The Slave
Trade: Early Roots in Britain
In 1562 John Hawkins, an English
navigator, seeing the want of slaves in the West Indies, determined to
enter upon the piratical traffic. Several London gentlemen contributed
funds liberally for the enterprise. Three ships were provided, and with
these and 100 men Hawkins sailed to the coast of Guinea, where, by
bribery, deception, treachery, and force, he procured at least 300
negroes and sold them to the Spaniards in Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo,
and returned to England with a rich freight of pearls, sugar, and
ginger. The nation was shocked by the barbarous traffic, and the Queen
(Elizabeth) declared to Hawkins that, " if any of the Africans were
carried away without their own consent, it would be detestable, and call
down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers." He satisfied the
Queen and continued the traffic, pretending that it was for the good of
the souls of the Africans, as it introduced them to Christianity and
civilization.
Already negro slaves had been introduced
by the Spaniards into the West Indies. They first enslaved the natives,
but these were unequal to the required toil, and they were soon almost
extinguished by hard labor and cruelty. Charles V. of Spain granted a
license to a Fleming to import 4,000 negroes annually into the West
Indies. He sold his license to Genoese merchants, who began a regular
trade in human beings between Africa and the West Indies. These were
found to thrive where the native laborers died. The benevolent Las Casas
and others favored the system as a means for saving the Indian tribes
from destruction; and the trade was going on briskly when the English,
under the influence of Hawkins, engaged in it in 1562. Ten years before
a few negroes had been sold in England, and it is said that Queen
Elizabeth's scruples were so far removed that she shared in the profits
of the traffic carried on by Englishmen. The Stuart kings of England
chartered companies for the trade; and Charles II. and his brother James
were members of one of them.
After the revolution of 1688 the trade
was thrown open, and in 1713 an English company obtained the privilege
of supplying the Spanish colonies in America, South and Central, for
thirty years, stipulating to deliver 144,000 negro slaves within that
period. One quarter of the stock of the company was taken by King Philip
V. of Spain, and Queen Anne of England reserved for herself the other
quarter. So the two monarchs became great slave-dealers.
Slavery
Comes to America
The first slaves were introduced into the
English-American colonies by a Dutch trader, who, in 1619, sold twenty
of them to the settlers at Jamestown, Va. After that the trade between
North America and Africa was carried on quite vigorously; but some of
the colonies remonstrated, and in the Continental Congress, and also in
the public mind, there was a strong desire evinced to abolish the
slave-trade. Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick were banished from the
colony of Massachusetts, in 1658, under penalty of death if they should
return. Their crime was the embracing of the principles and mode of
worship of the Quakers. Their two children remained behind in extreme
poverty. They were fined for non-attendance upon the public worship
carried on by their persecutors. The magistrates insisted that the fine
must be paid, and passed the following order: " Whereas, Daniel
Southwick and Provided Southwick, son and daughter of Lawrence
Southwick, absenting themselves from the public ordinances, having been
fined by the courts of Salem and Ipswich, pretending they have no
estates, and resolving not to work, the court, upon perusal of a law
which was made upon account of debts, in what should be done for the
satisfaction of the fines, resolves, that the treasurers of the several
counties are and shall be fully empowered to sell said persons to any of
the English natives at Virginia or Barbadoes to answer the said fines."
Endicott, it is said, urged the execution of the measure with vehemence;
but, to the honor of the marine service, not a sea-captain in the port
of Boston could be induced to become a slave-dealer to please the
General Court. They were spared the usual brutal whipping of
contumacious persons as a special mark of humanity.
In 1662 the Virginia Assembly passed a
law that children should be held, bond or free, " according to the
condition of the mother." This was to meet the case of mulatto children,
born of black mothers, in the colony. It was thought right to hold
heathen Africans in slavery; but, as mulattoes must be part Christians,
a knotty question came up, for the English law in relation to serfdom
declared the condition of the child must be determined by that of the
father. The Virginia law opposed this doctrine in favor of the
slave-holders. Some of the negroes brought into Virginia were converted
to Christianity and baptized. The question was raised, " Is it lawful to
hold Christians as slaves ?" The General Assembly came to the relief of
the slave-holders by enacting a law that slaves, though converted and
baptized, should not therefore become free. It was also enacted that
killing a slave by his master by " extreme correction " should not be
esteemed a felony, since it might not be presumed that " malice prepense
" would " induce any man to destroy his own estate." It was also
enacted, as an evasion of the statute prohibiting the holding of Indians
as slaves, " that all servants, not being Christians, imported by
shipping, shall be slaves for life." Indian slaves, under this law, were
imported from New England and the West Indies. Freed slaves were then
subjected to civil disabilities.

A COLONIAL SLAVE-MARKET
IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
In 1663 the Maryland legislature enacted
a law that " all negroes and other slaves within the province, and all
negroes and other slaves to be thereafter imported into the province,
should serve during life; and all children born of any negro should be
slaves, as their fathers were, for the term of their lives." The same
law recited that " divers free-born English-women, forgetful of their
free condition, and to the disgrace of the nation, did intermarry with
negro slaves," and it was enacted for deterring from such " shameful
matches " that, during their husbands' lives, white women so
intermarrying should be servants to the masters of their husbands, and
that the issue of such marriages should be slaves for life.
Intermarriage Between Slave and Free
In 1681 the legislature of Maryland
passed a new act to remedy the evils of intermarrying of whites and
blacks. The preamble recited that such matches were often brought about
by the instigation or connivance of the master or mistress, who took
advantage of the former law to prolong the servitude of their white
feminine servants, and at the same time to raise up a brood of mulatto
slaves. The new law enacted that all white feminine servants
intermarrying with negro slaves were free, at once, after the nuptials,
and their children also; and that the minister celebrating and the
master or mistress promoting or conniving at such marriages were
subjected to a fine of 10,000 pounds of tobacco.
Rules for
Slaves
In 1682 the slave code of Virginia
received additions. It was enacted that runaways who refused to be
arrested might be lawfully killed. Slaves were forbidden to carry arms,
offensive or defensive, or to go off the plantations of their masters
without a written pass, or to lift a hand against a Christian, even in
self-defense. The condition of slavery was imposed upon all servants,
whether " negroes, Moors, mulattoes, or Indians, brought into the colony
by sea or land, whether converted to Christianity or not, provided they
were not of Christian parentage or country, or, if Turks or Moors, in
amity with his Majesty." Nearly a century afterwards Virginia tried to
suppress the traffic in African slaves, and in 1761 it was proposed in
her legislature to suppress the importation of Africans by levying a
prohibitory duty. Danger to the political interest of that colony was
foreboded by her wisest men in the continuance of the trade. An act for
levying the tax was passed by the Assembly, but in England it met the
fate of similar bills from other colonies to suppress the nefarious
traffic. It was sent back with a veto.
King George
Orders That Slavery NOT be Abolished in the Colonies
The King in council, on Dec. 10, 1770,
issued an instruction, under his own hand, commanding the governor of
Virginia, " upon pain of the highest displeasure, to assent to no law by
which the importation of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or
obstructed." In 1772 the Virginia Assembly earnestly discussed the
question, " How shall we get rid of the great evil?" Jefferson, Henry,
Lee, and other leading men anxiously desired to rid the colony of it. "
The interest of the country," it was said, " manifestly requires the
total expulsion of them." The Assembly finally resolved to address the
King himself on the subject, who, in council, had compelled the
toleration of the traffic, They pleaded with him to remove all
restraints upon their efforts to stop the importation of slaves, which
they called " a very pernicious commerce." In this matter Virginia
represented the sentiments of all the colonies, and the King knew it;
but the monarch " stood in the path of humanity and made himself the
pillar of the colonial slave-trade." Ashamed to reject the earnest and
solemn appeal of the Virginians, he evaded a reply. The conduct of the
King caused Jefferson to write as follows in his first draft of the
Declaration of Independence: "He has waged cruel war against human
nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in
the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and
carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a
miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King
of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be
bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every
legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce."
This paragraph was stricken out of the Declaration of Independence
before the committee submitted it to a vote of the Congress.
Rationalizations for Slavery
The unwise regulations of the trustees of
Georgia, which crushed incentives to industry and thrift, and other
causes which exist in all new settlements, made that colony languish.
The settlers saw the prosperity of their neighbors in South Carolina,
and attributed the difference to the positive prohibition of slavery in
Georgia. This became their leading grievance, and even Whitefield
advocated the introduction of slavery, under the old (and later)
pretence of propagating, in that way, Christianity among the heathen
Africans. Habersham, too, advocated the introduction. " Many of the poor
slaves in America," he wrote, " have already been made freemen of the
heavenly Jerusalem." The Germans were assured by their friends in
Germany of its harmlessness. Word came to them in 1749: " If you take
slaves in faith and with the intent of conducting them to Christ, the
action will not be a sin, but may prove a benediction." So it was that
avarice subdued conscience. Already slaves had been introduced into
Georgia from South Carolina as hired servants, under indentures for
life, or for ninety-nine years; and at Savannah the continual toast was,
" The one thing needful," which meant negro slaves. Leading men among
the Scotch and Germans who opposed the introduction of slavery were
threatened and persecuted. Under great pressure, the trustees yielded,
and slavery was introduced on the condition that all masters should be
obliged to compel the negroes to "attend, at some time on the Lord's
day, for instruction in the Christian religion." In 1752 the charter was
surrendered to the crown, the colony had all the privileges accorded to
others, and flourished.

A Slave Auction in New Orleans
To completely enslave the
English-American colonies, the British Parliament, in 1750, gave liberty
to trade in negroes, as slaves, to and from any part of Africa between
Sallee, in South Barbary, and the Cape of Good Hope, to all the subjects
of the King of England. This was designed to fill the colonies with
slaves, who should neither trouble Great Britain with fears of
encouraging political independence nor compete with their industry with
British workshops; neither would they leave their employers the entire
security that might enable them to prepare a revolt.
Slavery
Illegal in Britain
James Somerset, a negro slave of James
Stewart, was taken from Virginia to England, where he refused to serve
his master any longer. Stewart caused him to be arrested and put on
board a vessel to be conveyed to Jamaica. Being brought before
Chief-Justice Mansfield on a writ of habeas corpus (December, 1771), his
case was referred to the full court, where it was argued for the slave
by the great philanthropist, Granville Sharp. The decision would affect
the estimated number of 14,000 slaves then with their masters in
England, involving a loss to their owners of $3,500,000. After a careful
judicial investigation of the subject in its legal aspects,
Chief-Justice Mansfield gave the decision of the court that slavery was
contrary to the laws of England—that slavery could not exist there. "
Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision," he
said, " I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of
England, and therefore the black must be discharged."
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