University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP

SOME time in August of the year 1619 a
strange vessel entered the mouth of the
James River, in what is now the State of
Virginia, and, coming in with the tide, dropped anchor
opposite the little settlement at Jamestown. This
ship, which carried the Dutch flag, had the appearance
of a man-of-war, but its mission, as it turned
out, was peaceful enough, for its purpose was trade,
and among other merchandise it carried twenty
Negro slaves.

This Dutch man-of-war, which brought the first
slaves to the first permanent English settlement
in the new world, is, so far as the United States is
concerned, the first slave-ship, for it was probably
the first slave-trader to visit the North American
continent.

But the twenty Africans were not the first slaves
to reach what is now the territory of the United
States, and the oversea African slave-trade had
been in existence for a century before this time.
In fact, Negro slaves were known in ancient Greece
and Rome and regular accounts of the African slave

trade with Europe are in existence since 990 A. D.
In 1442 Portuguese ships brought back Moorish
prisoners from a voyage to the Coast of Africa. As
ransom the Portuguese accepted a certain amount of
gold and a number of "black Moors" with curled
hair. About this same time the Spanish merchants of
Seville began to import gold and slaves from Western
Africa. As witness to the extent of this traffic,
there is still preserved an interesting letter, written
in 1474 to the celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid,
also called the "Negro Count," which not only
shows that the number of these dark-skinned aliens in
Spain was at that time considerable, but gives some
idea, also, of the manner in which they were treated.

"For the many good, loyal, and signal services
which you have done us, and do each day" the
letter begins, "and because we know your sufficiency,
ability, and good disposition, we constitute you
mayoral and judge of all the Negroes and mulattoes,
free or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble
city of Seville, and throughout the whole arch-bishopric
thereof, and that the said Negroes and
mulattoes may not hold any festivals, nor pleadings
among themselves except before you, Juan de
Valladolid, Negro, our judge and mayoral of the
said Negroes and mulattoes.

"And we command," the letter continues, "that
you, and you only, take cognisance of the disputes,
pleadings, marriages, and other things which may

take place among them, for as much as you are a
person sufficient for that office and deserving of your
power, and you know the laws and ordinances which
ought to be kept, and we are informed that you are
of noble lineage among the said Negroes"[1] The
letter is signed Ferdinand and Isabella, King and
Queen of Spain.

When the Spanish explorers and adventurers came
to America they brought many of these Spanish
Negroes with them as servants and as slaves. It is
probable that a few Negroes were sent out to the
West Indies as early as 1501. Soon after this date,
as shown by a letter of King Ferdinand, dated September
15, 1505, a considerable number of slaves
were introduced into Santo Domingo. In this letter
the following sentence occurs: "I will send you
more Negro slaves as you request. I think there
may be a hundred." Here we have the beginning
of African slavery in America, over a century before
its introduction into Jamestown, Va.

The records show. that Negroes in 1516 worked
with Balboa on the Isthmus of Panama; that Pizarro,

the conqueror of Peru, and Las Casas, the Dominican
Bishop and missionary, had Negro bodyguards.

Negroes also accompanied the expeditions of
Vasquez de Ayllon, Narvaez, Coronado and De Soto.
With the ill-fated expedition of Narvaez was the
Negro Estevan, in English, Stephen. For eleven
years, from 1528 to the year of his death, 1539, this
Negro Stephen was with the Spanish explorers on
the mainland of North America. He wandered
hundreds of miles across what is now the southwestern
part of the United States, two centuries or
more before our western frontier touched that
section of the country. He was a slave of one of
the survivors of the Narvaez expedition and must
have been a man far above the average type. In
one of the folk-tales of the Zuni Indians he lives
to-day, after a lapse of more than three and a half
centuries, and one well-known writer of American
history has called him the discoverer of Arizona.

According to the Spanish historian, Oviedo, Negroes
were among the settlers of the Spanish colony of
Chicora, in 1526, on what is now the coast of South
Carolina, and this, so far as known, was the earliest
appearance of the black man on the soil of the
United States. In 1526, when, under Vasques de
Ayllon, eighty-one years before the English, the
Spaniards tried to found a settlement on the James
River near the present sight of Jamestown, Virginia.
Negro slaves were employed in the work. An

insurrection of the Negro labourer and the death of
Ayllon were among the causes for the failure of the
venture. African slaves accompanied the expedition
of De Soto to Florida in 1539. Negro slaves were
settled at St. Augustine, Florida, by Pedro Menendez,
in 1565. These, however, were Spanish slaves
who had been trained as artisans and cultivators of
the soil and were of a different character from
those fresh levies of labourers who were brought
direct to America from Africa.[2]

Almost nothing is known of the history of the
ship that brought the first slaves, in 1619, to the
settlement of Jamestown; not even its name is
remembered. The coincidence has often been
noted, however, that the Mayflower, which is said
to have brought to America the first seeds of civil
and religious liberty, reached Plymouth a year later,
1620, so that Negro slavery is older than Anglo-Saxon
liberty on the soil of the United States.

In reading the early history of the United States,
I have been impressed with the fact that religious
animosities among European people were largely
responsible for the settlement of America.

The original thirteen states of the Union were
very generally settled by refugees from the religious
wars and religious persecutions of Europe, and three
of them at least, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
and Maryland, were settled by religious sects who

had crossed the ocean in order to secure freedom
of religious worship.

The Scotch-Irish, who so widely settled the
southern colonies, left their homes in Ireland to a
large degree because of the oppression that they
suffered in consequence of their religious faith.

North Carolina, which was one of the first of the
English colonies to grant religious liberty to the
persecuted sects of Europe, was frequently referred
to as a "Quaker Colony," because of the number of
those persecuted people who settled there.

South Carolina was also a refuge for a large number
of Huguenots, who were the Calvinists of
France. As an illustration of some of the milder
forms of persecution to which these people were
subjected in their homes, in France, because of
their religious opinions, I may quote the following
paragraph, from Bancroft's History of the United
States:

It is a very curious fact that, at the very same
time ships were leaving Europe with people who
were seeking in America a solution and an escape
from the religious controversies that had for centuries
torn Europe asunder, other ships were leaving

Africa bearing to this continent other people who
were to be the seeds of new conflicts and leave, as
a heritage, a new problem; a problem in many ways
as difficult and perplexing as that which faced
Europe at the beginning of the Protestant
Reformation.

Religious prejudice, transplanted to American
soil, did not at once die out. A study of some of
the older colonial codes will show that Quakers,
who were nonconformists, and Catholics, who were
not always counted as Christians, were subjected to
restrictions which were frequently quite as severe
as those imposed upon the free Negroes before
the war. Under the law of Virginia in existence in
1705, for instance, Catholics, Indians and Negro
slaves were denied the right to appear "as witnesses
in any case whatsoever, not being Christians," but
this was modified somewhat in 1732, when Negroes,
Indians, and mulattoes were admitted as witnesses
in the trial of slaves.[4]

In one particular instance religious prejudice
against the Catholics was curiously associated
with prejudice, on account of race, against the Negro.
I refer to what is known in the history of New York
as the "Negro Plot of 1741."

In this year the city of New York was thrown
into convulsions of excitement by the rumours of a
conspiracy among some of the lower class of Negroes,

supposed to have been instigated by Spanish
Catholics, to burn the city and destroy the inhabitants.
These rumours were confirmed by a letter,
received about this time from General Oglethorpe
of Georgia, which reported that Spain had employed
a number of Catholic priests, who were to go through
the country pretending to be physicians, dancing
masters, "and other such kinds of occupations,"
who were to get the confidence of families and so
further the plans "to burn all the considerable
cities in English North America."

Shortly before this time a Spanish vessel, manned
in part by Spanish Negroes, had been captured
and the Negroes, although they claimed to be free,
sold into slavery in the colony. Suspicion directed
to one of these slaves added to the excitement.
Among other persons arrested was a man supposed
to be a Catholic priest. Circumstances seemed to
connect certain other Catholics in the colony with
the supposed conspiracy. As usual, in such instances
of intense social commotion, fresh rumours and
fresh suspicions added fuel to the excitement and
before it had died away one hundred and seventy-eight
persons were arrested, thirty-six were executed
and seventy-one transported. Among those executed
was the supposed Catholic priest to whom I have
referred. Eighteen Negroes were hanged and
fourteen were burned. They were executed in
sight of the spot where the United States Custom

House now stands in the square that still has the
name of Bowling Green. It occurs to me, as I am
writing this, as an illustration of the progress of the
Negro, that Charles W. Anderson, the United States
Collector of Internal Revenue, who occupies a suite
of offices in this building is a Negro.

In spite of the numerous "confessions" of white
people and black, arrested during the period that
the excitement lasted, there does not seem to have
been any sufficient evidence that any conspiracy to
burn the city existed. The explanation seems to
be that the community was for the time labouring
under one of those strange social delusions, like
that which seized upon the people of New England
during the period of the Salem witchcraft panic.
The situation, as it existed at the height of the
excitement, as well as the circumstances that finally
brought the prosecutions to an end, are summed
up in the following paragraph from Smith's "History
of New York":

I have referred here at some length to these circumstances
because they show that in times past
religious prejudice, like racial prejudice, has often
been the source of those wild fears and vague suspicions
by which one class of people in the community
is sometimes incited to violence against
another and weaker class.

In spite, however, of the bitter animosities that
once divided them, the people of the different
religious creeds have since learned to live side by
side in peace. Is there any sound reason why
the white man and the black man, who, after all,
understand one another here in America pretty
well, should not do as much? I do not believe
there is.

In 1741, at the time of the "Negro Plot," the
population of New York City numbered 10,000, of
which 2,000 were Negroes. At this time the number
of slaves in the whole colony of Massachusetts did
not amount to more than 3,000. The number
in Pennsylvania had reached 11,000 in 1754, but
in some of the more southerly colonies the
number of slaves, particularly in proportion to
the number of inhabitants was considerably
larger. In South Carolina, for instance, the Negroes
were at one time in the proportion of 22 to 12
of the white population.[6] In 1740 this state
had 40,000 slaves.

In spite of restrictions that were put upon it from
time to time the slave-trade continued to flourish
down to the time of the American Revolution, when
for a time it ceased, only to leap into more vigorous
life at the close of the war. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century England held in all her colonies
in the new world 800,000 slaves. France had
250,000; Denmark 27,000; Spain and Portugal
600,000; Holland 50,000; Sweden 600. There were
about 900,000 slaves in the United States and about
2,000,000 in Brazil.[7]

I was much impressed in reading some years ago
Mungo Park's travels with his account of slavery
as he found it in those parts of Africa which he
visited. His description enabled me, as I thought,
to see how easily and naturally the milder form of
domestic slavery, which seems to have existed in
those countries from the earliest times, had grown,
under the influence of contact and commerce with
European people, into foreign slave-trade. In
other ways, also, it seems to me I have learned
something about African slavery in America, from
what I read of African slavery in Africa.

At the time of Park's famous journey he estimated
that the proportion of slaves to the free population,
in the regions through which he travelled, was
about three to one. These slaves were of two
descriptions: those who were born slaves and those

who had become slaves either through capture in
war, insolvency, or as punishment for crime.

There existed at that time in Africa regular markets
for the purchase and sale of slaves, just as they
afterward existed at Alexandria, at Natchez, and
New Orleans in America. Mungo Park noted, also,
the interesting fact that in the eye of an African
purchaser the value of a slave increased in proportion
to his distance from his native kingdom, for the
reason that when slaves were only a few days' journey
from their homes they frequently succeeded in making
their escape. On the other hand, when several
kingdoms intervened, making escape more difficult,
they were more easily reconciled to their situation.

The same thing was true, and for the same reason,
during the existence of slavery in America. For
instance, from 1820 to 1830, slaves were selling at from
$150 to $300 each in Virginia, while during the
same time the same slaves in New Orleans would
be worth from $800 to $1,200. The difference was
due, in large part, to the agricultural conditions,
since at that time an able-bodied Negro could earn
$200 a year for his master on a sugar plantation in
Louisiana, over and above the cost of his keep.
But the difference was due in a considerable degree,
also, to the fact that in Louisiana the slave was, under
ordinary conditions, beyond all hope of freedom.[8]

"The slaves which are purchased by Europeans
on the coast," Mungo Park continues, "are chiefly
of this description" (i.e., from the interior). "A few
of them are collected in petty wars, which take place
near the coast, but by far the greater number are
brought down in large caravans from the inland
countries, of which many are unknown, even by
name, to Europeans."

It was true in Africa, as it was afterward in
America, that slaves of mild disposition and such
as were not disposed to run away were retained by
their masters, while others who showed signs of
discontent or appeared in other ways intractable,
were disposed of in some distant state. Thus the
domestic slave-trade merged easily and naturally
into the foreign slave-trade and the intractable
slaves from the interior were sent to America.

On his way back to the coast, after his long
journey to the interior, Mungo Park joined company
with a party of merchants on their way to the coast,
having among other merchandise a coffle of slaves,
which they exchanged later for European rum and
tobacco.

These long marches of the slave-caravans and
the methods of caring for and confining the slaves
in the part of the country through which Mungo Park
travelled were not unlike those which one might have
seen fifty years ago on one of the old slave-roads,
from Alexandria, Virginia, to Natchez, Mississippi,

although the African journey was in many respects
more difficult.[9]

In the course of this long and tedious journey
from the interior of Africa to the coast, Mungo
Park had an opportunity to become thoroughly
acquainted with all phases of the slave-traffic, as
it then existed, and he has given many intimate and
interesting glimpses into the life, thoughts, and
feelings of the unfortunate captives, whom he seemed
to have an unusual ability to understand and sympathise
with. Of one party of captives which, at
one point in his journey, were added to the caravan,
he said:

At another part of the journey one of the slaves
belonging to the coffle, who had travelled for several
days with great difficulty, was unable to travel farther
and his master therefore determined to exchange him
for a young girl belonging to the townspeople with
whom they were stopping. "The poor girl" Park
continues, "was ignorant of her fate until the bundles
were all tied up in the morning, and the coffle ready
to depart, when, coming with some other young
women to see the coffle set out, her master took her
by the hand and delivered her to the singing man.
Never was a face of serenity more suddenly changed
into deepest distress; the terror she manifested on
having the load put upon her head and the rope
fastened round her neck, and the sorrow with which
she bade adieu to her companions were truly
affecting."

This dread of the African slave of being sent down
to the slave-markets of the coast towns is like the
fear that constantly haunted the slaves in Maryland,
Virginia, and the other border states, that some
day they might be sold into the Far South. The
most heartrending scenes of slave-life in the South

occurred when owners, on account of debt or some
other misfortune, were compelled to separate families
and sell them to the traders. It was not alone the
parting of children from parents, husbands from
wives, that made these scenes sad and memorable, but
frequently it was just as hard for the slaves to part
from their owners and members of his family, to
which, through years of association, they had become
deeply attached. This feeling of sorrow has found
expression in the words of an old plantation song
that originated in Virginia, the words of which
are in part as follows:

The slave-caravan, to which Mungo Park was
attached, finally reached the river Gambia, where
the slaves were set on board a ship and brought down
to the coast. At Goree one hundred and thirty, of
whom about twenty-five had been of free condition

and were able to read and write Arabic, were shipped
to America. There being no other vessel at hand,
Park took passage on the slaver and followed the
slaves, whom he had accompanied from the interior
to their destination in America.

"My conversation with the slaves," he said, "gave
them great comfort and, in truth they had need of
every consolation in my power to bestow; not that
I observed any wanton acts of cruelty practised
either by the master or seamen toward them, but
the mode of confining and securing Negroes in the
American slave-ships made these poor creatures
suffer greatly and a general sickness prevailed among
them. Besides the three who died at Gambia, and
six or eight while we remained at Goree, eleven
perished at sea, and many of the survivors were
reduced to a very weak and emaciated condition."

After 1808, when it became a crime to bring slaves
from Africa to the United States, the conditions under
which the trade was carried on grew worse. In the
course of the next forty years, before the trade with
the United States finally ended in 1862, it seems that
every possibility of cruelty and of suffering, inherent
in the traffic, was exhausted by the experience of
those who were merchants and those who were
merchandise in this iniquitous traffic. Of the
slaves imported from the region at the mouth of the
Niger it was estimated that one-third and often
more perished before they reached the coast, 15

to 20 per cent, more were lost in the voyage on the
middle passage or while they were going under the
process of seasoning, so that the number of slaves
that finally found their way to the plantations did
not, in many cases, represent more than one-third
of those who were originally torn from their homes
by slave-raiders in order to meet the demand for
labour in America.[10]

Sometimes people, enticed down to the coast
by showing them strips of bright coloured calico,
were seized and put on board the slave-ships. In
other cases, after the slave-traders had successfully
got on board a party of slaves, they seized the
native slave-merchants themselves and carried them
off, in turn, into slavery. I have often heard Major
R. R. Moton, of Hampton, relate the story, which
was told him by his grandmother, of the manner in

which his great-grandfather, at that time a young
African chief, was enticed on board a slave-ship and
brought to America. He had successfully brought
down to the coast and sold a party of slaves which
he had taken as captives in one of the tribal wars.
The trade concluded he was himself invited to dinner
on board the slave-ship. He was given something to
drink which put him to sleep. When he awoke he
found himself far out at sea, no longer a prince
but merely one among the number of slaves he
himself the day before had sold.

Some few years ago during a stay of a few days
at Mobile, Alabama, I visited a little colony of
Africans, who local tradition says are the remnants
of the last cargo of the last slave-ship which was
landed in the United States.

Mobile Bay during the latter days of the slave-trade
was a favourite entrance for slave-smugglers
to the United States. At the upper entrance of the
bay, where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers
pour their waters into it through a number of different
channels, there are many places in which it
was possible to hide a slave-ship. It was in one of
these ships, smuggled in through these channels, by
which the majority of the people in the "African
Colony" were brought to America.

In this community I met native Africans who
still speak the old tribal language and still retain
to some extent, I was told, their ancient tribal

customs. I talked with one of these men who still
passes by his African name. He is called Ossie
Keebe. He told me his were a hill people. They
lived in the uplands of Dahomey, seven days from
the sea. There had been a war—there was always
war in those slave-raiding days, he said—and one
night their village had been captured and all who
were not killed were marched down to the sea and
sold.

When I asked this old man if he ever thought of
returning to Africa, he replied: "Yes, I goes back to
Africa every night, in my dreams." Meeting this
old man whose dreams carry him back to Africa, I
felt as if I had discovered the link by which the old
life in Africa was connected with the new life in
America.

The people I met in the African colony were not,
however, the last slaves brought to the United States.
The famous yacht, Wanderer, which carried 500
slaves into Georgia in 1858, is supposed to have
brought 420 slaves more in 1860. But as late as
1862 a ship ran the blockade of Federal ships and
landed slaves in Mobile. Far up the river in
some remote part of that wilderness of swamp and
water there still may be seen, I have been told, above
the surface of the water portions of the iron work
of the Lawrence, which was possibly the last ship
to bring slaves into the United States. The ship was
burned to keep it from falling into the hands of the

"Yankees" during the war, but there are young men
in the African colony who still remember to have
played about the hull when they were boys. There
are still people living in Mobile who were brought
over as slaves upon it in 1862.

No one will ever know how many thousands of
Africans, during the progress of the slave-trade,
were carried from their homes in Africa to be used
as labourers in the opening up of the new and wild
country in North and South America. It has been
estimated that 270,000 slaves were brought into the
United States between the years 1808 and 1860, from
the time that the slave-trade was legally abolished
to the time when it practically ceased. In view of
the fact that other estimates indicate that fifteen
thousand slaves were smuggled into the United
States in 1858; that at another time fifteen thousand
slaves were brought into Texas alone in one year,
this may be taken as a low estimate.

Even this is no indication of the number of slaves
that were imported during this time and before into
the West Indies and into South America. South
America and the West Indies, like some of the
states of the Far South, were slave-consuming
countries, and it was necessary to constantly bring
in new levies to keep up the supply.

I have taken some pains to examine the different
estimates made by different writers at different
periods of the slave-trade and for different portions

of North and South America, and I have reached
the conclusion that the total number of slaves landed
in the western world from the beginning to the end
of the slave-trade cannot have been less than twelve
millions, and was probably much more.

Perhaps twelve millions more were taken in the
slave-raids, perished on the way to the coast or in the
"middle passage," or in the process of seasoning,
so that no less than twenty-four million human beings
were either brought to America as slaves or perished
on the way hither. I have not examined carefully
the figures of European emigration, but I venture
to say that from the time America was discovered
down to 1860, the number of white people that
have immigrated from Europe to North and South
America is less than the number of black people who
were brought over in slave-ships during the same
period.