American Negro Slavery | Page 4

dwelling in its
own clearing and having very slight intercourse with its neighbors.
Politically each village was governed by its chief and its elders,
oftentimes in complete independence. In occasional instances, however,
considerable states of loose organization were under the rule of central
authorities. Such states were likely to be the creation of invaders from
the eastward, the Dahomans and Ashantees for example; but the
kingdom of Benin appears to have arisen indigenously. In many cases
the subordination of conquered villages merely resulted in their paying
annual tribute. As to language, Lower Guinea spoke multitudinous
dialects of the one Bantu tongue, but in Upper Guinea there were many
dialects of many separate languages.
Land was so abundant and so little used industrially that as a rule it was
not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little
occasion to mark the limits of their domains. For travel by land there
were nothing but narrow, rough and tortuous foot-paths, with makeshift
bridges across the smaller streams. The rivers were highly
advantageous both as avenues and as sources of food, for the negroes
were expert at canoeing and fishing.
Intertribal wars were occasional, but a crude comity lessened their
frequency. Thus if a man of one village murdered one of another, the
aggrieved village if too weak to procure direct redress might save its

face by killing someone in a third village, whereupon the third must by
intertribal convention make common cause with the second at once, or
else coerce a fourth into the punitive alliance by applying the same sort
of persuasion that it had just felt. These later killings in the series were
not regarded as murders but as diplomatic overtures. The system was
hard upon those who were sacrificed in its operation, but it kept a check
upon outlawry.
A skin stretched over the section of a hollow tree, and usually so
constructed as to have two tones, made an instrument of extraordinary
use in communication as well as in music. By a system long
anticipating the Morse code the Africans employed this "telegraph
drum" in sending messages from village to village for long distances
and with great speed. Differences of speech were no bar, for the tom
tom code was interlingual. The official drummer could explain by the
high and low alternations of his taps that a deed of violence just done
was not a crime but a pourparler for the forming of a league. Every
week for three months in 1800 the tom toms doubtless carried the news
throughout Ashantee land that King Quamina's funeral had just been
repeated and two hundred more slaves slain to do him honor. In 1806
they perhaps reported the ending of Mungo Park's travels by his death
on the Niger at the hands of the Boussa people. Again and again
drummers hired as trading auxiliaries would send word along the coast
and into the country that white men's vessels lying at Lagos, Bonny,
Loango or Benguela as the case might be were paying the best rates in
calico, rum or Yankee notions for all slaves that might be brought.
In music the monotony of the tom tom's tone spurred the drummers to
elaborate variations in rhythm. The stroke of the skilled performer
could make it mourn a funeral dirge, voice the nuptial joy, throb the
pageant's march, and roar the ambush alarm. Vocal music might be
punctuated by tom toms and primitive wind or stringed instruments, or
might swell in solo or chorus without accompaniment. Singing,
however, appears not so characteristic of Africans at home as of the
negroes in America. On the other hand garrulous conversation,
interspersed with boisterous laughter, lasted well-nigh the livelong day.
Daily life, indeed, was far from dull, for small things were esteemed

great, and every episode was entertaining. It can hardly be maintained
that savage life is idyllic. Yet the question remains, and may long
remain, whether the manner in which the negroes were brought into
touch with civilization resulted in the greater blessing or the greater
curse. That manner was determined in part at least by the nature of the
typical negroes themselves. Impulsive and inconstant, sociable and
amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust, amiable, obedient
and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves. Prehistoric
Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan England
esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household service
as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free
negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a
body-servant whom John Quincy Adams, the American minister, had
brought from Massachusetts to St. Petersburg.[4]
[Footnote 4: _Writings of John Quincy Adams_, Ford ed., III, 471, 472
(New York, 1914).]
The impulse for the enslavement of negroes by other