Part 27 (2/2)

He would begin, he said, with the first boundary of the trade. Captain Wilson and Captain Hills, of His Majesty's navy, and Mr. Dalrymple, of the land service, had concurred in stating, that in the country contiguous to the river Senegal, when slave-s.h.i.+ps arrived there, armed parties were regularly sent out in the evening, who scoured the country, and brought in their prey. The wretched victims were to be seen in the morning bound back to back in the huts on sh.o.r.e, whence they were conveyed, tied hand and foot, to the slave-s.h.i.+ps. The design of these ravages was obvious, because, when the Slave Trade was stopped, they ceased. Mr. Kiernan spoke of the constant depredations by the Moors to procure slaves. Mr. Wadstrom confirmed them. The latter gentleman showed also that they were excited by presents of brandy, gunpowder, and such other incentives; and that they were not only carried on by one community against another, but that the kings were stimulated to practise them in their territories, and on their own subjects: and in one instance a chieftain, who, when intoxicated, could not resist the demands of the slave merchants, had expressed, in a moment of reason, a due sense of his own crime, and had reproached his Christian seducers.

Abundant also were the instances of private rapine. Individuals were kidnapped, whilst in their fields and gardens. There was an universal feeling of distrust and apprehension there. The natives never went any distance from home without arms; and when Captain Wilson asked them the reason of it, they pointed to a slave-s.h.i.+p then lying within sight.

On the windward coast, it appeared from Lieutenant Story and Mr. Bowman, that the evils just mentioned existed, if possible, in a still higher degree. They had seen the remains of villages, which had been burnt, whilst the fields of corn were still standing beside them, and every other trace of recent desolation. Here an agent was sent to establish a settlement in the country, and to send to the s.h.i.+ps such slaves as he might obtain. The orders he received from his captain were, that ”he was to encourage the chieftains by brandy and gunpowder to go to war, to make slaves.” This he did. The chieftains performed their part in return. The neighbouring villages were surrounded and set on fire in the night. The inhabitants were seized when making their escape; and, being brought to the agent, were by him forwarded to his princ.i.p.al on the coast. Mr. How, a botanist in the service of Government, stated, that on the arrival of an order for slaves from Cape Coast Castle, while he was there, a native chief immediately sent forth armed parties, who brought in a supply of all descriptions in the night.

But he would now mention one or two instances of another sort, and these merely on account of the conclusion, which was to be drawn from them.

When Captain Hills was in the river Gambia, he mentioned accidentally to a Black pilot, who was in the boat with him, that he wanted a cabin-boy.

It so happened that some youths were then on the sh.o.r.e with vegetables to sell. The pilot beckoned to them to come on board; at the same time giving Captain Hills to understand, that he might take his choice of them; and when Captain Hills rejected the proposal with indignation, the pilot seemed perfectly at a loss to account for his warmth; and drily observed, that the slave-captains would not have been so scrupulous.

Again, when General Rooke commanded at Goree, a number of the natives, men, women, and children, came to pay him a friendly visit. All was gaiety and merriment. It was a scene to gladden the saddest, and to soften the hardest, heart. But a slave-captain was not so soon thrown off his guard. Three English barbarians of this description had the audacity jointly to request the general, to seize the whole unsuspicious mult.i.tude and sell them. For this they alleged the precedent of a former governor. Was not this request a proof of the frequency of such acts of rapine? for how familiar must such have been to slave-captains, when three of them dared to carry a British officer of rank such a flagitious proposal! This would stand in the place of a thousand instances. It would give credibility to every other act of violence stated in the evidence, however enormous it might appear.

But he would now have recourse for a moment to circ.u.mstantial evidence.

An adverse witness, who had lived on the Gold Coast, had said that the only way in which children could he enslaved, was by whole families being sold when the princ.i.p.als had been condemned for witchcraft. But he said at the same time, that few were convicted of this crime, and that the younger part of a family in these cases was sometimes spared. But if this account were true, it would follow that the children in the slave-vessels would be few indeed. But it had been proved, that the usual proportion of these was never less than a fourth of the whole cargo on the coast, and also, that the kidnapping of children was very prevalent there.

All these atrocities, he said, were fully substantiated by the evidence; and here he should do injustice to his cause, if he were not to make a quotation from the speech of Mr. B. Edwards in the a.s.sembly of Jamaica, who, though he was hostile to his propositions, had yet the candour to deliver himself in the following manner there. ”I am persuaded,” says he, ”that Mr. Wilberforce has been rightly informed as to the manner in which slaves are generally procured. The intelligence I have collected from my own negroes abundantly confirms his account; and I have not the smallest doubt, that in Africa the effects of this trade are precisely such as he has represented them. The whole, or the greatest part, of that immense continent is a field of warfare and desolation; a wilderness, in which the inhabitants are wolves towards each other. That this scene of oppression, fraud, treachery, and bloodshed, if not originally occasioned, is in part (I will not say wholly) upheld by the Slave Trade, I dare not dispute. Every man in the Sugar Islands may be convinced that it is so, who will enquire of any African negroes, on their first arrival, concerning the circ.u.mstances of their captivity.

The a.s.sertion that it is otherwise, is mockery and insult.”

But it was not only by acts of outrage that the Africans were brought into bondage. The very administration of justice was turned into an engine for that end. The smallest offence was punished by a fine equal to the value of a slave. Crimes were also fabricated; false accusations were resorted to; and persons were sometimes employed to seduce the unwary into practices with a view to the conviction and the sale of them.

It was another effect of this trade, that it corrupted the morals of those who carried it on. Every fraud was used to deceive the ignorance of the natives by false weights and measures, adulterated commodities, and other impositions of a like sort. These frauds were even acknowledged by many who had themselves practised them, in obedience to the orders of their superiors. For the honour of the mercantile character of the country, such a traffic ought immediately to be suppressed.

Yet these things, however clearly proved by positive testimony, by the concession of opponents, by particular inference, by general reasoning, by the most authentic histories of Africa, by the experience of all countries and of all ages,--these things, and (what was still more extraordinary) even the possibility of them, were denied by those who had been brought forward on the other side of the question. These, however, were chiefly persons who had been trading-governors of forts in Africa, or who had long commanded s.h.i.+ps in the Slave Trade. As soon as he knew the sort of witnesses which was to be called against him, he had been prepared to expect much prejudice. But his expectations had been greatly surpa.s.sed by the testimony they had given. He did not mean to impeach their private characters, but they certainly showed themselves under the influence of such gross prejudices, as to render them incompetent judges of the subject they came to elucidate. They seemed (if he might so say) to be enveloped by a certain atmosphere of their own; and to see, as it were, through a kind of African medium. Every object which met their eyes came distorted and turned from its true direction. Even the declarations, which they made on other occasions, seemed wholly strange to them. They sometimes not only forgot what they had seen, but what they had said; and when to one of them his own testimony to the privy council was read, he mistook it for that of another, whose evidence he declared to be ”the merest burlesque in the world.”

But the House must be aware that there was not only an African medium, but an African logic. It seemed to be an acknowledged axiom in this, that every person who offered a slave for sale had a right to sell him, however fraudulently he might have obtained him. This had been proved by the witnesses who opposed him. ”It would have stopped my trade,” said one of them, ”to have asked the broker how he came by the person he was offering me for sale.”--”We always suppose,” said another, ”the broker has a right to sell the person he offers us.”--”I never heard of such a question being asked,” said a third; ”a man would be thought a fool who should put such a question.”--He hoped the House would see the practical utility of this logic. It was the key-stone which held the building together. By means of it, slave-captains might traverse the whole coast of Africa, and see nothing but equitable practices. They could not, however, be wholly absolved, even if they availed themselves of this principle to its fullest extent; for they had often committed depredations themselves; especially when they were pa.s.sing by any part of the coast, where they did not mean to continue or to go again. Hence it was (as several captains of the navy and others had declared on their examination), that the natives, when at sea in their canoes, would never come near the men-of-war, till they knew them to be such. But finding this, and that they were not slave-vessels, they laid aside their fears, and came and continued on board with unsuspecting cheerfulness. With respect to the miseries of the Middle Pa.s.sage, he had said so much on a former occasion, that he would spare the feelings of the committee as much as he could. He would therefore simply state that the evidence, which was before them, confirmed all those scenes of wretchedness which he had then described: the same suffering from a state of suffocation, by being crowded together; the same dancing in fetters; the same melancholy singing; the same eating by compulsion; the same despair; the same insanity; and all the other abominations which characterized the trade. New instances however had occurred, where these wretched men had resolved on death to terminate their woes. Some had destroyed themselves by refusing sustenance, in spite of threats and punishments. Others had thrown themselves into the sea; and more than one, when in the act of drowning, were seen to wave their hands in triumph, ”exulting” (to use the words of an eye-witness) ”that they had escaped.” Yet these and similar things, when viewed through the African medium he had mentioned, took a different shape and colour. Captain Knox, an adverse witness, had maintained, that slaves lay during the night in tolerable comfort. And yet he confessed, that in a vessel of one hundred and twenty tons, in which he had carried two hundred and ninety slaves, the latter had not all of them room to lie on their backs. How comfortably, then, must they have lain in his subsequent voyages! for he carried afterwards, in a vessel of a hundred and eight tons, four hundred and fifty; and in a vessel of one hundred and fifty tons, no less than six hundred slaves.

Another instance of African deception was to be found in the testimony of Captain Frazer, one of the most humane captains in the trade. It had been said of him, that he had held hot coals to the mouth of a slave, to compel him to eat. He was questioned on this point; but not admitting, in the true spirit of African logic, that he who makes another commit a crime is guilty of it himself, he denied the charge indignantly, and defied a proof. But it was said to him, ”Did you never order such a thing to be done?” His reply was, ”Being sick in my cabin, I was informed that a man-slave would neither eat, drink, nor speak. I desired the mate and surgeon to try to persuade him to speak. I desired that the slaves might try also. When I found he was still obstinate, not knowing whether it was from sulkiness or insanity, I ordered a person to present him with a piece of fire in one hand, and a piece of yam in the other, and to tell me what effect this had upon him. I learnt that he took the yam and began to eat it, but he threw the fire overboard.” Such was his own account of the matter. This was eating by duresse, if anything could be called so. The captain, however, triumphed in his expedient; and concluded by telling the committee, that he sold this very slave at Grenada for forty pounds. Mark here the moral of the tale, and learn the nature and the cure of sulkiness.

But upon whom did the cruelties, thus arising out of the prosecution of this barbarous traffic, fall? Upon a people with feeling and intellect like ourselves. One witness had spoken of the acuteness of their understandings; another, of the extent of their memories; a third, of their genius for commerce: a fourth, of their proficiency in manufactures at home. Many had admired their gentle and peaceable disposition, their cheerfulness, and their hospitality. Even they who were nominally slaves, in Africa lived a happy life. A witness against the abolition had described them as sitting and eating with their masters in the true style of patriarchal simplicity and comfort. Were these, then, a people incapable of civilization? The argument that they were an inferior species had been proved to be false.

He would now go to a new part of the subject. An opinion had gone forth that the abolition of the trade would be the ruin of the West India Islands. He trusted he should prove that the direct contrary was the truth; though, had he been unable to do this, it would have made no difference as to his own vote. In examining, however, this opinion; he should exclude the subject of the cultivation of new lands by fresh importations of slaves. The impolicy of this measure, apart from its inhumanity, was indisputably clear. Let the committee consider the dreadful mortality which attended it. Let them look to the evidence of Mr. Woolrich, and there see a contrast drawn between the slow, but sure, progress of cultivation carried on in the natural way, and the attempt to force improvements, which, however flattering the prospect at first, soon produced a load of debt, and inextricable embarra.s.sments. He might even appeal to the statements of the West Indians themselves, who allowed that more than twenty millions were owing to the people of this country, to show that no system could involve them so deeply as that on which they had hitherto gone. But he would refer them to the accounts of Mr. Irving, as contained in the evidence. Waving, then, the consideration of this part of the subject, the opinion in question must have arisen from a notion, that the stock of slaves, now in the islands, could not be kept up by propagation; but that it was necessary, from time to time, to recruit them with imported Africans. In direct refutation of this position he should prove: First, that, in the condition and treatment of the Negroes, there were causes sufficient to afford us reason to expect a considerable decrease, but particularly that their increase had not been a serious object of attention: Secondly, that this decrease was in fact, notwithstanding, very trifling; or rather, he believed, he might declare it had now actually ceased: and, Thirdly, he should urge many direct and collateral facts and arguments, const.i.tuting on the whole an irresistible proof, that even a rapid increase might henceforth be expected.

He wished to treat the West Indians with all possible candour: but he was obliged to confess, in arguing upon these points, that whatever splendid instances there might be of kindness towards their slaves, there were some evils of almost universal operation, which were necessarily connected with the system of slavery. Above all, the state of degradation to which they were reduced, deserved to be noticed, as it produced an utter inattention to them as moral agents; they were kept at work under the whip like cattle; they were left totally ignorant of morality and religion; there was no regular marriage among them; hence promiscuous intercourse, early prost.i.tution, and excessive drinking, were material causes of their decrease. With respect to the instruction of the slaves in the principles of religion, the happiest effects had resulted, particularly in Antigua, where, under the Moravians and Methodists, they had so far profited, that the planters themselves confessed their value as property had been raised one-third by their increased habits of regularity and industry.

Whatever might have been said to the contrary, it was plainly to be inferred from the evidence that the slaves were not protected by law.

Colonial statutes had indeed been pa.s.sed, but they were a dead letter; since, however ill they were treated, they were not considered as having a right to redress. An instance of astonis.h.i.+ng cruelty by a Jew had been mentioned by Mr. Ross; it was but justice to say, that the man was held in detestation for it, but yet no one had ever thought of calling him to a legal account. Mr. Ross conceived a master had a right to punish his slave in whatever manner he might think proper; the same was declared by numberless other witnesses. Some instances indeed had lately occurred of convictions. A master had wantonly cut the mouth of a child, of six months old, almost from ear to ear. But did not the verdict of the jury show, that the doctrine of calling masters to an account was entirely novel, as it only p.r.o.nounced him ”Guilty, subject to the opinion of the court, if immoderate correction of a slave by his master be a crime indictable!” The court determined in the affirmative; and what was the punishment of this barbarous act?--A fine of forty s.h.i.+llings currency, equivalent to about twenty-five s.h.i.+llings sterling.

The slaves were but ill off in point of medical care. Sometimes four or five, and even eight or nine thousand of them, were under the care of one medical man; which, dispersed on different and distant estates, was a greater number than he could possibly attend to.

It was also in evidence that they were in general under-fed; they were supported partly by the produce of their own provision-ground, and partly by an allowance of flour and grain from their masters. In one of the islands, where provision-ground did not answer one year in three, the allowance to a working Negro was but from five to nine pints of grain per week: in Dominica, where it never failed, from six to seven quarts: in Nevis and St. Christopher's, where there was no provision-ground, it was but eleven pints. Add to this, that it might be still less, as the circ.u.mstances of their masters might become embarra.s.sed, and in this case both an abridgment of their food and an increase of their labour would follow.

But the great cause of the decrease of the slaves was in the non-residence of the planters. Sir George Yonge, and many others, had said, they had seen the slaves treated in a manner which their owners would have resented if they had known it. Mr. Orde spoke in the strongest terms of the misconduct of managers. The fact was, that these in general sought to establish their characters by producing large crops at a small immediate expense; too little considering how far the slaves might suffer from ill-treatment and excessive labour. The pursuit of such a system was a criterion for judging of their characters, as both Mr. Long and Mr. Ottley had confessed.

But he must contend, in addition to this, that the object of keeping up the stock of slaves by breeding had never been seriously attended to.

For this he might appeal both to his own witnesses and to those of his opponents, but he would only notice one fact. It was remarkable that, when owners and managers were asked about the produce of their estates, they were quite at home as to the answer; but when they were asked about the proportion of their male and female slaves, and their infants, they knew little about the matter. Even medical men were adepts in the art of planting, but when they were asked the latter questions, as connected with breeding and rearing, they seemed quite amazed, and could give no information upon the subject of them.

Persons, however, of great respectability had been called as witnesses who had not seen the treatment of the Negroes as he had now described it. He knew what was due to their characters, but yet he must enter a general protest against their testimony. ”I have often,” says Mr. Ross, ”attended both governors and admirals upon tours in the island of Jamaica, but it was not likely that these should see much distress upon these occasions. The white people and drivers would take care not to harrow up the feelings of strangers of distinction by the exercise of the whip, or the infliction of punishments, at that particular time; and, even if there were any disgusting objects, it was natural to suppose that they would then remove them.” But in truth these gentlemen had given proofs that they were under the influence of prejudice. Some of them had declared the abolition would ruin the West Indies; but this, it was obvious, must depend upon the practicability of keeping up the stock without African supplies; and yet, when they were questioned upon this point, they knew nothing about it; hence they had formed a conclusion without premises. Their evidence, too, extended through a long series of years; they had never seen one instance of ill-treatment in the time, and yet, in the same breath, they talked of the amended situation of the slaves, and that they were now far better off than formerly. One of them, to whom his country owed much, stated that a master had been sentenced to death for the murder of his own slave; but his recollection must have failed him, for the murder of a slave was not then a capital crime. A respectable governor also had delivered an opinion to the same effect; but, had he looked into the statute-book of the island, he would have found his error.

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