Read Ebook: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 11 No. 65 March 1863 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various

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So a free-trade in negroes became at last a national necessity. Various companies, however, continued to hold or to procure trading privileges, as the merchants were not restrained from engaging in commerce in such ways as they preferred. The Cape-Verde, the South-Sea, the Mississippi or Louisiana, and the San-Domingo Companies tried their fortunes still. But they were all displaced, and free-trade itself was swallowed up, by the union of all the French Antilles under the great West-India Company of 1716. This was hardly done before the Government discovered that the supply of negroes was again diminishing, partly because so extensive a company could not undertake the peculiar risks and expenses of a traffic in slaves. So in the matter of negroes alone trade was once more declared free in 1741, burdened only with a certain tax upon every slave imported.

At this time the cultivation of sugar alone in the principal French islands consumed all the slaves who could be procured. The cry for laborers was loud and exacting, for the French now made as much sugar as the English, and were naturally desirous that more negroes should surrender the sweets of liberty to increase its manufacture. In less than forty years the average annual export of French sugar had reached 80,000 hogsheads. In 1742 it was 122,541 hogsheads, each of 1200 pounds. The English islands brought into the market for the same year only 65,950 hogsheads, a decrease which the planters attributed to the freedom enjoyed by the French of carrying their crops directly to Spanish consumers without taking them first to France. But whatever may have been the reason, the French were determined to hold and develop the commercial advantage which this single product gained for them. The English might import as many slaves and lay fresh acres open to the culture, but the French sugar was discovered to be of a superior quality; that of San Domingo, in particular, was the best in the world.

The French planter took his slaves on credit, and sought to discharge his debt with the crops which they raised. This increased the consumption of negroes, and he was constantly in debt for fresh ones. To stimulate the production of sugar, the Government lifted half the entry-tax from each negro who was destined for that culture.

It is plain from this, that, when livres are spoken of during a period of a hundred years, their precise equivalent in English or American money cannot be stated,--still less their market-relations to all the necessaries of life. The reader can therefore procure from the statistics of these periods only an approximative idea of the values of crops and the wealth created by their passing into trade.

The difference of value between Paris and the colony was the cause of great embarrassment. Projects for establishing an invariable money were often discussed, but never attempted. All foreign specie ought to have become merchandise in the colony, and to have passed according to its title and weight. Exchange of France with San Domingo was at 66-2/3: that is, 66 livres, 13 sols, 4 deniers tournois were worth a hundred livres in the Antilles. Deduct one-third from any sum to find the sum in livres tournois.

Pounds. Livres. Sugar, {To France, 166,353,834 for 61,849,381 {Abroad, 104,099,866 " 38,703,720

Coffee, {To France, 61,991,699 " 29,421,039 {Abroad, 50,058,246 " 23,757,464

Indigo, {To France, 2,067,498 " 17,573,733 {Abroad, 1,130,638 " 9,610,423

Cacao, {To France, 1,562,027 " 1,093,419 {Abroad, 794,275 " 555,992

Roucou, {To France, 352,216 " 220,369 {Abroad, 153,178 " 95,838

Cotton, {To France, 3,407,157 " 11,017,892 {Abroad, 102,011 " 255,027

This table, with its alluring figures, that seem to glean gratefully after the steps of labor, is the negro's manifesto of the French slave-trade. The surprising totals betray the sudden development of that iniquity under the stimulus of national ambition. The slave expresses his misery in the ciphers of luxury. The single article of sugar, which lent a new nourishment to the daily food of every country, sweetened the child's pap, the invalid's posset, and the drinks of rich and poor, yielded its property to medicine, made the nauseous palatable, grew white and frosted in curious confections, and by simply coming into use stimulated the trades and inventions of a world, was the slave's insinuation of the bitterness of his condition. Out of the eaten came forth meat, and out of the bitter sweetness.

In 1701, Western San Domingo had 19,000 negroes: in 1777, a moderate estimate gives 300,000, not including 50,000 children under fourteen years of age,--and in the other French colonial possessions 500,000. In the year 1785, sixty-five slavers brought to San Domingo 21,662 negroes, who were sold for 43,236,216 livres; and 32,990 were landed in the smaller French islands. In 1786, the value of the negroes imported was estimated at 65,891,395 livres, and the average price of a negro at that time was 1997 livres.

But we must recollect that these figures represent only living negroes. A yearly percentage of dead must be added, to complete the number taken from the coast of Africa. The estimate was five per cent, to cover the unavoidable losses incurred in a rapid and healthy passage; but such passages were a small proportion of the whole number annually made, and the mortality was irregular. It was sometimes frightful; a long calm was one long agony: asphyxia, bloody flux, delirium and suicide, and epidemics swept between the narrow decks, as fatally, but more mercifully than the kidnappers who tore these people from their native fields. The shark was their sexton, and the gleam of his white belly piloted the slaver in his regular track across the Atlantic. What need to revive the accounts of the horrors of the middle passage? We know from John Newton and other Englishmen what a current of misery swept in the Liverpool slavers into the western seas. The story of French slave-trading is the same. I can find but one difference in favor of the French slaver, that he took the shackles from his cargo after it had been a day or two at sea. The lust for procuring the maximum of victims, who must be delivered in a minimum of time and at the least expense, could not dally with schemes to temper their suffering, or to make avarice obedient to common sense. It was a transaction incapable of being tempered. One might as well expect to ameliorate the act of murder. Nay, swift murder would have been affectionate, compared with this robbery of life.

Nor is the consumption of negroes by the sea-voyage the only item suggested by the annual number actually landed. We should have to include all the people maimed and killed in the predatory excursions of native chiefs or Christian kidnappers to procure their cargoes. A village was not always surprised without resistance. The most barbarous tribes would defend their liberty. We can never know the numbers slain in wars which were deliberately undertaken to stock the holds of slavers.

Nor shall we ever know how many victims dropped out of the ruthless caravan, exhausted by thirst and forced marches, on the routes sometimes of three hundred leagues from the interior to the sea. They were usually divided into files containing each thirty or forty slaves, who were fastened together by poles of heavy wood, nine feet long, which terminated in a padlocked fork around the neck. When the caravan made a halt, one end of the pole was unfastened and dropped upon the ground. When it dropped, the slave was anchored; and at night his arm was tied to the end of the pole which he carried, so that a whole file was hobbled during sleep. If any one became too enfeebled to preserve his place, the brutal keepers transferred him to the swifter voracity of the hyena, who scented the wake of the caravan across the waste to the sea's margin, where the shark took up the trail.

The census of the slaves in San Domingo was annually taken upon the capitation-tax which each planter had to pay; thus the children, and negroes above forty-five years of age, escaped counting. But in 1789, Schoelcher says that the census declared five hundred thousand slaves; that is, in twelve years the increase had been two hundred thousand. How many negroes deported from Africa do these figures represent! what number who died soon after landing, too feeble and diseased to become acclimated!

Here is the prospectus of an expedition to the coast of Guinea in 1782 for the purpose of landing seven hundred slaves in the Antilles. They were shipped in two vessels, one of six hundred tons, the other a small corvette.

Two hundred and seventy-four slavers entered the ports of San Domingo, from 1767 to 1774, bringing 79,000 negroes. One-third of these perished from various causes, including the cold of the mountains and the unhealthiness of the coffee-plantations, so that only 52,667 remained. These could not naturally increase, for the mortality was nearly double the number of births, and the negroes had few children during the first years after their arrival. Only one birth was reckoned to thirty slaves. There was always a great preponderance of males, because they could bear the miseries of the passage better than the women, and were worth more upon landing. Include also the effects of forced labor, which reduced the average duration of a slave's life to fifteen years, and carried off yearly one-fifteenth of the whole number, and the reason for the slaver's profits and for his unscrupulous activity become clear.

Out of the sugar, thus clarified with blood, the glittering frosted-work of colonial splendor rose. A few great planters debauched the housekeeping of the whole island. Beneath were debts, distrust, shiftlessness, the rapacity of imported officials, the discontent of resident planters with the customs of the mother-country, the indifference of absentees, the cruel rage for making the most and the best sugar in the world, regardless of the costly lives which the mills caught and crushed out with the canes. Truly, it was sweet as honey in the mouth, and suddenly became bitter as wormwood in the belly.

Let us glance at the people who were thus violently torn from the climate, habits, diet, and customs which created their natural and congenial soil, from their mother-tongues, their native loves and hatreds, from the insignificant, half-barbarous life, which certainly poisoned not the life-blood of a single Christian, though it sweetened not his tea. What bitterness has crept into the great heart of Mr. Carlyle, which beats to shatter the affectations and hypocrisies of a generation, and to summon a civilized world to the worship of righteousness and truth! Is this a Guinea trader or a prophet who is angry when Quashee prefers his pumpkins and millet, reared without the hot guano of the lash, and who will not accept the reduction of a bale of cotton or a tierce of sugar, though Church and State be disinfected of slavery? It is a drop of planter's gall which the sham-hater shakes testily from his corroded pen. How far the effluvia of the slave-ship will be wafted, into what strange latitudes of temperance and sturdy independence, even to the privacy of solemn and high-minded thought! A nation can pass through epochs of the black-death, and recover and improve its average health; but does a people ever completely rally from this blackest death of all?

The Guinea trader brought to San Domingo in the course of eighty years representatives of almost every tribe upon the west coast of Africa and of its interior for hundreds of miles. Many who were thus brought were known only by the names of their obscure neighborhoods; they mingled their shade of color and of savage custom with the blood of a new Creole nation of slaves. With these unwilling emigrants the vast areas of Africa ran together into the narrow plains at the end of a small island; affinity and difference were alike obedient to the whip of the overseer, whose law was profit, and whose method cruelty, in making this strange people grow.

The Mandingoes of the most cultivated type seldom found their way to the West Indies. But if ever slave became noticeable for his temperate and laborious habits, a certain enterprise and self-subsistence, a cleanly, regular, and polished way, perhaps keeping his master's accounts, or those of his own private ventures, in Arabic, and mindful of his future, he was found to be a Mandingo. Their States are on the Senegal; Arabic is not their language, but they are zealous Mohammedans, and have schools in which the children learn the Koran. The men are merchants and agriculturists; they control the trade over a great extent of country, and the religion also, for the Koran is among the wares they carry, and they impose at once the whole form of their social condition. These Northern African nations have been subjected to Arab and Moorish influence, and they make it plain that great movements have taken place in regions which are generally supposed to be sunk in savage quiescence. The Mandingoes, notwithstanding a shade of yellow in the complexion, are still negroes, that is, they are an aboriginal people, improved by contact with Islamism, and capable of self-development afterwards; but the Moors never ruled them, nor mingled with their blood. Their features are African, in the popular sense of that word, without one Semitic trace. Awakened intelligence beams through frank and pleasing countenances, and lifts, without effacing, the primitive type. Undoubtedly, their ancestors sprang into being on sites where an improved posterity reside. But what a history lies between the Fetichism which is the mental form of African religious sentiment, and the worship of one God without image or symbol!

In the administration of justice, some classes of their criminals are sold into slavery, and occasionally a Mandingo would be kidnapped. But there are many Mandingoes who are still pagans, and know nothing of Arabic or commerce, yet who have the excellences of the dominant tribes: these were found in the gangs of the slave-merchant.

So were the Jolofs, handsome, black as jet, with features more regular than the Mandingoes, almost European, excepting the lips: a nonchalant air, very warlike upon occasion, but not disposed to labor. They have magistrates, and some forms for the administration of justice, but a civilization less developed than the Mandingo, in consequence of early contact with Christians. It is said that the slave-traders taught them to lie and steal, and to sell each other, whenever they could not supply a sufficient number of their neighbors, the simple and pastoral Serreres.

They have mechanics who work in iron and silver, leather and wood; they build good houses, and live in them cleanly and respectable. The Foulahs show, quite as decidedly as the Mandingoes, that great passions and interests have given to these parts of Africa a history and developed stocks of men. When the Foulahs are compared with the wandering Felatahs, from whom they came, who speak the same language and wear the same external characters, it will be seen how Nature has yearned for her children in these unknown regions, and set herself, for their sakes, great stints of work, in that motherly ambition to bring them forward in the world. Yes,--thought the Guinea trader,--these skilful Foulahs are Nature's best gifts to man.

Their pure African origin is, however, still a contested point. Many ethnologists are unwilling to attribute so much capacity to a native negro tribe. D'Eichthal objects, that "a pretended negro people, pastoral, nomadic, warlike, propagating a religious faith, to say nothing of the difference in physical characteristics, offers an anomaly which nothing can explain. It would force us to attribute to the black race, whether for good or for evil, acts and traits that are foreign to its nature. To cite only one striking example, let me recall that Job Ben Salomon, the African, who in the last century was carried to America and thence to England, and was admired by all who knew him for the loftiness of his character, the energy of his religious fanaticism, and the extent of his intelligence,--this Ben Salomon, who has been cited as a model of that which the negro race could produce, did not belong to that race; he was a Foulah."

D'Eichthal develops at great length his theory, that the Foulahs are descended from some Eastern people of strong Malay characters, who found their way to their present site through Madagascar, along the coast, to Cordofan, Darfour, and Haoussa. They are bronzed, or copper-colored, or like polished mahogany,--the red predominating over the black. Their forms are tall and slim, with small hands and feet, thin curved noses, long hair braided into several queues, and an erect profile. Certain negro traits do not exist in them.

Burmeister, who saw Ira Aldridge, the Foulah actor, play in Macbeth, Othello, and his other famous parts, saw nothing negro about him, except the length of his arm, the shrillness of his voice in excitement, the terrible animality of the murder-scenes, and his tendency to exaggerate. "The bright-colored nails were very evident, and his whole physiognomy, in spite of his beard, was completely negro-like."

But if Ira Aldridge's exaggerated style of acting points to an African origin, would it not be better, if some of our distinguished actors, who are presumptively white before the foot-lights, took out free-papers at once? We have seen Macbeth and Othello so "created" by the Caucasian models of the stage, that but one line of Shakspeare remained in our memory, and narrowly escaped the lips,--"Out, hyperbolical fiend!"

It is not unlikely that the Felatah was mixed with Moorish or Kabylic blood to make the Foulah. If so, it proves the important fact, that, when the good qualities of the negro are crossed with a more advanced race, the product will be marked with intelligence, mobility, spiritual traits, and an organizing capacity. Felatah blood has mixed with white blood in the Antilles; the Jolof and the Eboe have yielded primitive affections and excellences to a new mulatto breed. This great question of the civilizable qualities of a race cannot be decided by quoting famous isolated cases belonging to pure breeds, but only by observing and comparing the average quality of the pure or mixed.

When we approach the Slave Coast itself, strong contrasts in appearance and culture are observable among the inhabitants; they are all negroes, but in different social conditions, more or less liable to injury from the presence of the slaver, and yielding different temperaments and qualities to colonial life. The beautiful and fertile amphitheatre called Whidah, in North latitude 6?, with Dahomey just behind it, is populous with a superior race. Where did it come from? The area which it occupies has only about fifty miles of coast and less than thirty of interior; its people are as industrious and thrifty as any on the face of the earth. They never raised sugar and indigo with enthusiasm, but at home their activity would have interpreted to Mr. Carlyle a soul above pumpkins. They cultivated every square foot of ground up to the threshold of their dwellings; the sides of ditches, hedges, and inclosures were planted with melons and vegetables, and the roads between the villages shrank to foot-paths in the effort to save land for planting. On the day when a crop was harvested, another was sown.

How did it happen that such a thrifty little kingdom learned the shiftlessness of slave-trading? Early navigators discovered that they had one passion, that of gaming. This was sedulously cultivated by the French and Portuguese who had colonies at stake. A Whidah man, after losing all his money and merchandise, would play for his wife and children, and finally for himself. A slave-trader was always ready to purchase him and his interesting family from the successful gamester, who, in turn, often took passage in the same vessel. In this way Whidah learned to procure slaves for itself, who could be gambled away more conveniently: the markets exposed for sale monthly one thousand human beings, taken from the inferior tribes of the coast. The whole administration of justice of these superior tribes was overthrown by the advent of the European, who taught them to punish theft, adultery, and other crimes by putting up the criminal for sale.

The Whidah people were Fetich-worshippers; so were the inhabitants of Benin. But the latter had the singularity of refusing to sell a criminal, adjudged to slavery, to the foreign slave-traders, unless it was a woman. They procured, however, a great many slaves from the interior for the Portuguese and French. The Benin people dealt in magic and the ordeal; they believed in apparitions, and filled up their cabins with idols to such an extent as nearly to eject the family.

The slaves of the river Calabar and the Gaboon were drawn from very inferior races, who lived in a state of mutual warfare for the purpose of furnishing each other to the trader. They kidnapped men in the interior, and their expeditions sometimes went so far that the exhausted victims occasioned the slaver a loss of sixty per cent, upon his voyage. The toughest of these people were the Eboes; the most degraded were the Papels and Bissagos.

The Congo negro was more intelligent than these; he understood something of agriculture and the keeping of cattle. He made Tombo wine and some kinds of native cloth. The women worked in the fields with their children slung to their backs. The Congo temperament near the coast was mild and even, like the climate; but there dwelt in the mountains the Auziko and N'teka, who were cannibals. The Congoes in Cuba had the reputation of being stupid, sensual, and brutal; but these African names have always been applied without much discrimination.

The slavers collected great varieties of negroes along the coasts of Loango and Benguela; some of them were tall, well-made, and vigorous, others were stunted and incapable. They were all pagans, accustomed to Fetich- and serpent-worship, very superstitious, without manliness and dignity, stupid and unimpressible.

The Benguela women learned the panel game from the Portuguese. This is an ugly habit of enticing men to such a point of complicity, that an indignant husband, and a close calculator, can appear suddenly and denounce the victim. Many a slave was furnished in this way.--But we restrain the pen from tracing the villanous and savage methods, suggested by violence or fraud or lust, to keep those decks well stocked over which the lilies of France drooped with immunity.

But a few tribes were so turbulent and sullen that the planter avoided buying them, unless his need of field-hands was very urgent. He was obliged to be circumspect, however; for the traders knew how to jockey a man with a sick, disabled, or impracticable negro. The Jews made a good business of buying refuse negroes and furbishing them up for the market. The French traders thought it merit to deceive a Jew; but the latter feigned to be abjectly helpless, in order to enjoy this refitting branch of the business.

"Yet, if thine own, thy children's life, be dear, Buy not a Cormantee, though healthy, young, Of breed too generous for the servile field: They, born to freedom in their native land, Choose death before dishonorable bonds; Or, fired with vengeance, at the midnight hour Sudden they seize thine unsuspecting watch, And thine own poniard bury in thy breast."

But these distinctions could not be preserved upon such a limited area and amid these jostling tribes. People of a dozen latitudes swarmed in the cabins of a single negro-quarter. Even the small planter could not stock his habitation with a single kind of negro: the competition at each trade-sale of slaves prevented it. So did a practice of selling them by the scramble. This was to shut two or three hundred of them into a large court-yard, where they were all marked at the same price, and the gates thrown open to purchasers. A greedy crowd rushed in, with yells and fighting, each man struggling to procure a quota, by striking them with his fists, tying handkerchiefs or pieces of string to them, fastening tags around their necks, regardless of tribe, family, or condition. The negroes, not yet recovered from their melancholy voyage, were amazed and panic-stricken at this horrible onslaught of avaricious men; they frequently scaled the walls, and ran frantically up and down the town.

As soon as the slaves were procured, by sale on shipboard, by auction, or by scramble, they received the private marks of their owners. Each planter had a silver plate, perforated with his letter, figure, or cipher, which he used to designate his own slaves by branding. If two planters happened to be using the same mark, the brand was placed upon different spots of the body. The heated plate, with an interposing piece of oiled or waxed paper, was touched lightly to the body; the flesh swelled, and the form of the brand could never be obliterated. Many slaves passed from one plantation to another, being sold and resold, till their bodies were as thick with marks as an obelisk. How different from the symbols of care in the furrowed face and stooping form of a free laborer, where the history of a humble home, planted in marriage and nursed by independent sorrow, is printed by the hand of God!

Mo quitt? bram-bram sonette, Mo pas batte bamboula. Quand mo contr? l'aut' negresse, Mo pas gagn? z'yeu pour ly; Mo pas souchi? travail piece, Tou qui chose a mou? mouri.

The French of which is as follows:--

Mes pas, loin de ma Lisette, S'?loiguent du Calinda; Et ma ceinture ? sonnette Languit sur mon bamboula. Mon oeil de toute autre belle N'aper?oit plus le souris; Le travail en vain m'appelle, Mes sens sont an?antis.

Free men who have children by slaves, and masters who permit the connection, are liable to a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar. If the guilty person be a master, his slave and her children are confiscated for the benefit of the hospital, and cannot be freed.

If a free man is not married to any white person during concubinage with his slave, and shall marry said slave, she and her children shall become enfranchised.

No consent of father and mother is essential for marriage between slaves, but no master can constrain slaves to marry against their will.

If a slave has a free black or colored woman for his wife, the male and female children shall follow the condition of the mother; and if a slave-woman has a free husband, the children shall follow his condition.

The weekly ration for a slave of ten years old and upwards consists of five Paris pints of manioc meal, or three cassava loaves, each weighing two and a half pounds, with two pounds of salt beef, or three of fish, or other things in proportion, but never any tafia in the place of a ration; and no master can avoid giving a slave his ration by offering him a day for his own labor. Weaned children to the age of ten are entitled to half the above ration. Each slave must also have two suits of clothes yearly, or cloth in proportion.

Slaves who are not properly nourished and clothed by their masters can lodge a complaint against them. If it be well-founded, the masters can be prosecuted without cost to the slave.

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