Lobengula succeeded Umsilikatsi in 1870 and, realizing that his power was
waning, began to retreat northward toward the Zambesi. He was finally
defeated by the British and native forces in 1893 and the land was
incorporated into South Central Africa.

The result of all these movements was to break the inhabitants of
Bechuanaland into numerous fragments. There were small numbers of mulatto
Gricquas in the southwest and similar Bastaards in the northwest. The
Hottentots and Bushmen were dispersed into groups and seem doomed to
extinction, the last Hottentot chief being deposed in 1810 and replaced by
an English magistrate. Partially civilized Hottentots still live grouped
together in their kraals and are members of Christian churches. The
Bechuana hold their own in several centers; one is in Basutoland, west of
Natal, where a number of tribes were welded together under the far-sighted
Moshesh into a modern and fairly well civilized nation. In the north part
of Bechuanaland are the self-governing Bamangwato and the Batwana, the
former ruled by Khama, one of the canniest of modern rulers in Africa.

Meantime, in Portuguese territory south of the Zambesi, there arose Gaza,
a contemporary and rival of Chaka. His son, Manikus, was deputed by
Dingan, Chaka's successor, to drive out the Portuguese. This Manikus
failed to do, and to escape vengeance he migrated north of the Limpopo.
Here he established his military kraal in a district thirty-six hundred
and fifty feet above the sea and one hundred and twenty miles inland from
Sofala. From this place his soldiery nearly succeeded in driving the
Portuguese out of East Africa. He was succeeded by his son, Umzila, and
Umzila's brother, Guzana (better known as Gungunyana), who exercised for a
time joint authority. Gungunyana was finally overthrown in November, 1895,
captured, and removed to the Azores.

[Illustration: Races in Africa]

North of the Zambesi, in British territory, the chief role in recent times
has been played by the Bechuana, the first of the Bantu to return
northward after the South African migration. Livingstone found there the
Makolo, who with other tribes had moved northward on account of the
pressure of the Dutch and Zulus below, and by conquering various tribes
in the Zambesi region had established a strong power. This kingdom was
nearly overthrown by the rebellion of the Barotse, and in 1875 the Barotse
kingdom comprised a large territory. To-day their king, Lewanika, rules
directly and indirectly fifty thousand square miles, with a population
between one and two and a half million. They are under a protectorate of
the British.

In Southwest Africa, Hottentot mulattoes crossing from the Cape caused
widespread change. They were strong men and daring fighters and soon
became dominant in what is now German Southwest Africa, where they fought
fiercely with the Bantu Ova-Hereros. Armed with fire arms, these Namakwa
Hottentots threatened Portuguese West Africa, but Germany intervened,
ostensibly to protect missionaries. By spending millions of dollars and
thousands of soldiers Germany has nearly exterminated these brave men.

Thus we have between the years 1400 and 1900 a great period of migration
up to 1750, when Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu, and Dutch appeared in
succession at Land's End. In the latter part of the eighteenth century we
have the clash of the Hottentots and Bechuana, followed in the nineteenth
century by the terrible wars of Chaka, the Kaffirs, and Matabili. Finally,
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the gradual
subjection of the Kaffir-Zulus and the Bechuana under the English and the
final conquest of the Dutch. The resulting racial problem in South Africa
is one of great intricacy.

To the racial problem has been added the tremendous problem of modern
capital brought by the discovery of gold and diamond mines, so that the
future of the Negro race is peculiarly bound up in developments here at
Land's End, where the ship of the Flying Dutchman beats back and forth on
its endless quest.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Stowe: Native Races of South Africa, pp. 215-216.

VIII AFRICAN CULTURE

We have followed the history of mankind in Africa down the valley of the
Nile, past Ethiopia to Egypt; we have seen kingdoms arise along the great
bend of the Niger and strive with the ancient culture at its mouth. We
have seen the remnants of mankind at Land's End, the ancient culture at
Punt and Zymbabwe, and followed the invading Bantu east, south, and west
to their greatest center in the vast jungle of the Congo valleys.

We must now gather these threads together and ask what manner of men these
were and how far and in what way they progressed on the road of human
culture.

That Negro peoples were the beginners of civilization along the Ganges,
the Euphrates, and the Nile seems proven. Early Babylon was founded by a
Negroid race. Hammurabi's code, the most ancient known, says "Anna and Bel
called me, Hammurabi the exalted prince, the worshiper of the gods; to
cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked, to prevent
the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the
black-head race, to enlighten the land, and to further the welfare of the
people." The Assyrians show a distinct Negroid strain and early Egypt was
predominantly Negro. These earliest of cultures were crude and primitive,
but they represented the highest attainment of mankind after tens of
thousands of years in unawakened savagery.

It has often been assumed that the Negro is physically inferior to other
races and markedly distinguishable from them; modern science gives no
authority for such an assumption. The supposed inferiority cannot rest on
color,[35] for that is "due to the combined influences of a great number
of factors of environment working through physiological processes," and
"however marked the contrasts may be, there is no corresponding difference
in anatomical structure discoverable."[36] So, too, difference in texture
of hair is a matter of degree, not kind, and is caused by heat, moisture,
exposure, and the like.

The bony skeleton presents no distinctly racial lines of variation.
Prognathism "presents too many individual varieties to be taken as a
distinctive character of race."[37] Difference in physical measurements
does not show the Negro to be a more primitive evolutionary form.
Comparative ethnology to-day affords "no support to the view which sees in
the so-called lower races of mankind a transition stage from beast to
man."[38]

Much has been made of the supposed smaller brain of the Negro race; but
this is as yet an unproved assumption, based on the uncritical measurement
of less than a thousand Negro brains as compared with eleven thousand or
more European brains. Even if future measurement prove the average Negro
brain lighter, the vast majority of Negro brain weights fall within the
same limits as the whites; and finally, "neither size nor weight of the
brain seems to be of importance" as an index of mental capacity. We may,
therefore, say with Ratzel, "There is only one species of man. The
variations are numerous, but do not go deep."[39]

To this we may add the word of the Secretary of the First Races Congress:
"We are, then, under the necessity of concluding that an impartial
investigator would be inclined to look upon the various important peoples
of the world as to all intents and purposes essentially equal in
intellect, enterprise, morality, and physique."[40]

If these conclusions are true, we should expect to see in Africa the
human drama play itself out much as in other lands, and such has actually
been the fact. At the same time we must expect peculiarities arising from
the physiography of the land--its climate, its rainfall, its deserts, and
the peculiar inaccessibility of the coast.

Three principal zones of habitation appear: first, the steppes and deserts
around the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari desert in the south;
secondly, the grassy highlands bordering the Great Lakes and connecting
these two regions; thirdly, the forests and rivers of Central and West
Africa. In the deserts are the nomads, and the Pygmies are in the forest
fastnesses. Herdsmen and their cattle cover the steppes and highlands,
save where the tsetse fly prevents. In the open forests and grassy
highlands are the agriculturists.

Among the forest farmers the village is the center of life, while in the
open steppes political life tends to spread into larger political units.
Political integration is, however, hindered by an ease of internal
communication almost as great as the difficulty of reaching outer worlds
beyond the continent. The narrow Nile valley alone presented physical
barriers formidable enough to keep back the invading barbarians of the
south, and even then with difficulty. Elsewhere communication was all too
easy. For a while the Congo forests fended away the restless, but this
only temporarily.

On the whole Africa from the Sahara to the Cape offered no great physical
barrier to the invader, and we continually have whirlwinds of invading
hosts rushing now southward, now northward, from the interior to the coast
and from the coast inland, and hurling their force against states,
kingdoms, and cities. Some resisted for generations, some for centuries,
some but a few years. It is, then, this sudden change and the fear of it
that marks African culture, particularly in its political aspects, and
which makes it so difficult to trace this changing past. Nevertheless
beneath all change rests the strong substructure of custom, religion,
industry, and art well worth the attention of students.

Starting with agriculture, we learn that "among all the great groups of
the 'natural' races, the Negroes are the best and keenest tillers of the
ground. A minority despise agriculture and breed cattle; many combine both
occupations. Among the genuine tillers the whole life of the family is
taken up in agriculture, and hence the months are by preference called
after the operations which they demand. Constant clearings change forests
to fields, and the ground is manured with the ashes of the burnt thicket.
In the middle of the fields rise the light watch-towers, from which a
watchman scares grain-eating birds and other thieves. An African
cultivated landscape is incomplete without barns. The rapidity with which,
when newly imported, the most various forms of cultivation spread in
Africa says much for the attention which is devoted to this branch of
economy. Industries, again, which may be called agricultural, like the
preparation of meal from millet and other crops, also from cassava, the
fabrication of fermented drinks from grain, or the manufacture of cotton,
are widely known and sedulously fostered."[41]

Bücher reminds us of the deep impression made upon travelers when they
sight suddenly the well-attended fields of the natives on emerging from
the primeval forests. "In the more thickly populated parts of Africa these
fields often stretch for many a mile, and the assiduous care of the Negro
women shines in all the brighter light when we consider the insecurity of
life, the constant feuds and pillages, in which no one knows whether he
will in the end be able to harvest what he has sown. Livingstone gives
somewhere a graphic description of the devastations wrought by slave
hunts; the people were lying about slain, the dwellings were demolished;
in the fields, however, the grain was ripening and there was none to
harvest it."[42]

Sheep, goat, and chickens are domestic animals all over Africa, and Von
Franzius considers Africa the home of the house cattle and the Negro as
the original tamer. Northeastern Africa especially is noted for
agriculture, cattle raising, and fruit culture. In the eastern Sudan, and
among the great Bantu tribes extending from the Sudan down toward the
south, cattle are evidences of wealth; one tribe, for instance, having so
many oxen that each village had ten or twelve thousand head. Lenz (1884),
Bouet-Williaumez (1848), Hecquard (1854), Bosman (1805), and Baker (1868)
all bear witness to this, and Schweinfurth (1878) tells us of great cattle
parks with two to three thousand head and of numerous agricultural and
cattle-raising tribes. Von der Decken (1859-61) described the paradise of
the dwellers about Kilimanjaro--the bananas, fruit, beans and peas, cattle
raising with stall feed, the fertilizing of the fields, and irrigation.
The Negroid Gallas have seven or eight cattle to each inhabitant.
Livingstone bears witness to the busy cattle raising of the Bantus and
Kaffirs. Hulub (1881) and Chapman (1868) tell of agriculture and fruit
raising in South Africa. Shutt (1884) found the tribes in the southwestern
basin of the Congo with sheep, swine, goats, and cattle. On this
agricultural and cattle-raising economic foundation has arisen the
organized industry of the artisan, the trader, and the manufacturer.

While the Pygmies, still living in the age of wood, make no iron or stone
implements, they seem to know how to make bark cloth and fiber baskets and
simple outfits for hunting and fishing. Among the Bushmen the art of
making weapons and working in hides is quite common. The Hottentots are
further advanced in the industrial arts, being well versed in the
manufacture of clothing, weapons, and utensils. In the dressing of skins
and furs, as well as in the plaiting of cords and the weaving of mats, we
find evidences of their workmanship. In addition they are good workers in
iron and copper, using the sheepskin bellows for this purpose. The
Ashantis of the Gold Coast know how to make "cotton fabrics, turn and
glaze earthenware, forge iron, fabricate instruments and arms, embroider
rugs and carpets, and set gold and precious stones."[43] Among the people
of the banana zone we find rough basket work, coarse pottery, grass cloth,
and spoons made of wood and ivory. The people of the millet zone, because
of uncertain agricultural resources, quite generally turn to
manufacturing. Charcoal is prepared by the smiths, iron is smelted, and
numerous implements are manufactured. Among them we find axes, hatchets,
hoes, knives, nails, scythes, and other hardware. Cloaks, shoes, sandals,
shields, and water and oil vessels are made from leather which the natives
have dressed. Soap is manufactured in the Bautschi district, glass is
made, formed, and colored by the people of Nupeland, and in almost every
city cotton is spun and woven and dyed. Barth tells us that the weaving of
cotton was known in the Sudan as early as the eleventh century. There is
also extensive manufacture of wooden ware, tools, implements, and
utensils.

In describing particular tribes, Baker and Felkin tell of smiths of
wonderful adroitness, goatskins prepared better than a European tanner
could do, drinking cups and kegs of remarkable symmetry, and polished clay
floors. Schweinfurth says, "The arrow and the spear heads are of the
finest and most artistic work; their bristlelike barbs and points are
baffling when one knows how few tools these smiths have." Excellent wood
carving is found among the Bongo, Ovambo, and Makololo. Pottery and
basketry and careful hut building distinguish many tribes. Cameron (1877)
tells of villages so clean, with huts so artistic, that, save in book
knowledge, the people occupied no low plane of civilization. The Mangbettu
work both iron and copper. "The masterpieces of the Monbutto [Mangbettu]
smiths are the fine chains worn as ornaments, and which in perfection of
form and fineness compare well with our best steel chains." Shubotz in
1911 called the Mangbettu "a highly cultivated people" in architecture and
handicraft. Barth found copper exported from Central Africa in competition
with European copper at Kano.

Nor is the iron industry confined to the Sudan. About the Great Lakes and
other parts of Central Africa it is widely distributed. Thornton says,
"This iron industry proves that the East Africans stand by no means on so
low a plane of culture as many travelers would have us think. It is
unnecessary to be reminded what a people without instruction, and with the
rudest tools to do such skilled work, could do if furnished with steel
tools." Arrows made east of Lake Nyanza were found to be nearly as good as
the best Swedish iron in Birmingham. From Egypt to the Cape, Livingstone
assures us that the mortar and pestle, the long-handled axe, the goatskin
bellows, etc., have the same form, size, etc., pointing to a migration
southwestward. Holub (1879), on the Zambesi, found fine workers in iron
and bronze. The Bantu huts contain spoons, wooden dishes, milk pails,
calabashes, handmills, and axes.

Kaffirs and Zulus, in the extreme south, are good smiths, and the latter
melt copper and tin together and draw wire from it, according to Kranz
(1880). West of the Great Lakes, Stanley (1878) found wonderful examples
of smith work: figures worked out of brass and much work in copper.
Cameron (1878) saw vases made near Lake Tanganyika which reminded him of
the amphorae in the Villa of Diomedes, Pompeii. Horn (1882) praises tribes
here for iron and copper work. Livingstone (1871) passed thirty smelting
houses in one journey, and Cameron came across bellows with valves, and
tribes who used knives in eating. He found tribes which no Europeans had
ever visited, who made ingots of copper in the form of the St. Andrew's
cross, which circulated even to the coast. In the southern Congo basin
iron and copper are worked; also wood and ivory carving and pottery making
are pursued. In equatorial West Africa, Lenz and Du Chaillu (1861) found
iron workers with charcoal, and also carvers of bone and ivory. Near Cape
Lopez, Hübbe-Schleiden found tribes making ivory needles inlaid with
ebony, while the arms and dishes of the Osaka are found among many tribes
even as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Wilson (1856) found natives in West
Africa who could repair American watches.

Gold Coast Negroes make gold rings and chains, forming the metal into all
kinds of forms. Soyaux says, "The works in relief which natives of Lower
Guinea carve with their own knives out of ivory and hippopotamus teeth are
really entitled to be called works of art, and many wooden figures of
fetishes in the Ethnographical Museum of Berlin show some understanding of
the proportions of the human body." Great Bassam is called by Hecquard the
"Fatherland of Smiths." The Mandingo in the northwest are remarkable
workers in iron, silver, and gold, we are told by Mungo Park (1800), while
there is a mass of testimony as to the work in the north-west of Africa in
gold, tin, weaving, and dyeing. Caille found the Negroes in Bambana
manufacturing gunpowder (1824-28), and the Hausa make soap; so, too,
Negroes in Uganda and other parts have made guns after seeing European
models.

So marked has been the work of Negro artisans and traders in the
manufacture and exchange of iron implements that a growing number of
archeologists are disposed to-day to consider the Negro as the originator
of the art of smelting iron. Gabriel de Mortillet (1883) declared Negroes
the only iron users among primitive people. Some would, therefore, argue
that the Negro learned it from other folk, but Andree declares that the
Negro developed his own "Iron Kingdom." Schweinfurth, Von Luschan, Boaz,
and others incline to the belief that the Negroes invented the smelting of
iron and passed it on to the Egyptians and to modern Europe.

Boaz says, "It seems likely that at a time when the European was still
satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented or adopted the
art of smelting iron. Consider for a moment what this invention has meant
for the advance of the human race. As long as the hammer, knife, saw,
drill, the spade, and the hoe had to be chipped out of stone, or had to be
made of shell or hard wood, effective industrial work was not impossible,
but difficult. A great progress was made when copper found in large
nuggets was hammered out into tools and later on shaped by melting, and
when bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life
did not begin until the hard iron was discovered. It seems not unlikely
that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing iron ores by
smelting were the African Negroes. Neither ancient Europe, nor ancient
western Asia, nor ancient China knew the iron, and everything points to
its introduction from Africa. At the time of the great African discoveries
toward the end of the past century, the trade of the blacksmith was found
all over Africa, from north to south and from east to west. With his
simple bellows and a charcoal fire he reduced the ore that is found in
many parts of the continent and forged implements of great usefulness and
beauty."[44]

Torday has argued recently, "I feel convinced by certain arguments that
seem to prove to my satisfaction that we are indebted to the Negro for the
very keystone of our modern civilization and that we owe him the discovery
of iron. That iron could be discovered by accident in Africa seems beyond
doubt: if this is so in other parts of the world, I am not competent to
say. I will only remind you that Schweinfurth and Petherick record the
fact that in the northern part of East Africa smelting furnaces are worked
without artificial air current and, on the other hand, Stuhlmann and
Kollmann found near Victoria Nyanza that the natives simply mixed powdered
ore with charcoal and by introduction of air currents obtained the metal.
These simple processes make it simple that iron should have been
discovered in East or Central Africa. No bronze implements have ever been
found in black Africa; had the Africans received iron from the Egyptians,
bronze would have preceded this metal and all traces of it would not have
disappeared. Black Africa was for a long time an exporter of iron, and
even in the twelfth century exports to India and Java are recorded by
Idrisi.

"It is difficult to imagine that Egypt should have obtained it from
Europe where the oldest find (in Hallstadt) cannot be of an earlier period
than 800 B.C., or from Asia, where iron is not known before 1000 B.C., and
where, in the times of Ashur Nazir Pal, it was still used concurrently
with bronze, while iron beads have been only recently discovered by
Messrs. G.A. Wainwright and Bushe Fox in a predynastic grave, and where a
piece of this metal, possibly a tool, was found in the masonry of the
great pyramid."[45]

The Negro is a born trader. Lenz says, "our sharpest European merchants,
even Jews and Armenians, can learn much of the cunning and trade of the
Negroes." We know that the trade between Central Africa and Egypt was in
the hands of Negroes for thousands of years, and in early days the cities
of the Sudan and North Africa grew rich through Negro trade.

Leo Africanus, writing of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century, said, "It is
a wonder to see what plentie of Merchandize is daily brought hither and
how costly and sumptuous all things be.... Here are many shops of
artificers and merchants and especially of such as weave linnen and
cloth."

Long before cotton weaving was a British industry, West Africa and the
Sudan were supplying a large part of the world with cotton cloth. Even
to-day cities like Kuka on the west shore of Lake Chad and Sokota are
manufacturing centers where cotton is spun and woven, skins tanned,
implements and iron ornaments made.

"Travelers," says Bücher, "have often observed this tribal or local
development of industrial technique. 'The native villages,' relates a
Belgian observer of the Lower Congo, 'are often situated in groups. Their
activities are based upon reciprocality, and they are to a certain extent
the complements of one another. Each group has its more or less strongly
defined specialty. One carries on fishing; another produces palm wine; a
third devotes itself to trade and is broker for the others, supplying the
community with all products from outside; another has reserved to itself
work in iron and copper, making weapons for war and hunting, various
utensils, etc. None may, however, pass beyond the sphere of its own
specialty without exposing itself to the risk of being universally
proscribed.'"

From the Loango Coast, Bastian tells of a great number of centers for
special products of domestic industry. "Loango excels in mats and fishing
baskets, while the carving of elephants' tusks is specially followed in
Chilungo. The so-called Mafooka hats with raised patterns are drawn
chiefly from the bordering country of Kakongo and Mayyume. In Bakunya are
made potter's wares, which are in great demand; in Basanza, excellent
swords; in Basundi, especially beautiful ornamented copper rings; on the
Congo, clever wood and tablet carvings; in Loango, ornamented clothes and
intricately designed mats; in Mayumbe, clothing of finely woven mat-work;
in Kakongo, embroidered hats and also burnt clay pitchers; and among the
Bayakas and Mantetjes, stuffs of woven grass."[46]

A native Negro student tells of the development of trade among the
Ashanti. "It was a part of the state system of Ashanti to encourage trade.
The king once in every forty days, at the Adai custom, distributed among a
number of chiefs various sums of gold dust with a charge to turn the same
to good account. These chiefs then sent down to the coast caravans of
tradesmen, some of whom would be their slaves, sometimes some two or three
hundred strong, to barter ivory for European goods, or buy such goods with
gold dust, which the king obtained from the royal alluvial workings. Down
to 1873 a constant stream of Ashanti traders might be seen daily wending
their way to the merchants of the coast and back again, yielding more
certain wealth and prosperity to the merchants of the Gold Coast and Great
Britain than may be expected for some time yet to come from the mining
industry and railway development put together. The trade chiefs would, in
due time, render a faithful account to the king's stewards, being allowed
to retain a fair portion of the profit. In the king's household, too, he
would have special men who directly traded for him. Important chiefs
carried on the same system of trading with the coast as did the king. Thus
every member of the state, from the king downward, took an active interest
in the promotion of trade and in the keeping open of trade routes into the
interior."[47]

The trade thus encouraged and carried on in various parts of West Africa
reached wide areas. From the Fish River to Kuka, and from Lagos to
Zanzibar, the markets have become great centers of trade, the leading
implement to civilization. Permanent markets are found in places like
Ujiji and Nyangwe, where everything can be bought and sold from
earthenware to wives; from the one to three thousand traders flocked here.

"How like is the market traffic, with all its uproar and sound of human
voices, to one of our own markets! There is the same rivalry in praising
the goods, the violent, brisk movements, the expressive gesture, the
inquiring, searching glance, the changing looks of depreciation or
triumph, of apprehension, delight, approbation. So says Stanley. Trade
customs are not everywhere alike. If when negotiating with the Bangalas of
Angola you do not quickly give them what they want, they go away and do
not come back. Then perhaps they try to get possession of the coveted
object by means of theft. It is otherwise with the Songos and Kiokos, who
let you deal with them in the usual way. To buy even a small article you
must go to the market; people avoid trading anywhere else. If a man says
to another; 'Sell me this hen' or 'that fruit,' the answer as a rule will
be, 'Come to the market place.' The crowd gives confidence to individuals,
and the inviolability of the visitor to the market, and of the market
itself, looks like an idea of justice consecrated by long practice. Does
not this remind us of the old Germanic 'market place'?"[48]

Turning now to Negro family and social life we find, as among all
primitive peoples, polygamy and marriage by actual or simulated purchase.
Out of the family develops the typical African village organization, which
is thus described in Ashanti by a native Gold Coast writer: "The headman,
as his name implies, is the head of a village community, a ward in a
township, or of a family. His position is important, inasmuch as he has
directly to deal with the composite elements of the general bulk of the
people.

"It is the duty of the head of a family to bring up the members thereof in
the way they should go; and by 'family' you must understand the entire
lineal descendants of a materfamilias, if I may coin a convenient phrase.
It is expected of him by the state to bring up his charge in the knowledge
of matters political and traditional. It is his work to train up his wards
in the ways of loyalty and obedience to the powers that be. He is held
responsible for the freaks of recalcitrant members of his family, and he
is looked to to keep them within bounds and to insist upon conformity of
their party with the customs, laws, and traditional observances of the
community. In early times he could send off to exile by sale a troublesome
relative who would not observe the laws of the community.

"It is a difficult task that he is set to, but in this matter he has
all-powerful helpers in the female members of the family, who will be
either the aunts, or the sisters, or the cousins, or the nieces of the
headman; and as their interests are identical with his in every
particular, the good women spontaneously train up their children to
implicit obedience to the headman, whose rule in the family thus becomes a
simple and an easy matter. 'The hand that rocks the cradle rules the
world.' What a power for good in the native state system would the mothers
of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become by judicious training upon native
lines!

"The headman is par excellence the judge of his family or ward. Not only
is he called upon to settle domestic squabbles, but frequently he sits
judge over more serious matters arising between one member of the ward and
another; and where he is a man of ability and influence, men from other
wards bring him their disputes to settle. When he so settles disputes, he
is entitled to a hearing fee, which, however, is not so much as would be
payable in the regular court of the king or chief.

"The headman is naturally an important member of his company and often is
a captain thereof. When he combines the two offices of headman and
captain, he renders to the community a very important service. For in
times of war, where the members of the ward would not serve cordially
under a stranger, they would in all cases face any danger with their own
kinsman as their leader. The headman is always succeeded by his uterine
brother, cousin, or nephew--the line of succession, that is to say,
following the customary law."[49]

We may contrast this picture with the more warlike Bantus of Southeast
Africa. Each tribe lived by itself in a town with from five to fifteen
thousand inhabitants, surrounded by gardens of millet, beans, and
watermelon. Beyond these roamed their cattle, sheep, and goats. Their
religion was ancestor worship with sacrifice to spirits and the dead, and
some of the tribes made mummies of the corpses and clothed them for
burial. They wove cloth of cotton and bark, they carved wood and built
walls of unhewn stone. They had a standing military organization, and the
tribes had their various totems, so that they were known as the Men of
Iron, the Men of the Sun, the Men of the Serpents, Sons of the Corn
Cleaners, and the like. Their system of common law was well conceived and
there were organized tribunals of justice. In difficult cases precedents
were sought and learned antiquaries consulted. At the age of fifteen or
sixteen the boys were circumcised and formed into guilds. The land was
owned by the tribe and apportioned to the chief by each family, and the
main wealth of the tribe was in its cattle.

In general, among the African clans the idea of private property was but
imperfectly developed and never included land. The main mass of visible
wealth belonged to the family and clan rather than to the individual; only
in the matter of weapons and ornaments was exclusive private ownership
generally recognized.

The government, vested in fathers and chiefs, varied in different tribes
from absolute despotisms to limited monarchies, almost republican. Viewing
the Basuto National Assembly in South Africa, Lord Bryce recently wrote,
"The resemblance to the primary assemblies of the early peoples of Europe
is close enough to add another to the arguments which discredit the theory
that there is any such thing as an Aryan type of institutions."[50]

While women are sold into marriage throughout Africa, nevertheless their
status is far removed from slavery. In the first place the tracing of
relationships through the female line, which is all but universal in
Africa, gives the mother great influence. Parental affection is very
strong, and throughout Negro Africa the mother is the most influential
councilor, even in cases of tyrants like Chaka or Mutesa.

"No mother can love more tenderly or be more deeply beloved than the Negro
mother. Robin tells of a slave in Martinique who, with his savings, freed
his mother instead of himself. 'Everywhere in Africa,' writes Mungo Park,
'I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negro than
insulting his mother. 'Strike me,' cried a Mandingo to his enemy, 'but
revile not my mother!' ... The Herero swears 'By my mother's tears!'.. The
Angola Negroes have a saying, 'As a mist lingers on the swamps, so lingers
the love of father and mother.'"[51]

Black queens have often ruled African tribes. Among the Ba-Lolo, we are
told, women take part in public assemblies where all-important questions
are discussed. The system of educating children among such tribes as the
Yoruba is worthy of emulation by many more civilized peoples.

Close knit with the family and social organization comes the religious
life of the Negro. The religion of Africa is the universal animism or
fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching
monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic
missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere
senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life. Among primitive Negroes
there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds us, no such divorce of religion
from practical life as is common in civilized lands. Religion is life, and
fetish an expression of the practical recognition of dominant forces in
which the Negro lives. To him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says,
"If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature
according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of
it made than is made by Goethe in his superb 'Prometheus.'"[52] Fetish is
a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of good and
malignant spirits.

"It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of fetish in
Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that
white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday
affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish,
though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in
fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish
is almost irresistible when affliction comes to him."[53]

Ellis tells us of the spirit belief of the Ewe people, who believe that
men and all nature have the indwelling "Kra," which is immortal; that the
man himself after death may exist as a ghost, which is often conceived of
as departed from the "Kra," a shadowy continuing of the man. Bryce,
speaking of the Kaffirs of South Africa, says, "To the Kaffirs, as to the
most savage races, the world was full of spirits--spirits of the rivers,
the mountains, and the woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead,
who had power to injure or help the living, and who were, therefore,
propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when
their aid was especially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once
most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground
among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient
civilization, as it does in China and Japan to-day, was, and is, virtually
the religion of the Kaffirs."[54]

African religion does not, however, stop with fetish, but, as in the case
of other peoples, tends toward polytheism and monotheism. Among the
Yoruba, for instance, Frobenius shows that religion and city-state go hand
in hand.

"The first experienced glance will here detect the fact that this nation
originally possessed a clear and definite organization so duly ordered and
so logical that we but seldom meet with its like among all the peoples of
the earth. And the basic idea of every clan's progeniture is a powerful
God; the legitimate order in which the descendants of a particular clan
unite in marriage to found new families, the essential origin of every
new-born babe's descent in the founder of its race and its consideration
as a part of the God in Chief; the security with which the newly wedded
wife not only may, but should, minister to her own God in an unfamiliar
home."[55]

The Yoruba have a legend of a dying divinity. "This people ... give
evidence of a generalized system; a theocratic scheme, a well-conceived
perceptible organization, reared in rhythmically proportioned manner."

Miss Kingsley says, "The African has a great Over God."[56] Nassau, the
missionary, declares, "After more than forty years' residence among these
tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with their customs,
dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with them in the various
relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master, fellow-traveler, and guest,
and in my special office as missionary, searching after their religious
thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper entrance into the arcana of
their soul than would be accorded to a passing explorer), I am able
unhesitatingly to say that among all the multitude of degraded ones with
whom I have met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was
only a superstition.

"Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief
has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to
speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there
is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,--the bold, gaunt
cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with
rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village
smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white
with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and
children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from
their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,--I have yet to be asked, 'Who
is God?'"[57]

The basis of Egyptian religion was "of a purely Nigritian character,"[58]
and in its developed form Sudanese tribal gods were invoked and venerated
by the priests. In Upper Egypt, near the confines of Ethiopia, paintings
repeatedly represent black priests conferring on red Egyptian priests the
instruments and symbols of priesthood. In the Sudan to-day Frobenius
distinguishes four principal religions: first, earthly ancestor worship;
next, the social cosmogony of the Atlantic races; third, the religion of
the Bori, and fourth, Islam. The Bori religion spreads from Nubia as far
as the Hausa, and from Lake Chad in the Niger as far as the Yoruba. It is
the religion of possession and has been connected by some with Asiatic
influences.

From without have come two great religious influences, Islam and
Christianity. Islam came by conquest, trade, and proselytism. As a
conqueror it reached Egypt in the seventh century and had by the end of
the fourteenth century firm footing in the Egyptian Sudan. It overran the
central Sudan by the close of the seventeenth century, and at the
beginning of the nineteenth century had swept over Senegambia and the
whole valley of the Niger down to the Gulf of Guinea. On the east Islam
approached as a trader in the eighth century; it spread into Somaliland
and overran Nubia in the fourteenth century. To-day Islam dominates Africa
north of ten degrees north latitude and is strong between five and ten
degrees north latitude. In the east it reaches below the Victoria Nyanza.

Christianity early entered Africa; indeed, as Mommsen says, "It was
through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world.
Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from Sicca Veneria,
Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius Felix, in spite of their
Latin names, were natives of Africa, and not less so Augustine. In Africa
the Church found its most zealous confessors of the faith and its most
gifted defenders."[59]

The Africa referred to here, however, was not Negroland, but Africa above
the desert, where Negro blood was represented in the ancient Mediterranean
race and by intercourse across the desert. On the other hand Christianity
was early represented in the valley of the Nile under "the most holy pope
and patriarch of the great city of Alexandria and of all of the land of
Egypt, of Jerusalem, the holy city, of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Pentapolis,
and all the preaching of St. Mark." This patriarchate had a hundred
bishoprics in the fourth century and included thousands of black
Christians. Through it the Cross preceded the Crescent in some of the
remotest parts of black Africa.

All these beginnings were gradually overthrown by Islam except among the
Copts in Egypt, and in Abyssinia. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century
began to replant the Christian religion and for a while had great success,
both on the east and west coasts. Roman Catholic enterprise halted in the
eighteenth century and the Protestants began. To-day the west coast is
studded with English and German missions, South Africa is largely
Christian through French and English influence, and the region about the
Great Lakes is becoming christianized. The Roman Catholics have lately
increased their activities, and above all the Negroes of America have
entered with their own churches and with the curiously significant
"Ethiopian" movement.

Coming now to other spiritual aspects of African culture, we can speak at
present only in a fragmentary way. Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided
into two language zones: north of the fifth degree of north latitude is
the zone of diversity, with at least a hundred groups of widely divergent
languages; south of the line there is one minor language
(Bushman-Hottentot), spoken by less than fifty thousand people, and
elsewhere the predominant Bantu tongue with its various dialects, spoken
by at least fifty million. The Bantu tongue, which thus rules all Central,
West, and South Africa, is an agglutinative tongue which makes especial
use of prefixes. The hundreds of Negro tongues or dialects in the north
represent most probably the result of war and migration and the breaking
up of ancient centers of culture. In Abyssinia and the great horn of East
Africa the influence of Semitic tongues is noted. Despite much effort on
the part of students, it has been impossible to show any Asiatic origin
for the Egyptian language. As Sergi maintains, "everything favors an
African origin."[60] The most brilliant suggestion of modern days links
together the Egyptian of North Africa and the Hottentot and Bushmen
tongues of South Africa.

Language was reduced to writing among the Egyptians and Ethiopians and to
some extent elsewhere in Africa. Over 100 manuscripts of Ethiopian and
Ethiopic-Arabian literature are extant, including a version of the Bible
and historical chronicles. The Arabic was used as the written tongue of
the Sudan, and Negroland has given us in this tongue many chronicles and
other works of black authors. The greatest of these, the Epic of the Sudan
(Tarikh-es-Soudan), deserves to be placed among the classics of all
literature. In other parts of Africa there was no written language, but
there was, on the other hand, an unusual perfection of oral tradition
through bards, and extraordinary efficiency in telegraphy by drum and
horn.

The folklore and proverbs of the African tribes are exceedingly rich. Some
of these have been made familiar to English writers through the work of
"Uncle Remus." Others have been collected by Johnston, Ellis, and Theal.

A black bard of our own day has described the onslaught of the Matabili in
poetry of singular force and beauty:

  They saw the clouds ascend from the plains:
  It was the smoke of burning towns.
    The confusion of the whirlwind
Was in the heart of the great chief of the blue-colored cattle.
      The shout was raised,
        "They are friends!"
      But they shouted again,
        "They are foes!"
Till their near approach proclaimed them Matabili.
      The men seized their arms,
And rushed out as if to chase the antelope.
    The onset was as the voice of lightning,
And their javelins as the shaking of the forest in the autumn storm.[61]

There can be no doubt of the Negro's deep and delicate sense of beauty in
form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies
to them independent invention and individual taste in their work either
shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of
knowledge renders him an incompetent judge."[62] M. Rutot had lately told
us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe.
The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in
company with drawings and sculpture in high and low relief; some of their
sculptures, like the Wellendorff "Venus," are unusually well finished for
primitive man. So, too, the painting and carving of the Bushmen and their
forerunners in South Africa has drawn the admiration of students. The
Negro has been prolific in the invention of musical instruments and has
given a new and original music to the western world.

Schweinfurth, who has preserved for us much of the industrial art of the
Negroes, speaks of their delight in the production of works of art for the
embellishment and convenience of life. Frobenius expressed his
astonishment at the originality of the African in the Yoruba temple which
he visited. "The lofty veranda was divided from the passageway by
fantastically carved and colored pillars. On the pillars were sculptured
knights, men climbing trees, women, gods, and mythical beings. The dark
chamber lying beyond showed a splendid red room with stone hatchets,
wooden figures, cowry beads, and jars. The whole picture, the columns
carved in colors in front of the colored altar, the old man sitting in the
circle of those who reverenced him, the open scaffolding of ninety
rafters, made a magnificent impression."[63]

The Germans have found, in Kamarun, towns built, castellated, and
fortified in a manner that reminds one of the prehistoric cities of Crete.
The buildings and fortifications of Zymbabwe have already been described
and something has been said of the art of Benin, with its brass and bronze
and ivory. All the work of Benin in bronze and brass was executed by
casting, and by methods so complicated that it would be no easy task for a
modern European craftsman to imitate them.

Perhaps no race has shown in its earlier development a more magnificent
art impulse than the Negro, and the student must not forget how far Negro
genius entered into the art in the valley of the Nile from Meroe and
Nepata down to the great temples of Egypt.

Frobenius has recently directed the world's attention to art in West
Africa. Quartz and granite he found treated with great dexterity. But more
magnificent than the stone monument is the proof that at some remote era
glass was made and molded in Yorubaland and that the people here were
brilliant in the production of terra-cotta images. The great mass of
potsherds, lumps of glass, heaps of slag, etc., "proves, at all events,
that the glass industry flourished in this locality in ages past. It is
plain that the glass beads found to have been so very common in Africa
were not only not imported, but were actually manufactured in great
quantities at home."

The terra-cotta pieces are "remains of another ancient and fine type of
art" and were "eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy of form, and
practically a reminiscence of the ancient Greeks." The antique bronze head
Frobenius describes as "a head of marvelous beauty, wonderfully cast," and
"almost equal in beauty and, at least, no less noble in form, and as
ancient as the terra-cotta heads."[64]

In a park of monuments Frobenius saw the celebrated forge and hammer: a
mighty mass of iron, like a falling drop in shape, and a block of quartz
fashioned like a drum. Frobenius thinks these were relics dating from past
ages of culture, when the manipulation of quartz and granite was
thoroughly understood and when iron manipulation gave evidence of a skill
not met with to-day.

Even when we contemplate such revolting survivals of savagery as
cannibalism we cannot jump too quickly at conclusions. Cannibalism is
spread over many parts of Negro Africa, yet the very tribes who practice
cannibalism show often other traits of industry and power. "These cannibal
Bassonga were, according to the types we met with, one of those rare
nations of the African interior which can be classed with the most
esthetic and skilled, most discreet and intelligent of all those generally
known to us as the so-called natural races. Before the Arabic and European
invasion they did not dwell in 'hamlets,' but in towns with twenty or
thirty thousand inhabitants, in towns whose highways were shaded by
avenues of splendid palms planted at regular intervals and laid out with
the symmetry of colonnades. Their pottery would be fertile in suggestion
to every art craftsman in Europe. Their weapons of iron were so perfectly
fashioned that no industrial art from abroad could improve upon their
workmanship. The iron blades were cunningly ornamented with damascened
copper, and the hilts artistically inlaid with the same metal. Moreover,
they were most industrious and capable husbandmen, whose careful tillage
of the suburbs made them able competitors of any gardener in Europe. Their
sexual and parental relations evidenced an amount of tact and delicacy of
feelings unsurpassed among ourselves, either in the simplicity of the
country or the refinements of the town. Originally their political and
municipal system was organized on the lines of a representative republic.
True, it is on record that these well-governed towns often waged an
internecine warfare; but in spite of this it had been their invariable
custom from time immemorial, even in times of strife, to keep the trade
routes open and to allow their own and foreign merchants to go their ways
unharmed. And the commerce of these nations ebbed and flowed along a road
of unknown age, running from Itimbiri to Batubenge, about six hundred
miles in length. This highway was destroyed by the 'missionaries of
civilization' from Arabia only toward the close of the eighteenth century.
But even in my own time there were still smiths who knew the names of
places along that wonderful trade route driven through the heart of the
'impenetrable forests of the Congo.' For every scrap of imported iron was
carried over it."[65]

In disposition the Negro is among the most lovable of men. Practically all
the great travelers who have spent any considerable time in Africa testify
to this and pay deep tribute to the kindness with which they were
received. One has but to remember the classic story of Mungo Park, the
strong expressions of Livingstone, the words of Stanley and hundreds of
others to realize this.

Ceremony and courtesy mark Negro life. Livingstone again and again reminds
us of "true African dignity." "When Ilifian men or women salute each
other, be it with a plain and easy curtsey (which is here the simplest
form adopted), or kneeling down, or throwing oneself upon the ground, or
kissing the dust with one's forehead, no matter which, there is yet a
deliberateness, a majesty, a dignity, a devoted earnestness in the manner
of its doing, which brings to light with every gesture, with every fold of
clothing, the deep significance and essential import of every single
action. Everyone may, without too greatly straining his attention, notice
the very striking precision and weight with which the upper and lower
native classes observe these niceties of intercourse."[66]

All this does not mean that the African Negro is not human with the
all-too-well-known foibles of humanity. Primitive life among them is,
after all, as bare and cruel as among primitive Germans or Chinese, but it
is not more so, and the more we study the Negro the more we realize that
we are dealing with a normal human stock which under reasonable conditions
has developed and will develop in the same lines as other men. Why is it,
then, that so much of misinformation and contempt is widespread concerning
Africa and its people, not simply among the unthinking mass, but among men
of education and knowledge?

One reason lies undoubtedly in the connotation of the term "Negro." In
North America a Negro may be seven-eights white, since the term refers to
any person of Negro descent. If we use the term in the same sense
concerning the inhabitants of the rest of world, we may say truthfully
that Negroes have been among the leaders of civilization in every age of
the world's history from ancient Babylon to modern America; that they have
contributed wonderful gifts in art, industry, political organization, and
religion, and that they are doing the same to-day in all parts of the
world.

In sharp contrast to this usage the term "Negro" in Africa has been more
and more restricted until some scientists, late in the last century,
declared that the great mass of the black and brown people of Africa were
not Negroes at all, and that the "real" Negro dwells in a small space
between the Niger and the Senegal. Ratzel says, "If we ask what justifies
so narrow a limitation, we find that the hideous Negro type, which the
fancy of observers once saw all over Africa, but which, as Livingstone
says, is really to be seen only as a sign in front of tobacco shops, has
on closer inspection evaporated from all parts of Africa, to settle no one
knows how in just this region. If we understand that an extreme case may
have been taken for the genuine and pure form, even so we do not
comprehend the ground of its geographical limitation and location; for
wherever dark, woolly-haired men dwell, this ugly type also crops up. We
are here in the presence of a refinement of science which to an
unprejudiced eye will hardly hold water."[67]

In this restricted sense the Negro has no history, culture, or ability,
for the simple fact that such human beings as have history and evidence
culture and ability are not Negroes! Between these two extreme
definitions, with unconscious adroitness, the most extraordinary and
contradictory conclusions have been reached.

Let it therefore be said, once for all, that racial inferiority is not the
cause of anti-Negro prejudice. Boaz, the anthropologist, says, "An
unbiased estimate of the anthropological evidence so far brought forward
does not permit us to countenance the belief in a racial inferiority which
would unfit an individual of the Negro race to take his part in modern
civilization. We do not know of any demand made on the human body or mind
in modern life that anatomical or ethnological evidence would prove to be
beyond the powers of the Negro."[68]

"We have every reason to suppose that all races are capable, under proper
guidance, of being fitted into the complex scheme of our modern
civilization, and the policy of artificially excluding them from its
benefits is as unjustifiable scientifically as it is ethically
abhorrent."[69] What is, then, this so-called "instinctive" modern
prejudice against black folk?

Lord Bryce says of the intermingling of blacks and whites in South
America, "The ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled by marriage
with the Indian tribes--and the Portuguese have done the like, not only
with the Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar Negroes--shows
that race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human
affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of
being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in the matter, we are rather the
exception, for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race
repulsion."

In nearly every age and land men of Negro descent have distinguished
themselves. In literature there is Terence in Rome, Nosseyeb and Antar in
Arabia, Es-Sa'di in the Sudan, Pushkin in Russia, Dumas in France, Al
Kanemi in Spain, Heredia in the West Indies, and Dunbar in the United
States, not to mention the alleged Negro strain in Æsop and Robert
Browning. As rulers and warriors we remember such Negroes as Queen
Nefertari and Amenhotep III among many others in Egypt; Candace and
Ergamenes in Ethiopia; Mansa Musa, Sonni Ali, and Mohammed Askai in the
Sudan; Diaz in Brazil, Toussaint L'Ouverture in Hayti, Hannivalov in
Russia, Sakanouye Tamuramaro in Japan, the elder Dumas in France, Cazembe
and Chaka among the Bantu, and Menelik, of Abyssinia; the numberless black
leaders of India, and the mulatto strain of Alexander Hamilton. In music
and art we recall Bridgewater, the friend of Beethoven, and the
unexplained complexion of Beethoven's own father; Coleridge-Taylor in
England, Tanner in America, Gomez in Spain; Ira Aldridge, the actor, and
Johnson, Cook, and Burleigh, who are making the new American syncopated
music. In the Church we know that Negro blood coursed in the veins of many
of the Catholic African fathers, if not in certain of the popes; and there
were in modern days Benoit of Palermo, St. Benedict, Bishop Crowther, the
Mahdi who drove England from the Sudan, and Americans like Allen, Lot
Carey, and Alexander Crummell. In science, discovery, and invention the
Negroes claim Lislet Geoffroy of the French Academy, Latino and Amo, well
known in European university circles; and in America the explorers
Dorantes and Henson; Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone
improver; McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who
revolutionized shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of
genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are strong
human testimony to the ability of this race.

We must, then, look for the origin of modern color prejudice not to
physical or cultural causes, but to historic facts. And we shall find the
answer in modern Negro slavery and the slave trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] "Some authors write that the Ethiopians paint the devil white, in
disdain of our complexions."--Ludolf: _History of Ethiopia_, p. 72.

[36] Ripley: _Races of Europe_, pp. 58, 62.

[37] Denniker: _Races of Men_, p. 63.

[38] G. Finot: _Race Prejudice_. F. Herz: _Moderne Rassentheorien_.

[39] Ratzel: quoted in Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 31.

[40] Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 35.

[41] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 380 ff.

[42] _Industrial Evolution_, p. 47.

[43] These and other references in this chapter are from Schneider:
Culturfähigkeit des Negers.

[44] Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19.

[45] _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, XLIII, 414, 415.
Cf. also _The Crisis_, Vol. IX, p. 234.

[46] Bücher: _Industrial Revolution_ (tr. by Wickett), pp. 57-58.

[47] Hayford: _Native Institutions_, pp. 95-96.

[48] Ratzel, II, 376.

[49] Hayford: _Native Institutions_, pp. 76 ff.

[50] _Impressions of South Africa_, 3d ed., p. 352.

[51] William Schneider.

[52] _West African Studies_, Chap. V.

[53] _Op. cit._

[54] _Impressions of South Africa._

[55] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[56] _West African Studies_, p. 107.

[57] Nassau: _Fetishism in West Africa_, p. 36.

[58] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 9th ed., XX, 362.

[59] _The African Provinces_, II, 345.

[60] _Mediterranean Race_, p. 10.

[61] Stowe: _Native Races_, etc., pp. 553-554.

[62] Quoted in Schneider.

[63] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I, Chap. XIV.

[64] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[65] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 14-15.

[66] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 272.

[67] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 313.

[68] Atlanta University Publications, No. 11.

[69] Robert Lowie in the _New Review_, Sept., 1914.

IX THE TRADE IN MEN

Color was never a badge of slavery in the ancient or medieval world, nor
has it been in the modern world outside of Christian states. Homer sings
of a black man, a "reverend herald"

    Of visage solemn, sad, but sable hue,
    Short, woolly curls, o'erfleeced his bending head,...
    Eurybiates, in whose large soul alone,
    Ulysses viewed an image of his own.

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 peoples and was
wide-spread in Africa. The relative number of African slaves under these
conditions was small and the labor not hard; they were 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 industries were threatened by powerful
barbarians from the west and central regions of the continent and by the
Moors in the north, and Islam had only partially converted the leading
peoples.

When, therefore, a demand for workmen arose in America, European
exportation was limited by 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 Negroes. Two
great modern religions, therefore, agreed at least in the policy of
enslaving heathen blacks, while the overthrow of black Askias by the Moors
at Tenkadibou brought that economic chaos among the advanced Negro peoples
and movement among the more barbarous tribes which proved of prime
advantage to the development of a systematic trade in men.

The modern 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 in Christian lands made slaves the object, and not the
incident, of African wars.

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-Kabu,
the Portuguese began to creep down the west coast in quest of trade. They
reached the River of Gold in 1441, 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.

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, the fifteenth of 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."[70] 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.[71] 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. Nunez 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, 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[72]."

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[73]. 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 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 upon every part of Africa--upon the west coast, the western and
Egyptian Sudan, the valley of the Congo, Abyssinia, the lake regions, the
east coast, and Madagascar. Not simply the degraded and weaker types of
Negroes were seized, but the strong Bantu, the Mandingo and Songhay, the
Nubian and Nile Negroes, the Fula, and even the Asiatic Malay, were
represented in the raids.

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, and 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 the 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 the most inexcusable and despicable blot on
modern human 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[74].

It was the Dutch, however, who launched the oversea slave trade as a
regular institution. They began their fight for freedom from Spain in
1579; in 1595, as a war measure against Spain, who at that time was
dominating Portugal, they made 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 sugar. 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 them 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 a
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 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 coöperation 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 François, 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 François 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]

The revolt once started, blacks and mulattoes murdered whites without
mercy and the whites retaliated. Commissioners were sent from France, who
asked simply civil rights for freedmen, and not emancipation. Indeed that
was all that Toussaint himself had as yet demanded. The planters intrigued
with the British and this, together with the beheading of the king (an
impious act in the eyes of Negroes), induced Toussaint to join the
Spaniards. In 1793 British troops were landed and the French commissioners
in desperation declared the slaves emancipated. This at once won back
Toussaint from the Spaniards. He became supreme in the north, while
Rigaud, leader of the mulattoes, held the south and the west. By 1798 the
British, having lost most of their forces by yellow fever, surrendered
Mole St. Nicholas to Toussaint and departed. Rigaud finally left for
France, and Toussaint in 1800 was master of Hayti. He promulgated a
constitution under which Hayti was to be a self-governing colony; all men
were equal before the law, and trade was practically free. Toussaint was
to be president for life, with the power to name his successor.

Napoleon Bonaparte, master of France, had at this time dreams of a great
American empire, and replied to Toussaint's new government by sending
twenty-five thousand men under his brother-in-law to subdue the
presumptuous Negroes, as a preliminary step to his occupation and
development of the Mississippi valley. Fierce fighting and yellow fever
decimated the French, but matters went hard with the Negroes too, and
Toussaint finally offered to yield. He was courteously received with
military honors and then, as soon as possible, treacherously seized,
bound, and sent to France. He was imprisoned at Fort Joux and died,
perhaps of poison, after studied humiliations, April 7, 1803.

Thus perished the greatest of American Negroes and one of the great men of
all time, at the age of fifty-six. A French planter said, "God in his
terrestrial globe did not commune with a purer spirit."[83] Wendell
Phillips said, "Some doubt the courage of the Negro. Go to Hayti and stand
on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had and
ask them what they think of the Negro's sword. I would call him Napoleon,
but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of
blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but
Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him
into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held
slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in
the humblest village of his dominions. You think me a fanatic, for you
read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty
years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put
Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for the English, La
Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of
our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will
write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the
statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture."

The treacherous killing of Toussaint did not conquer Hayti. In 1802 and
1803 some forty thousand French soldiers died of war and fever. A new
colored leader, Dessalines, arose and all the eight thousand remaining
French surrendered to the blockading British fleet.

The effect of all this was far-reaching. Napoleon gave up his dream of
American empire and sold Louisiana for a song. "Thus, all of Indian
Territory, all of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa and Wyoming and Montana and
the Dakotas, and most of Colorado and Minnesota, and all of Washington and
Oregon states, came to us as the indirect work of a despised Negro.
Praise, if you will, the work of a Robert Livingstone or a Jefferson, but
to-day let us not forget our debt to Toussaint L'Ouverture, who was
indirectly the means of America's expansion by the Louisiana Purchase of
1803."[84]

With the freedom of Hayti in 1801 came a century of struggle to fit the
people for the freedom they had won. They were yet slaves, crushed by a
cruel servitude, without education or religious instruction. The Haytian
leaders united upon Dessalines to maintain the independence of the
republic. Dessalines, like Toussaint and his lieutenant Christophe, was
noted in slavery days for his severity toward his fellows and the
discipline which he insisted on. He had other characteristics of African
chieftains. "There were seasons when he broke through his natural
sullenness and showed himself open, affable, and even generous. His vanity
was excessive and manifested itself in singular perversities."[85] He was
a man of great personal bravery and succeeded in maintaining the
independence of Hayti, which had already cost the Frenchmen fifty thousand
lives.

On January 1, 1804, at the place whence Toussaint had been treacherously
seized and sent to France, the independence of Hayti was declared by the
military leaders. Dessalines was made governor-general for life and
afterward proclaimed himself emperor. This was not an act of
grandiloquence and mimicry. "It is truer to say that in it both Dessalines
and later Christophe were actuated by a clear insight into the social
history and peculiarities of their people. There was nothing in the
constitution which did not have its companion in Africa, where the
organization of society was despotic, with elective hereditary chiefs,
royal families, polygamic marriages, councils, and regencies."[86]

The population was divided into soldiers and laborers. The territory was
parceled out to chiefs, and the laborers were bound to the soil and worked
under rigorous inspection; part of the products were reserved for their
support, and the rest went to the chiefs, the king, the general
government, and the army. The army was under stern discipline and
military service was compulsory. Women did much of the agricultural labor.
Under Toussaint the administration of this system was committed to
Dessalines, who carried it out with rigor; it was afterward followed by
Christophe. The latter even imported four thousand Negroes from Africa,
from whom he formed a national guard for patrolling the land. These
regulations brought back for a time a large part of the former prosperity
of the island.

The severity with which Dessalines enforced the laws soon began to turn
many against him. The educated mulattoes especially objected to submission
to the savage African _mores_. Dessalines started to suppress their
revolt, but was killed in ambush in October, 1806.

Great Britain now began to intrigue for a protectorate over the island and
the Spanish end of the island threatened attack. These difficulties were
overcome, but at a cost of great internal strain. After the death of
Dessalines it seemed that Hayti was about to dissolve into a number of
petty subdivisions. At one time Christophe was ruling as king in the
north, Petion as president at Port au Prince, Rigaud in the south, and a
semi-brigand, Goman, in the extreme southwest. Very soon, however, the
rivalry narrowed down to Petion and Christophe. Petion was a man of
considerable ability and did much, not simply for Hayti, but for South
America. Already as early as 1779, before the revolution in Hayti, the
Haytian Negroes had helped the United States. The British had captured
Savannah in 1778. The French fleet appeared on the coast of Georgia late
that year and was ordered to recruit men in Hayti. Eight hundred young
freedmen, blacks and mulattoes, offered to take part in the expedition,
and they fought valiantly in the siege and covered themselves with glory.
It was this legion that made the charge on the British and saved the
retreating American army. Among the men who fought there was Christophe.

When Simon Bolivar, Commodore Aury, and many Venezuelan families were
driven from their country in 1815, they and their ships took temporary
refuge in Hayti. Notwithstanding the embarrassed condition of the
republic, Petion received them and gave them four thousand rifles with
ammunition, provisions, and last and best a printing press. He also
settled some international quarrels among members of the groups, and
Bolivar expressed himself afterward as being "overwhelmed with magnanimous
favors."[87]

Petion died in 1818 and was succeeded by his friend Boyer. Christophe
committed suicide the following year and Boyer became not simply ruler of
western Hayti, but also, by arrangement with the eastern end of the
island, gained the mastery there, where they were afraid of Spanish
aggression. Thus from 1822 to 1843 Boyer, a man of much ability, ruled the
whole of the island and gained the recognition of Haytian independence
from France and other nations.

France, under Charles X, demanded an indemnity of thirty million dollars
to reimburse the planters for confiscated lands and property. This Hayti
tried to pay, but the annual installment was a tremendous burden to the
impoverished country. Further negotiations were entered into. Finally in
1838 France recognized the independence of the republic and the indemnity
was reduced to twelve million dollars. Even this was a large burden for
Hayti, and the payment of it for years crippled the island.

The United States and Great Britain in 1825-26 recognized the independence
of Hayti. A concordat was arranged with the Pope for governing the church
in Hayti, and finally in 1860 the church placed under the French
hierarchy. Thus Boyer did unusually well; but his necessary concessions to
France weakened his influence at home, and finally an earthquake, which
destroyed several towns in 1842, raised the superstitious of the populace
against him. He resigned in 1843, leaving the treasury well filled; but
with his withdrawal the Spanish portion of the island was lost to Hayti.

The subsequent history of Hayti since 1843 has been the struggle of a
small divided country to maintain political independence. The rich
resources of the country called for foreign capital, but outside capital
meant political influence from abroad, which the little nation rightly
feared. Within, the old antagonism between the freedman and the slave
settled into a color line between the mulatto and the black, which for a
time meant the difference between educated liberalism and reactionary
ignorance. This difference has largely disappeared, but some vestiges of
the color line remain. The result has been reaction and savagery under
Soulouque, Dominique, and Nord Alexis, and decided advance under
presidents like Nissage-Saget, Solomon, Legitime, and Hyppolite.

In political life Hayti is still in the sixteenth century; but in
economic life she has succeeded in placing on their own little farms the
happiest and most contented peasantry in the world, after raising them
from a veritable hell of slavery. If modern capitalistic greed can be
restrained from interference until the best elements of Hayti secure
permanent political leadership the triumph of the revolution will be
complete.

In other parts of the French-American dominion the slaves achieved freedom
also by insurrection. In Guadeloupe they helped the French drive out the
British, and thus gained emancipation. In Martinique it took three revolts
and a civil war to bring freedom.

The English slave empire in America centered in the Bermudas, Barbadoes,
Jamaica and the lesser islands, and in the United States. Barbadoes
developed a savage slave code, and the result was attempted slave
insurrections in 1674, 1692, and 1702. These were not successful, but a
rising in 1816 destroyed much property under the leadership of a mulatto,
Washington Franklin, and the repeal of bad laws and eventual
enfranchisement of the colored people followed. One Barbadian mulatto, Sir
Conrad Reeves, has held the position of chief justice in the island and
was knighted. A Negro insurrection in Dominica under Farcel greatly
exercised England in 1791 and 1794 and delayed slave trade abolition; in
1844 and 1847 further uprisings took place, and these continued from 1853
to 1893.

The chief island domain of English slavery was Jamaica. It was Oliver
Cromwell who, in his zeal for God and the slave trade, sent an expedition
to seize Hayti. His fleet, driven off there, took Jamaica in 1655. The
English found the mountains already infested with runaway slaves known as
"Maroons," and more Negroes joined them when the English arrived. In 1663
the freedom of the Maroons was acknowledged, land was given them, and
their leader, Juan de Bolas, was made a colonel in the militia. He was
killed, however, in the following year, and from 1664 to 1738 the three
thousand or more black Maroons fought the British Empire in guerrilla
warfare. Soldiers, Indians, and dogs were sent against them, and finally
in 1738 Captain Cudjo and other chiefs made a formal treaty of peace with
Governor Trelawney. They were granted twenty-five hundred acres and their
freedom was recognized.

The peace lasted until 1795, when they rebelled again and gave the
British a severe drubbing, besides murdering planters. Bloodhounds again
were imported. The Maroons offered to surrender on the express condition
that none of their number should be deported from the island, as the
legislature wished. General Walpole hesitated, but could get peace on no
other terms and gave his word. The Maroons surrendered their arms, and
immediately the whites seized six hundred of the ringleaders and
transported them to the snows of Nova Scotia! The legislature then voted a
sword worth twenty-five hundred dollars to General Walpole, which he
indignantly refused to accept. Eventually these exiled Maroons found their
way to Sierra Leone, West Africa, in time to save that colony to the
British crown.[88]

The pressing desire for peace with the Maroons on the part of the white
planters arose from the new sugar culture introduced in 1673. A greatly
increased demand for slaves followed, and between 1700 and 1786 six
hundred and ten thousand slaves were imported; nevertheless, so severely
were they driven, that there were only three hundred thousand Negroes in
Jamaica in the latter year.

Despite the Moravian missions and other efforts late in the eighteenth
century, unrest among the Jamaica slaves and freedmen grew and was
increased by the anti-slavery agitation in England and the revolt in
Hayti. There was an insurrection in 1796; and in 1831 again the Negroes of
northwest Jamaica, impatient because of the slow progress of the
emancipation, arose in revolt and destroyed nearly three and a half
million dollars' worth of property, well-nigh ruining the planters there.
The next year two hundred and fifty-five thousand slaves were set free,
for which the planters were paid nearly thirty million dollars. There
ensued a discouraging condition of industry. The white officials sent out
in these days were arbitrary and corrupt. Little was done for the mass of
the people and there was outrageous over-taxation. Nevertheless the
backwardness of the colony was attributed to the Negro. Governor Eyre
complained in 1865 that the young and strong were good for nothing and
were filling the jails; but a simultaneous report by a missionary told the
truth concerning the officials. This aroused the colored people, and a
mulatto, George William Gordon, called a meeting. Other meetings were
afterward held, and finally the Negro peasantry began a riot in 1861, in
which eighteen people were killed, only a few of whom were white.

The result was that Governor Eyre tried and executed by court-martial 354
persons, and in addition to this killed without trial 85, a total of 439.
One thousand Negro homes were burned to the ground and thousands of
Negroes flogged or mutilated. Children had their brains dashed out,
pregnant women were murdered, and Gordon was tried by court-martial and
hanged. In fact the punishment was, as the royal commissioners said,
"reckless and positively barbarous."[89]

This high-handed act aroused England. Eyre was not punished, but the
island was made a crown colony in 1866, and given representation in the
legislature in 1886.

In the island of St. Vincent, Indians first sought to enslave the fugitive
Negroes wrecked there, but the Negroes took the Carib women and then drove
the Indian men away. These "black Caribs" fought with Indians, English,
and others for three quarters of a century, until the Indians were
exterminated. The British took possession in 1763. The black Caribs
resisted, and after hard fighting signed a treaty in 1773, receiving
one-third of the island as their property. They afterward helped the
French against the British, and were finally deported to the island of
Ruatan, off Honduras. In Trinidad and British Guiana there have been
mutinies and rioting of slaves and a curious mingling of races.

Other parts of South America must be dismissed briefly, because of
insufficient data. Colombia and Venezuela, with perhaps eight million
people, have at least one-third of their population of Negro and Indian
descent. Here Simon Bolivar with his Negro, mulatto, and Indian forces
began the war that liberated South America. Central America has a smaller
proportion of Negroids, perhaps one hundred thousand in all. Bolivia and
Peru have small amounts of Negro blood, while Argentine and Uruguay have
very little. The Negro population in these lands is everywhere in process
of rapid amalgamation with whites and Indians.

FOOTNOTES:

[76] H.O. Flipper's translation of Castaneda de Nafera's narrative.

[77] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, p. 109.

[78] Bryce: _South America_, pp. 479-480.

[79] I.e., mulattoes.

[80] _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 381.

[81] Smith: _General History of Virginia_.

[82] La Croix: _Mémoires sur la Révolution_, I, 253, 408.

[83] Marquis d'Hermonas. Cf. Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, p. 158.

[84] DeWitt Talmage, in Christian Herald, November 28, 1906.

[85] Aimes: _African Institutions in America_ (reprinted from _Journal of
American Folk Lore_), p. 25.

[86] Brown: _History of San Domingo_, II, 158-159.

[87] See Leger: _Hayti_, Chap. XI.

[88] Cf. Chapter V, p. 69.

[89] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_.

XI THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES

There were half a million slaves in the confines of the United States when
the Declaration of Independence declared "that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The
land that thus magniloquently heralded its advent into the family of
nations had supported the institution of human slavery for one hundred and
fifty-seven years and was destined to cling to it eighty-seven years
longer.

The greatest experiment in Negro slavery as a modern industrial system was
made on the mainland of North America and in the confines of the present
United States. And this experiment was on such a scale and so
long-continued that it is profitable for study and reflection. There were
in the United States in its dependencies, in 1910, 9,828,294 persons of
acknowledged Negro descent, not including the considerable infiltration of
Negro blood which is not acknowledged and often not known. To-day the
number of persons called Negroes is probably about ten and a quarter
million. These persons are almost entirely descendants of African slaves,
brought to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries.

The importation of Negroes to the mainland of North America was small
until the British got the coveted privilege of the Asiento in 1713. Before
that Northern States like New York had received some slaves from the
Dutch, and New England had early developed a trade by which she imported a
number of house servants. Ships went out to the African coast with rum,
sold the rum, and brought the slaves to the West Indies; there they
exchanged the slaves for sugar and molasses and brought the molasses back
to New England, to be made into rum for further exploits. After the
Asiento treaty the Negro population increased in the eighteenth century
from about 50,000 in 1710 to 220,000 in 1750 and to 462,000 in 1770. When
the colonies became independent, the foreign slave trade was soon made
illegal; but illicit trade, annexation of territory and natural increase
enlarged the Negro population from a little over a million at the
beginning of the nineteenth century to four and a half millions at the
outbreak of the Civil War and to about ten and a quarter millions in 1914.

The present so-called Negro population of the United States is:

1. A mixture of the various African populations, Bantu, Sudanese,
west-coast Negroes, some dwarfs, and some traces of Arab, Berber, and
Semitic blood.

2. A mixture of these strains with the blood of white Americans through a
system of concubinage of colored women in slavery days, together with some
legal intermarriage.

The figures as to mulattoes[90] have been from time to time officially
acknowledged to be understatements. Probably one-third of the Negroes of
the United States have distinct traces of white blood. This blending of
the races has led to interesting human types, but racial prejudice has
hitherto prevented any scientific study of the matter. In general the
Negro population in the United States is brown in color, darkening to
almost black and shading off in the other direction to yellow and white,
and is indistinguishable in some cases from the white population.

Much has been written of the black man in America, but most of this has
been from the point of view of the whites, so that we know of the effect
of Negro slavery on the whites, the strife among the whites for and
against abolition, and the consequent problem of the Negro so far as the
white population is concerned.

This chapter, however, is dealing with the matter more from the point of
view of the Negro group itself, and seeking to show what slavery meant to
them, how they reacted against it, what they did to secure their freedom,
and what they are doing with their partial freedom to-day.

The slaves landing from 1619 onward were received by the colonies at first
as laborers, on the same plane as other laborers. For a long time there
was in law no distinction between the indented white servant from England
and the black servant from Africa, except in the term of their service.
Even here the distinction was not always observed, some of the whites
being kept beyond term of their service and Negroes now and then securing
their freedom. Gradually the planters realized the advantage of laborers
held for life, but they were met by certain moral difficulties. The
opposition to slavery had from the first been largely stilled when it was
stated that this was a method of converting the heathen to Christianity.
The corollary was that when a slave was converted he became free. Up to
1660 or thereabouts it seemed accepted in most colonies and in the English
West Indies that baptism into a Christian church would free a Negro slave.
Masters therefore, were reluctant in the seventeenth century to have their
slaves receive Christian instruction. Massachusetts first apparently
legislated on this matter by enacting in 1641 that slavery should be
confined to captives in just wars "and such strangers as willingly sell
themselves or are sold to us,"[91] meaning by "strangers" apparently
heathen, but saying nothing as to the effect of conversion. Connecticut
adopted similar legislation in 1650, and Virginia declared in 1661 that
Negroes "are incapable of making satisfaction" for time lost in running
away by lengthening their time of services, thus implying that they were
slaves for life. Maryland declared in 1663 that Negro slaves should serve
_durante vita_, but it was not until 1667 that Virginia finally plucked up
courage to attack the issue squarely and declared by law: "Baptism doth
not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom, in
order that diverse masters freed from this doubt may more carefully
endeavor the propagation of Christianity."[92]

The transplanting of the Negro from his African clan life to the West
Indian plantation was a social revolution. Marriage became geographical
and transient, while women and girls were without protection.

The private home as a self-protective, independent unit did not exist.
That powerful institution, the polygamous African home, was almost
completely destroyed, and in its place in America arose sexual
promiscuity, a weak community life, with common dwelling, meals, and child
nurseries. The internal slave trade tended further to weaken natural ties.
A small number of favored house servants and artisans were raised above
this--had their private homes, came in contact with the culture of the
master class, and assimilated much of American civilization. This was,
however, exceptional; broadly speaking, the greatest social effect of
American slavery was to substitute for the polygamous Negro home a new
polygamy less guarded, less effective, and less civilized.

At first sight it would seem that slavery completely destroyed every
vestige of spontaneous movement among the Negroes. This is not strictly
true. The vast power of the priest in the African state is well known; his
realm alone--the province of religion and medicine--remained largely
unaffected by the plantation system. The Negro priest, therefore, early
became an important figure on the plantation and found his function as the
interpreter of the supernatural, the comforter of the sorrowing, and as
the one who expressed, rudely but picturesquely, the longing and
disappointment and resentment of a stolen people. From such beginnings
arose and spread with marvelous rapidity the Negro church, the first
distinctively Negro American social institution. It was not at first by
any means a Christian church, but a mere adaptation of those rites of
fetish which in America is termed obe worship, or "voodooism."[93]
Association and missionary effort soon gave these rites a veneer of
Christianity and gradually, after two centuries, the church became
Christian, with a simple Calvinistic creed, but with many of the old
customs still clinging to the services. It is this historic fact, that the
Negro church of to-day bases itself upon the sole surviving social
institution of the African fatherland, that accounts for its extraordinary
growth and vitality.

The slave codes at first were really labor codes based on an attempt to
reestablish in America the waning feudalism of Europe. The laborers were
mainly black and were held for life. Above them came the artisans, free
whites with a few blacks, and above them the master class. The feudalism
called for the plantation system, and the plantation system as developed
in America, and particularly in Virginia, was at first a feudal domain. On
these plantations the master was practically supreme. The slave codes in
early days were but moderately harsh, allowing punishment by the master,
but restraining him in extreme cases and providing for care of the slaves
and of the aged. With the power, however, solely in the hands of the
master class, and with the master supreme on his own plantation, his power
over the slave was practically what he wished it to be. In some cases the
cruelty was as great as on the worst West Indian plantations. In other
cases the rule was mild and paternal.

Up through this American feudalism the Negro began to rise. He learned in
the eighteenth century the English language, he began to be identified
with the Christian church, he mingled his blood to a considerable extent
with the master class. The house servants particularly were favored, in
some cases receiving education, and the number of free Negroes gradually
increased.

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of
Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle
patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease
and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and
unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The
answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same
shield; they are different shields. They are pictures, on the one hand, of
house service in the great country seats and in the towns, and on the
other hand of the field laborers who raised the great tobacco, rice, and
cotton crops. We have thus not only carelessly mixed pictures of what were
really different kinds of slavery, but of that which represented different
degrees in the development of the economic system. House service was the