19. Rhode Is. Col. Records, VIII, 251-2.
20. Economic and Social History of New Eng., 1745-50, Vol. 2, pp. 584, 641, 753. 1890: Williams, E., Golden Age of the Slave System in England, Jour. of Negro Hist. Vol. 25, pp. 60-106. 1940.
20a. Development of the British West Indies, p. vii. 1917.
21. Case of the Northern Colonies. 1731.
22. Case of the Northern Colonies. Brochure, pp. 2, 3. 1731.
23. Rhode Is. Colonial Records, VI, 381. Field E., State of Rhode Is. and The Providence Plantations, Vol. 1, p. 215.
24. Hist. of the American People, Vol. 4, p. 35. 1918.
25. Hist. of Rhode Island. Vol. 1, p. 124. 1874.
26. The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1773-76, pp. 43-4. 1918.
27. Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776, p. 153. 1923.
28. Works of John Adams, Vol. 10, p. 349.
29. Hart, A. B., Commonwealth Hist. of Mass., Vol. 2, p. 473. 1928.
30. The Rhode Island Merchants and the Sugar Act. New Eng. Quar., Vol. 3, pp. 464-500, 1930. See also: Taussig: Rum, Romance and Rebellion.
31. Works of Ed. Burke, Vol. 1, p. 467. 1864.
32. Hist. and Present State of Virginia, para. 150.
33. American Hist. Review, Vol. 1, p. 89.
34. Notes on Virginia, p. 200.
35. Travels, etc., p. 54.
WERE AFRICANS THE ONLY SLAVES?
Since a great many Americans of African ancestry are sensitive about slavery and an equally great or greater number of Americans of European ancestry are proud that their ancestors once held the ancestors of the former as slaves it might do well at this point to look into that.
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, blue-eyed 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, nay, sometimes fourteen, they at length become objects of commercial speculation and the itinerant Jew traders, who wander about Wedinoon to sell their wares find means to barter them for tobacco, salt, a cloth garment, or any other thing.” (Empire of Morocco, pp. 272-81)
Whole peoples with their household goods and cattle were carried away into slavery in ancient times. This scene is from the Monuments of Nineveh.
Frederick Moore says, “There can be no mistake about the records of history, which state that thousands of Christian slaves, many of them British, were sold in the great white market of Sallee.” (Passing of Morocco, 133-34, 1908). Voltaire, who lived that time, tells in the eleventh chapter of Candide of the color of the Moors, (“blacks and mulattoes”) and of their capture and sale of white people.
Mulai Ismael, Emperor of Morocco, an almost full-blooded black, had 10,000 white slaves to build his stables at Meknes and a regiment of whites born in captivity. Abbe Bus-not, who went to see him on a mission sent by Louis XIV, describes his appearance and tells of the white slaves he saw. Other writers of that time as Pidon de St. Olon and Lempriere have done the same.
As late as 1810, white Americans were captured on the high seas and sold at the great slave port of Salee, Morocco. Some were taken inland as far south as Timbuctoo. After America won independence, she had to pay tribute to the North African powers, better known as “the Barbary Pirates,” to sail the North Atlantic. In 1785, two American ships were captured and their crew made prisoners. In October and November 1793, 119 Americans were captured. (Wright, L. B. First Americans in North Africa, p. 23-24. 1945). In 1821, Commodore Decatur freed many Americans there.
Ancient slavery: The Helvetians, a Germanic people, pass the Romans under the yoke after the battle of Lake Leman (from the painting by Gleyre).
(Further details of European captives as far north as Sweden taken to Africa are in “Nature Knows No Color-Line, Chapter Five).
Slavery among the ancients—These white slave-girls who were sold in the slave-markets of Greece and Rome came sometimes from even royal families. Such were usually captives. Horace, Roman poet, 65-8 B.C. mentions three of this kind. He says, “Briseis, though a slave, had power to move Achilles’ heart with her white beauty; “Tecomessa”; and Phyllis of royal blood. Think not, at least that e’er from tainted breed thy darling is sprung.” (Book II, Ode, iv). (Painting by Girard).
A 15th Century conception of Africa with white people held as slaves. (Dapper’s Naukenrige Beschryvinge der Afrikaensche (frontespiece))
Emperor of Morocco, whose mother was an unmixed Negro slave had tens of thousands of white slaves. From a painting of 1670. See John Ogilby’s Africa (p. 264, 1670).
Africans treated their white slaves much better than white Americans their Africans. “The meanest Christian slave on becoming a Mohammedan,” says Blake, “was free … and he and his descendants were eligible to the highest offices in the state.” Acceptance of Christianity