University of Virginia Library

AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVERY

CHAPTER I
THE DISCOVERY AND EXPLOITATION OF GUINEA

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.

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 Ogowé 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]

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 commonplace
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 larvæ, 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.

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 torn torn 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]

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]

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]

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.

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 gam 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.

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 riot 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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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 ingenio, 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.