American Negro Slavery | Page 5

peoples came
from the Arabs who spread over northern Africa in the eighth century,
conquering and converting as they went, and stimulating the trade
across the Sahara until it attained large dimensions. The northbound
caravans carried the peculiar variety of pepper called "grains of
paradise" from the region later known as Liberia, gold from the
Dahomey district, palm oil from the lower Niger, and ivory and slaves
from far and wide. A small quantity of these various goods was
distributed in southern Europe and the Levant. And in the same general
period Arab dhows began to take slave cargoes from the east coast of
Africa as far south as Mozambique, for distribution in Arabia, Persia
and western India. On these northern and eastern flanks of Guinea
where the Mohammedans operated and where the most vigorous of the
African peoples dwelt, the natives lent ready assistance in catching and
buying slaves in the interior and driving them in coffles to within reach
of the Moorish and Arab traders. Their activities, reaching at length the
very center of the continent, constituted without doubt the most cruel of
all branches of the slave-trade. The routes across the burning Sahara
sands in particular came to be strewn with negro skeletons.[5]

[Footnote 5: Jerome Dowd, "The African Slave Trade," in the _Journal
of Negro History_, II (1917), 1-20.]
This overland trade was as costly as it was tedious. Dealers in
Timbuctoo and other centers of supply must be paid their price; camels
must be procured, many of which died on the journey; guards must be
hired to prevent escapes in the early marches and to repel predatory
Bedouins in the later ones; food supplies must be bought; and
allowance must be made for heavy mortality among the slaves on their
terrible trudge over the burning sands and the chilling mountains. But
wherever Mohammedanism prevailed, which gave particular sanction
to slavery as well as to polygamy, the virtues of the negroes as laborers
and as eunuch harem guards were so highly esteemed that the trade was
maintained on a heavy scale almost if not quite to the present day. The
demand of the Turks in the Levant and the Moors in Spain was met by
exportations from the various Barbary ports. Part of this Mediterranean
trade was conducted in Turkish and Moorish vessels, and part of it in
the ships of the Italian cities and Marseilles and Barcelona. Venice for
example had treaties with certain Saracen rulers at the beginning of the
fourteenth century authorizing her merchants not only to frequent the
African ports, but to go in caravans to interior points and stay at will.
The principal commodities procured were ivory, gold, honey and negro
slaves.[6]
[Footnote 6: The leading authority upon slavery and the slave-trade in
the Mediterranean countries of Europe is J.A. Saco, Historia de la
Esclavitud desde los Tiempas mas remotas hasta nuestros Dias
(Barcelona, 1877), vol. III.]
The states of Christian Europe, though little acquainted with negroes,
had still some trace of slavery as an inheritance from imperial Rome
and barbaric Teutondom. The chattel form of bondage, however, had
quite generally given place to serfdom; and even serfdom was
disappearing in many districts by reason of the growth of towns and the
increase of rural population to the point at which abundant labor could
be had at wages little above the cost of sustaining life. On the other
hand so long as petty wars persisted the enslavement of captives

continued to be at least sporadic, particularly in the south and east of
Europe, and a considerable traffic in white slaves was maintained from
east to west on the Mediterranean. The Venetians for instance, in spite
of ecclesiastical prohibitions, imported frequent cargoes of young girls
from the countries about the Black Sea, most of whom were doomed to
concubinage and prostitution, and the rest to menial service.[7] The
occurrence of the Crusades led to the enslavement of Saracen captives
in Christendom as well as of Christian captives in Islam.
[Footnote 7: W.C. Hazlitt, _The Venetian Republic_(London, 1900),
pp. 81, 82.]
The waning of the Crusades ended the supply of Saracen slaves, and
the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 destroyed the Italian
trade on the Black Sea. No source of supply now remained, except a
trickle from Africa, to sustain the moribund institution of slavery in any
part of Christian Europe east of the Pyrenees. But in mountain-locked
Roussillon and Asturias remnants of slavery persisted from Visigothic
times to the seventeenth century; and in other parts of the peninsula the
intermittent wars against the Moors of Granada supplied captives and
to some extent reinvigorated slavery among the Christian states from
Aragon to Portugal. Furthermore the conquest of the Canaries at the
end of the fourteenth century and of Teneriffe and other islands in the