The NegroDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
History
The Negro
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
Africa -- History; Black race
It was estimated that out of every one hundred lot shipped from Africa
only about fifty lived to be effective laborers across the sea, and among
the whites more seamen died in that trade in one year than in the whole
remaining trade of England in two. The full realization of the horrors of
the slave trade was slow in reaching the ears and conscience of the modern
world, just as to-day the treatment of dark natives in European colonies
is brought to publicity with the greatest difficulty. The first move
against the slave trade in England came in Parliament in 1776, but it was
not until thirty-one years later, in 1807, that the trade was banned
through the arduous labors of Clarkson, Wilberforce, Sharpe, and others.
Denmark had already abolished the trade, and the United States attempted
to do so the following year. Portugal and Spain were induced to abolish
the trade between 1815 and 1830. Notwithstanding these laws, the
contraband trade went on until the beginning of the Civil War in America.
The reasons for this were the enormous profit of the trade and the
continued demand of the American slave barons, who had no sympathy with
the efforts to stop their source of cheap labor supply.
However, philanthropy was not working alone to overthrow Negro slavery and
the slave trade. It was seen, first in England and later in other
countries, that slavery as an industrial system could not be made to work
satisfactorily in modern times. Its cost was too great, and one of the
causes of this cost was the slave insurrections from the very beginning,
when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil
War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrection in the West
Indies, in North and South America, kept the slave owners in apprehension
and turmoil, or called for a police system difficult to maintain. In North
America revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the
North, and this, with the growing scarcity of suitable land and the moral
revolt, led to the Civil War and the disappearance of the American slave
trade.
There was still, however, the Mohammedan slave trade to deal with, and
this has been the work of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
the last quarter of the nineteenth century ten thousand slaves annually
were being distributed on the southern and eastern coast of the
Mediterranean and at the great slave market in Bornu.
On the east coast of Africa in 1862 nineteen thousand slaves were passed
into Zanzibar and thence into Arabia and Persia. As late as 1880, three
thousand annually were being thus transplanted, but now the trade is about
stopped. To-day the only centers of actual slave trading may be said to be
the cocoa plantations of the Portuguese Islands on the west coast of
Africa, and the Congo Free State.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account