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American Negro Slavery
Chapter I - The Discovery and Exploitation of Guinea
by Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell
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The Portuguese began exploring the west coast of Africa shortly before
Christopher Columbus was born; and no sooner did they encounter negroes
than they began to seize and carry them in captivity to Lisbon. The court
chronicler Azurara set himself in 1452, at the command of Prince Henry, to
record the valiant exploits of the negro-catchers. Reflecting the spirit
of the time, he praised them as crusaders bringing savage heathen for
conversion to civilization and christianity. He gently lamented the
massacre and sufferings involved, but thought them infinitely outweighed by
the salvation of souls. This cheerful spirit of solace was destined long to
prevail among white peoples when contemplating the hardships of the colored
races. But Azurara was more than a moralizing annalist. He acutely observed
of the first cargo of captives brought from southward of the Sahara, less
than a decade before his writing, that after coming to Portugal "they never
more tried to fly, but rather in time forgot all about their own country,"
that "they were very loyal and obedient servants, without malice"; and that
"after they began to use clothing they were for the most part very fond of
display, so that they took great delight in robes of showy colors, and such
was their love of finery that they picked up the rags that fell from the
coats of other people of the country and sewed them on their own garments,
taking great pleasure in these, as though it were matter of some greater
perfection."[1] These few broad strokes would portray with equally happy
precision a myriad other black servants born centuries after the writer's
death and dwelling in a continent of whose existence he never dreamed.
Azurara wrote further that while some of the captives were not able to
endure the change and died happily as Christians, the others, dispersed
among Portuguese households, so ingratiated themselves that many were
set free and some were married to men and women of the land and acquired
comfortable estates. This may have been an earnest of future conditions in
Brazil and the Spanish Indies; but in the British settlements it fell out
far otherwise.
[Footnote 1: Gomez Eannes de Azurara Chronicle of the Discovery and
Conquest of Guinea, translated by C.R. Beazley and E.P. Prestage, in the
Hakluyt Society Publications, XCV, 85.]
As the fifteenth century wore on and fleets explored more of the African
coast with the double purpose of finding a passage to India and exploiting
any incidental opportunities for gain, more and more human cargoes were
brought from Guinea to Portugal and Spain. But as the novelty of the blacks
wore off they were held in smaller esteem and treated with less liberality.
Gangs of them were set to work in fields from which the Moorish occupants
had recently been expelled. The labor demand was not great, however, and
when early in the sixteenth century West Indian settlers wanted negroes
for their sugar fields, Spain willingly parted with some of hers. Thus did
Europe begin the coercion of African assistance in the conquest of the
American wilderness.
Guinea comprises an expanse about a thousand miles wide lying behind
three undulating stretches of coast, the first reaching from Cape Verde
southeastward nine hundred miles to Cape Palmas in four degrees north
latitude, the second running thence almost parallel to the equator a
thousand miles to Old Calabar at the head of "the terrible bight of
Biafra," the third turning abruptly south and extending some fourteen
hundred miles to a short distance below Benguela where the southern desert
begins. The country is commonly divided into Upper Guinea or the Sudan,
lying north and west of the great angle of the coast, and Lower Guinea,
the land of the Bantu, to the southward. Separate zones may also be
distinguished as having different systems of economy: in the jungle belt
along the equator bananas are the staple diet; in the belts bordering this
on the north and south the growing of millet and manioc respectively, in
small clearings, are the characteristic industries; while beyond the edges
of the continental forest cattle contribute much of the food supply. The
banana, millet and manioc zones, and especially their swampy coastal
plains, were of course the chief sources of slaves for the transatlantic
trade.
Of all regions of extensive habitation equatorial Africa is the worst. The
climate is not only monotonously hot, but for the greater part of each year
is excessively moist. Periodic rains bring deluge and periodic tornadoes
play havoc. The dry seasons give partial relief, but they bring occasional
blasts from the desert so dry and burning that all nature droops and is
grateful at the return of the rains. The general dank heat stimulates
vegetable growth in every scale from mildew to mahogany trees, and
multiplies the members of the animal kingdom, be they mosquitoes, elephants
or boa constrictors. There would be abundant food but for the superabundant
creatures that struggle for it and prey upon one another. For mankind life
is at once easy and hard. Food of a sort may often be had for the plucking,
and raiment is needless; but aside from the menace of the elements human
life is endangered by beasts and reptiles in the forest, crocodiles and
hippopotami in the rivers, and sharks in the sea, and existence is made a
burden to all but the happy-hearted by plagues of insects and parasites. In
many districts tse-tse flies exterminate the cattle and spread the fatal
sleeping-sickness among men; everywhere swarms of locusts occasionally
destroy the crops; white ants eat timbers and any other useful thing, short
of metal, which may come in their way; giant cockroaches and dwarf
brown ants and other pests in great variety swarm in the dwellings
continuously--except just after a village has been raided by the great
black ants which are appropriately known as "drivers." These drivers march
in solid columns miles on miles until, when they reach food resources to
their fancy, they deploy for action and take things with a rush. To stay
among them is to die; but no human being stays. A cry of "Drivers!" will
depopulate a village instantly, and a missionary who at one moment has been
combing brown ants from his hair will in the next find himself standing
safely in the creek or the water barrel, to stay until the drivers have
taken their leave. Among less spectacular things, mosquitoes fly in crowds
and leave fevers in their wake, gnats and flies are always on hand, chigoes
bore and breed under toe-nails, hook-worms hang themselves to the walls of
the intestines, and other threadlike worms enter the eyeballs and the flesh
of the body. Endurance through generations has given the people large
immunity from the effects of hook-worm and malaria, but not from the
indigenous diseases, kraw-kraw, yaws and elephantiasis, nor of course from
dysentery and smallpox which the Europeans introduced. Yet robust health is
fairly common, and where health prevails there is generally happiness, for
the negroes have that within their nature. They could not thrive in Guinea
without their temperament.
It is probable that no people ever became resident on or near the west
coast except under compulsion. From the more favored easterly regions
successive hordes have been driven after defeat in war. The Fangs on the
Ogowe are an example in the recent past. Thus the inhabitants of Guinea,
and of the coast lands especially, have survived by retreating and
adapting themselves to conditions in which no others wished to dwell. The
requirements of adaptation were peculiar. To live where nature supplies
Turkish baths without the asking necessitates relaxation. But since undue
physical indolence would unfit people for resistance to parasites and
hostile neighbors, the languid would perish. Relaxation of mind, however,
brought no penalties. The climate in fact not only discourages but
prohibits mental effort of severe or sustained character, and the negroes
have submitted to that prohibition as to many others, through countless
generations, with excellent grace. So accustomed were they to interdicts of
nature that they added many of their own through conventional taboo, some
of them intended to prevent the eating of supposedly injurious food, others
calculated to keep the commonalty from infringing upon the preserves of the
dignitaries.[2]
[Footnote 2: A convenient sketch of the primitive African régime is J.A.
Tillinghast's The Negro in Africa and America, part I. A fuller survey
is Jerome Dowd's The Negro Races, which contains a bibliography of the
sources. Among the writings of travelers and sojourners particularly
notable are Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa as a vivid picture of
coast life, and her West African Studies for its elaborate and convincing
discussion of fetish, and the works of Sir A.B. Ellis on the Tshi-, Ewe-
and Yoruba-speaking peoples for their analyses of institutions along the
Gold Coast.]
No people is without its philosophy and religion. To the Africans the
forces of nature were often injurious and always impressive. To invest them
with spirits disposed to do evil but capable of being placated was perhaps
an obvious recourse; and this investiture grew into an elaborate system of
superstition. Not only did the wind and the rain have their gods but each
river and precipice, and each tribe and family and person, a tutelary
spirit. These might be kept benevolent by appropriate fetish ceremonies;
they might be used for evil by persons having specially great powers over
them. The proper course for common-place persons at ordinary times was to
follow routine fetish observances; but when beset by witch-work the only
escape lay in the services of witch-doctors or priests. Sacrifices were
called for, and on the greatest occasions nothing short of human sacrifice
was acceptable.
As to diet, vegetable food was generally abundant, but the negroes were not
willingly complete vegetarians. In the jungle game animals were scarce, and
everywhere the men were ill equipped for hunting. In lieu of better they
were often fain to satisfy their craving for flesh by eating locusts and
larvae, as tribes in the interior still do. In such conditions cannibalism
was fairly common. Especially prized was an enemy slain in war, for not
only would his body feed the hungry but fetish taught that his bravery
would pass to those who shared the feast.
In African economy nearly all routine work, including agriculture, was
classed as domestic service and assigned to the women for performance. The
wife, bought with a price at the time of marriage, was virtually a slave;
her husband her master. Now one woman might keep her husband and children
in but moderate comfort. Two or more could perform the family tasks much
better. Thus a man who could pay the customary price would be inclined to
add a second wife, whom the first would probably welcome as a lightener of
her burdens. Polygamy prevailed almost everywhere.
Slavery, too, was generally prevalent except among the few tribes who
gained their chief sustenance from hunting. Along with polygamy, it perhaps
originated, if it ever had a distinct beginning, from the desire to lighten
and improve the domestic service. [3] Persons became slaves through
capture, debt or malfeasance, or through the inheritance of the status.
While the ownership was absolute in the eyes of the law and captives
were often treated with great cruelty, slaves born in the locality were
generally regarded as members of their owner's family and were shown much
consideration. In the millet zone where there was much work to be done the
slaveholdings were in many cases very large and the control relatively
stringent; but in the banana districts an easy-going schedule prevailed for
all. One of the chief hardships of the slaves was the liability of being
put to death at their master's funeral in order that their spirits might
continue in his service. In such case it was customary on the Gold Coast
to give the victim notice of his approaching death by suddenly thrusting a
knife through each cheek with the blades crossing in his mouth so that he
might not curse his master before he died. With his hands tied behind him
he would then be led to the ceremonial slaughter. The Africans were in
general eager traders in slaves as well as other goods, even before the
time when the transatlantic trade, by giving excessive stimulus to raiding
and trading, transformed the native economy and deranged the social order.
[Footnote 3: Slavery among the Africans and other primitive peoples has
been elaborately discussed by H.J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial
System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague, 1900).]
Apart from a few great towns such as Coomassee and Benin, life in Guinea
was wholly on a village basis, each community dwelling in its own clearing
and having very slight intercourse with its neighbors. Politically each
village was governed by its chief and its elders, oftentimes in complete
independence. In occasional instances, however, considerable states of
loose organization were under the rule of central authorities. Such states
were likely to be the creation of invaders from the eastward, the Dahomans
and Ashantees for example; but the kingdom of Benin appears to have arisen
indigenously. In many cases the subordination of conquered villages merely
resulted in their paying annual tribute. As to language, Lower Guinea spoke
multitudinous dialects of the one Bantu tongue, but in Upper Guinea there
were many dialects of many separate languages.
Land was so abundant and so little used industrially that as a rule it
was not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little
occasion to mark the limits of their domains. For travel by land there were
nothing but narrow, rough and tortuous foot-paths, with makeshift bridges
across the smaller streams. The rivers were highly advantageous both as
avenues and as sources of food, for the negroes were expert at canoeing and
fishing.
Intertribal wars were occasional, but a crude comity lessened their
frequency. Thus if a man of one village murdered one of another, the
aggrieved village if too weak to procure direct redress might save its
face by killing someone in a third village, whereupon the third must by
intertribal convention make common cause with the second at once, or else
coerce a fourth into the punitive alliance by applying the same sort of
persuasion that it had just felt. These later killings in the series were
not regarded as murders but as diplomatic overtures. The system was hard
upon those who were sacrificed in its operation, but it kept a check upon
outlawry.
A skin stretched over the section of a hollow tree, and usually so
constructed as to have two tones, made an instrument of extraordinary use
in communication as well as in music. By a system long anticipating the
Morse code the Africans employed this "telegraph drum" in sending
messages from village to village for long distances and with great speed.
Differences of speech were no bar, for the tom tom code was interlingual.
The official drummer could explain by the high and low alternations of his
taps that a deed of violence just done was not a crime but a pourparler
for the forming of a league. Every week for three months in 1800 the
tom toms doubtless carried the news throughout Ashantee land that King
Quamina's funeral had just been repeated and two hundred more slaves slain
to do him honor. In 1806 they perhaps reported the ending of Mungo Park's
travels by his death on the Niger at the hands of the Boussa people. Again
and again drummers hired as trading auxiliaries would send word along the
coast and into the country that white men's vessels lying at Lagos, Bonny,
Loango or Benguela as the case might be were paying the best rates in
calico, rum or Yankee notions for all slaves that might be brought.
In music the monotony of the tom tom's tone spurred the drummers to
elaborate variations in rhythm. The stroke of the skilled performer could
make it mourn a funeral dirge, voice the nuptial joy, throb the pageant's
march, and roar the ambush alarm. Vocal music might be punctuated by tom
toms and primitive wind or stringed instruments, or might swell in solo
or chorus without accompaniment. Singing, however, appears not so
characteristic of Africans at home as of the negroes in America. On the
other hand garrulous conversation, interspersed with boisterous laughter,
lasted well-nigh the livelong day. Daily life, indeed, was far from dull,
for small things were esteemed great, and every episode was entertaining.
It can hardly be maintained that savage life is idyllic. Yet the question
remains, and may long remain, whether the manner in which the negroes were
brought into touch with civilization resulted in the greater blessing or
the greater curse. That manner was determined in part at least by the
nature of the typical negroes themselves. Impulsive and inconstant,
sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust,
amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves.
Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan
England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household
service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free
negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a
body-servant whom John Quincy Adams, the American minister, had brought
from Massachusetts to St. Petersburg.[4]
[Footnote 4: Writings of John Quincy Adams, Ford ed., III, 471, 472 (New
York, 1914).]
The impulse for the enslavement of negroes by other peoples came from the
Arabs who spread over northern Africa in the eighth century, conquering and
converting as they went, and stimulating the trade across the Sahara until
it attained large dimensions. The northbound caravans carried the peculiar
variety of pepper called "grains of paradise" from the region later known
as Liberia, gold from the Dahomey district, palm oil from the lower Niger,
and ivory and slaves from far and wide. A small quantity of these various
goods was distributed in southern Europe and the Levant. And in the same
general period Arab dhows began to take slave cargoes from the east coast
of Africa as far south as Mozambique, for distribution in Arabia, Persia
and western India. On these northern and eastern flanks of Guinea where the
Mohammedans operated and where the most vigorous of the African peoples
dwelt, the natives lent ready assistance in catching and buying slaves in
the interior and driving them in coffles to within reach of the Moorish and
Arab traders. Their activities, reaching at length the very center of the
continent, constituted without doubt the most cruel of all branches of the
slave-trade. The routes across the burning Sahara sands in particular came
to be strewn with negro skeletons.[5]
[Footnote 5: Jerome Dowd, "The African Slave Trade," in the Journal of
Negro History, II (1917), 1-20.]
This overland trade was as costly as it was tedious. Dealers in Timbuctoo
and other centers of supply must be paid their price; camels must be
procured, many of which died on the journey; guards must be hired to
prevent escapes in the early marches and to repel predatory Bedouins in the
later ones; food supplies must be bought; and allowance must be made for
heavy mortality among the slaves on their terrible trudge over the burning
sands and the chilling mountains. But wherever Mohammedanism prevailed,
which gave particular sanction to slavery as well as to polygamy, the
virtues of the negroes as laborers and as eunuch harem guards were so
highly esteemed that the trade was maintained on a heavy scale almost if
not quite to the present day. The demand of the Turks in the Levant and the
Moors in Spain was met by exportations from the various Barbary ports. Part
of this Mediterranean trade was conducted in Turkish and Moorish vessels,
and part of it in the ships of the Italian cities and Marseilles and
Barcelona. Venice for example had treaties with certain Saracen rulers at
the beginning of the fourteenth century authorizing her merchants not only
to frequent the African ports, but to go in caravans to interior points and
stay at will. The principal commodities procured were ivory, gold, honey
and negro slaves.[6]
[Footnote 6: The leading authority upon slavery and the slave-trade in the
Mediterranean countries of Europe is J.A. Saco, Historia de la Esclavitud
desde los Tiempas mas remotas hasta nuestros Dias (Barcelona, 1877), vol.
III.]
The states of Christian Europe, though little acquainted with negroes,
had still some trace of slavery as an inheritance from imperial Rome
and barbaric Teutondom. The chattel form of bondage, however, had quite
generally given place to serfdom; and even serfdom was disappearing in
many districts by reason of the growth of towns and the increase of rural
population to the point at which abundant labor could be had at wages
little above the cost of sustaining life. On the other hand so long as
petty wars persisted the enslavement of captives continued to be at least
sporadic, particularly in the south and east of Europe, and a considerable
traffic in white slaves was maintained from east to west on the
Mediterranean. The Venetians for instance, in spite of ecclesiastical
prohibitions, imported frequent cargoes of young girls from the countries
about the Black Sea, most of whom were doomed to concubinage and
prostitution, and the rest to menial service.[7] The occurrence of the
Crusades led to the enslavement of Saracen captives in Christendom as well
as of Christian captives in Islam.
[Footnote 7: W.C. Hazlitt, The Venetian Republic(London, 1900), pp. 81,
82.]
The waning of the Crusades ended the supply of Saracen slaves, and the
Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 destroyed the Italian trade on
the Black Sea. No source of supply now remained, except a trickle from
Africa, to sustain the moribund institution of slavery in any part of
Christian Europe east of the Pyrenees. But in mountain-locked Roussillon
and Asturias remnants of slavery persisted from Visigothic times to the
seventeenth century; and in other parts of the peninsula the intermittent
wars against the Moors of Granada supplied captives and to some extent
reinvigorated slavery among the Christian states from Aragon to Portugal.
Furthermore the conquest of the Canaries at the end of the fourteenth
century and of Teneriffe and other islands in the fifteenth led to the
bringing of many of their natives as slaves to Castille and the neighboring
kingdoms.
Occasional documents of this period contain mention of negro slaves at
various places in the Spanish peninsula, but the number was clearly small
and it must have continued so, particularly as long as the supply was drawn
through Moorish channels. The source whence the negroes came was known to
be a region below the Sahara which from its yield of gold and ivory was
called by the Moors the land of wealth, "Bilad Ghana," a name which on the
tongues of European sailors was converted into "Guinea." To open a direct
trade thither was a natural effort when the age of maritime exploration
began. The French are said to have made voyages to the Gold Coast in the
fourteenth century, though apparently without trading in slaves. But in
the absence of records of their activities authentic history must confine
itself to the achievements of the Portuguese.
In 1415 John II of Portugal, partly to give his five sons opportunity to
win knighthood in battle, attacked and captured the Moorish stronghold of
Ceuta, facing Gibraltar across the strait. For several years thereafter the
town was left in charge of the youngest of these princes, Henry, who there
acquired an enduring desire to gain for Portugal and Christianity the
regions whence the northbound caravans were coming. Returning home, he
fixed his residence at the promontory of Sagres, on Cape St. Vincent,
and made his main interest for forty years the promotion of maritime
exploration southward.[8] His perseverance won him fame as "Prince
Henry the Navigator," though he was not himself an active sailor; and
furthermore, after many disappointments, it resulted in exploration as far
as the Gold Coast in his lifetime and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope
twenty-five years after his death. The first decade of his endeavor brought
little result, for the Sahara shore was forbidding and the sailors timid.
Then in 1434 Gil Eannes doubled Cape Bojador and found its dangers
imaginary. Subsequent voyages added to the extent of coast skirted until
the desert began to give place to inhabited country. The Prince was now
eager for captives to be taken who might inform him of the country, and in
1441 Antam Gonsalvez brought several Moors from the southern edge of the
desert, who, while useful as informants, advanced a new theme of interest
by offering to ransom themselves by delivering on the coast a larger number
of non-Mohammedan negroes, whom the Moors held as slaves. Partly for the
sake of profit, though the chronicler says more largely to increase the
number of souls to be saved, this exchange was effected in the following
year in the case of two of the Moors, while a third took his liberty
without delivering his ransom. After the arrival in Portugal of these
exchanged negroes, ten in number, and several more small parcels of
captives, a company organized at Lagos under the direction of Prince Henry
sent forth a fleet of six caravels in 1444 which promptly returned with 225
captives, the disposal of whom has been recounted at the beginning of this
chapter.
[Footnote 8: The chief source for the early Portuguese voyages is Azurara's
Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, already cited.]
In the next year the Lagos Company sent a great expedition of twenty-six
vessels which discovered the Senegal River and brought back many natives
taken in raids thereabout; and by 1448 nearly a thousand captives had been
carried to Portugal. Some of these were Moorish Berbers, some negroes,
but most were probably Jolofs from the Senegal, a warlike people of mixed
ancestry. Raiding in the Jolof country proved so hazardous that from about
1454 the Portuguese began to supplement their original methods by planting
"factories" on the coast where slaves from the interior were bought from
their native captors and owners who had brought them down in caravans
and canoes. Thus not only was missionary zeal eclipsed but the desire of
conquest likewise, and the spirit of exploration erelong partly subdued, by
commercial greed. By the time of Prince Henry's death in 1460 Portugal was
importing seven or eight hundred negro slaves each year. From this time
forward the traffic was conducted by a succession of companies and
individual grantees, to whom the government gave the exclusive right for
short terms of years in consideration of money payments and pledges of
adding specified measures of exploration. As new coasts were reached
additional facilities were established for trade in pepper, ivory and gold
as well as in slaves. When the route round Africa to India was opened at
the end of the century the Guinea trade fell to secondary importance, but
it was by no means discontinued.
Of the negroes carried to Portugal in the fifteenth century a large
proportion were set to work as slaves on great estates in the southern
provinces recently vacated by the Moors, and others were employed as
domestic servants in Lisbon and other towns. Some were sold into Spain
where they were similarly employed, and where their numbers were recruited
by a Guinea trade in Spanish vessels in spite of Portugal's claim of
monopoly rights, even though Isabella had recognized these in a treaty of
1479. In short, at the time of the discovery of America Spain as well as
Portugal had quite appreciable numbers of negroes in her population and
both were maintaining a system of slavery for their control.
When Columbus returned from his first voyage in the spring of 1493 and
announced his great landfall, Spain promptly entered upon her career
of American conquest and colonization. So great was the expectation of
adventure and achievement that the problem of the government was not how
to enlist participants but how to restrain a great exodus. Under heavy
penalties emigration was restricted by royal decrees to those who procured
permission to go. In the autumn of the same year fifteen hundred men,
soldiers, courtiers, priests and laborers, accompanied the discoverer
on his second voyage, in radiant hopes. But instead of wealth and high
adventure these Argonauts met hard labor and sickness. Instead of the rich
cities of Japan and China sought for, there were found squalid villages of
Caribs and Lucayans. Of gold there was little, of spices none.
Columbus, when planting his colony at Isabella, on the northern coast
of Hispaniola (Hayti), promptly found need of draught animals and other
equipment. He wrote to his sovereigns in January, 1494, asking for the
supplies needed; and he offered, pending the discovery of more precious
things, to defray expenses by shipping to Spain some of the island natives,
"who are a wild people fit for any work, well proportioned and very
intelligent, and who when they have got rid of their cruel habits to which
they have been accustomed will be better than any other kind of slaves."[9]
Though this project was discouraged by the crown, Columbus actually took a
cargo of Indians for sale in Spain on his return from his third voyage;
but Isabella stopped the sale and ordered the captives taken home and
liberated. Columbus, like most of his generation, regarded the Indians
as infidel foreigners to be exploited at will. But Isabella, and to some
extent her successors, considered them Spanish subjects whose helplessness
called for special protection. Between the benevolence of the distant
monarchs and the rapacity of the present conquerors, however, the fate of
the natives was in little doubt. The crown's officials in the Indies were
the very conquerors themselves, who bent their soft instructions to fit
their own hard wills. A native rebellion in Hispaniola in 1495 was crushed
with such slaughter that within three years the population is said to have
been reduced by two thirds. As terms of peace Columbus required annual
tribute in gold so great that no amount of labor in washing the sands could
furnish it. As a commutation of tribute and as a means of promoting the
conversion of the Indians there was soon inaugurated the encomienda system
which afterward spread throughout Spanish America. To each Spaniard
selected as an encomendero was allotted a certain quota of Indians bound to
cultivate land for his benefit and entitled to receive from him tutelage
in civilization and Christianity. The grantees, however, were not assigned
specified Indians but merely specified numbers of them, with power to seize
new ones to replace any who might die or run away. Thus the encomendero was
given little economic interest in preserving the lives and welfare of his
workmen.
[Footnote 9: R.H. Major, Select Letters of Columbus, 2d. ed., 1890, p.
88.]
In the first phase of the system the Indians were secured in the right of
dwelling in their own villages under their own chiefs. But the encomenderos
complained that the aloofness of the natives hampered the work of
conversion and asked that a fuller and more intimate control be authorized.
This was promptly granted and as promptly abused. Such limitations as the
law still imposed upon encomendero power were made of no effect by the lack
of machinery for enforcement. The relationship in short, which the law
declared to be one of guardian and ward, became harsher than if it had been
that of master and slave. Most of the island natives were submissive in
disposition and weak in physique, and they were terribly driven at their
work in the fields, on the roads, and at the mines. With smallpox and other
pestilences added to their hardships, they died so fast that before 1510
Hispaniola was confronted with the prospect of the complete disappearance
of its laboring population.[10] Meanwhile the same régime was being carried
to Porto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba with similar consequences in its train.
[Footnote 10: E. g. Bourne, Spain in America (New York, 1904); Wilhelm
Roscher, The Spanish Colonial System, Bourne ed. (New York, 1904); Konrad
Habler, "The Spanish Colonial Empire," in Helmolt, History of the World,
vol I.]
As long as mining remained the chief industry the islands failed to
prosper; and the reports of adversity so strongly checked the Spanish
impulse for adventure that special inducements by the government were
required to sustain any flow of emigration. But in 1512-1515 the
introduction of sugar-cane culture brought the beginning of a change in
the industrial situation. The few surviving gangs of Indians began to be
shifted from the mines to the fields, and a demand for a new labor supply
arose which could be met only from across the sea.
Apparently no negroes were brought to the islands before 1501. In that
year, however, a royal decree, while excluding Jews and Moors, authorized
the transportation of negroes born in Christian lands; and some of these
were doubtless carried to Hispaniola in the great fleet of Ovando, the new
governor, in 1502. Ovando's reports of this experiment were conflicting.
In the year following his arrival he advised that no more negroes be sent,
because of their propensity to run away and band with and corrupt the
Indians. But after another year had elapsed he requested that more negroes
be sent. In this interim the humane Isabella died and the more callous
Ferdinand acceded to full control. In consequence a prohibition of the
negro trade in 1504 was rescinded in 1505 and replaced by orders that the
bureau in charge of colonial trade promote the sending of negroes from
Spain in large parcels. For the next twelve years this policy was
maintained--the sending of Christian negroes was encouraged, while the
direct slave trade from Africa to America was prohibited. The number of
negroes who reached the islands under this régime is not ascertainable. It
was clearly almost negligible in comparison with the increasing demand.[11]
[Footnote 11: The chief authority upon the origin and growth of negro
slavery in the Spanish colonies is J.A. Saco, Historia de la Esclavitud
de la Raza Africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los Paises
Americo-Hispanos. (Barcelona, 1879.) This book supplements the same
author's Historia de la Esclavitud desde los Tiempos remotos previously
cited.]
The policy of excluding negroes fresh from Africa--"bozal negroes" the
Spaniards called them--was of course a product of the characteristic
resolution to keep the colonies free from all influences hostile to
Catholic orthodoxy. But whereas Jews, Mohammedans and Christian heretics
were considered as champions of rival faiths, the pagan blacks came
increasingly to be reckoned as having no religion and therefore as a mere
passive element ready for christianization. As early as 1510, in fact, the
Spanish crown relaxed its discrimination against pagans by ordering the
purchase of above a hundred negro slaves in the Lisbon market for dispatch
to Hispaniola. To quiet its religious scruples the government hit upon
the device of requiring the baptism of all pagan slaves upon their
disembarkation in the colonial ports.
The crown was clearly not prepared to withstand a campaign for supplies
direct from Africa, especially after the accession of the youth Charles I
in 1517. At that very time a clamor from the islands reached its climax.
Not only did many civil officials, voicing public opinion in their island
communities, urge that the supply of negro slaves be greatly increased as
a means of preventing industrial collapse, but a delegation of Jeronimite
friars and the famous Bartholomeo de las Casas, who had formerly been a
Cuban encomendero and was now a Dominican priest, appeared in Spain to
press the same or kindred causes. The Jeronimites, themselves concerned in
industrial enterprises, were mostly interested in the labor supply. But the
well-born and highly talented Las Casas, earnest and full of the milk
of human kindness, was moved entirely by humanitarian and religious
considerations. He pleaded primarily for the abolition of the encomienda
system and the establishment of a great Indian reservation under missionary
control, and he favored the increased transfer of Christian negroes from
Spain as a means of relieving the Indians from their terrible sufferings.
The lay spokesmen and the Jeronimites asked that provision be made for the
sending of thousands of negro slaves, preferably bozal negroes for the sake
of cheapness and plenty; and the supporters of this policy were able to
turn to their use the favorable impression which Las Casas was making, even
though his programme and theirs were different.[12] The outcome was that
while the settling of the encomienda problem was indefinitely postponed,
authorization was promptly given for a supply of bozal negroes.
[Footnote 12: Las Casas, Historio de las Indias (Madrid, 1875, 1876);
Arthur Helps, Life of Las Casas (London, 1873); Saco, op. cit., pp.
62-104.]
The crown here had an opportunity to get large revenues, of which it was in
much need, by letting the slave trade under contract or by levying taxes
upon it. The young king, however, freshly arrived from the Netherlands with
a crowd of Flemish favorites in his train, proceeded to issue gratuitously
a license for the trade to one of the Flemings at court, Laurent de
Gouvenot, known in Spain as Garrevod, the governor of Breza. This license
empowered the grantee and his assigns to ship from Guinea to the Spanish
islands four thousand slaves. All the historians until recently have placed
this grant in the year 1517 and have called it a contract (asiento); but
Georges Scelle has now discovered and printed the document itself which
bears the date August 18, 1518, and is clearly a license of grace bearing
none of the distinctive asiento features.[13] Garrevod, who wanted ready
cash rather than a trading privilege, at once divided his license into two
and sold them for 25,000 ducats to certain Genoese merchants domiciled at
Seville, who in turn split them up again and put them on the market where
they became an object of active speculation at rapidly rising prices. The
result was that when slaves finally reached the islands under Garrevod's
grant the prices demanded for them were so exorbitant that the purposes
of the original petitioners were in large measure defeated. Meanwhile the
king, in spite of the nominally exclusive character of the Garrevod grant,
issued various other licenses on a scale ranging from ten to four hundred
slaves each. For a decade the importations were small, however, and the
island clamor increased.
[Footnote 13: Georges Scelle, Histoire Politique de la Traité Négrière aux
Indes de Castille: Contrats et Traités d'Asíento (Paris, 1906), I, 755.
Book I, chapter 2 of the same volume is an elaborate discussion of the
Garrevod grant.]
In 1528 a new exclusive grant was issued to two German courtiers at
Seville, Eynger and Sayller, empowering them to carry four thousand slaves
from Guinea to the Indies within the space of the following four years.
This differed from Garrevod's in that it required a payment of 20,000
ducats to the crown and restricted the price at which the slaves were to
be sold in the islands to forty ducats each. In so far it approached the
asientos of the full type which became the regular recourse of the Spanish
government in the following centuries; but it fell short of the ultimate
plan by failing to bind the grantees to the performance of their
undertaking and by failing to specify the grades and the proportion of the
sexes among the slaves to be delivered. In short the crown's regard was
still directed more to the enrichment of courtiers than to the promotion of
prosperity in the islands.
After the expiration of the Eynger and Sayller grant the king left the
control of the slave trade to the regular imperial administrative boards,
which, rejecting all asiento overtures for half a century, maintained a
policy of granting licenses for competitive trade in return for payments
of eight or ten ducats per head until 1560, and of thirty ducats or more
thereafter. At length, after the Spanish annexation of Portugal in 1580,
the government gradually reverted to monopoly grants, now however in the
definite form of asientos, in which by intent at least the authorities made
the public interest, with combined regard to the revenue and a guaranteed
labor supply, the primary consideration.[14] The high prices charged for
slaves, however, together with the burdensome restrictions constantly
maintained upon trade in general, steadily hampered the growth of Spanish
colonial industry. Furthermore the allurements of Mexico and Peru drained
the older colonies of virtually all their more vigorous white inhabitants,
in spite of severe penalties legally imposed upon emigration but never
effectively enforced.
[Footnote 14: Scelle, I, books 1-3.]
The agricultural régime in the islands was accordingly kept relatively
stagnant as long as Spain preserved her full West Indian domination. The
sugar industry, which by 1542 exported the staple to the amount of 110,000
arrobas of twenty-five pounds each, was standardized in plantations of two
types--the trapiche whose cane was ground by ox power and whose labor
force was generally thirty or forty negroes (each reckoned as capable of
the labor of four Indians); and the inqenio, equipped with a water-power
mill and employing about a hundred slaves.[15] Occasional slave revolts
disturbed the Spanish islanders but never for long diminished their
eagerness for slave recruits. The slave laws were relatively mild, the
police administration extremely casual, and the plantation managements
easy-going. In short, after introducing slavery into the new world the
Spaniards maintained it in sluggish fashion, chiefly in the islands, as an
institution which peoples more vigorous industrially might borrow and adapt
to a more energetic plantation régime.
[Footnote 15: Saco, pp. 127, 128, 188; Oviedo, Historia General de las
Indias, book 4. chap. 8.]
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