A SKETCH OF THE RISE OF THE SLAVE TRADE IN AFRICAN STATES AND OF THE FOREIGN SLAVE TRADE OF THE SOUTHERN STATES.
It is not our intention nor is it within our province to enter into details concerning the foreign slave trade. It seems, however, that a brief account is necessary as introductory to the subject of the Domestic Slave Trade.
The rise in Europe of the traffic in slaves from Africa was an incident in the commercial expansion of Portugal. It was coeval and almost coextensive with the development of commerce, and followed in the wake of discovery and colonization.
The first name connected with it is that of Antonio Gonçalvez, who was a marine under Prince Henry the Navigator. In 1441 he was sent to Cape Bojador to get a vessel load of "sea-wolves" skins. He signalized his voyage by the capture of some Moors whom he carried to Portugal. In 1442 these Moors promised black slaves as a ransom for themselves. Prince Henry approved of this exchange and Gonçalvez took the captives home and received, among other things, ten black slaves in exchange for two of them. The king justified his act on the ground that the negroes might be converted to the Christian religion, but the Moors could not.[1] Two years later the Company of Lagos chartered by the king, and engaged in exploration on the coast of Africa, imported about two hundred slaves from the islands of Nar and Tidar.[2] "This year (1444) Europe may be said to have made a distinct beginning in the slave trade, henceforth to spread on all sides like the waves [in] stirred up water, and not like them to become fainter and fainter as the circles widen."[3]
After the discovery of America, the islands which became known as the Spanish West Indies were speedily colonized, and the inefficiency of the Indian as a laborer in the mines there soon led to the substitution of the negro. As early as 1502 a few were employed, and in 1517 Charles V. granted a patent to certain traders for the exclusive supply of 4,000 negroes annually to the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and Porto Rico.[4]
So far as known John Hawkins was the first Englishman to engage in the slave traffic. He left England for Sierra Leone with three ships and a hundred men in 1562, and having secured three hundred negroes he proceeded to Hispaniola where he disposed of them, and having had a very profitable voyage, he returned to England in 1563. This appears to have excited the avarice of the British Government. The next year Hawkins was appointed to the command of one of the Queen's ships and proceeded to Africa where in company with several others, it appears, he engaged in the slave traffic.[5]
In 1624 France began the slave trade and later Holland, Denmark, New England and other English colonies, though the leader in the trade and the last to abandon it was Great Britain.[6]
The first slaves introduced into any of the English continental colonies was in 1619 about the last of August when a piratical Dutch frigate, manned chiefly by English, stopped at Jamestown, Virginia, and sold the colonists twenty negroes.[7] Even for a long while after this, it seems, importation of negroes was merely of an occasional or incidental nature. Indeed, in 1648 only three hundred negroes were to be found in Virginia.[8] However, several shiploads were brought in between 1664 and 1671, and at the latter date Virginia had two thousand slaves.[9] During the latter part of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth century the importation of negroes gradually increased. In 1705, eighteen hundred negroes were brought in and in 1715 Virginia had twenty-three thousand. By 1723 they were being imported into this colony at the rate of fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred a year.[10]
In the eighteenth century Virginia sought from time to time to hinder the introduction of slaves by placing heavy duties on them. Indeed, from 1732 until the Revolution there were only about six months in which slaves could be brought into Virginia free of duty.[11] Nevertheless, in 1776 Virginia had 165,000 slaves.[12]