MORTALITY IN BATTLE AND ON SLAVERS. 59 Lest we exaggerate, however, let us put it at twenty per cent. only.* It is considered a bloody battle when ten per cent. of the combatants engaged are killed or wounded. The loss at Gettysburg did not amount to so high a percentage. Nor, even when that proportion of killed and wounded is reached, does the ultimate mortality amount to five per cent. Through what a frightful ordeal, then, were these poor wretches, during their incarceration of eight or ten weeks on board Christian-owned slavers, doomed to pass! Their ranks twice decimated in that brief period; their numbers, without regard to age or sex, thinned by death as the numbers of soldiers passing through four sanguinary battles seldom are; not inspired, as the soldier may be, by zeal in a cause; not sustained, as the soldier in battle is, by hope of victory; their future dark, purposeless, despairing, as the prospect of pitiless slavery, ending only at death, could make it; what people, even under the harrow of pagan victory, were ever made to endure what they endured! And this crime of one portion of God's creatures against another portion was committed not in the case * It may not be wholly unnecessary to remind the reader, if he be not familiar with the calculation of percentages, that if twenty per cent. of the negroes received on board be the number lost on the Middle Passage, while we must deduct that percentage from the total shipped to ascertain the number landed in the colonies, we must add, not twenty, but twenty-five per cent. to the number landed, if we wish to obtain the number shipped. Thus, if the number of negroes shipped be one hundred, we obtain the number landed—namely, eighty-by deducting twenty per cent. from one hundred; but to these eighty we must add twenty-five per cent. on eighty, in order to obtain the original number shipped,-namely, one hundred. The term Middle Passage is not to be understood as designating the trans-oceanic route to the West Indies from any particular portion of the slave-coast. "Middle Passage, or Mid-passage, the passage of a slaveship from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean."- Worcester's Dictionary. 60 MORTALITY IN AFRICA. of thousands, not even of millions only: it was committed, through the persistent barbarities of three centuries and a half, in the case of tens of millions! When we consider the character of the means employed in Africa to fill up the slave-cargoes, the wasting wars waged to procure prisoners, the marauding bands of kidnappers firing villages and killing all who resisted, the slaughter of those who were too young, and the abandonment of those who were too old or infirm, to be marketable, the deaths on the long desert-journey, and again in the pestilence-invaded barracoons, and yet again in the dungeons of the slave-ship,-when we reflect upon all these prolific sources of mortality, we shall not be inclined to consider Lord Palmerston guilty of exaggeration when he calculated that we must treble the number of slaves actually landed in the colonies, to find the total of persons who were consigned to death or slavery by the various operations of the trade, from its inception in the Old World to its close in the harbors of the New. But, lest in this the British Premier should have exaggerated, let us assume that the number of those who perished in Africa by slave-wars, marauding murders, pestilence, and the extremity of hardship previous to embarkation, was but equal to the number embarked; in other words, let us, to obtain the entire number of victims, lower the estimate to double the number only that were actually received on board slave-ships. Then, according to our previous calculation, assuming the number shipped from Africa in the three and a half centuries through which this traffic lasted to have been fifteen millions and a half, we have thirty-one millions as the total number of negroes who have been consigned to death or to foreign slavery, that one race of men might live by the labor of another. FATE OF THIRTY-ONE MILLIONS OF MEN. 61 THIRTY-ONE MILLIONS! a portion of mankind equal in number to the entire inhabitants, Northern and Southern, white and colored, of the United States! Of these thirty-one millions, upwards of three millions (a population equal to that of the United States when Independence was declared) were cast into the Atlantic; while less than twelve millions and a half were landed in colonial ports and distributed to planters from the auction-block.† Never, in any three centuries of man's written history, was the violation of a great principle alike in political economy, in national morals, and in the religion of Christ, followed by a succession of outrages against God's creatures,-in numbers a vast nation,— so openly sanctioned by public law and solemn treaty, so shamelessly countenanced by public opinion, yet so marked at every stage of its progress by those flagrant enormities which usually arouse loud-spoken indignation, even when they do not stir to practical reform, among mankind! * The dead were thrown overboard even in port. Captain Cook, commanding a trading-vessel on the east coast of Africa in 1836, 1837, and 1838, informed Mr. Fowell Buxton that slaves who "die on board, in ports, are never interred on shore, but are invariably thrown overboard, when they sometimes float backwards and forwards with the tide for a week, should the sharks and alligators not devour them."-The African SlaveTrade, by Thomas Fowell Buxton, London, 1839, p. 93. † See, for confirmation of the moderation of these estimates, Appendix, Note A. 62 FORCE OF STATISTICAL DETAILS. CHAPTER VII. WHAT BECAME OF THE IMPORTED SLAVES. WE have raised the curtain on but the first two acts of the Great Tragedy,—the scene being laid, of the first in Africa, of the second in the prison-slaver. The third and last, opening on colonial plantations, remains to be glanced at. We must say a few words as to the treatment of those who survived death to become, in a foreign land, slaves, and the progenitors of slaves. The graphic recital of individual barbarities, authentic examples of which can be found without number, are best calculated to stir indignation; but a doubt may obtrude itself, in reading these, as to how far they constitute the rule, and how far they are to be taken as the exception only. Statistical details on a large scale, grave and dispassionate though their language be, addressed not to the heart, but to the reason, carry with them a force of evidence far beyond that of individual example,-a force of evidence against which sophistry strives in vain,-which compels conviction, except when the mind is closed against all proof by the hermetic influence of prejudice. I select an example of such evidence, based on official tables running through nearly three-quarters of a century, and bearing upon the character of slavery in the principal English colony in the West Indies. The character of England for humanity, as compared with that of other owners of slave-colonies,-Spain, France, Holland, is not below the average; and, on that score, the example may be assumed as fair. To the Jamaica House of Assembly, convened by the DECREASE OF POPULATION IN JAMAICA. 63 governor of the colony, August 6, 1702, a return was made of the negroes and stock then on the island. The number of slaves was forty-one thousand five hundred and ninety-six.* In the Report of the Lords in Council, from which I have already so copiously extracted, is a tablet giving the number of negroes annually imported into, and exported from, the island of Jamaica, from the year 1702 to the year 1775, both inclusive,—that is, during seventy-four years : There were imported........ There were exported. 497,736 137,014 Leaving an addition, by importation, to the negro popu- These two items, of forty-one thousand five hundred and ninety-six negroes in the island in 1702, and of three hundred and sixty thousand seven hundred and twenty-two imported from Africa from that time up to 1775,-together four hundred and two thousand three hundred and eighteen,-give the number of negroes who would have been in the island in 1775, if the population had neither augmented by natural increase, nor diminished by mortality, in the previous seventy-four years. But, in point of fact, this population of four hundred and two thousand three hundred and eighteen was represented in 1775 by only one hundred and ninetytwo thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven survivors. It had diminished in three-quarters of a cen * Annals of Jamaica, by the Rev. G. W. Bridges, A.M., London, 1827, vol. i. p. 331. † Lords of Council Report, Part III., Jamaica, Sheet P. The Rev. Mr. Bridges, after quoting the table above given and stating that, after deducting the negroes exported from those imported, three hun |