From the year when Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope (1497) to the year 1807, when the British government prohibited the exportation of slaves over the high seas, is a period of 310 years. During all this time Africa was surrendered to the cruelty of the slave-hunter, and the avarice of the slave-trader. While its people were thus subject to capture and expatriation, it was clearly impossible that any intellectual or moral progress could be made by them. The greater number of those accessible from the coast were compelled to study the best methods of avoiding the slaver and escaping his force and his wiles—the rest only thought of the arts of kidnapping their innocent and unsuspecting fellow-creatures. Yet ridiculous as it may appear to us, there were not wanting zealous men who devoted themselves to Christianizing the savages who were moved by such an opposite spirit. In Angola, Congo, and Mozambique, and far up the Zambezi, missionaries erected churches and cathedrals, appointed bishops and priests, who converted and baptized, while at the mouths of the Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi their countrymen built slave-barracoons and anchored their murderous slave-ships. European governments legalized and sanctioned the slave trade, the public conscience of the period approved it, the mitred heads of the Church blessed the slave-gangs as they marched to the shore, and the tax-collector received the levy per head as lawful revenue.
But here and there during these guilty centuries words of warning are not wanting. Queen Elizabeth, upon being informed of the forcible capture of Africans for the purposes of sale, exclaims solemnly that “such actions are detestable, and will call down vengeance on the perpetrators.” When Las Casas, in his anxiety to save his Indians, suggests that Africans be substituted for them, the Pope, Leo X., declares that “not only the Christian religion but Nature herself cried out against such a course.”
One hundred and sixty-five years after the discovery of the Cape, Sir John Hawkins pioneers the way for England to participate in the slave trade, hitherto carried on by the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch.
A century later a king of England, Charles II., heads an English company which undertakes to supply the British West Indies yearly with 30,000 negroes.
After the Asiento Contract, under which for thirty years England secured the monopoly of supplying the Spanish West Indies with slaves, as many as 192 ships were engaged every year in the transportation of slaves from the African coast. The countries which suffered most from the superior British method of slave capturing and trading and slave-carrying were Congo land, the Niger Valley, the Guinea and Gold coasts, the Gambia, Cross, and Calabar lands.
The system adopted by the British crews in those days was very similar to that employed by the Arabs to-day in inner Africa. They landed at night, surrounded the selected village, and then set fire to the huts, and as the frightened people issued out of the burning houses, they were seized and carried to the ships; or sometimes the skipper, in his hurry for sea, sent his crew to range through the town he was trading with, and, regardless of rank, to seize upon every man, woman, and child they met. Old Town, Creek Town, and Duke Town, in Old Calabar, have often witnessed this summary and high-handed proceeding.
Boswell, the biographer of Dr. Johnson, called the slave trade “an important and necessary branch of commerce;” and probably the largest section of the British public, before those antislavery champions Clarkson and Wilberforce succeeded in persuading their countrymen to reflect a little, shared Boswell’s views, as well as his surprise and indignation, when it became known that there were English people who talked of suppressing it.
That the slave trade must have been a lucrative commerce there can be no doubt, when we consider that from 1777 to 1807 upwards of 3,000,000 Africans had been sold in the West Indies. All those forts which may be seen lining the west coast of Africa to-day were constructed principally by means of the revenue derived from the slave tax.
In 1833 slavery was abolished throughout the British dominions, and the government agreed to pay the slave-owners of the West Indies £20,000,000 redemption-money for 1,000,000 of slaves. On the 1st of August, 1834, the famous Act of Emancipation came into operation. Throughout the West Indies the eve of the great day was kept by watch meetings, in acclamations of praise and thanksgiving. It is said that when the hour of midnight began to strike, the singing and the shouting ceased, and the congregations knelt down and listened with bated breath to the solemn strokes of the bell which announced their freedom, and ere the new day was a minute old the loud strains of “Glory Allelujah!” burst from the now enfranchised people. They flung themselves upon one another’s breasts, clapped their hands, cried and laughed, but louder than all other sounds were the cries, “Praise God! Glory! glory to God!”
Ten years later, the abolition of the legal status of slavery in India freed 9,000,000 of slaves. Then, little by little, the nations implicated in slavery gravitated to the side of the emancipators. In 1846 the Bey of Tunis, through British influence, decreed that all slaves touching his territory should become free. The French Republic in 1848 declared by a brief act that no more slaves should be admitted into French territory. In 1861 the autocrat of Russia decreed the emancipation of 20,000,000 serfs. The history of the great struggle in the United States is too recent for it to be forgotten that it occasioned the proclamation of freedom on January 1, 1863, by which 6,000,000 of slaves were admitted to the rights of freemen. Finally, and only four years ago, Brazil, after long and laborious efforts of her most enlightened men, heard that the law of abolition of slavery had passed through her Senate—and thus the cruel and inhuman system of man holding fellow-man as a chattel and barterable property was extinguished throughout all America.