A part of the holders of the debt of Great Britain had been incorporated into a company, with the exclusive trade to the South Seas. But as Spain, having occupied much of the American coast in those seas, claimed a monopoly of its commerce, the grant was worthless, unless that monopoly could be successfully invaded; and, for this end, the benefit of the assiento treaty was assigned to the South Sea company.

In 1719, the capital of the company was increased by new subscriptions of national debt; and, in the next year, it was proposed to incorporate into its stock all the national debt. The system resembled that of Law; but the latter was connected with a bank of issue, and became a war against specie. In England, there was no attempt, directly or indirectly, to exile specie, no increase of the circulating medium, but only an increase of stocks. The parties implicated suffered from fraud and folly: the stock-jobbers; they who had parted with their certificates of the national debt for stock in the company; they who, hurried away by a blind avidity, had engaged in other "bubbles," — were ruined; but the country was not impoverished.

Enough of the South Sea company survived to execute the contract for negroes and to conduct an illicit commerce with Spanish America. "Ambition, avarice, distress, disappointment, and the complicated vices that tend to render the mind of man uneasy, filled all places and all hearts in the English nation." While dreams of the acquisition of Florida, with the sole use of the Bahama Channel; of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, with their real and their imagined wealth, rose up to dazzle the minds of the restless, Jamaica became the centre of an extensive smuggling trade; and slave-ships, deriving their passport from the assiento treaty, were the ready instruments of contraband cupidity.

The great activity of the English slave-trade does not acquire its chief interest for American history by the transient conflict to which it led. While the South Sea company satisfied but imperfectly its passion for wealth by a monopoly of the supply of negroes for the Spanish

islands and main, the African company and independent traders were still more busy in sending negroes to the colonies of England. To this eagerness, encouraged by English legislation, fostered by royal favor, and enforced for a century by every successive ministry of England, it is due that one sixth part of the population of the United States a moiety of those who dwell in the five states nearest the Gulf of Mexico are descendants of Africans. The colored men who were imported into our colonies, sometimes by way of the West Indies, and sometimes, especially for the south, directly from the Old World, were sought all along the African coast, for thirty degrees together, from Cape Blanco to Loango St. Paul's; from the Great Desert of Sahara to the kingdom of Angola, or perhaps even to the borders of the land of the Kaffres. is not possible to relate precisely in what bay they were respectively laden, from what sunny cottages they were kidnapped, from what more direful captivity they were rescued. The traders in men have not been careful to record the lineage of their victims. They were chiefly gathered from gangs that were marched from the far interior; so that the freight of a single ship might be composed of persons of different languages, and of nations altogether strange to each other. Nor was there uniformity of complexion of those brought to our country, some were from tribes of which the skin was of a tawny yellow.

It

The purchases in Africa were made, in part, of convicts punished with slavery, or mulcted in a fine which was discharged by their sale; of debtors sold, though but rarely, into foreign bondage; of children sold by their parents; of kidnapped villagers; of captives taken in war. Hence the sea-coast and the confines of hostile nations were laid waste. But the chief source of supply was from swarms of those born in a state of slavery; for the despotisms, the superstitions, and the usages of Africa had multiplied bondage. In the upper country, on the Senegal and the Gambia, three fourths of the inhabitants were not free; and the slave's master was the absolute lord of the slave's children. The trade in slaves, whether for the caravans

of the Moors or for the European ships, was chiefly supplied from the natural increase. In the healthy and fertile uplands of Western Africa, under the tropical sun, the reproductive power of the prolific race, combined with the imperfect development of its moral faculties, gave to human life, in the eye of man himself, an inferior value. Humanity did not respect itself in any of its forms, in the individual, in the family, or in the nation. Our systems of morals will not explain the phenomenon: its cause is not to be sought in the suppression of moral feeling, but rather in the condition of a branch of the human family not yet conscious of its powers, not yet fully possessed of its moral and rational life. In the state of the race itself, in Sene gambia, in Upper and Lower Guinea, the problem of the slave-trade finds its solution. The habits of the native tribes of America rendered its establishment with them impossible. The quick maturity of life, the facility of obtaining suste nance, the nature of the negro, an undeveloped intelligence, and the fruitfulness of the race, explain why, from century to century, the slave-ships could find a freight, and yet the population of the interior be replenished.

England valued Africa as returning for her manufactures abundant laborers for her colonies, and valued it for nothing else. Africans of more than thirty years of age were rejected by the traders as too old, and few were received under fourteen. Of the whole number, not more than one third part was composed of women; and a woman past two-and-twenty was hardly deemed worth transportation. The English slave-ships were laden with the youth of Africa.

Slavery, and even a change of masters, were familiar to the African; but to be conducted to the shores of the Western Ocean, to be doomed to pass its boundless deep and enter on new toils in an untried clime and amidst an unknown race, was appalling to the black man. The horrors of the passage corresponded with the infamy of the trade. Small vessels, of little more than two hundred tons' burden, were prepared for the traffic; for these could most easily penetrate the bays and rivers of the coast, and,

quickly obtaining a lading, could soonest hurry away from the deadly air of the African coast. In such a bark, five hundred negroes and more have been stowed, exciting wonder that men could have lived, within the tropics, cribbed in so few inches of room. The inequality of force between the crew and the cargo led to the use of manacles; the hands of the stronger men were made fast together, and the right leg of one was chained to the left of another. The avarice of the trader was a partial guarantee of the security of life, as far as it depended on him; but death hovered always over the slave-ship. The negroes, as they came from the higher level to the seaside, poorly fed on the sad pilgrimage, sleeping at night on the damp earth without covering, and often reaching the coast at unfavorable seasons, imbibed the seeds of disease, which confinement on board ship quickened into feverish activity. There have been examples where one half of them—it has been said, even, where two thirds of them— perished on the passage. The total loss of life on the voyage is computed to have been, on the average, fifteen, certainly full twelve and a half, in the hundred; the harbors of the West Indies proved fatal to four and a half more out of every hundred. No scene of wretchedness could surpass a crowded slaveship during a storm at sea, unless it were that same ship dismasted, or suffering from a protracted voyage and want of food, its miserable inmates tossed helplessly to and fro under the rays of a vertical sun, vainly gasping for a drop of water.

Of a direct voyage from Guinea to the coast of the United States no journal is known to exist, though slaveships from Africa entered Newport and nearly every considerable harbor south of it.

In the northern provinces of English America, the few negroes were lost in the larger number of whites; and only in the lowlands of South Carolina and Virginia did they constitute a great majority of the inhabitants. But they came with the limited faculties of uncivilized man; when they met on our soil, they were as strange to one another as to their masters. Taken from places in Africa a thou

sand miles asunder, the negro emigrants to America brought with them no common language or worship, no abiding usages, no nationality. They were compelled to adopt a new dialect for intercourse with each other; and broken English became their tongue not less among themselves than with their masters. Hence there was no unity among them, and no immediate political danger from their joint action. Once an excitement against them raged in New York, through fear of a pretended plot; but the frenzy grew out of a delusion. Sometimes the extreme harshness of taskmasters may have provoked resistance; or sometimes an African, accustomed from birth to freedom, and reduced. to slavery by the chances of war, carried with him across the Atlantic the indomitable spirit of a warrior; but the instances of insurrection were insulated, and without result. Destitute of common traditions, customs, and laws, the black population existed in fragments, having no bonds of union but color and misfortune. Thus the negro slave in America was dependent on his master for civilization; he could be initiated into skill in the arts only through him; through him only could he gain a country; and, as a consequence, in the next generation, if dissatisfied with his condition, he had yet learned to love the land of his master; it was his-country also.

It is not easy to conjecture how many negroes were imported into the English continental colonies. The usual estimates far exceed the truth. Climate came in aid of opinion to oppose their introduction. Owing to the inequality of the sexes, their natural increase was not rapid in the first generation. Previous to the year 1740, there may have been introduced into our country nearly one hundred and thirty thousand; before 1776, a few more than three hundred thousand. In 1727, "the vast importation of negroes" was a subject of complaint in South Carolina. The German traveller Von Reck, in 1734, reported the number of negroes in that province at thirty thousand, and for the annual importation gave the greatly exaggerated estimate of nearly three thousand.

In the northern and the middle states, the negro was