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| What About Slavery? (Third in a series) By Dr. Don Boys © 2001 Cornerstone Communications One black African king said in response to England's demand for a stop to slavery — ”We think that this trade must go on,” he exclaimed. The king continued: “That also is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.” And the trade went on until it seemed as if some countries would be emptied of its strongest people. Notice that the black king appealed to religion to justify what he was doing to his own people. Of course, men have used religion to justify their wickedness for centuries. Some countries protested but the trading in human lives went on — and grew, aided and promoted by local black chiefs. One former slave wrote: I must own ... that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by (those of) my own complexion (color) who were the first cause of my exile and slavery But if there were no buyers, there would be no sellers.” And there were plenty of buyers— French, English, Dutch. Historian John A. Garraty wrote: “The local king dictated the rules of trade and filled a slave ship in his own good time. The Europeans’ power lay in the insidious luxuries which became necessities: liquor and firearms.” So whites used liquor and guns to convince black kings and chiefs to attack their own villages at night and carry away in chains their own people to be sold at auction in the markets of the West Indies, Latin America, and Jamestown. The slaves were sold for two ounces of gold in some ports while in other ports, a healthy, strong male brought 115 gallons of rum to his owner. Women sold for ninety-five gallons of rum. Some slavers were convinced that the blacks didn’t have souls so that made slavery all right! However, the Portuguese believed they had souls and could be redeemed like anyone else. They convinced themselves that slavery was not wrong because slaves would be taken to Christian lands where they would be exposed to the gospel. Many thousands of black slaves were sprinkled (called baptism by some church leaders) before the ships sailed out of the harbors of the Congo and Angola. And heaven wept. Some have estimated that from ten to twenty million blacks were sold into slavery, yet many never reached land and were buried at sea. They were kept below deck “in two rows, one above the other like books on a shelf” One ex-slave said, “The stench of the hold (beneath the ship's deck) while we were on the coast was intolerably loathsome but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined there together it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, was (sic) ... aggravated by the galling of the chains.” The air was so foul below decks a candle would not burn. Many blacks committed suicide rather than endure such conditions while others simply stopped breathing, dying of suffocation. Those who lived were sold on auction blocks in Latin America and North America destined to be worked, beaten, and sometimes killed by their owners. Twenty blacks arrived in Jamestown on a Dutch ship in 1619 and were sold to tobacco planters. The tobacco planters had large tracts of land that had to be worked and they had now found their workers. There were large profits in tobacco, more than six times as much as in grain. And as years passed, most of the original indentured servants gained their freedom leaving a void. The black slaves began replacing those white servants. Hufstadter wrote about slavery at its peak: "Nearly 60 percent of all Negroes worked in the two tobacco colonies, Virginia and Maryland, and nearly 30 percent in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Virginia, with 140,000 Negroes, led all the colonies in absolute numbers, followed by South Carolina and Maryland. In the proportion of blacks to whites, however, South Carolina, being 60 percent black, was the only province with a Negro majority; Virginia followed with 41 percent. Georgia and North Carolina were slightly more than one-third black, Maryland slightly less.” Obviously, the slave system was a major building block of the economies especially in the tobacco colonies. However, less than three percent of all the blacks sold into slavery in the Western Hemisphere came to America. Most of them were sold in Central and South America and the Caribbean area. They were treated worse, worked harder, and had a higher death rate in those areas than in America. Slaves were not only working on the tobacco plantations in the south but they were also laboring in every colony in the north. The northern masters were just as cruel as those in the south and penalties were just as harsh for unacceptable activity. (Cont.)
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