"Were Black People The Only Slaves?"
THIS INFORMATION TAKEN FROM THE BOOK: "AFRICA'S GIFT TO AMERICA" BY A .A. ROGERS.
WERE AFRICANS THE ONLY SLAVES
Whenever Africans are mentioned, they are usually associated with slavery-natural servitude, as Frobenius says. But what people can be mentioned that were not slaves at some period in their history? Jose Antonio Saco, foremost authority on slavery, names about all of them in his six-volume work, "Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos mas remotos hasta nuestros dias," (History of Slavery from the Remotest Time to Our Day).
The laboring element of Greece and Rome and even many of the scholars, doctors, and overseers, were slaves. Later the Christian Church, itself, kept slaves as Paul Allard shows in his "Les Esclaves Chretiens." St. Paul advised one- slave, Onesimus, to return to his master and counselled slaves to be obedient to their owners. There is undoubted proof that as early as the fifth century A.D. white people were sold as slaves in Africa. St. Jerome (340-420) wrote, "Who would have believed that the daughters of that mighty city (Rome) would one day be wandering as servants and slaves on the shores of Egypt and Africa."
In fact, slave," itself, was first used for white people. It comes from "Slav," a blond, blueeyed people, captured by the Germans and reduced to servitude. Slav originally meant
"people of glory." As Gibbon says in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," "From the Luxine to the Adriatic, in the state of captives or subjects" the Slavs overspread the land and their name was degraded "from the signification of glory to that of servitude." When one encounters "slave" in the French language today it means "a female Slav." The earlier name for those held in bondage was "serf" from the Latin "servus." (Some trace it to Greek). - In Russia that was the name used. In 1861, 40,000; 000 of her serfs or slaves were freed, that is, only four years before the American Negroes. By all accounts they were more debased and treated more barbarously than the American slaves.
It happens, too, that while Europeans and white Americans were raiding Africa for slaves, Africans were raiding the coasts of Europe as far north as Sweden and Finland for slaves and had been doing so for centuries. The evidence on this is abundant and indisputable. For 400 years (1400-1800) collections- were taken up in the churches of Europe for ransom of these slaves. The "Ordre Franc de Trintaires" was founded especially for this purpose. Sallee, in Morocco, was the great slave-market for these white captives.
J. G. Jackson, writing in 1809, said, "They (the Moors) carry the Christian captives about the Desert to the different markets to sell them for they soon discover that their habits of life render them unserviceable, or very inferior to the black slaves from Timbuctoo. After travelling three days to one market, five to another, water . . . lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off . . . . During a storm that closely packed people tumble over each other both the sick and the well . . . ." (Journey to Pennsylvania, p. 20) . Geiser's "Redemptioners," Chapter "The Voyage" gives equally harrowing tales of those sufferers.
Like the black slaves, they were packed like sardines. "Packed like herrings and sold as slaves," says Pastor Kunze. Christopher Sauer in his petition to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1775 asserted that at times "there was not more than twelve inches room for each person at night."
These unfortunate whites, mostly Irish and German, died like flies. Caspar Wisler said in 1752, "Last year a ship was twenty-four weeks at sea and of the 150 passengers on board more than 100 died at sea." Sauer estimated in 1778 that 2,000 of those on the fifteen ships arriving that year, died during the voyage. On one ship ~r~ with 400 passengers, 350 died at sea. (Henning hausen L. P., History of the German Society in Maryland, pp. 120-28. 1949) .
James Oneal, writing of a sale of whites in 1826, says "A half a century had passed since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which declared all men free and equal and yet the purchase of white flesh had not become extinct." (Chapter on "The White Slave Trade" in Workers in American History). But the sale -of white orphans continued in New York until as late as 1858. They were put up for sale in a church at $10 each. Congressman W. Jacobs writing in 1859, quotes an advertisement of these children in the New York Journal of Commerce, May 6, 1858. One sale is described thus: "The price of each slave was $10. The Free Church was then thrown open, the young females occupying the front seats in rows, some of them crying. Customers walked among the ranks with perfect coolness examining their condition, one by one, as they found one suitable they plaked the cash and carried off the piece." The Journal of Commerce of October Paage 58
reports that "4,000 of such children have been sold and fifty will be sold every two months." More details and sources are given in "Sex and Race" (Vol. 2, p. 210) .
Kidnapping of whites in Europe for sale as lifetime slaves in America was common. Richard Hildreth wrote in 1848, "Just catch a stray Irish or German girl and sell her."
The very high price of slaves induced many to kidnap white children and sell them as Negroes in the South as late as the 1850's. Instances of such abound. I have reproduced in "Sex and Race" Vol. 2, an engraving of 1838, showing a tanning pit in which white children were dipped to blacken them. This was hardly necessary as due to racial intermixture, some of the Negroes were so white that real white people held as slaves couldn't prove what they were. The best known case is that of Sally Muller, German-born, whom the Supreme Court of Louisiana ruled was a Negro and was proved to be white only when her birth-certificate was dug up in Alsace. George W. Cable writes, of her in his "Strange True Stories of Louisiana. A motion picture of some years ago showed white women being kidnapped in the Eastern states and sold on the block to white men in the West. This was far from being mere fiction.
FIRST AFRICANS NOT SLAVES
Russell, in his chapter "Origin of the Free Negro Class" calls the belief that the first Negroes were slaves "a popular error maintained and supported by a large number of writers." M. P. Andrews says, "The evidence clearly points to the customary indenture for Virginia archives show that throughout the
EARLY VIRGINIA NEGROES BOUGHT WHITE PEOPLE
J. H. Russell (white) in his doctor's thesis, "The Free Negro in Virginia," says, "Indeed for more than twenty years after the Negroes first appear in the courts there was no restriction upon their right to own white indentured servants." (p. 91) .
E. S..Abdy, an English visitor to America in the 1830's, mentions two German families, who "were bought by free Negroes of which there is a fairly large number in Baltimore." (Journal,. etc. Vol. 2, p. 56, 1835. Also Henninghausen, L. P. German Society of Maryland, p. 28, 1909) .
These first Africans , were variously called, Niger (from River Niger), Nigra, Neger, Ethiopian, Moor. Niger was pronounced not Ni-jer but Nigger.
Virginia, as we see in Hening's Statutes, passed laws five times prohibiting the purchase of white people by free Negroes-. Act 5, 1670, reads, "No Negro or Indian, though baptised and enjoying their own freedom shall be capable of any such purchase of Christians but yet not debarred from buying their own kind." By "Christian" was meant white. That a Negro was a Christian made no difference. Other such laws were Act V, 1680; Act 49, ,3 (xi) 1705; Act 9, October 1748; and Chapter 67; 1792. That of 1748 included Jews. "No Negro, Mulatto, Indian, although Christian, or any Jew, Moor, or Mohammedan . . . shall purchase any Christian servant." Statutes of Louisiana, Section 13, March 20, 1818, makes the same provision. Whites so bought should be set free immediately.
That these first Negroes could buy white people shows that in earliest America there was equal treatment for white and black according to class, that the first Virginians did not regard Negroes as a "race of slaves," or that as Thomas Carlyle, a great advocate of slavery said, "God has put into every white man's hand a whip to flog the black."
Discrimination came later. Why? There were at least two causes: the indispensability of the Negro and the humane attitude of some of the white colonists. And later, as the opposition of these latter - the abolitionists - grew, so tightened the laws. to hold the Negro down. This, too, was the reason for using the Bible to prove that the blacks, "sons of Ham," were cursed by God and doomed to eternal servitude to whites, "sons of japhet." Biblical argument was then the most powerful that could be used to alienate sympathy from any one group, white or black, as Jews and Catholics. In the case of the blacks here was a spectacle of the masters belittling and reviling their most useful and prized possession, a thing they wouldn't have done to a prize bull or horse.
THE SLAVE-TRADE NOT A RACIAL ISSUE
THE END.
