FOREWORD
Just under the left shoulder of Africa, which juts out boldly into the Atlantic, as though to meet half way the right shoulder of South America, lie, between Sierra Leone and the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Gold Coast. It was the lure of gold and ivory that brought to these shores the enterprising traders who first offered the African slave-holders a stable foreign market for the captives of bow and spear and knobkerrie.
Out of this fetid armpit of the Dark Continent came the first black bondsmen to curse the Western world. Thence, across the narrowing ocean, but a night’s flight for Walt Whitman’s “Man-of-War-Bird”—
“At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America”—Portuguese and Spanish traders, but a few years after Columbus had set foot on San Salvador, transported their first human cargoes to the plantations of Brazil and the rich islands of the Caribbean. Here the labor of the blacks proved so profitable that the envious English soon engaged in the traffic, and during the reign of the virginal Elizabeth certain of her noble subjects sought concessions for the monopoly of the West Indian slave trade.
A generation or two later, the first slaves filtered through to the mainland colonies of North America from the Barbados, Antigua, and other West Indian Islands. After the institution had become firmly established, the New England eye, not lacking “speculation,” saw the promise of the East, and New England, pocketing her prayer book while pouching her musket balls, freighted her bluff-bowed ships with red flannel and glass beads with which to accentuate, if not to clothe, the heathen nakedness, and set sail for the rising sun. Thenceforth the New England slavers sailed in cycles, and their course was charted by rum, slaves, and molasses. The “black-birders” bartered their human cargoes for West Indian molasses, which, by a spirituous, if not a spiritual, process, became New England rum. “Old Medford” filled their holds, westerly winds filled their bellying sails, and the rum was soon converted into more slaves, to be in turn converted again into molasses in completing the gainful cycle.
For a hundred and fifty years Rhode Island and Massachusetts competed successfully with England for the North American trade, and these colonies (with “God’s grace”) throve exceedingly. In the early years of the last century, however, the importation of slaves was interdicted and the last Yankee slaver converted the last rum-bought slave into cash, then, converting himself, he became an Abolitionist, and the well-known “New England conscience” was developed.
But the Puritan slaver, whatever “woes unnumbered” he brought upon his own race, was, in transferring these bought or stolen blacks to the humane Cavalier planters of the South, an unconscious benefactor to thousands of Negro captives and to millions of their descendants, whose masters gave them Christianity and such a measure of civilization, that, in the short space of two hundred years from the cannibal savagery of the stew-pot and the spit, they were fitted, in the New England mind, at least, for manhood suffrage, which came to enlightened England only after more than a thousand years of development!
None of the encyclopedias mentions the Gullah Negroes, nor does the name appear in the dictionaries. Mr. John Bennett, the well-known writer of Charleston, who has, for twenty years, been gathering data concerning this interesting people, places the Gullahs among the Liberian group of tribes; “formerly powerful and numerous, they have been crowded and overrun; their remnant remains about thirty miles inward from Monrovia;” but in 1822, in a publication by the Charleston City Council at the time of the attempted Negro insurrection, reference is made to “Gullah Jack” and his company of “Gullah or Angola” Negroes, thereby making the suggestion that “Gullah” is a corruption of Angola. As Angola and Liberia are at least fifteen hundred miles apart, the former being nearly one thousand miles south of the Equator, these two opinions seem to be in hopeless conflict.
Mr. Bennett says further: “Among the many African tribes brought to this country, the presence of very many Gullah Negroes is apparent from the earliest times. On some plantations, before the days of experienced precaution, it is highly probable they formed a majority of the hands. As early as 1730 a plan had been hatched against Charleston by these Negroes....
“The dialect of the West Coast, from which came these Gullah Negroes, was early commented upon as peculiarly harsh, quacking, flat in intonation, quick, clipped and peculiar even in Africa. Bosman, the Dutch sailor, described its peculiar tonality, and calls its speakers the ‘Qua-quas,’ because they gabbled like ducks.