HAWKINS THE FIRST ENGLISH SLAVE MERCHANT. 173 V. African slaves, was the first to set the example of CHAP. The odious distinction of having first interested 1562 England in the slave-trade, belongs to Sir John Hawkins. He had fraudulently transported a large cargo of Africans to Hispaniola; the rich returns of sugar, ginger, and pearls, attracted the notice of Queen Elizabeth; and when a new expedition was prepared, 1567. she was induced, not only to protect, but to share the traffic.1 In the accounts which Hawkins himself gives of one of his expeditions, he relates, 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 deliberate and even self-approving frankness with which this act of atrocity is related, and the lustre which the fame of Hawkins acquired, display in the strongest terms the depravity of public sentiment in the age of Elizabeth. The leader in these expeditions was not merely a man of courage; in all other emergencies, he knew how to pity the unfortunate, even when they were not his countrymen, and to relieve their wants with cheerful liberality. Yet the commerce, on the part of the English, in the 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.* A ship of one Thomas Keyser and one James Smith, 1645 1 Compare Hakluyt, ii. 351, 352, with iii. 594. Hewat's Carolina, i. 20-26 Keith's Virginia, 31. Arderson's History of Commerce. 2 Hakluyt, iii. 618, 619. 3 Ibid. iii. 418, 419, 612-614. CHAP. the latter a member of the church of Boston, first V. brought upon the colonies the guilt of participating in the traffic in African slaves. They sailed " for Guinea to trade for negroes;" but throughout Massachusetts the cry of justice was raised against them as malefactors and murderers; Richard Saltonstall, a worthy assistant, felt himself moved by his duty as a magistrate, to denounce the act of stealing negroes as "expressly contrary to the law of God and the law of the country;" the guilty men were committed for the offence;3 and, after advice with the elders, the repre1646. sentatives 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.4 1671. When George Fox visited Barbadoes 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." The idea of George Fox had been anticipated by the 1652. fellow-citizens of Gorton and Roger Williams. Nearly 18. twenty years had then elapsed, since the representa May tives of Providence and Warwick, perceiving the disposition of people in the colony "to buy negroes," and hold them "as slaves forever," had enacted that "no black mankind” should, "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 may be enslaved to others for a longer time, shall for he 1 Winthrop, ii. 243, 244, 245. 3 Colony Records, iii. 45. 4 Colony Laws, c. xii ENGLISH, SCOTCH, AND IRISH, SOLD AS SERVANTS. 175 V. feit to the colony forty pounds." 1 Now, forty pounds CHAP 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. 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. The supply of white servants became a regular business; and a class of men, nicknamed spirits, used to delude young persons, servants and idlers, into embarking for America, as to a land of spontaneous plenty.3 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. the average price in the colonies, where five 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 Wor cester; and the leaders in the insurrection of Penrud 1 George Fox's Journal, An. 1671. The law of Rhode Island I copied from the records in Providence. 2 Smith, i. 105. 3 Bullock's Virginia, 1649, p. 14. 4 Sad State of Virginia, 1657, p. 4, 5. Hammond's Leah and Rachel, 7. In 1672, years of 5 Blome's Jamaica, 84 and 16. 7 Suffolk County Records, i. 5 V. CHAP. doc,' 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 of influence at court, with rival importunity, scrambled for the convicted insurgents as a merchantable commodity.3 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, 1620. it was in 1620 laid open to free competition.5 In the month of August of that year, just fourteen months after the first representative assembly of Virginia, four months before the Plymouth colony landed in America, and less than a year before the concession of a written constitution, more than a century after the last vestiges of hereditary slavery had disappeared from English society and the English constitution, and six years after the commons of France had petitioned for the emancipation of every serf in every fief, a Dutch manof-war entered James River, and landed twenty "ironwork, household stuff, and 1 Burton's Diary, iv. 262. 271. 2 Lingard, xi. 131, 132. 3 Dalrymple. Mackintosh, Hist. of the Revolution of 1688. 4 Hening, i. 257. 5 Stith, 171. NEGRO SLAVERY IN VIRGINIA. 177 V. negroes for sale.1 for sale.1 This is, indeed, the sad epoch of CHAP 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; 2 and, at a later period, after seventy years of its colonial existence, the number of its negro slaves was proportionably much less than in several of the free states at the time of the war of independence. It is the duty of faithful history to trace events, not only to their causes, but to their authors; and we shall hereafter inquire what influence was ultimately extended to counteract the voice of justice, the cry of humanity, and the remonstrances of colonial legislation. 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 Æthiopian and Caucasian races were to meet together in nearly equal numbers beneath a temperate zone. Who could foretell the issue? The negro race, from the first, was regarded with disgust, and its union with the whites forbidden under ignominious penalties.3 For many years, the Dutch were principally concerned in the slave-trade in the market of Virginia; the immediate demand for laborers may, in part, have blinded the eyes of the planters to the ultimate evils of slavery,* 1 Beverley's Virginia, 35. Stith, 182; Chalmers, 49; Burk, i. 211; and Hening, i. 146, all rely on Beverley. 2 New Description of Virginia. 23 VOL. I. 3 Hening, i. 146. 4 This may be inferred from a paper on Virginia, in Thurloe, v. 81, or Hazard, i. 601. |
