Modern Slave Trade

England.

The first Englishman who engaged in the traffic was Sir John Hawkins (q.v.). The English slave traders were at first altogether occupied in supplying the Spanish settlements. Indeed, the reign of Elizabeth passed without any English colony having been permanently established in America. But in 1620 a. Dutch ship from the coast of Guinea visited Jamestown in Vir ginia, and sold a part of her cargo of negroes to the tobacco planters. This was the beginning of slavery in British Amer ica; the number of negroes was afterwards continually increased— though apparently at first slowly—by importation, and the field labour was more and more performed by servile hands, so that in 1790 the State of Virginia contained 200,000 negroes.

The African trade of England was long in the hands of exclu sive companies; but by an act of the first year of William and Mary it became free and open to all subjects of the Crown. The African company, however, continued to exist, and obtained from time to time large parliamentary grants. By the Treaty of Utrecht, the asiento, or contract for supplying the Spanish colonies with 4,800 negroes annually, which had previously passed from the Dutch to the French, was transferred to Great Britain; an Eng lish company was to enjoy the monopoly for a period of 3o years from May 1713. But the contract came to an end in 1739, when the complaints of the English merchants on one side and of the Spanish officials on the other rose to such a height that Philip V. declared his determination to revoke the asiento, and Sir Robert Walpole was forced by popular feeling into war with Spain. Between 168o and 1700 about 140,000 negroes were exported by the African company, and 16o,000 more by private adventurers, making a total of 300,000. Between 1700 and the end of 1786 as many as 61o,000 were transported to Jamaica alone, which had been an English possession since 1655. Bryan Edwards estimated the total import into all the British colonies of America and the West Indies from 1680 to 1786 at 2,130,00o, being an annual average of 20,095. The British slave trade reached its utmost extension shortly before the War of American Independence. It was then carried on principally from Liverpool, but also from London, Bristol and Lancaster: the entire number of slave ships sailing from those ports was 192 and in them space was provided for the transport of 47,146 negroes. During the war the number decreased, but on its termination the trade immediately revived. When Edwards wrote (1791), the number of European factories on the coasts of Africa was 4o; of these 14 were English, 3 French, 5 Dutch, 4 Portuguese and 4 Danish. As correct a notion as can be obtained of the numbers annually exported from the con tinent about the year 1790 by traders of the several European countries engaged in the traffic is supplied by the following state ment : "By the British, 38,000; by the French, 2o,000; by the Dutch, 4,000; by the Danes, 2,000; by the Portuguese, ro,000, total 74,000." Thus more than half the trade was in British

hands.

The hunting of human beings to make them slaves was greatly aggravated by the demand of the European colonies. The native chiefs engaged in forays, sometimes even on their own subjects, for the purpose of procuring slaves to be exchanged for Western commodities. They often set fire to a village by night and cap tured the inhabitants when trying to escape. Thus all that was shocking in the barbarism of Africa was multiplied and intensified by this foreign stimulation. Exclusive of the slaves who died before they sailed from Africa, 121% were lost during their passage to the West Indies; at Jamaica died whilst in the harbours or before the sale and one-third more in the "season ing." Thus, out of every lot of roo shipped from Africa 17 died in about 9 weeks, and not more than so lived to be effective labourers in the islands. The circumstances of their subsequent life on the plantations were not favourable to the increase of their numbers. In Jamaica there were in 169o, 40,000; from that year till 182o there were imported 800,000; yet at the latter date there were only 340,000 in the island. One cause which prevented the natural increase of population was the inequality in the numbers of the sexes; in Jamaica alone there was in 1789 an excess of 30,00o males.

Movement Against the Slave Trade.---When

the nature of the slave trade began to be understood by the public, all that was best in England was adverse to it. Among those who denounced it—besides some whose names are now little known, but are re corded in the pages of Clarkson—were Baxter, Sir Richard Steele (in Inkle and Yarico), the poets Southern (in Oroonoko), Pope, Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Savage and above all Cowper (see his Charity, and Task, bk. 2), Thomas Day (author of Sandford and Merton), Sterne, Warburton, Hutcheson, Beattie, John Wes ley, Whitfield, Adam Smith, Millar, Robertson, Dr. Johnson, Paley, Gregory, Gilbert Wakefield, Bishop Porteus, Dean Tucker. The question of the legal existence of slavery in Great Britain and Ireland was raised in consequence of an opinion given in 1729 by Yorke and Talbot, attorney-general and solicitor-general at the time, to the effect that a slave by coming into those countries from the West Indies did not become free, and might be com pelled by his master to return to the plantations. Chief-justice Holt had expressed a contrary opinion ; and the matter was brought to a final issue by Granville Sharp in the case of the negro Somerset. It was decided by Lord Mansfield, in the name of the whole bench, on June 22, 1772, that as soon as a slave set his foot on the soil of the British islands he became free. In 1776 it was moved in the House of Commons by David Hartley, son of the author of Observations on Man, that "the slave trade was contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men"; but this motion—the first which was made on the subject—failed.