England, though free from the curse of slavery within her own proper borders, had in the course of history done as much as, nay, more than, any other nation to enslave the Negro. She had acquired him in Africa by thousands in exchange for guns, knives, alcohol, and dry goods; had transported him across the Atlantic to her American cotton plantations in a manner compared with which a modern steerage emigrant’s experience may be regarded as a luxurious cruise; and had then extracted the utmost amount of work from him by the aid of the lash.
Types of Bearers (North Bank of Cataracts).
Group of Yie-Yie Women (Uelle).
England’s Retribution.
All the vested interests created by this traffic, long persevered in, as well as the callousness engendered by its brutality, had to be fought against and overthrown by a small band of Liberationists, aided by nothing but their enthusiasm and a just cause. Nevertheless they daily gathered strength, and finally succeeded in inducing the British Parliament to vote a hundred million dollars for the purchase and liberation of every slave in every country where the British flag flies. This grand event took place in the year·1830.
The Fight for Right and Union.
Three decades later came that tremendous convulsion in the United States, the like of which the world has not seen. It was resolved by the United States Government to free the slaves, slavery being a system never deliberately adopted by the United States, but inherited, as it were, from the English Colonial régime, of which they had by revolution become the successors. The slaveholding Southern States, resisting the new law, sought to withdraw from the Union, and civil war ensued, in which the Abolitionists were entirely successful, but at an appalling cost in men and money.
A Common Error.