American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[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 regime 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 regime 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 Traite Negriere aux
Indes de Castille: Contrats et Traites d'Asiento_ (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 regime 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 regime.

[Footnote 15: Saco, pp. 127, 128, 188; Oviedo, _Historia General de las
Indias_, book 4. chap. 8.]

CHAPTER II

THE MARITIME SLAVE TRADE

At the request of a slaver's captain the government of Georgia issued in
1772 a certificate to a certain Fenda Lawrence reciting that she, "a free
black woman and heretofore a considerable trader in the river Gambia on the
coast of Africa, hath voluntarily come to be and remain for some time in
this province," and giving her permission to "pass and repass unmolested
within the said province on her lawfull and necessary occations."[1] This
instance is highly exceptional. The millions of African expatriates went
against their own wills, and their transporters looked upon the business
not as passenger traffic but as trade in goods. Earnings came from selling
in America the cargoes bought in Africa; the transportation was but an item
in the trade.

[Footnote 1: U.B. Phillips, _Plantation and Frontier Documents_, printed
also as vols. I and II of the _Documentary History of American Industrial
Society_ (Cleveland, O., 1909), II, 141, 142. This publication will be
cited hereafter as _Plantation and Frontier_.]

The business bulked so large in the world's commerce in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries that every important maritime community on the
Atlantic sought a share, generally with the sanction and often with the
active assistance of its respective sovereign. The preliminaries to the
commercial strife occurred in the Elizabethan age. French traders in gold
and ivory found the Portuguese police on the Guinea Coast to be negligible;
but poaching in the slave trade was a harder problem, for Spain held firm
control of her colonies which were then virtually the world's only slave
market.

The test of this was made by Sir John Hawkins who at the beginning of his
career as a great English sea captain had informed himself in the Canary
Islands of the Afro-American opportunity awaiting exploitation. Backed by
certain English financiers, he set forth in 1562 with a hundred men in
three small ships, and after procuring in Sierra Leone, "partly by the
sword and partly by other means," above three hundred negroes he sailed to
Hispaniola where without hindrance from the authorities he exchanged them
for colonial produce. "And so, with prosperous success, and much gain to
himself and the aforesaid adventurers, he came home, and arrived in the
month of September, 1563."[2] Next year with 170 men in four ships Hawkins
again captured as many Sierra Leone natives as he could carry, and
proceeded to peddle them in the Spanish islands. When the authorities
interfered he coerced them by show of arms and seizure of hostages, and
when the planters demurred at his prices he brought them to terms through a
mixture of diplomacy and intimidation. After many adventures by the way he
reached home, as the chronicler concludes, "God be thanked! in safety: with
the loss of twenty persons in all the voyage; as with great profit to the
venturers in the said voyage, so also to the whole realm, in bringing
home both gold, silver, pearls, and other jewels in great store. His name
therefore be praised for evermore! Amen." Before two years more had passed
Hawkins put forth for a third voyage, this time with six ships, two of them
among the largest then afloat. The cargo of slaves, procured by aiding a
Guinea tribe in an attack upon its neighbor, had been duly sold in the
Indies when dearth of supplies and stress of weather drove the fleet into
the Mexican port of San Juan de Ulloa. There a Spanish fleet of thirteen
ships attacked the intruders, capturing their treasure ship and three of
her consorts. Only the _Minion_ under Hawkins and the bark _Judith_ under
the young Francis Drake escaped to carry the harrowing tale to England. One
result of the episode was that it filled Hawkins and Drake with desire for
revenge on Spain, which was wreaked in due time but in European waters.
Another consequence was a discouragement of English slave trading for
nearly a century to follow.

[Footnote 2: Hakluyt, _Voyages_, ed. 1589. This and the accounts of
Hawkins' later exploits in the same line are reprinted with a valuable
introduction in C.R. Beazley, ed., _Voyages and Travels_ (New York, 1903),
I, 29-126.]

The defeat of the Armada in 1588 led the world to suspect the decline of
Spain's maritime power, but only in the lapse of decades did the suspicion
of her helplessness become a certainty. Meantime Portugal was for sixty
years an appanage of the Spanish crown, while the Netherlands were at their
heroic labor for independence. Thus when the Dutch came to prevail at sea
in the early seventeenth century the Portuguese posts in Guinea fell their
prey, and in 1621 the Dutch West India Company was chartered to take them
over. Closely identified with the Dutch government, this company not
only founded the colony of New Netherland and endeavored to foster the
employment of negro slaves there, but in 1634 it seized the Spanish island
of Curacao near the Venezuelan coast and made it a basis for smuggling
slaves into the Spanish dominions. And now the English, the French and the
Danes began to give systematic attention to the African and West Indian
opportunities, whether in the form of buccaneering, slave trading or
colonization.

The revolt of Portugal in 1640 brought a turning point. For a
quarter-century thereafter the Spanish government, regarding the Portuguese
as rebels, suspended all trade relations with them, the asiento included.
But the trade alternatives remaining were all distasteful to Spain. The
English were heretics; the Dutch were both heretics and rebels; the French
and the Danes were too weak at sea to handle the great slave trading
contract with security; and Spain had no means of her own for large scale
commerce. The upshot was that the carriage of slaves to the Spanish
colonies was wholly interdicted during the two middle decades of the
century. But this gave the smugglers their highest opportunity. The Spanish
colonial police collapsed under the pressure of the public demand for
slaves, and illicit trading became so general and open as to be pseudo
legitimate. Such a boom came as was never felt before under Protestant
flags in tropical waters. The French, in spite of great exertions, were
not yet able to rival the Dutch and English. These in fact had such an
ascendency that when in 1663 Spain revived the asiento by a contract with
two Genoese, the contractors must needs procure their slaves by arrangement
with Dutch and English who delivered them at Curacao and Jamaica. Soon
after this contract expired the asiento itself was converted from an item
of Spanish internal policy into a shuttlecock of international politics. It
became in fact the badge of maritime supremacy, possessed now by the Dutch,
now by the French in the greatest years of Louis XIV, and finally by the
English as a trophy in the treaty of Utrecht.

By this time, however, the Spanish dominions were losing their primacy
as slave markets. Jamaica, Barbados and other Windward Islands under the
English; Hayti, Martinique and Guadeloupe under the French, and Guiana
under the Dutch were all more or less thriving as plantation colonies,
while Brazil, Virginia, Maryland and the newly founded Carolina were
beginning to demonstrate that slave labor had an effective calling without
as well as within the Caribbean latitudes. The closing decades of the
seventeenth century were introducing the heyday of the slave trade, and the
English were preparing for their final ascendency therein.

In West African waters in that century no international law prevailed but
that of might. Hence the impulse of any new country to enter the Guinea
trade led to the project of a chartered monopoly company; for without
the resources of share capital sufficient strength could not be had, and
without the monopoly privilege the necessary shares could not be sold. The
first English company of moment, chartered in 1618, confined its trade to
gold and other produce. Richard Jobson while in its service on the Gambia
was offered some slaves by a native trader. "I made answer," Jobson
relates, "we were a people who did not deal in any such commodities;
neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes; at
which he seemed to marvel much, and told us it was the only merchandize
they carried down, and that they were sold to white men, who earnestly
desired them. We answered, they were another kind of people, different from
us; but for our part, if they had no other commodities, we would return
again."[3] This company speedily ending its life, was followed by another
in 1631 with a similarly short career; and in 1651 the African privilege
was granted for a time to the East India Company.