On The Old Subject—The Origin Of It All
image 1
image 2
image 3
image 4
cropped image 1
ON THE OLD SUBJECT—THE ORIGIN OF IT ALL
Still the slave-trade is carried on—not to the shores of the United States, but to those of Cuba and other West-India islands, and to Brazil. A gentleman writing a letter from Havana, gives the following statement:
“The African slave trade continues to flourish amazingly. I have intelligence of three cargoes of Bozales, in number 473,381 and 428, landed within the past ten days on the south side of this island. Of course the Spanish authorities at the district where they were landed will deny all knowledge of the circumstance; it is nevertheless a fact.”
In Brazil the arrival of slave ships is common. No success yet attends the efforts of Great Britain, France, and the United States, to guard the coast of Africa, from the purchase and carrying away of the natives, for this purpose. Of course the reader understands that the present slave population of the United States descends to us from original supplies after the same fashion.
Back from the coast, at greater or less distances, captives taken in war, or for the purpose of gain, are held in “barracoons,” half pens, half forts. To these the slave-traders come, make their purchases, and then get their live freight aboard the vessels the best way they can. The traders are Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Americans.
Are the lower strata of the inhabitants of Africa made worse off by being sent to slavery in foreign lands? In their own country degraded, cruel, almost bestial, the victims of cruel chiefs, and of bloody religious rites—their lives never secure—no education, no refinement, no elevation, no political knowledge,—such is the general condition of the African tribes. From these things they are sold to the American plantations.
Would we then defend the slave-trade? No; we would merely remind the reader that, in a large view of the case, the change is not one for the worse, to the victims of that trade. The blacks, mulattoes, &c., either in the Northern or Southern States, might bear in mind that had their forefathers remained in Africa, and their birth occurred there, they would now be roaming Krumen and Ashantee-men, wild, filthy, paganistic—not residents of a land of light, and bearing their share, to some extent, in all its civilisations.
It is also to be remembered that no race ever can remain slaves if they have it in them to become free. Why do the slave-ships go to Africa only?
The worst results of the slave trade are those mainly caused by the attempts of governments to outlaw it. We speak of the horrors of the “middle passage,”–the wretched suffocating, steaming, thirsty, dying crowds of black men, women and children, packed between decks in cutter-built ships, modeled not for space, but speed. This we repeat, is not an inherent attribute of the trade, but of declaring it piracy.
The establishment of Liberia, and the deep interest felt in its welfare—the modern travelers in the old continent of the Nile and of the Desert—the almost morbid philanthropy of Europe and America—the opposition to slavery, so stern, so rapidly growing, more resolute in defeat than it is in triumph—these will before long tell fatally for the slave trade.
For the Brazils, for Cuba, and it may be for some of the Southern States of this Confederacy, the infusion of slaves, and the prevalent use of their labor, are not objectionable on politico-economic grounds. Slaves are there because they must be—when the time arrives for them not to be proper there, they will leave.
For all that, America is not the land for slaves, on any grounds. The recorded theory of America denies slavery any existence in justice, law, or as a moral fact. The geography of the country, its interests, enterprise, labor, farmers, mechanics, commerce, agriculture, railroads, steamers—these with the rest disfavor slavery, and therefore the slave trade. The great heart and trunk of America is the West—and the West would be paralyzed by slavery. But Cuba and the Brazils are not the West.