Part 11 (1/2)
The result was that Governor Eyre tried and executed by court-martial 354 persons, and in addition to this killed without trial 85, a total of 439.
One thousand Negro homes were burned to the ground and thousands of Negroes flogged or mutilated. Children had their brains dashed out, pregnant women were murdered, and Gordon was tried by court-martial and hanged. In fact the punishment was, as the royal commissioners said, ”reckless and positively barbarous.”[89]
This high-handed act aroused England. Eyre was not punished, but the island was made a crown colony in 1866, and given representation in the legislature in 1886.
In the island of St. Vincent, Indians first sought to enslave the fugitive Negroes wrecked there, but the Negroes took the Carib women and then drove the Indian men away. These ”black Caribs” fought with Indians, English, and others for three quarters of a century, until the Indians were exterminated. The British took possession in 1763. The black Caribs resisted, and after hard fighting signed a treaty in 1773, receiving one-third of the island as their property. They afterward helped the French against the British, and were finally deported to the island of Ruatan, off Honduras. In Trinidad and British Guiana there have been mutinies and rioting of slaves and a curious mingling of races.
Other parts of South America must be dismissed briefly, because of insufficient data. Colombia and Venezuela, with perhaps eight million people, have at least one-third of their population of Negro and Indian descent. Here Simon Bolivar with his Negro, mulatto, and Indian forces began the war that liberated South America. Central America has a smaller proportion of Negroids, perhaps one hundred thousand in all. Bolivia and Peru have small amounts of Negro blood, while Argentine and Uruguay have very little. The Negro population in these lands is everywhere in process of rapid amalgamation with whites and Indians.
FOOTNOTES:
[76] H.O. Flipper's translation of Castaneda de Nafera's narrative.
[77] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, p. 109.
[78] Bryce: _South America_, pp. 479-480.
[79] I.e., mulattoes.
[80] _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 381.
[81] Smith: _General History of Virginia_.
[82] La Croix: _Memoires sur la Revolution_, I, 253, 408.
[83] Marquis d'Hermonas. Cf. Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, p. 158.
[84] DeWitt Talmage, in Christian Herald, November 28, 1906.
[85] Aimes: _African Inst.i.tutions in America_ (reprinted from _Journal of American Folk Lore_), p. 25.
[86] Brown: _History of San Domingo_, II, 158-159.
[87] See Leger: _Hayti_, Chap. XI.
[88] Cf. Chapter V, p. 69.
[89] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_.
XI THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES
There were half a million slaves in the confines of the United States when the Declaration of Independence declared ”that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The land that thus magniloquently heralded its advent into the family of nations had supported the inst.i.tution of human slavery for one hundred and fifty-seven years and was destined to cling to it eighty-seven years longer.
The greatest experiment in Negro slavery as a modern industrial system was made on the mainland of North America and in the confines of the present United States. And this experiment was on such a scale and so long-continued that it is profitable for study and reflection. There were in the United States in its dependencies, in 1910, 9,828,294 persons of acknowledged Negro descent, not including the considerable infiltration of Negro blood which is not acknowledged and often not known. To-day the number of persons called Negroes is probably about ten and a quarter million. These persons are almost entirely descendants of African slaves, brought to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
The importation of Negroes to the mainland of North America was small until the British got the coveted privilege of the Asiento in 1713. Before that Northern States like New York had received some slaves from the Dutch, and New England had early developed a trade by which she imported a number of house servants. s.h.i.+ps went out to the African coast with rum, sold the rum, and brought the slaves to the West Indies; there they exchanged the slaves for sugar and mola.s.ses and brought the mola.s.ses back to New England, to be made into rum for further exploits. After the Asiento treaty the Negro population increased in the eighteenth century from about 50,000 in 1710 to 220,000 in 1750 and to 462,000 in 1770. When the colonies became independent, the foreign slave trade was soon made illegal; but illicit trade, annexation of territory and natural increase enlarged the Negro population from a little over a million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to four and a half millions at the outbreak of the Civil War and to about ten and a quarter millions in 1914.
The present so-called Negro population of the United States is:
1. A mixture of the various African populations, Bantu, Sudanese, west-coast Negroes, some dwarfs, and some traces of Arab, Berber, and Semitic blood.
2. A mixture of these strains with the blood of white Americans through a system of concubinage of colored women in slavery days, together with some legal intermarriage.