1518.

the board of trade at Seville was consulted, to learn how many slaves would be required. It had been proposed to allow four for each Spanish emigrant; deliberate calculation fixed the number esteemed necessary at four thousand. The year in which Charles V. led an expedition against Tunis, to check the piracies of the Barbary states and to emancipate Christian slaves in Africa, he gave an open sanction to the African slave-trade. The sins of the Moors were to be revenged on the negroes; and the monopoly, for eight years, of annually importing four thousand slaves into the West Indies, was eagerly seized by La Bresa, a favorite of the Spanish monarch, and was sold to the Genoese, who purchased their cargoes of Portugal. We shall, at a later period, observe a stipulation for this lucrative monopoly, in a treaty of peace, established by a European congress; shall witness the sovereign of the most free state in Europe chaffering for a fourth part of its profits; and shall trace its intimate connection with the first in that series of wars which led to the emancipation of America. Las Casas lived to repent of his hasty benevolence, declaring afterwards that the captivity of black men is as iniquitous as that of Indians; and he feared the wrath of divine justice for having favored the importation of negro slaves into the western hemisphere. But covetousness, and not a mistaken compassion, established the slavetrade, which had nearly received its development before the voice of charity was heard in defence of the Indians. Reason, policy, and religion alike condemned the traffic. A series of papal bulls had indeed secured to the Portuguese the exclusive commerce with Western Africa; but the slave-trade between Africa and America was, I believe, never expressly sanctioned by the see of Rome. Even Leo X., though his voluptuous life, making of his pontificate a continued carnival, might have deadened the sentiments of humanity and justice, declared that "not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery." Yet Paul III., when in a bull of the thirtieth of August, 1535, he called upon all princes to take up arms against the rebellious Henry VIII. of

1535.

1537.

England and his accomplices, gave authority to make slaves of every English person who would not assist in the June 10. expulsion of their king. But, two years later, the same pontiff, in two separate briefs, imprecated a curse on the Europeans who should enslave Indians, or any other class of men. It even became usual for Spanish vessels, when they sailed on a voyage of discovery, to be attended by a priest, whose duty it was to prevent the kidnapping of the aborigines. The legislation of independent America has been emphatic in denouncing the hasty avarice which entailed the anomaly of negro slavery in the midst of liberty. Ximenes, the gifted coadjutor of Ferdinand and Isabella, the stern grand inquisitor, the austere but ambitious Franciscan, foresaw the danger which it required centuries to reveal, and refused to sanction the introduction of negroes into Hispaniola ; believing that the favorable climate would increase their numbers, and infallibly lead them to a successful revolt. A severe retribution has manifested his sagacity: Hayti, the first spot in America that received African slaves, was the first to set the example of African liberty. But for the slave-trade, the African race would have had no inheritance in the New World.

1562.

1567.

The odious distinction of having first interested England in the slave-trade belongs to Sir John Hawkins. In 1562, he transported a large cargo of Africans to Hispaniola; the rich returns of sugar, ginger, and pearls, attracted the notice of Queen Elizabeth; and when, five years later, a new expedition was prepared, she was induced not only to protect, but to share the traffic. Hawkins himself relates of one of his expeditions, that he set fire to a city, of which the huts were covered with dry palm-leaves, and, out of eight thousand inhabitants, succeeded in seizing two hundred and fifty. The self-approving frankness with which he avows the deed, and the lustre which his fame acquired, display the depravity of public sentiment in his time. In all other emergencies, he knew how to pity the unfortunate, and with cheerful liberality relieve their wants, even when they were not his countrymen. Yet the commerce, on the part of the English,

in Spanish ports was by the laws of Spain illicit, as well as by the laws of morals detestable; and when the sovereign of England participated in its hazards, its profits, and its crimes, she became at once a smuggler and a slave-merchant.

1637.

1645.

The earliest importation of negro slaves into New England was made in 1637, from Providence Isle, in the Salem ship "Desire." A ship of one James Smith, a member of the church of Boston, and one Thomas Keyser, first brought upon the colonies the guilt of participating in the direct traffic with Africa for slaves. In 1645, they sailed “for Guinea to trade for negroes." When they arrived there, they joined with "some Londoners," and "upon the Lord's day invited the natives aboard one of their ships." Such as came they kept prisoners. Then, landing men, they assaulted a town, which they burned, killing some of the people. But throughout Massachusetts, where slavery could plead the sanction of positive law, and where a very few blacks as well as Indians were already held in bondage, a cry was raised against "such vile and most odious courses, abhorred of all good and just men." Richard Saltonstall, a worthy assistant, who "truly endeavored the advance of the gospel, and the good of the people," denounced the "acts of murder, of stealing negroes, and of chasing them upon the Sabbath day," as "directly contrary to the laws of God and the laws of this jurisdiction;" the guilty men were committed for the offence, and escaped punishment only because the court could not take cognizance of crimes committed in foreign lands. In the next year, after advice with the elders, the representatives of the people, bearing "witness against the heinous crime of man-stealing," ordered the negroes to be restored, at the public charge, "to their native country, with a letter expressing the indignation of the general court at their wrongs.

1646.

When George Fox visited Barbados in 1671, he enjoined it upon the planters that they should "deal mildly and gently with their negroes; and that, after certain years of servitude, they should make them free." His idea had

been anticipated by the fellow-citizens of Gorton and Roger Williams. On the eighteenth of May, 1652, the representatives of Providence and Warwick, perceiving the disposition of people in the colony "to buy negroes," and hold them 66 as slaves for ever," enacted that " no black mankind” shall, "by covenant, bond, or otherwise," be held to perpetual service; the master, "at the end of ten years, shall set them free, as the manner is with English servants; and that man that will not let " his slave "go free, or shall sell him away, to the end that he may be enslaved to others for a longer time, shall forfeit to the colony forty pounds." Now forty pounds was nearly twice the value of a negro slave. The law was not enforced; but the principle lived among the people.

Conditional servitude, under indentures or covenants, had from the first existed in Virginia. Once at least James sent over convicts, and once at least the city of London a hundred homeless children from its streets. The servant stood to his master in the relation of a debtor, bound to discharge the costs of emigration by the entire employment of his powers for the benefit of his creditor. Oppression early ensued men, who had been transported into Virginia at an expense of eight or ten pounds, were sometimes sold for forty, fifty, or even threescore pounds. White servants came to be a usual article of traffic. They were sold in England to be transported, and in Virginia were resold to the highest bidder; like negroes, they were to be purchased on shipboard, as men buy horses at a fair. In 1672, the average price in the colonies, where five years of service were due, was about ten pounds; while a negro was worth twenty or twenty-five pounds. So usual was this manner of dealing in Englishmen, that not the Scots only, who were taken in the field of Dunbar, were sent into involuntary servitude in New England, but the royalist prisoners of the battle of Worcester; and the leaders in the insurrection of Penruddoc, in spite of the remonstrance of Haselrig and Henry Vane, were shipped to America. At the corresponding period, in Ireland, the crowded exportation of Irish Catholics was a frequent event, and was attended

by aggravations hardly inferior to the usual atrocities of the African slave-trade. In 1685, when nearly a thousand of the prisoners, condemned for participating in the insurrection of Monmouth, were sentenced to transportation, men and women of influence at court scrambled for the convicted insurgents as a merchantable commodity.

The condition of apprenticed servants in Virginia differed from that of slaves chiefly in the duration of their bondage; and the laws of the colony favored their early enfranchisement. But this state of labor easily admitted the introduction of perpetual servitude. The commerce of Virginia had been at first monopolized by the company; but, as its management for the benefit of the corporation led to frequent dissensions, it was in 1620 laid open to free competition. In the month of August, 1619, a few days only after the first representative assembly of Virginia, about sixteen months before the Plymouth colony landed in America, and less than two years before the concession of a written constitution, and five years after the commons of France had petitioned for the emancipation of every serf in every fief, a Dutch man-of-war entered James River, and landed twenty negroes for sale. This is, indeed, the sad epoch of the introduction of negro slavery in the English colonies; but the traffic would have been checked in its infancy, had its profits remained with the Dutch. Thirty years after this first importation of Africans, the increase had been so inconsiderable that to one black Virginia contained fifty whites; and, after seventy years of its colonial existence, the number of its negro slaves was proportionably much less than in several northern states at the time of the war of independence. Had no other form of servitude been known in Virginia than such as had been tolerated in Europe, every difficulty would have been promptly obviated by the benevolent spirit of colonial legislation. But a new problem in the history of man was now to be solved. For the first time, the Ethiopian and Caucasian races were to meet together in nearly equal numbers beneath a temperate Who could foretell the issue? The negro race, from its introduction, was regarded with disgust, and its union

zone.