The Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois

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The chief contract for trade in Negroes was the celebrated "Asiento" or
agreement of the King of Spain to the importation of slaves into Spanish
domains. The Pope's Bull or Demarkation, 1493, debarred Spain from African
possessions, and compelled her to contract with other nations for slaves.
This contract was in the hands of the Portuguese in 1600; in 1640 the
Dutch received it, and in 1701 the French. The War of the Spanish
Succession brought this monopoly to England.

This Asiento of 1713 was an agreement between England and Spain by which
the latter granted the former a monopoly of the Spanish colonial slave
trade for thirty years, and England engaged to supply the colonies within
that time with at least one hundred and forty-four thousand slaves at the
rate of forty-eight hundred per year. The English counted this prize as
the greatest result of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the
mighty struggle against the power of Louis XIV. The English held the
monopoly until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), although they had to
go to war over it in 1739.

From this agreement the slave traders reaped a harvest. The trade centered
at Liverpool, and that city's commercial greatness was built largely on
this foundation. In 1709 it sent out one slaver of thirty tons' burden;
encouraged by Parliamentary subsidies which amounted to nearly half a
million dollars between 1729 and 1750, the trade amounted to fifty-three
ships in 1751; eighty-six in 1765, and at the beginning of the nineteenth
century one hundred and eighty-five, which carried forty-nine thousand two
hundred and thirteen slaves in one year.

The slave trade thus begun by the Portuguese, enlarged by the Dutch, and
carried to its culmination by the English centered on the west coast near
the seat of perhaps the oldest and most interesting culture of Africa. It
came at a critical time. The culture of Yoruba, Benin, Mossiland, and Nupe
had exhausted itself in a desperate attempt to stem the on-coming flood of
Mohammedan culture. It has succeeded in maintaining its small, loosely
federated city-states suited to trade, industry, and art. It had developed
strong resistance toward the Sudan state builders toward the north, as in
the case of the fighting Mossi; but behind this warlike resistance lay the
peaceful city life which gave industrial ideas to Byzantium and shared
something of Ethiopian and Mediterranean culture.

The first advent of the slave traders increased and encouraged native
industry, as is evidenced by the bronze work of Benin; but soon this was
pushed into the background, for it was not bronze metal but bronze flesh
that Europe wanted. A new tyranny, blood-thirsty, cruel, and built on war,
forced itself forward in the Niger delta. The powerful state of Dahomey
arose early in the eighteenth century and became a devastating tyranny,
reaching its highest power early in the nineteenth century. Ashanti, a
similar kingdom, began its conquests in 1719 and grew with the slave
trade. Thus state building in West Africa began to replace the city
economy, but it was a state built on war and on war supported and
encouraged largely for the sake of trade in human flesh. The native
industries were changed and disorganized. Family ties and government were
weakened. Far into the heart of Africa this devilish disintegration,
coupled with Christian rum and Mohammedan raiding, penetrated. The face of
Africa was turned south on these slave traders instead of northward toward
the Mediterranean, where for two thousand years and more Europe and Africa
had met in legitimate trade and mutual respect. The full significance of
the battle of Tenkadibou, which overthrew the Askias, was now clear.
Hereafter Africa for centuries was to appear before the world, not as the
land of gold and ivory, of Mansa Musa and Meroe, but as a bound and
captive slave, dumb and degraded.

The natural desire to avoid a painful subject has led historians to gloss
over the details of the slave trade and leave the impression that it was a
local west-coast phenomenon and confined to a few years. It was, on the
contrary, continent wide and centuries long and an economic, social, and
political catastrophe probably unparalleled in human history.

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

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

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

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

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

In the American trade there was not only the horrors of the slave raid,
which lined the winding paths of the African jungles with bleached bones,
but there was also the horrors of what was called the "middle passage,"
that is, the voyage across the Atlantic. As Sir William Dolben said, "The
Negroes were chained to each other hand and foot, and stowed so close that
they were not allowed above a foot and a half for each in breadth. Thus
crammed together like herrings in a barrel, they contracted putrid and
fatal disorders; so that they who came to inspect them in a morning had
occasionally to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their
carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers to whom they
had been fastened[75]."

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[70] Cf. Helps: _Spanish Conquest_, IV, 401.

[71] Helps, _op. cit._, I, 219-220.

[72] Helps, _op. cit._, II, 18-19.

[73] Helps, _op. cit._, III, 211-212.

[74] Theal: _History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795_, I, 476.

[75] Ingram: _History of Slavery_, p. 152.

X THE WEST INDIES AND LATIN AMERICA

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

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

Before 1530 there were enough Negroes in Mexico to lead to an
insurrection, where the Negroes fought desperately, but were overcome and
their ringleaders executed. Later the followers of another Negro
insurgent, Bayano, were captured and sent back to Spain. Negroes founded
the town of Santiago del Principe in 1570, and in 1540 a Negro slave of
Hernandez de Alarcon was the only one of the party to carry a message
across the country to the Zunis of New Mexico. A Negro, Stephen Dorantes,
discovered New Mexico. This Stephen or "Estevanico" was sent ahead by
certain Spanish friars to the "Seven Cities of Cibola." "As soon as
Stephen had left said friars, he determined to earn all the reputation and
honor for himself, and that the boldness and daring of having alone
discovered those villages of high stories so much spoken of throughout
that country should be attributed to him; and carrying along with him the
people who followed him, he endeavored to cross the wilderness which is
between Cibola and the country he had gone through, and he was so far
ahead of the friars that when they arrived at Chichilticalli, which is on
the edge of the wilderness, he was already at Cibola, which is eighty
leagues of wilderness beyond." But the Indians of the new and strange
country took alarm and concluded that Stephen "must be a spy or guide for
some nations who intended to come and conquer them, because it seemed to
them unreasonable for him to say that the people were white in the country
from which he came, being black himself and being sent by them."[76]

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

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

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

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

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

By 1872 the number of free Negroes had very greatly increased, so that
emancipation did not come as a shock. While Mohammedan Negroes still gave
trouble and were in some cases sent back to Africa, yet on the whole
emancipation was peaceful, and whites, Negroes, and Indians are to-day
amalgamating into a new race. "At the present moment there is scarcely a
lowly or a highly placed federal or provincial official at the head of or
within any of the great departments of state that has not more or less
Negro or Amer-Indian blood in his veins."[77]

Lord Bryce says, "It is hardly too much to say that along the coast from
Rio to Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the interior behind
these two cities, the black population predominates.... The Brazilian
lower class intermarries freely with the black people; the Brazilian
middle class intermarries with mulattoes and Quadroons. Brazil is the one
country in the world, besides the Portuguese colonies on the east and west
coasts of Africa, in which a fusion of the European and African races is
proceeding unchecked by law or custom. The doctrines of human equality and
human solidarity have here their perfect work. The result is so far
satisfactory that there is little or no class friction. The white man does
not lynch or maltreat the Negro; indeed I have never heard of a lynching
anywhere in South America except occasionally as part of a political
convulsion. The Negro is not accused of insolence and does not seem to
develop any more criminality than naturally belongs to any ignorant
population with loose notions of morality and property.

"What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will have on the European
element in Brazil I will not venture to predict. If one may judge from a
few remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce the intellectual
standard. One of the ablest and most refined Brazilians I have known had
some color; and other such cases have been mentioned to me. Assumptions
and preconceptions must be eschewed, however plausible they may
seem."[78]

A Brazilian writer said at the First Races Congress: "The cooeperation of
the _metis_[79] in the advance of Brazil is notorious and far from
inconsiderable. They played the chief part during many years in Brazil in
the campaign for the abolition of slavery. I could quote celebrated names
of more than one of these _metis_ who put themselves at the head of the
literary movement. They fought with firmness and intrepidity in the press
and on the platform. They faced with courage the gravest perils to which
they were exposed in their struggle against the powerful slave owners, who
had the protection of a conservative government. They gave evidence of
sentiments of patriotism, self-denial, and appreciation during the long
campaign in Paraguay, fighting heroically at the boarding of the ships in
the naval battle of Riachuelo and in the attacks on the Brazilian army, on
numerous occasions in the course of this long South American war. It was
owing to their support that the republic was erected on the ruins of the
empire."[80]

The Dutch brought the first slaves to the North American continent. John
Rolfe relates that the last of August, 1619, there came to Virginia "a
Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars."[81] This was probably one
of the ships of the numerous private Dutch trading companies which early
entered into the developed and the lucrative African slave trade. Although
the Dutch thus commenced the continental slave trade they did not actually
furnish a very large number of slaves to the English colonies outside the
West Indies. A small trade had by 1698 brought a few thousand to New York
and still fewer to New Jersey.

The Dutch found better scope for slaves in Guiana, which they settled in
1616. Sugar cane became the staple crop, but the Negroes early began to
revolt and the Dutch brought in East Indian coolies. The slaves were badly
treated and the runaways joined the revolted Bush Negroes in the interior.
From 1715 to 1775 there was continuous fighting with the Bush Negroes or
insurrections, until at last in 1749 a formal treaty between sixteen
hundred Negroes and the Dutch was made. Immediately a new group revolted
under a Mohammedan, Arabi, and they obtained land and liberty. In 1763 the
coast Negroes revolted. They were checked, but made terms and settled in
the interior. The Bush Negroes fought against both French and English to
save Guiana to the Dutch, but Guiana was eventually divided between the
three. The Bush Negroes still maintain their independence and vigor.

The French encouraged settlements in the West Indies in the seventeenth
century, but at last, finding that French immigrants would not come, they
began about 1642 to import Negroes. Owing to wars with England, slaves
were supplied by the Dutch and Portuguese, although the Royal Senegal
Company held the coveted Asiento from 1701 to 1713.

It was in the island of Hayti, however, that French slavery centered.
Pirates from many nations, but chiefly French, began to frequent the
island, and in 1663 the French annexed the eastern part, thus dividing the
island between France and Spain. By 1680 there were so many slaves and
mulattoes that Louis XIV issued his celebrated Code Noir, which was
notable in compelling bachelor masters, fathers of slave children, to
marry their concubines. Children followed the condition of the mother as
to slavery or freedom; they could have no property; harsh punishments were
provided for, but families could not be separated by sale except in the
case of grown children; emancipation with full civil rights was made
possible for any slave twenty years of age or more. When Louisiana was
settled and the Alabama coast, slaves were introduced there. Louisiana was
transferred to Spain in 1762, against the resistance of both settlers and
slaves, but Spain took possession in 1769 and introduced more Negroes.

Later, in Hayti, a more liberal policy encouraged trade; war was over and
capital and slaves poured in. Sugar, coffee, chocolate, indigo, dyes, and
spices were raised. There were large numbers of mulattoes, many of whom
were educated in France, and many masters married Negro women who had
inherited large properties, just as in the United States to-day white men
are marrying eagerly the landed Indian women in the West. When white
immigration increased in 1749, however, prejudice arose against these
mulattoes and severe laws were passed depriving them of civil rights,
entrance into the professions, and the right to hold office; severe edicts
were enforced as to clothing, names, and social intercourse. Finally,
after 1777, mulattoes were forbidden to come to France.

When the French Revolution broke out, the Haytians managed to send two
delegates to Paris. Nevertheless the planters maintained the upper hand,
and one of the colored delegates, Oge, on returning, started a small
rebellion. He and his companions were killed with great brutality. This
led the French government to grant full civil rights to free Negroes,
Immediately planters and free Negroes flew to arms against each other and
then, suddenly, August 22, 1791, the black slaves, of whom there were four
hundred and fifty-two thousand, arose in revolt to help the free Negroes.

For many years runaway slaves had hidden in the mountains under their own
chiefs. One of the earliest of these chiefs was Polydor, in 1724, who was
succeeded by Macandal. The great chief of these runaways or "Maroons" at
the time of the slave revolt was Jean Francois, who was soon succeeded by
Biassou.

Pierre Dominic Toussaint, known as Toussaint L'Ouverture, joined these
Maroon bands, where he was called "the doctor of the armies of the king,"
and soon became chief aid to Jean Francois and Biassou. Upon their deaths
Toussaint rose to the chief command. He acquired complete control over the
blacks, not only in military matters, but in politics and social
organization; "the soldiers regarded him as a superior being, and the
farmers prostrated themselves before him. All his generals trembled before
him (Dessalines did not dare to look in his face), and all the world
trembled before his generals."[82]

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