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Europeans or Yankee slave
traders, but purchased from African slave traders through tribal
mediators. J.C. Furnas observes, "[I]t is safe to say that ninetynine
in a hundred of the poor devils of Negroes shipped in the trans-Atlantic
trade were already slaves, some born so, some become so legally, some
forcibly made so — kidnapped if you like — before they were turned
over to white men... And since slavery was well established along the
Guinea
Coast
when the whites first saw it, kidnapping of free Negroes remained most
exceptional even when, as time passed, whites came to buy thousands per
year." Furnas continues, "Even after superior weapons raised the
odds for success, raiding remained bad for business. The
Guinea
trade went best when the Negro trader on the other side of the bargain was
confident of his own safety... kidnapping [by a European] aroused the
keenest resentment, for it defrauded the local chief of his dues and the
native traders of their opportunities." The position taken by the
Africans was that there was nothing wrong with kidnapping free people into
slavery particularly if they came from other tribes, but this enterprise
was the rightful monopoly of the West Africans themselves and not of white
Europeans (The Road to Harper's Ferry, New York: William
Sloan Associates, 1959), pp. 106-108.
6"It
is customary to date the beginning of the New World traffic in Africans in
the year 1502 when the first references to blacks appear in the documents
of Spanish colonial administrators "It lasted over three and a half
centuries during which time over 9,500,000 Africans were forcibly
transported across the
Atlantic
. "
Brazil
was by far the largest single participant in the traffic, accounting for
38 percent of the total" The British and French-owned colonies in the
Caribbean
and the Spanish/American empire were the destination of 50%. Dutch,
Danish, and Swedish colonies took another 6%. And the remaining 6%
represent the share of the
United States
(Engerman and Fogel, Time on the Cross, Lantham, MD:
University Press of America, Inc., 1974), p. 15.
7Dabney,
Defense, p. 50.
8John
S. Tilley
, The Coming of the Glory (Nashville, TN: Bill Coats Ltd., 1995),
p. 8. Tilley mentions an unattributed comment which is worth remembering
in all discussions of slavery and the slave trade — "History is a
collection of lies that have been agreed upon."
9Dabhey,
Defense, p. 43.
10And
even on the subject of the opposition to slavery, in 1827 four-fifths of
the anti-slavery societies were in the Southern states. Tilley,
referring to A.Y. Lloyd, The Slavery Controversy, p. 58.
11George
Lunt, The Origin of the Late War, 1866
12Judge
George L. Christian, "Report of the History Committee of the U.C.V.,
Made to the Reunion of Confederate Veterans, held at
Richmond
,
VA
, May 30th-June 3rd, 1907." |