CHAPTER VII

The Trade in Men

The new thing in the Renaissance was not simply freedom of spirit and body, but a new freedom to destroy freedom; freedom for eager merchants to exploit labor; freedom for white men to make black slaves. The ancient world knew slaves and knew them well; but they were slaves who worked in private and personal service, or in public service like the building of pyramids and making of roads. When such slaves made goods, the goods made them free because men knew the worker and the value of his work and treated him accordingly. But when, in the later fifteenth century, there came slaves, and mainly black slaves, they performed an indirect service. That service became for the most part not personal but labor which made crops, and crops which sold widely in unknown places and in the end promised vaster personal services than previous laborers could directly give.

This then was not mere labor but capitalized labor; labor transmitted to goods and back to services; and the slaves were not laborers of the older sort but a kind of capital goods; and capital, whether in labor or in goods, in men or in crops, was impersonal, inhuman, and a dumb means to mighty ends.

Immediately black slaves became not men but things; and were valued as things are valued, by the demand and supply of their labor force as represented by their bodies. They belonged, it happened, to a race apart, unknown, umfamiliar, because the available supply of people of that race was for the moment cheaper; because religious feuds and political conquest in Africa rendered masses of men homeless and defenseless, while state-building in feudal Europe conserved and protected the peasants. Hence arose a doctrine of race based really on economic gain but frantically rationalized in every possible direction. The ancient world knew no races; only families, clans, nations; and degrees and contrasts of culture. The medieval world evolved an ideal of personal worth and freedom for wide groups of men and a dawning belief in humanity as such. Suddenly comes America; the sale of men as goods in Africa; the crops these goodsmen grew; the revolution in industry and commerce; in manufacture and transport; in trade and transformation of goods for magnificent service and power. “The Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century through the opening of new trade routes to India and America, the development of world markets, and the increased output of silver from the German, Austrian and Mexican mines, made possible the productive use of capital which had heretofore been employed chiefly in military operations, and which resulted in its rapid increase. Great companies flourished and a new class of wealthy merchants arose to vie in luxury not only with the great landed proprietors but even with princes and kings. Many parallels are to be found between this and the Industrial Revolution three centuries later.”¹

It was not a mere case of parallelism but of cause and effect: the African slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave birth to the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth. The cry for the freedom of man’s spirit became a shriek for freedom in trade and profit. The rise and expansion of the liberal spirit were arrested and diverted by the theory of race, so that black men became black devils or imbeciles to be consumed like cotton and sugar and tobacco, so as to make whiter and nobler men happier.

There are two reasons why the history of Africa is peculiar. Color of skin is not one that was regarded as important before the eighteenth century. “I am black but comely, 0 ye daughters of Jerusalem,” cries the old Hebrew love song. Cultural backwardness was no reason—Africa, as compared with Europe, Asia, and America, was not backward before the seventeenth century. It was different, because its problems were different. At times Africa was in advance of the world. But climate: hot sun and flooding rains made Africa a land of desert, jungle, and disease, where culture could indeed start even earlier than in ice-bound Europe, but when, unaided by recent discoveries of science, its survival and advance was a hard fight. And finally, and above all, beginning with the fifteenth century and culminating in the eighteenth and nineteenth, mankind in Africa became goods—became merchandise, became even real estate. Men were bought and sold for private profit and on that profit Europe, by the use of every device of modern science and technique, began to dominate the world.

How did Africans become goods? Why did they submit? Why did the white world fight and scheme and steal to own them? Negroes were physically no weaker than others, if as weak; they were no more submissive. Slavery as an institution is as old as humanity; but never before the Renaissance was the wealth and well-being of so many powerful and intelligent men made squarely dependent not on labor itself but on the buying of labor power. And never before nor since have so many million workers been so helpless before the mass might and concentrated power of greed, helped on by that Industrial Revolution which black slavery began in the sixteenth century and helped to culmination in the nineteenth.

A new and masterful control of the forces of nature evoked a Frankenstein, which Christianity could not guide. But the Renaissance also gave birth to an idea of individual freedom in Europe and emphasized the Christian ideal of the worth of the common man. The new industry, therefore, which was as eager to buy and sell white labor as black, was canalized off toward the slavery of blacks, because the beginnings of the democratic ideal acted so as to protect the white workers. To dam this philanthropy and keep it from flooding into black slavery, the theory of the innate and eternal inferiority of black folk was invented and diffused. It was not until the nineteenth century that the floods of human sympathy began to burst through this artificial protection of slavery and in the abolition movement start to free the black worker.

Fortunately, as Gobineau rationalized this subjection of men, Marx saw the virus of labor exploitation, of labor regarded and treated as goods, poisoning Europe. He saw the social revolution; revolution in ideas which traffic in labor force for power and personal enjoyment, brought; and he saw this becoming the object of that very industrial revolution to which black slavery gave birth. Freedom then became freedom to enslave all working classes and soon the emancipation of the new wage slaves, arising out of the hell of the Industrial Revolution, was hindered by chattel slavery and then men began dimly to see slavery as it really was.

Then chattel slavery of black folk fell, but immediately and in its very falling it was rebuilt on African soil, in the image and pattern of European wage slavery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which at the time was yielding before a new labor movement. The abolitionists, however, did not realize where the real difference between white and black workers had entered. Initially the goods which the white workers made had made them free; because they began to get their share; but the goods which black slaves made did not make them free. It long kept them slaves with a minimum share, because these workers were isolated in far and wild America. The eaters and wearers and smokers of their crops, even the owners of their crops and bodies, did not see them working or know their misery or realize the injustice of their economic situation. They were workers isolated from the consumer and consumers bargained only with those who owned the fruit of their stolen toil, often fine, honest, educated men.

Those then who in the dying nineteenth century and dawning twentieth saw the gleam of the new freedom were too busy to realize how land monopoly and wage slavery and forced labor in present Africa were threatening Europe of the twentieth century, re-establishing the worst aspects of the factory system and dehumanizing capital in the world, at the time when the system was diligently attacked in culture lands. They did not see that here was the cause of that new blossoming of world wars which instead of being wars of personal enmity, of dynastic ambition, or of national defense, became wars for income and income on so vast a scale that its realization meant the enslavement of the majority of men. They therefore did not finish the task, and today in the twentieth century, as the white worker struggles toward a democratization of industry, there is the same damming and curtailment of human sympathy to keep the movement from touching workers of the darker races. On their exploitation is being built a new fascist capitalism. Hence the significance of that slave trade which we now study.

Greece and Rome had their chief supplies of slaves from Europe and Asia. Egypt enslaved races of all colors, and if there were more blacks than others among her slaves, there were also more blacks among her nobles and Pharaohs, and both facts are explained by her racial origin and geographical position. The fall of Rome led to a cessation of the slave trade, but after a long interval came the white slave trade of the Saracens and Moors, and finally the modern trade in Negroes.

Slavery as it exists universally among primitive people is a system whereby captives in war are put to tasks about the homes and in the fields, thus releasing the warriors for systematic fighting and the women for leisure. Such slavery has been common among all people and was widespread in Africa. The relative number of African slaves under these conditions varied according to tribe and locality, but usually the labor was not hard; and slaves were recognized members of the family and might and did often rise to high position in the tribe.

Remembering that in the fifteenth century there was no great disparity between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe, what made the striking difference in subsequent development? European civilization, cut off by physical barriers from further incursions of barbaric races, settled more and more to systematic industry and to the domination of one religion; African culture and industry were not only threatened by powerful African barbarians from the west and central regions of the continent, but also by invading Arabs with a new religion precipitating from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries a devastating duel of cultures and faiths.

When, therefore, a demand for workmen arose in America, European exportation was limited by unity of religious ties and economic stability African exportation was encouraged not simply by the Christian attitude toward heathen, but also by the Moslem enmity toward the unconverted. Two great modem religions, therefore, agreed at least in the policy of enslaving heathen blacks; while the conquest of Egypt, the overthrow of the black Askias by the Moors at Tondibi, brought economic chaos among the advanced Negro peoples. Finally the duel between Islam and Fetish left West Africa naked to the slave-trader.

The modem slave trade began with the Mohammedan conquests in Africa, when heathen Negroes were seized to supply the harems, and as soldiers and servants. They were bought from the masters and seized in war, until the growing wealth and luxury of the conquerors demanded larger numbers. Then Negroes from the Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, and Zanzibar began to pass into Arabia, Persia, and India in increased numbers. As Negro kingdoms and tribes rose to power they found the slave trade lucrative and natural, since the raids in which slaves were captured were ordinary inter-tribal wars. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the demand for slaves made slaves the object, and not the incident, of African wars.

There was, however, between the Mohammedan and American slave trade one fundamental difference which has not heretofore been stressed. The demand for slaves in Mohammedan countries was to a large extent a luxury demand. Black slaves were imported as soldiers and servants or as porters of gold and ivory rather than industrial workers. The demand, therefore, was limited by the wealth of a leisure class or the ambitions of conquest and not by the prospect of gain on the part of a commercial class. Even where the idle rich did not support slavery in Africa, other conditions favored its continuance, as Cooley points out, when he speaks of the desert as a cause of the African slave trade.

“It is impossible to deny the advancement of civilization in that zone of the African continent which has formed the field of our inquiry. Yet barbarism is there supported by natural circumstances with which it is vain to think of coping. It may be doubted whether, if mankind had inhabited the earth only in populous and adjoining communities, slavery would have ever existed. The Desert, if it be not absolutely the root of the evil, has, at least, been from the earliest times the great nursery of slave hunters. The demoralization of the towns on the southern borders of the desert has been pointed out, and if the vast extent be considered of the region in which man has no riches but slaves, no enjoyment but slaves, no article of trade but slaves, and where the hearts of wandering thousands are closed against pity by the galling misery of life, it will be difficult to resist the conviction that the solid buttress on which slavery rests in Africa, is—The Desert.”²

In Mohammedan countries there were gleams of hope in slavery. In fiction and in truth the black slave had a chance. Once converted to Islam, he became a brother to the best, and the brotherhood of the faith was not the sort of idle lie that Christian slave masters made it. In Arabia black leaders arose like Antar; in India black slaves carved out principalities where their descendants still rule.

Some Negro slaves were brought to Europe by the Spaniards in the fourteenth century, and a small trade was continued by the Portuguese, who conquered territory from the “tawny” Moors of North Africa in the early fifteenth century. Later, after their severe repulse at Al Kasr Al Kebir, the Portuguese swept farther down the West Coast in quest of trade with Negroland, a new route to India and the realm of Prester John. As early as 1441, they reached the River of Gold, and their story is that their leader seized certain free Moors and the next year exchanged them for ten black slaves, a target of hide, ostrich eggs, and some gold dust. The trade was easily justified on the ground that the Moors were Mohammedans and refused to be converted to Christianity, while heathen Negroes would be better subjects for conversion and stronger laborers.

In the next few years a small number of Negroes continued to be imported into Spain and Portugal as servants. We find, for instance, in 1474, that Negro slaves were common in Seville. There is a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474 to a celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid, commonly called the “Negro Count” (El Conde Negro), nominating him to the office of “mayoral of the Negroes” in Seville. The slaves were apparently treated kindly, allowed to keep their own dances and festivals, and to have their own chief, who represented them in the courts, as against their own masters, and settled their private quarrels.

In Portugal, “the decline of the population, in general, and the labor supply, in particular, was especially felt in the southern provinces, which were largely stripped of population. This resulted in the establishment there of a new industrial system. The rural lands were converted into extensive estates held by absentee landlords, and worked by large armies of black bondmen recently brought from Africa. Soon the population of Algarve was almost completely Negro; and by the middle of the sixteenth century, blacks outnumbered whites in Lisbon itself. As intermarriage between the two races went on from the beginning, within a few generations Ethiopian blood was generally diffused throughout the nation, but it was notably pronounced in the south and among the lower classes.”³

Between 1455 and 1492 little mention is made of slaves in the trade with Africa. Columbus is said to have suggested Negroes for America, but Ferdinand and Isabella refused. Nevertheless, by 1501, we have the first incidental mention of Negroes going to America in a declaration that Negro slaves “born in the power of Christians were to be allowed to pass to the Indies, and the officers of the royal revenue were to receive the money to be paid for their permits.”

About 1501 Ovando, Governor of Spanish America, was objecting to Negro slaves and “solicited that no Negro slaves should be sent to Hispaniola, for they fled amongst the Indians and taught them bad customs, and never could be captured.” Nevertheless a letter from the king to Ovando, dated Segovia, in September, 1505, says, “I will send more Negro slaves as you request; I think there may be a hundred. At each time a trustworthy person will go with them who may have some share in the gold they may collect and may promise them ease if they work well.”⁴ There is a record of a hundred slaves being sent out this very year, and Diego Columbus was notified of fifty to be sent from Seville for the mines in 1510.

After this time frequent notices show that Negroes were common in the New World.⁵ When Pizarro, for instance, had been slain in Peru, his body was dragged to the cathedral by two Negroes. After the battle of Anaquito, the head of the viceroy was cut off by a Negro; and during the great earthquake in Guatemala a most remarkable figure was a gigantic Negro seen in various parts of the city. Núñez had thirty Negroes with him on the top of the Sierras, and there was rumor of an aboriginal tribe of Negroes in South America. One of the last acts of King Ferdinand was to urge that no more Negroes be sent to the West Indies, but, under Charles V, Bishop Las Casas drew up a plan of assisted migration to America and asked in 1517 the right for immigrants to import twelve Negro slaves each, in return for which the Indians were to be freed.

Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error: “This advice that license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the Clerigo Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world. For he always held that they had been made slaves unjustly and tyrannically; for the same reason holds good of them as of the Indians.”⁶

As soon as the plan was broached, a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot, Governor of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and shrewdly sold it to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats. Other monopolies were granted in 1523,1527, and 1528.⁷ Thus the American trade became established and gradually grew, passing successively into the hands of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English.

At first the slave trade was of the same kind and volume as that already passing northward over the desert routes. Soon, however, the American trade developed. A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor in the West Indies and on the continent of America grew, until it culminated in the eighteenth century, when Negro slaves were crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty to one hundred thousand a year. This called for slave raiding on a scale that drew slaves from most parts of Africa, although centering on the West Coast, from the Senegal to St. Paul de Loanda. The Mohammedan trade continued along the East Coast and the Nile Valley.

Carleton Beals says: “This vast labor army, conscripted for developing the Americas, represented a force of many millions of man power. It was taken from all parts of Africa; from Angola and from the deep Congo, from Bonny River and the central Niger and Hausaland, from Lagos, Dahomey, Old Calabar; from Madagascar and Ethiopia and Gabun. The Portuguese, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, English, French recruiting agents with their platoons of soldiers reached far above Stanley Pool to the Mozambique, clear south of Kunene River. Portuguese Guinea and the Gold Coast poured forth their contingents. Not only the Yoruba, Egba, Jebu, Sokoto, the Mandingo, but the Hottentots and Bushmen gave up forced levies.

“Mohammedan Negro settlements are found in Brazil, the Guianas and elsewhere. Some of them still speak and use Arabic.”

Herskovits believes: “From contemporary documentary evidence that the region from which the slaves brought to the New World were derived, has limits that are less vast than stereotyped belief would have them.... That some, perhaps in the aggregate; even impressive numbers of slaves, came from the deep interior, or from East or South Africa, does not make less valid the historical evidence that by far the major portion of the slaves brought to the New World came from a region that comprises only a fraction of the vast bulk of the African continent.”⁸

There was thus begun in modern days a new slavery and slave trade. It was different from that of the past, because more and more it came in time to be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a new industrial system. For four hundred years, from 1450 to 1850, European civilization carried on a systematic trade in human beings of such tremendous proportions that the physical, economic, and moral effects are still plainly to be remarked throughout the world. To this must be added the large slave trade of Mussulman lands, which began with the seventh century and raged almost unchecked until the end of the nineteenth century.

These were not days of decadence, but a period that gave the world Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Raphael, Haroun-al-Raschid and Abraham Lincoln. It was the day of the greatest expansion of two of the world’s most pretentious religions, and of the beginnings of modern organization of industry. In the midst of this advance and uplift, this slave trade and slavery spread more human misery, inculcated more disrespect for and neglect of humanity, a greater callousness to suffering, and more petty, cruel, human hatred than can well be calculated. We may excuse and palliate it, and write history so as to let men forget it; it remains a most inexcusable and despicable blot on modern history.

The Portuguese built the first slave-trading fort at Elmina, on the Gold Coast, in 1482, and extended their trade down the West Coast and up the East Coast. Under them the abominable traffic grew larger and larger, until it became far the most important in money value of all the commerce of the Zambesi basin. There could be no extension of agriculture, no mining, no progress of any kind where it was so extensively carried on.⁹

It was the Dutch, however, who launched the overseas slave trade as a regular institution. They began their fight for freedom from Spain in 1579; in 1595, as a war measure against Spain, which at that time was dominating Portugal, they made their fight for slaves in their first voyage to Guinea. By 1621 they had captured Portugal’s various slave forts on the West Coast and they proceeded to open sixteen forts along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. Ships sailed from Holland to Africa, got slaves in exchange for their goods, carried the slaves to the West Indies or Brazil, and returned home laden with New World produce. In 1621 the private companies trading in the west were all merged into the Dutch West India Company, which sent in four years fifteen thousand four hundred and thirty Negroes to Brazil, carried on war with Spain, supplied even the English plantations, and gradually became the great slave carrier of the day.

The commercial supremacy of the Dutch early excited the envy and emulation of the English. The Navigation Ordinance of 1651 was aimed at them, and two wars were necessary to wrest the slave trade from the Dutch and place it in the hands of the English. The final terms of peace, among other things, surrendered New Netherlands to England and opened the way for England to become henceforth the world’s greatest slave trader.

The English trade began with Sir John Hawkins’ voyages in 1562 and later, in which “the Jesus, our chiefe shippe,” played a leading part. Desultory trade was kept up by the English until the middle of the seventeenth century, when English chartered slave-trading companies began to appear. In 1662 the “Royal Adventurers,” including the king, the queen dowager, and the Duke of York, invested in the trade, and finally the Royal African Company, which became the world’s chief slave trader, was formed in 1672 and carried on a growing trade for a quarter of a century. Jamaica had finally been captured and held by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 and formed the West Indian base for the trade in men.

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 of Demarcation, 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 was motivated not so much by royal rivalries as to bring this slave trade 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 for thirty-five years until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, although they had to go to war over it in 1739.

It has been shown by a recent study made at Howard University that the development of England as a great capitalist power was based directly and mainly upon the slave trade.¹⁰ English industry and commerce underwent a vast expansion in the early seventeenth century, based on the shipment of English goods to Africa, of African slaves to the West Indies, and of West Indian products back to England. About 1700 Bristol became an important center of the slave trade, followed by London and Liverpool. Liverpool soon overtook both Bristol and London. In 1709 it sent out one slaver of thirty tons burden; encouraged by Parliamentary subsidies which amounted to nearly a half million dollars between 1729 and 1750, the trade increased 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. In 1764 a quarter of the shipping of Liverpool was in the African trade and Liverpool merchants conducted one half of England’s trade with Africa. The value of all English goods sent to Africa was 464,000 pounds sterling of which three-fourths was of English manufactures.

This growth of Liverpool indicated the evolution of the capitalist economy in England. Liverpool did not grow because it was near the Lancaster manufacturing district, but, on the contrary, Lancaster manufacturers grew because they were near the Liverpool slave trade and largely invested in it. Thus Liverpool made Manchester.

Karl Marx emphasized the importance of slavery as the foundation of the capitalist order. He said, “Slavery is an economic category just as any other. Direct slavery is the pivot of bourgeois industry, just as are machinery and credit, etc. Without slavery there is no cotton; without cotton, there is no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to universal commerce, and it is world trade which is the condition of large scale industry. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the first importance.”¹¹

The tremendous economic stake of Great Britain in the African and West Indian trade is shown by these figures, after Bryan Edwards: from 1701 to 1787 British ships took to Africa goods to the value of twenty-three million pounds sterling. Of these, fourteen million pounds sterling were of British manufacture. Slaves, gold and other products were purchased with these goods. The slaves were transported to the West Indies. From the West Indies in the century from 1698 to 1798 Great Britain imported goods to the value of over two hundred million pounds.

The basis of the English trade, on which capitalism was erected, was Negro labor. This labor was cheap and was treated as capital goods and not as human beings. The purchase of slaves furnished a large market for British manufacture, especially textiles. African gold became the medium of exchange which rising capitalism and the profits of African trade demanded. The large fortunes which were turned to industrial investment, and especially to the African trade, stimulated industries like ship building, which helped make England mistress of the seas. The West Indies too as a seat of slavery furnished an outlet for British manufacture and a source of raw materials. From this again large fortunes arose which were transferred to the mother country and invested.

All this spelled revolution: world-wide revolution starting in Europe; sinister and fatal revolution in West Africa. The city-state represented by Yoruban civilization had fought with the empire builders of the Sudan and retreated toward the Gulf of Guinea. Here they came in contact with the new western slave trade. It stimulated trade and industry; but the trade was not only in gold and oil and ivory, it was in men; and those nations that could furnish slaves were encouraged and prospered. The ruder culture of Ashanti and Dahomey outstripped Yoruba. Benin was changed. Blood lust was encouraged and the human culture which the slave trade helped build up for Europe, tore down and debauched West Africa.

The culture of Yoruba, Benin, Mossiland and Nupe had exhausted itself in a desperate attempt to stem the on-coming flood of Sudanese expansion. It had 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 state-building tyranny, ingenious, well organized but cruel, and built on war, forced itself forward in the Niger Delta. The powerful state of Dahomey arose early in the eighteenth century. Ashanti, a similar kingdom, began its conquests in 1719 and grew with the slave trade because the profits of the trade and the insatiable demands of the Europeans disrupted and changed the older native economy.

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.

Few detailed studies have been made of the Mohammedan slave trade. Slave raiding was known in the Nile Valley from the time of the Egyptians and with the advent of Islam it continued, but it was incidental to conquest and proselytism. Later, however, it began to be commercialized; it was systematically organized with raiders, factories, markets, and contractors. By the nineteenth century African slaves were regularly supplied to Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, and Persia; and also to Morocco there came from the Western Sudan and Timbuktu about four thousand annually.

Egyptians in the nineteenth century tried to stop this slave trade, but they encountered vested interests making large profits. The trade continued to exist as late as 1890. The English charge that under the Madhi in the Egyptian Sudan, slavery and slave raiding were widespread; but this was the result of the very misrule and chaos which caused the Madhist movement and for which it was not responsible. Doubtless many of the Madhist followers were enslaved and robbed under cover of religious frenzy; but the Madhi could not in the midst of war curb an evil which forced recognition even from Chinese Gordon. From the East African coast and especially the lake districts a stream of slaves went to the coast cities, whence they were sent to Madagascar, Arabia and Persia. In 1862, nineteen thousand slaves a year were passing from the regions about Lake Nyasa to Zanzibar. Minor trade in slaves took place in and about Abyssinia and Somaliland. Turkey began to check the slave traffic between 1860 and 1890. In Morocco it continued longer.

The face of Africa was turned south and west toward 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 at Tondibi, 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 Gongo Mussa 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 African West Coast phenomenon and confined to a few years. It was, on the contrary, continent wide and centuries long; an economic, social, and political catastrophe probably unparalleled in human history.

Usually the slave trade has been thought of from its sentimental and moral point of view; but it is its economic significance that is of greatest moment. Whenever the human element in industry is degraded, society must suffer accordingly. In the case of the African slave trade the human element reached its nadir of degradation. Great and significant as was the contribution of black labor to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, its compensation approached zero, falling distinctly and designedly below the cost of human reproduction; and yet on this system was built the wealth and power of modern civilization. One can conceive no more dangerous foundation; because even when the worst aspects were changed and the slave trade limited and the slave given certain legal rights of freedom, nevertheless the possibilities of low wages for the sake of high profits remained an ideal in industry, which made the African slave trade the father of industrial imperialism, and of the persistence of poverty in the richest lands.

As Marx declared: “Under the influence of the colonial system, commerce and navigation ripened like hot-house fruit. Chartered companies were powerful instruments in promoting the concentration of capital. The colonies provided a market for the rising manufactures, and the monopoly of this market intensified accumulation. The treasures obtained outside Europe by direct looting, enslavement, and murder, flowed to the motherland in streams, and were there turned into capital.”

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 two hundred forty-nine ships to Africa, shipped there sixty thousand, seven hundred eighty-three Negro slaves, and after losing fourteen thousand, three hundred eighty-seven on the middle passage, delivered forty-six thousand, three hundred ninety-six 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 seven-teenth, 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. The Mohammedan slave trade meant the expatriation or forcible migration in Africa of millions more. (Many other millions were left dead in the wake of the raiders.) It would be conservative, then, to say that the slave trade cost Negro Africa from a fourth to a third of its population. And yet people ask today 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. The African continent gradually became revolutionized. Whole regions were depopulated, whole tribes disappeared; the character of people developed excesses of cruelty instead of the flourishing arts of peace. The dark, irresistible grasp of fetish took firmer hold on men’s minds. Advances toward higher civilization became more difficult. It was a rape of a continent to an extent seldom if ever paralleled in ancient or modern times.

In the American trade, there were not only the horrors of the slave raid, which lined the winding paths of the African jungles with bleached bones, but there were 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.”¹²

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 today the treatment of 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 tended to become too great, as the sources of supply of slaves dried up; on the other hand, the slave insurrections from the very beginning threatened the system, as modern labor strikes have threatened capitalism, from the time when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrections 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.

The red revolt of Haiti struck the knell of the slave trade. In North America revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the North. All this with the growing scarcity of suitable land led to the abolition of the slave trade, the American Civil War and the disappearance of the American slave system. Further effort stopped the Mohammedan slave raider, but slowly because its philanthropic objects were clouded and hindered by the new Colonial Imperialism of Christian lands, which sought not wholly to abolish slavery but rather to re-establish it under new names, with a restricted slave trade.

Such is the story of the Rape of Ethiopia—a sordid, pitiful, cruel tale. Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sang; 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.