude work. And more than a little of the skilled one. Some had brought with them their ancient skills in metals, weaving, carving and agriculture. And as a colony grew, so grew the call for them. Nations fought one another on the high seas to seize their cargo of Africans. The Dutch counted heavily on such captures for their colony of New Netherland (New York).

Louisiana Historical Quarterly quotes Dixon, an official of 1722,” It is absolutely necessary to send a great many Negroes here … Just as the islands of American were established by Negro slaves Louisiana will never be established until a sufficient number of them is sent.” (Vol. 1-3, p. 101. 1917-18)

Planters would say, “Negroes are the lifeblood of the plantations. Without them we could not exist.” Southern planters, quoting the Bible, called Africans “the one thing needful.” Others said, “They are the sinews and strength of the Western world; the lack of them, the great obstruction.” Peter Stuyvesant, Dutch governor of New York, said, “Everything is by God’s blessing in good condition and in consequence of the employment of Negro slaves.” Cotton Mather, New England divine, when presented with a Negro slave, said in his diary, December 13, 1706, that it was “a mighty smile from Heaven upon my family.” In 1724, Virginia petitioned the King to let them have more Negroes, they being especially needed for the settlement of two new counties.⁹ Patrick Henry declared that while he would not and could not justify slavery, he found Negroes a necessity. “I am drawn along,” he said, “by the general inconvencience of living without them.”¹⁰ In his address to the Virginia Convention, June 24, 1788, he deplored “the necessity of holding his fellow-men in bondage” but that “their manumission is incompatible with the felicity of the country.¹¹ Thomas Jefferson and other humane slaveholders said much the same. James Parton, writing of the Negroes in the 1770’s, said, they were indispensable. “What a debt we owe to the jolly, amiable, indispensable Negro,”¹² he said.

Georgia is a striking example of a colony that couldn’t get along without the African. Named for George II, it was founded in 1732 as a refuge for persecuted Protestants, the poor, and the unfortunate, among them some who had run afoul of the law. The first colonists, some 2,000 in number were pricipally English, German Lutherans, Italians, Swiss, Portuguese and Jews. Two of the principal conditions were no African slaves and no rum. One of its leaders, John Wesley, father of Methodism, and a great opponent of slavery, had said, “The slave trade is the execrable sum of all villainies.”

Another reason for barring Negroes is the following, by the Earl of Egmont, who said in his Journal (1738-39), “where there are Negroes, a white man despises work, saying, what, will you have me slave and work like a Negro?”

Due de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a visitor in America, observed as late as 1795, or twelve years after the Revolution, “In a country abounding in slaves the white do not apply much to labour. Their ambition consists in buying Negroes; they buy them with the first sum of money they get and when they have two of them leave off working themselves.”^13a

The sturdier whites of Georgia — Scotch Highlanders, and the Salzburgers as well as the clergy, opposed slavery and petitioned the trustees not to allow it. White servants were brought in but as Johnson says they were “a shiftless, saucy group, some filthy and infected with itch, they often deserted their masters to hang around the town to be fed from the common store. … The plague of idle, roguish servants increased daily. Their worthless character strengthened the demand for slaves. …”^13b

Without Negroes, Georgia rapidly declined. Its 2,000 souls dwindled to six or seven hundred. The Earl of Egmont wrote, “The industrious went away because they found that without Negroes they could not subsist. … Numbers who have left the colony would return if Negroes were allowed and many from Carolina would do so, too. … If Negroes were allowed, the colony would people apace. …”^13c

Twenty-nine years after its founding, Edmund Burke, celebrated English statesman, found the Georgians in “a famished condition.” He said, “They neglected their agriculture to hunt for gold and provoking the Indians by their unguarded behavior.” They found the climate too warm, he said, “the consequence of which was that the great part of their time, all the heat of the day, was spent in idleness.”^13d

Another writer of that time said, “In spite of all endeavor to disguise this point it is as clear as light itself, that Negroes are as necessary to the cultivation of Georgia as axes, hoes, or any other utensil of agriculture.”

Matters got to a state where the colony either had to be abandoned or the African brought in. It had had three previous failures. Bringing in whites each time simply did not help. Even the staunchest opponents of slavery now gave in. In 1748, one of them, the Rev. Brozius, wrote the trustees, “Things are now in such a melancholy state I must humbly beseech Your Honours not to regard any more our, or our friends’ petition against slavery.”¹⁴

George Whitfield, most dynamic preacher of his time, a close associate of Wesley, and once a bitter opponent of slavery, also came out in favor of it. He saw how the neighboring colony of South Carolina was prospering thanks to the Africans. Proving from the Bible that slavery was approved by God, he said in a letter, March 22, 1751, “Hot countries cannot be cultivated without Negroes. What a flourishing country Georgia might have been had the use of them been permitted years ago! How many white people have been destroyed for want of them and how many thousands of pounds spent to no purpose at all.” (Reproduced in Tyerman, Life and Times of John Wesley. Vol. 2, p. 132. 1878). Whitfield, who had left the colony for England, returned to it, bought slaves, and even left them to his heirs in his will.

The Negroes, brought in, saved the once “drooping colony” so much so that twenty-five years later it was able to play a role of more than a little importance in the Revolution.

Another great advantage to Southern econnomy was that the slaves were not only capital and labor combined but they were a form of capital that could look to its own welfare. A strong healthy, intelligent slave was the finest currency. One such might fetch $2,000, or about five times that now. In 1785, Virginia valued her slaves at 6,370,400 pounds sterling, or $31,-292,000.¹⁵ According to Thomas Jefferson, she had 270,762 of them. The free population, of whom some were Negroes, was 296,852.

General Pinckney of South Carolina said at the National Convention in 1787 that “South Carolina has in one year exported to the amount of 600,000 pounds sterling, all of which was the fruit of the labor of the blacks.” And whenever the price of cotton, tobacco, and rice, rose so did the price of slaves. Slave-grown tobacco was once Virginia currency. At the first Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Southern slave states declared their wealth in Negroes made them equal of the free New England ones. Butler of South Carolina said, “The labor of a slave in South Carolina was as productive and as valuable as that of a free man in Massachusetts. Wealth ought to be considered equal to the number of free men in New England; States ought to have weight in the Government in proportion to their wealth.” Lowndes of South Carolina said that the North with its few slaves “want to exclude us from this advantage.” that is, the South’s real wealth.¹⁶

The Negro was, in short, the backbone of the South. To quote J. W. DuBose, eminent authority on Confederate history, again, “What would have been the fate of the Southern portion of the British American possessions had the African not come? Whence would have come the immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to America; and where would they have settled had not African labor been available? African labor … was the introduction of a hitherto unknown muscular force, proving on trial to be the most perfect agent of production then known to commerce.” (Life and Times of Yancey, pp. 159, 170. 1892)

THE MOLASSES TRADE

The events leading up to the trade in rum and molasses are these: England, with Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595), had taken the lead in the slave trade. The Royal African Company had the monopoly but it was unable to supply the demand and Parliament ordered the trade opened to all British ships “for the well supplying of the plantations and colonies with sufficient numbers of Negroes at reasonable prices.”

New England Yankees who had inherited the maritime spirit of their motherland now entered this trade with such zest that they soon became rivals of the English merchants. The Yankees had discovered that molasses, the best article for making rum, was either being fed to the hogs or thrown away in the French sugar islands of the Caribbean, and therefore could be had very cheaply. The molasses trade, in turn, gave impetus to other New England industries as distillling, fishing, shipbuilding, lumber and horse—and cattle-rearing. In 1708, Governor Cranston of Rhode Island reported that his colony had built 103 ships since 1698. In 1749, Boston had 469 ships tied to the slave trade. G. F. Dow has a special chapter on American ships engaged in the trade.¹⁷ The New England merchants, says Louis B. Wright, had discovered “two commodities which enriched them and their ports, rum and slaves.”¹⁸

Thanks to rum and the slave-trade, New England became commercially dominant in the New World. She not only dominated the Caribbean trade but that of Virginia, the Carolinas, and the rest of the South. She had very few slaves herself. Her climate and agriculture did not make them profitable. In 1776, the six New England colonies had only 16,034 slaves as compared with nearly 300,000 in Virginia alone. Her type of industry made white servants, who were semi-slaves, more profitable. In 1652, Rhode Island abolished Negro slavery, not from humane reasons but because what she gained from it locally was trifling in comparison with what she made from the trade. In abolishing her own slavery, she had specially provided that “nothing in the Act shall extend or be deemed to extend to any Negro or mulatto slave brought from the coast of Africa into the West on board any vessel belonging to this colony.”¹

This was the procedure. New England ships with their cargo of rum would sail to West Africa, where they would exchange it for slaves and such articles they could pick up as gold dust and ivory, thence to the West Indies where they disposed of them at high profit, then return with molasses for more rum, then again to Africa. This was known as the Triangular (or Three-Cornered) Trade. Molasses, be it noted, was slave-produced, too.

Distilling became the chief home industry of New England, especially of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. There were hundreds of distillers. Boston with her then small population alone had sixty-three. But they could not keep pace with the demand.

“The trade in Negroes from West Africa,” says Weeden, “absorbed immense quantities of spirit. The African demand was very importunate.” Letters of ship-captains of the period prove it. In 1752, when Captain Isaac Freeman wrote for a cargo of rum, he was told that he wouldn’t be able to get that quantity even in three months. “There are so many vessels loading for Guinea we can’t get one hogshead of rum for the cash.” Captains were advised to water their rum. One satire ran “Water ye rum as much as possible and sell as much by the short measure as ye can. An overwhelming Providence has been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathen to enjoy the blessings of a gospel dispensation.”

Dow says, “Molasses was the all-important feature of the slaving trade, which required rum as a means of barter for slaves for without molasses there could be no New England rum.” He reproduces letters from ship-captains of the time telling how great a necessity they found rum. There are also letters from distillers. “In whatever branch of trade we now find ourselves,” said W. B. Weeden, “we are impressed by the immense prevalence and moving power of rum, lumber, Negroes … all feel the initiative and moving impulse of rum. … Rum distilling and Negro importation gave more than direct profits to Newport (Rhode Island), great as they were. They gave a tremendous impulse to more than legitimate industry and commerce and compelled the exchange to follow in the wake of the ‘rum’ vessel and slaver.” Molasses, says James Parton, in his “Life of Franklin,” was the basis on which a great part of the commerce of America rested. … The single article of molasses did actually par, and was therefore the equivalent of the bulk of the numberless articles which Yankee traders took to the French West Indies.” (Vol. 2, p. 298. 1865). Pitman says likewise, “In the great slave communities to the southward, Americans found the only great and permanent market for all their staples. It was the wealth accumulated from West India trade which more than anything else underlay the prosperity of New England and the Middle Colonies.”^20a

New England made better rum, sold it cheaper, and pushed it so energetically that it began to displace English rum and even French brandy.

The war of the American Revolution really began in rivalry over the African slave-trade. The American colonies, principally the New England ones, were taking it away from the mother-country principally by using rum as barter for slaves, ivory, gold and other products. This later cartoon from Punch of London illustrates the English viewpoint. America is shown getting all the benefits from Africa; England who started the exploitation is getting nothing. John Bull is asking why.

Yankee success galled not only the slave-trading moguls of Bristol and Liverpool but the British government, itself. Under the Assiento of 1713, England had the monopoly of supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies of the New World. Slave-trading, the profits from slave products, and African trade in general, were very important in the British economy. Karl Marx did not exaggerate when he said, “The population and wealth of England after slumbering for seven hundred years began to develop itself under the influence of slave-acquired capital.” How dared Americans, colonials, to become their rivals, demanded the English. Were not colonies founded for the benefit of the mother-country? To make it still worse the Americans with their trade were helping to develop the colonies of their great rival, France. The British West India planters were especially angry. They joined with the mother country in demanding that Americans either be prohibited from using foreign molasses or from making rum. They presented a petition to Parliament urging an “Act for the better securing and encouraging the trade of His Majesty’s Sugar Colonies in America.”²¹

American interests in London replied, “The trade between the Northern colonies and French islands is absolutely necessary for the continuance and being of the Northern colonies and is so far from being a trade detrimental to Great Britain, that in its natural consequence, it brings great riches to this Kingdom. …

“The British Northern colonies, a laborious, industrious people that furnish a great strength to this nation must grow poor, their trade in general be so greatly reduced that they will be utterly disabled from making returns to England for one-half of the manufactures of this kingdom they now consume. … The Molasses trade is the most (if not the only) valuable one New England hath.”²²

The Americans, in short, wanted free trade. But they protested in vain. Two years later (1733), Parliament passed the Molasses Act (6 George II. Chap. 13), placing a duty of sixpence (about thirty cents) on each gallon of imported molasses, or about half as much as the purchase price. But that was not all. The molasses of the British West Indies was already twenty cents a gallon dearer than the French one. And as if to make it worse there was an export duty on the British molasses. That is, the cost of molasses to the Americans would be double what they had been paying. To make it still worse, the British islands were poorer and could buy much less of New England goods than the French ones. Moreover, the British islands did not produce enough to supply the American demand. F. W. Pitman in “The Development of the British West Indies” gives figures of the times in proof.

The Americans saw ruin ahead. They called it atrocious discrimination. John Adams gave an idea of what the law meant to New England industry: On the seven million gallons of molasses imported annually, Britain would collect about $875,000 a year, a sum worth about ten times that now, he said.

The Rhode Island Assembly sent a strong “Remonstrance” to George II. The colony, it said, had one hundred and fifty vessels engaged in the West India trade and imported “14,000 hogsheads of molasses whereof a quantity not exceeding 2,500 hogsheads” came from the British islands.

Governor Hopkins protested, “Upwards of thirty distil-houses, erected at vast expense for want of molasses must be shut up to the ruin of many families and of our trade in general. Two-thirds of our vessels will become useless and perish upon our hands. Our mechanics and those dependent upon the merchant for employment must seek subsistence elsewhere.” It would affect the mother country, too. He added, “An end will be put to our commerce; the merchants cannot import any more British manufactures, nor will the people be able to pay for those they have already received.”,²³

Massachusetts was equally indignant. Most of her distilleries would have to be closed; seven hundred ships, including fishing ones, would be tied up and some five thousand sailors thrown out of work. Most of New England industry, including fishing, was tied to the slave trade. “The Act,” says Woodrow Wilson, “cut at the very heart of New England trade. … For the vast majority of the merchants, the Act meant financial ruin.”²⁴ Governors of other states, including Colden of New York and Franklin of New Jersey joined in the protest. Talk of severance from Britain began. The American Revolution really started at this time. As Pitman rightly says, “The West India planting interest had laid substantial foundations in the realm of economic life for that great discontent which culminated in the American Revolution.”

Samuel G. Arnold makes it even more emphatic. Of the protest of Partridge, Rhode Island representative in England, he says, “The war-cry of Revolution, which was ere long to rally the American colonies in the struggle for independence was here first sounded by the Quaker agent of Rhode Island to cease only with the dismemberment of the British Empire.”²⁵

In the face of American defiance, England did little to enforce the act. Smuggling continued almost openly for the next thirty-one years. “If,” says Schlesinger “any serious attempt had been made to enforce the statute, the prosperity of the commercial provinces would have been laid prostrate. It was the West India Trade, more than anything else which had enabled them to utilize their fisheries, forests and fertile soil to build up their towns, cities, and to supply cargoes for their merchant marine and to liquidate their indebtedness to British merchants and manufacturers. The entire molasses output of the British islands did not equal two-thirds of the quantity imported into Rhode Island alone. Moreover the prices of the British planters were 25 to 40 per cent higher than the foreign islands.”²⁶ This in addition to the heavy export duty, as was said.

“The terms of the Molasses Act were so drastic,” says Albert Bushnell Hart, “that evasion seemed justifiable.”

Another objection of the Americans was that the Europeans tried to cut in on their trade. Dr. Belknap, writing then, said, “I do not find that European adventurers had any other business here than to procure cargoes of our rum to assist them in carrying on the slave trade.”

The smugglers operated in areas less frequented by the English patrols. And, of course, there was much collusion with the English revenue agents. But the Act, says James Truslow Adams “constituted a perpetual grievance against England. Moreover, as it lowered the moral tone of the community, it decreased the respect for law.”²⁷

So it went on until 1764. The Peace of Paris had just ended Britain’s long war with France and Spain and she was badly in need of revenue to pay her huge national debt. America, at peace, had been growing more and more prosperous. Visitors to America took back to Europe glowing tales of the wealth of its upper-class, “the rich plate, fine mansions, furniture, carriages-and-four, costly wines, silks and satin of the ladies” and generally sumptuous living with troops of slaves to wait on their slightest whim. The English press and Parliament demanded that America be made to help bear the burden. The Molasses Act, now called the Sugar Act, was revived. Britain sent out twenty-seven warships to patrol the New England coasts and soldiers and revenue agents to enforce the act.

American shipping and general commerce at once felt the effect. Providence and Medford, chief slave-ports, suffered heavily. So did other cities as far south as Charleston. One merchant wrote, “What are the people of England going to do with us? Nothing but Ruine seems to hang over our Heads.”

American defiance grew. The Boston Evening Post, July 8, 1765, declared the Act was being enforced so that West Indian Creoles “could roll in gilded equipages through the streets of London at the expense of two million Americans.” James Otis, openly defied Britain. John Adams quoted him with approval. “If the King of Great Britain in person were encamped on Boston Common at the head of 20,000 men, with all his navy on our coasts, he would not be able to enforce it.”²⁸ “The Act of April 5, 1764 can be set down as a landmark in the development of the forces that led to the Revolution,” says Hart.²⁹ And Weeden, “The new enforcement of the Sugar Act was the most powerful cause in exciting the discontent of the colonies.”

Thus the wealth gained from the sale of Africans and their labor not only laid the foundations of America’s commerce, but the attempt to deprive her of the benefits of the slave trade was the most direct cause of the Revolution. The Encyclopedia Britannica says that the Molasses Act “contributed to the beginnings of revolutionary activities in the colonies,” but whoever reads the heated discussion over it will realize that this appraisal is much too low. Note how close all of this happened towards the Revolution.

Rum and slave-trading are not glamorous and patriotic items therefore most popular historians and text-books omit them. Instead, stress is laid on the Stamp Act, which came into being to make up for the loss of revenue on the reduction of the taxes on sugar and molasses. The Stamp Act, long used in England, forced Americans to use stamped paper on all legal documents. It also taxed newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, advertisements, almanacs, playing cards and dice. The Molasses and the Sugar Acts had struck directly at the slave merchants and at the general population only indirectly. But the Stamp Act and the tax on tea affected all, especially the masses, and were thus much more effective issues for capturing general discontent. The real, the underlying irritant, however, was still the rivalry between the slave moguls of New England and those of Bristol and Liverpool. Proof is that the cry for independence continued even after the repeal of the Stamp Act. That and the tax on tea didn’t bring in enough to pay the cost of collection and were abandoned in consequence. Note, also, that John Adams’ statement that “molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence.” was written thirty-five years after that event. In his letter to John Tudor, August 11, 1818, he shows how far more the economic, than the purely patriotic, stirred Americans of his day. Later, we shall see how the importations of Africans and the products they grew were to cause bitterest rivalry and armed conflict among Americans themselves. It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the African and the Afro-American on the United States from 1512 to 1865.

Certain present-day writers of whom one hears little, as Taussig, Weeden, Schlesinger, and Wiener, do tell of the part that slave-trading played in the demand for independence. “Commerce and politics,” says Wiener,³⁰ “were so mixed that rum and liberty were but liquors from the same still.” That “rum was the spirit of ’76” is more than a pun.

The falsifying of this period for patriotism’s sake was amply illustrated in 1925 at the ceremonies commemorating the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Lexington and the ride of Paul Revere and his companion, William Dawes. Vice-President Dawes (descendant of Dawes), General Pershing, ex-Mayor Fitzgerald of Boston and others made patriotic speeches. New York City celebrated with a great gathering at the Church of St. John the Divine at which were a score or more of patriotic organizations as the Daughters of the American Revolution, Sons of the Revolutions, and the Society of Colonial Dames. Of course, not a word was uttered about rum, slavery, and Africa. However, some newspapermen dug into what had really happened and gave something of another story. The New York Times, April 21, 1925, said, “Few, if any of the speeches as yet delivered at Boston or elsewhere, in the course of celebrating the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington have contained any American history except of the kind that used to be in all of our school textbooks and still fills most of them. One or two of the orators indeed have hinted that the men of those early days were a human lot with the ordinary human failings but that is as far as they have gone and for the rest they have proclaimed the standardized theories and the accepted myths and let it go at that.”

Of the ride of Paul Revere and William Dawes, the Times said, “History seems to leave no doubt about one thing; Paul Revere and William Dawes were dispatched on their history-making rides on different routes from Boston to Lexington and Concord. There was nothing in the plan of the patriots who sent them calculated to call out the Minute Men, cause immediate resistance to the British forces and precipiate war. They were sent out quietly to warn Hancock to flee and escape military arrest and also to tell the patriots of those towns to hide their military stores.”

One item the Americans wished particularly to keep out of the hands of the British was rum. The British were seizing all they could of it not only to hurt America’s slave trade but because rum was then an important item in the British soldier’s ration. Now it is significant that Revere’s first stop was at the home of one of the biggest distillers, Isaac Hall, who was also captain of the Medford Minute Men. Frank W. Blair (New York Times, May 2, 1925) thinks that Hall gave Revere a shot of rum that really sped him on his way. Justin Winsor, foremost American historian of his time, says that the popular version of Revere’s ride “paid little attention to the exactness of fact.” Hall was what we would call a bootlegger.

In plain language, therefore, it was the profit from the sale of Africans and the wealth they produced that was the underlying cause of the Revolution. In short, had there been no Africa, the United States might still be attached to Britain as Canada which is older than New England. Or if America did win independence might it not have been delayed like Mexico and Brazil?

Of course, this will sound preposterous to most. But suppose the Americans hadn’t discovered Africa and the Africans as a source of wealth and had remained a poor colony would Britain have singled them out for such crushing taxation? And even if she did would America have been financially strong enough to beat England? The wealth of most of the New England families was founded on the slave trade. John Hancock, great patriot, made his fortune as a slave smuggler. F. W. Taussig in “Rum, Romance and Rebellion,” names several of these families. Colonel Isaac Royall, who gave two thousand acres of land to Harvard made his money that way, too. (Journal of Commerce, Oct. 6, 1865).

ONE ENGLISH VIEW WHY AMERICANS REBELLED

One popular English view was that the Americans did not rebel principally because of taxes but from the arrogance and conceit bred into them from slavery of the blacks. They compensated this way for their own lowly, despised origin, it was said, and had grown so overbearing, so quick to anger and violence, they could no longer submit to authority. Edmund Burke, a great friend of America, himself, gave this as one cause. In his speech “Conciliation with with America” he said that “the vast multitude of slaves” had made “the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty. Freedom is to them (the Americans) not only an enjoyment but a kind of rank.”³¹

This pride was sharpened by the contempt that aristocratic English officials had for native-born Americans and their frequent reference to “convict” origin. Beverly mentions some, Governor Nichols of Virginia, in particular. Nichols called Virginians “Dogs and their wives, Bitches.”³²

Some Americans as Colonel William Byrd of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton did think that the presence of Negroes had made Americans arrogant. Byrd, in a letter to Lord Egmont, July 12, 1736, said the presence of “these Aethiopians amongst us … blow up the pride and ruin the industry of our White People who seeing a rank of poor Creature below them detest work for fear it should make them look like slaves. It disposes them to pilfer, who account it more like Gentlemen to steal than to dirty their hands with Labour of any kind.”³³

Thomas Jefferson, who once had to rebuke his grandson, Jefferson Randolph, for conduct of this sort, wrote, “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny can not but be stamped by it. …”³⁴

Hamilton said, “The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither on reason nor experience.”

One English visitor, Andrew Burnaby in 1759, made much the same observation. He said of the Virginia whites, “Their authority over their slaves renders them vain and imperious and entire strangers to that elegance of sentiment which is so peculiarly characteristic of refined, polished nations. Their ignorance of mankind and of learning exposes them to many errors and prejudices, especially in regard to Indians and Negroes.”³⁵

NOTES

1. I’lnegalite des Races Humaines, Vol. 4 p. 313, 1853.

2. Edinburgh Rev. Vol. 33, Jan. to May 1820, in his review of Seybert’s book on America. McSparran wrote, “America Dissected,” in 1753. Gustavus Myers discussed these detractions in “America Strikes Back.”

3. Captain John Smith (1580-1631) wrote, “So great was our famine that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him; and so did divers ones another boiled and stewed with herbs. And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her and had eaten part of her.” The General Historie of Virginia. The Fourth Booke, p. 294 (1606-1625). Neill E. D., quotes the Virginia Assembly of 1623 in its complaint against Governor Thomas Smythe, “One man killed his wife to eat for which he was burned. Many fed on corpses. “Terre Mariae (Maryland), p. 30. 1867. Other instances of eating corpses and killing Indians and eating them occurred as late as 1846. The Donner party, lost in the Sierras in the dead of winter, was driven to this. State of California Bulletin. The Donner Party Tragedy, pp. 10, 11; Croy, Homer. Wheels West. Stewart G. R. Ordeal by Hunger: Story of the Donner Party, pp. 132-35. 1960. This is significant because one great charge against Negroes was that their ancestors were cannibals.

4. Case of the Northern Colonies, p. 3, 1731.

5. Works of John Adams, Vol. 10, p. 345 ed. by C. F. Adams.

6. Helps, Sir A. Life of Las Casas, p. 67. 1868. Also Encyc. Brit.

7. Hist. Gen. de los Hechos de los Castillanos. Dec. 1, lib. 2, c. 5; Dec. 2, lib. 2, c. 8.

8. Dec. 2, lib. 3. c. 14.

9. Virginia Calendar of State Papers, Vol. 1, p. 206.

10. Quoted by Bancroft, G. Hist. of the U. S., Vol. 4, p 233, 1882.

11. Correspondence of Patrick Henry, V. 1, 3, 1881. Ed. by W. W. Henry.

12. Biography of Benj. Franklin, Vol. 1, p. 2151. 1887.

13a. Travels in North America, etc. Vol. 2, p. 290. 1799.

13b. Johnson, A., Georgia As Colony and State, p. 71. 1938.

13c. Colonial Records of Georgia, Vol. 5, 1738-44, pp. 452, 476, 605.

13d. European Settlements in North America, p. 212. 1762.

14. Quoted by Coulter, Short History of Georgia, p. 64, 1933.

15. Va. Maga. of Hist., Vol. 23, p. 410.

16. U. S. Constit. Convention, 1787, July 11, Vol. 1, pp. 580, 592.

17. Slave Ships and slaving, pp. 255-265, 1927.

18. Colon. Civiliz. of N. America, p. 105, 1949.

19. Rhode Is. Col. Records, VIII, 251-2.

20. Economic and Social History of New Eng., 1745-50, Vol. 2, pp. 584, 641, 753. 1890: Williams, E., Golden Age of the Slave System in England, Jour. of Negro Hist. Vol. 25, pp. 60-106. 1940.

20a. Development of the British West Indies, p. vii. 1917.

21. Case of the Northern Colonies. 1731.

22. Case of the Northern Colonies. Brochure, pp. 2, 3. 1731.

23. Rhode Is. Colonial Records, VI, 381. Field E., State of Rhode Is. and The Providence Plantations, Vol. 1, p. 215.

24. Hist. of the American People, Vol. 4, p. 35. 1918.

25. Hist. of Rhode Island. Vol. 1, p. 124. 1874.

26. The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1773-76, pp. 43-4. 1918.

27. Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776, p. 153. 1923.

28. Works of John Adams, Vol. 10, p. 349.

29. Hart, A. B., Commonwealth Hist. of Mass., Vol. 2, p. 473. 1928.

30. The Rhode Island Merchants and the Sugar Act. New Eng. Quar., Vol. 3, pp. 464-500, 1930. See also: Taussig: Rum, Romance and Rebellion.

31. Works of Ed. Burke, Vol. 1, p. 467. 1864.

32. Hist. and Present State of Virginia, para. 150.

33. American Hist. Review, Vol. 1, p. 89.

34. Notes on Virginia, p. 200.

35. Travels, etc., p. 54.

WERE AFRICANS THE ONLY SLAVES?

Since a great many Americans of African ancestry are sensitive about slavery and an equally great or greater number of Americans of European ancestry are proud that their ancestors once held the ancestors of the former as slaves it might do well at this point to look into that.

Whenever Africans are mentioned, they are usually associated with slavery—natural servitude, as Frobenius says. But what people can be mentioned that were not slaves at some period in their history? Jose Antonio Saco, foremost authority on slavery, names about all of them in his six-volume work, “Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos mas remotos hasta nuestros dias,” (History of Slavery from the Remotest Time to Our Day).

The laboring element of Greece and Rome and even many of the scholars, doctors, and overseers, were slaves. Later the Christian Church, itself, kept slaves as Paul Allard shows in his “Les Esclaves Chretiens.” St. Paul advised one slave, Onesimus, to return to his master and counselled slaves to be obedient to their owners. There is undoubted proof that as early as the fifth century A.D. white people were sold as slaves in Africa. St. Jerome (340-420) wrote, “Who would have believed that the daughters of that mighty city (Rome) would one day be wandering as servants and slaves on the shores of Egypt and Africa.”

In fact, slave,” itself, was first used for white people. It comes from “Slav,” a blond, blue-eyed people, captured by the Germans and reduced to servitude. Slav originally meant “people of glory.” As Gibbon says in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” “From the Luxine to the Adriatic, in the state of captives or subjects” the Slavs overspread the land and their name was degraded “from the signification of glory to that of servitude.” When one encounters “slave” in the French language today it means “a female Slav.” The earlier name for those held in bondage was “serf” from the Latin “servus.” (Some trace it to Greek). In Russia that was the name used. In 1861, 40,000,000 of her serfs or slaves were freed, that is, only four years before the American Negroes. By all accounts they were more debased and treated more barbarously than the American slaves.

It happens, too, that while Europeans and white Americans were raiding Africa for slaves, Africans were raiding the coasts of Europe as far north as Sweden and Finland for slaves and had been doing so for centuries. The evidence on this is abundant and indisputable. For 400 years (1400-1800) collections were taken up in the churches of Europe for ransom of these slaves. The “Ordre Franc de Trintaires” was founded especially for this purpose. Sallee, in Morocco, was the great slave-market for these white captives.

J. G. Jackson, writing in 1809, said, “They (the Moors) carry the Christian captives about the Desert to the different markets to sell them for they soon discover that their habits of life render them unserviceable, or very inferior to the black slaves from Timbuctoo. After travelling three days to one market, five to another, nay, sometimes fourteen, they at length become objects of commercial speculation and the itinerant Jew traders, who wander about Wedinoon to sell their wares find means to barter them for tobacco, salt, a cloth garment, or any other thing.” (Empire of Morocco, pp. 272-81)

Whole peoples with their household goods and cattle were carried away into slavery in ancient times. This scene is from the Monuments of Nineveh.

Frederick Moore says, “There can be no mistake about the records of history, which state that thousands of Christian slaves, many of them British, were sold in the great white market of Sallee.” (Passing of Morocco, 133-34, 1908). Voltaire, who lived that time, tells in the eleventh chapter of Candide of the color of the Moors, (“blacks and mulattoes”) and of their capture and sale of white people.

Mulai Ismael, Emperor of Morocco, an almost full-blooded black, had 10,000 white slaves to build his stables at Meknes and a regiment of whites born in captivity. Abbe Bus-not, who went to see him on a mission sent by Louis XIV, describes his appearance and tells of the white slaves he saw. Other writers of that time as Pidon de St. Olon and Lempriere have done the same.

As late as 1810, white Americans were captured on the high seas and sold at the great slave port of Salee, Morocco. Some were taken inland as far south as Timbuctoo. After America won independence, she had to pay tribute to the North African powers, better known as “the Barbary Pirates,” to sail the North Atlantic. In 1785, two American ships were captured and their crew made prisoners. In October and November 1793, 119 Americans were captured. (Wright, L. B. First Americans in North Africa, p. 23-24. 1945). In 1821, Commodore Decatur freed many Americans there.

Ancient slavery: The Helvetians, a Germanic people, pass the Romans under the yoke after the battle of Lake Leman (from the painting by Gleyre).

(Further details of European captives as far north as Sweden taken to Africa are in “Nature Knows No Color-Line, Chapter Five).

Slavery among the ancients—These white slave-girls who were sold in the slave-markets of Greece and Rome came sometimes from even royal families. Such were usually captives. Horace, Roman poet, 65-8 B.C. mentions three of this kind. He says, “Briseis, though a slave, had power to move Achilles’ heart with her white beauty; “Tecomessa”; and Phyllis of royal blood. Think not, at least that e’er from tainted breed thy darling is sprung.” (Book II, Ode, iv). (Painting by Girard).

A 15th Century conception of Africa with white people held as slaves. (Dapper’s Naukenrige Beschryvinge der Afrikaensche (frontespiece))

Emperor of Morocco, whose mother was an unmixed Negro slave had tens of thousands of white slaves. From a painting of 1670. See John Ogilby’s Africa (p. 264, 1670).

Africans treated their white slaves much better than white Americans their Africans. “The meanest Christian slave on becoming a Mohammedan,” says Blake, “was free … and he and his descendants were eligible to the highest offices in the state.” Acceptance of Christianity made no difference in the status of the African slave in America. General Eaton, American consul at Tunis, said in 1799, “Truth and justice demand from me the confession that the Christian slaves among the barbarians of Africa are treated with more humanity than the African slaves among the Christians of civilized America.” (Quoted by W. O. Blake, “History of Slavery In Northern Africa,” p. 79. 1857).

For centuries also and well into the last century, the Arabs, a Negroid people, had been raiding what is now Russia for white slaves, mostly women,—the Circassians. One Arab writer declared that Arabia is such a hard country to live in that but for the importation of African and Circassian slaves its population would soon be extinct.

White slave in Egypt. (Drawing by Sichel).

SLAVERY OF WHITES IN AMERICA

It happens, too, that the first slaves in what is now the United States, were white Englishmen. The earliest warrants banishing convicts to a life of servitude in Virginia were signed by James I in 1617 and the first hundred arrived in 1619 (that is, the same year the Negroes did), and were sold.

The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers.

Scene on a slave-ship bound for America from a French lithograph of 1802. Similar scenes existed on ships bringing white slaves from Europe a little earlier.

Charles V of Germany freeing white slaves held in Africa after his victory there in 1535. (From painting by Nicoles de Keyser).

Freed whites returning to France from slavery in Africa.

One gets an idea of how the sale of white people was regarded in colonial America by what Cotton Mather, famous New England divine, said should be done with William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, a Quaker. Mather called that faith, “very horrible idolatry.” (Diary, Vol. 1, p. 572). Hearing that Penn, whom he called “the chief scamp,” was on the high seas with his settlers, he urged the authorities to send a ship to capture him. “Make captive Penn and his ungodly crew,” he urged, “so that the Lord may be glorified. Much spoil can be had by selling the whole lot to Barbados, where slaves fetch high prices in rum and sugar.”

Act V, 1680, of the Laws of Virginia, reads, “For the encouragement of trade and manufacture, it is provided that all goods, wares, English servants, Negroes and other slaves imported after September 29, 1681, shall be landed and laid on shore, bought and sold at appointed places and at no other places under penalty.”

They were advertised for sale along with Negroes. The Boston News Letter, September 13, 1714, offers “several Irish maid-servants; one Irishman, good barber and wigmaker; and five likely Negro boys.” The New York Gazette, September 4 and 11, 1732, offers “Welshmen, Englishmen, Negroes, a Negro girl, and Cheshire cheese.” Wall Street was then a slave market. A Philadelphia advertisement of 1728 reads, “Lately imported and to be sold cheap, a parcel of likely men and women servants.” They were mostly German.

European girl captured by Moorish sea-captain. From Voltaire’s Candide. Daughter of the Princess of Palestrina. (Illustration by Bruneschelli).

Johann Buettner, one of those who came under these conditions tells how men and women were stripped naked on board on arrival and examined like cattle by prospective buyers. He says that on the voyage the women slept indiscriminately among the men. So much the better if they became pregnant. They would fetch more.

G. Mittelberger, who came to America in 1750, wrote, “Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle.” He estimated that during the four years he was in Philadelphia, 25,000 of his compatriots were sold there. Children from nine to twelve went for from $30 to $40; and over eighteen from $60 to $69.

William Eddis in “Letters From America, 1769-1777” tells how badly these white slaves were treated by their masters. In that of September 20, 1770, he compares their treatment with that of the Negro slaves: “Negroes being a property for life the death of slaves in the prime of youth and strength is a material loss to the proprietor … they are therefore under more comfortable circumstances than the miserable Europeans over whom the rigid planter exercises an inflexible severity. They are strained to the utmost to perform their allotted labor … generally speaking they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.”

“White servants,” says Bancroft, “came to be a usual article of traffic. They were sold in England to be transported and in Virginia resold to the highest bidder; like the Negroes they were to be purchased on shipboard as men buy horses at a fair.”

J. B. McMaster says, “They became in the eyes of the law a slave and in both the civil and the criminal code were classed with the Negro and the Indian. They were worked hard, were dressed in the cast-off clothes of their owners and might be flogged as often as the master and mistress thought necessary. … Father, mother, and children could be sold to different buyers. Such remnants of cargoes as could not find purchasers within the time specified were bought in lots of fifty or more by speculators, known as ‘soul-drivers,’ who drove them through the country like so many cattle and sold them for what they would fetch.” (Acquisition of Political, Social, and Industrial Rights in America, pp. 32-35). Some whites served under Negro slave overseers.

White slaves who ran away were advertised for in the newspapers. If caught, they were branded with the letter “R” (runaway). Those who “stole flour and meal given out for baking” had their ears clipped. George Washington advertised for two white runaways.

No wonder Moreau de St. Mery, who spent five years in America (1793-98) wrote as regards the sale of white people, “It is, therefore, not the goodness of the soil, nor the excellence of the laws which are responsible for the growth of the population of the United States, but the traffic in men from Europe.” He estimated that in one year alone, 13,000 of these whites were sold at ten pounds sterling each, or a total of some $650,000. (Voyage, etc. pp. 321-22). There is a translation of this work by Kenneth Roberts.

One reads of the horrors that Negroes suffered on slave ships from Africa but eyewitness accounts of what white slaves suffered on their passage sound as awful. Mittelberger wrote in 1750, “During the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sea-sickness, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot and the like all of which comes from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from the bad and foul water … lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off. … During a storm that closely packed people tumble over each other both the sick and the well. …” (Journey to Pennsylvania, p. 20). Geiser’s “Redemptioners,” Chapter “The Voyage” gives equally harrowing tales of those sufferers.

Detail from “The Slave Market” by J. L. Gerome (1824-1904). Negroes and Whites being sold together.

Like the black slaves, they were packed like sardines. “Packed like herrings and sold as slaves,” says Pastor Kunze. Christopher Sauer in his petition to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1775 asserted that at times “there was not more than twelve inches room for each person at night.”