As it is desirable to know the true sources of events in history, so
this will be realized in that of the abolition of the Slave
Trade.--Inquiry as to those who favoured the cause of the Africans
previously to the year 1787.--All these to be considered as necessary
forerunners in that cause.--First forerunners were Cardinal Ximenes;
the Emperor Charles the Fifth; Pope Leo the Tenth; Elizabeth, queen of
England; Louis the Thirteenth, of France.
It would be considered by many, who have stood at the mouth of a river,
and witnessed its torrent there, to be both an interesting and a
pleasing journey to go to the fountain head, and then to travel on its
banks downwards, and to mark the different streams in each side, which
should run into it and feed it. So I presume the reader will not be a
little interested and entertained, in viewing with me the course of the
abolition of the Slave Trade, in first finding its source, and then in
tracing the different springs which have contributed to its increase.
And here I may observe that, in doing this, we shall have advantages,
which historians have not always had in developing the causes of things.
Many have handed down to us, events, for the production of which they
have given us but their own conjectures. There has been often, indeed,
such a distance between the events themselves, and the lives of those
who have recorded them, that the different means and motives belonging
to them have been lost through time. On the present occasion, however,
we shall have the peculiar satisfaction of knowing, that we communicate
the truth, or that those which we unfold, are the true causes and means;
for the most remote of all the human springs, which can be traced as
having any bearing upon the great event in question, will fall within
the period of three centuries, and the most powerful of them within the
last twenty years. These circumstances indeed have had their share in
inducing me to engage in the present history. Had I measured it by the
importance of the subject, I had been deterred; but believing that most
readers love the truth, and that it ought to be the object of all
writers to promote it, and believing, moreover, that I was in possession
of more facts on this subject than any other person, I thought I was
peculiarly called to undertake it.
In tracing the different streams from whence the torrent arose, which
has now happily swept away the Slave Trade, I must begin with an inquiry
as to those who favoured the cause of the injured Africans, from the
year 1516, to the year 1787, at which latter period, a number of persons
associated themselves, in England, for its abolition. For though they,
who belonged to this association, may, in consequence of having pursued
a regular system, be called the principal actors, yet it must be
acknowledged, that their efforts would never have been so effectual, if
the minds of men had not been prepared by others, who had moved before
them. Great events have never taken place without previously disposing
causes. So it is in the case before us. Hence they, who lived even in
early times, and favoured this great cause, may be said to have been
necessary precursors in it. And here it may be proper to observe, that
it is by no means necessary that all these should have been themselves
actors in the production of this great event. Persons have contributed
towards it in different ways:--Some have written expressly on the
subject, who have had no opportunity of promoting it by personal
exertions. Others have only mentioned it incidentally in their writings.
Others, in an elevated rank and station, have cried out publicly
concerning it, whose sayings have been recorded. All these, however, may
be considered as necessary forerunners in their day; for all of them
have brought the subject more or less into notice. They have more or
less enlightened the mind upon it; they have more or less impressed it;
and therefore each may be said to have had his share in diffusing and
keeping up a certain portion of knowledge and feeling concerning it,
which has been eminently useful in the promotion of the cause.
It is rather remarkable, that the first forerunners and coadjutors
should have been men in power.
So early as in the year 1503, a few slaves had been sent from the
Portuguese settlements in Africa into the Spanish colonies in America.
In 1511, Ferdinand the Fifth, king of Spain, permitted them to be
carried in great numbers. Ferdinand, however, must have been ignorant in
these early times of the piratical manner in which the Portuguese had
procured them. He could have known nothing of their treatment when in
bondage, nor could he have viewed the few uncertain adventurous
transportations of them into his dominions in the western world, in the
light of a regular trade. After his death, however; a proposal was made
by Bartholomew de las Casas, the bishop of Chiapa, to Cardinal Ximenes,
who held the reigns of the government of Spain till Charles the Fifth
came to the throne, for the establishment of a regular system of
commerce in the persons of the native Africans. The object of
Bartholomew de las Casas was undoubtedly to save the American Indians,
whose cruel treatment and almost extirpation he had witnessed during his
residence among them, and in whose behalf he had undertaken a voyage to
the court of Spain. It is difficult to reconcile this proposal with the
humane and charitable spirit of the bishop of Chiapa. But it is probable
he believed that a code of laws would soon be established in favour both
of Africans and of the natives in the Spanish settlements, and that he
flattered himself that, being about to return and to live in the country
of their slavery, he could look to the execution of it. The cardinal,
however, with a foresight, a benevolence, and a justice which will
always do honour to his memory, refused the proposal, not only judging
it to be unlawful to consign innocent people to slavery at all, but to
be very inconsistent to deliver the inhabitants of one country from a
state of misery by consigning to it those of another. Ximenes,
therefore, may be considered as one of the first great friends of the
Africans after the partial beginning of the trade.
This answer of the cardinal, as it showed his virtue as an individual,
so was it peculiarly honourable to him as a public man, and ought to
operate as a lesson to other statesmen, how they admit any thing new
among political regulations and establishments, which is connected in
the smallest degree with injustice; for evil, when once sanctioned by
governments, spreads in a tenfold degree, and may, unless seasonably
checked, become so ramified as to effect the reputation of a country,
and to render its own removal scarcely possible without detriment to the
political concerns of the state. In no instance has this been verified
more than in the case of the Slave Trade. Never was our national
character more tarnished, and our prosperity more clouded by guilt.
Never was there a monster more difficult to subdue. Even they, who heard
as it were the shrieks of oppression, and wished to assist the
sufferers, were fearful of joining in their behalf. While they
acknowledged the necessity of removing one evil, they were terrified by
the prospect of introducing another; and were, therefore, only able to
relieve their feelings by, lamenting, in the bitterness of their hearts,
that this traffic had ever been begun at all.
After the death of Cardinal Ximenes, the emperor Charles the Fifth, who
had come into power, encouraged the Slave Trade. In 1517, he granted a
patent to one of his Flemish favourites, containing an exclusive right
of importing four thousand Africans into America. But he lived long
enough to repent of what he had thus inconsiderately done; for in the
year 1542, he made a code of laws for the better protection of the
unfortunate Indians in his foreign dominions, and he stopped the
progress of African slavery by an order that all slaves in his American
islands should he made free. This order was executed by Pedro de la
Gasca. Manumission took place as well in Hispaniola as on the Continent;
but on the return of Gasca to Spain, and the retirement of Charles into
a monastery, slavery was revived.
It is impossible to pass over this instance of the abolition of slavery
by Charles, in all his foreign dominions, without some comments. It
shows him, first, to have been a friend both to the Indians and the
Africans, as a part of the human race; it shows he was ignorant of what
he was doing when he gave his sanction to this cruel trade; it shows
when legislators give one set of men undue power over another, how
quickly they abuse it, or he never would have found himself obliged, in
the short space of twenty-five years, to undo that which he had
countenanced as a great state measure; and while it confirms the former
lesson to statesmen of watching the beginnings or principles of things
in their political movements, it should teach them never to persist in
the support of evils, through the false shame of being obliged to
confess that they had once given them their sanction, nor to delay the
cure of them because, politically speaking, neither this nor that is the
proper season; but to do them away instantly, as there can only be one
fit or proper time in the eye of religion, namely, on the conviction of
their existence.
From the opinions of Cardinal Ximenes and of the emperor Charles the
Fifth, I hasten to that which was expressed much about the same time, in
a public capacity, by Pope Leo the Tenth. The Dominicans in Spanish
America, witnessing the cruel treatment which the slaves underwent
there, considered slavery as utterly repugnant to the principles of the
gospel, and recommended the abolition of it. The Franciscans did not
favour the former in this their scheme of benevolence; and the
consequence was, that a controversy on this subject sprung up between
them, which was carried to this pope for his decision. Leo exerted
himself, much to his honour, in behalf of the poor sufferers, and
declared "That not only the Christian religion, but that Nature herself
cried out against a state of slavery." This answer was certainly worthy
of one who was deemed the head of the Christian Church. It must,
however, be confessed that it would have been strange if Leo, in his
situation as pontiff, had made a different reply. He could never have
denied that God was no respecter of persons. He must have acknowledged
that men were bound to love each other as brethren; and, if he admitted
the doctrine that all men were accountable for their actions hereafter,
he could never have prevented the deduction that it was necessary they
should be free. Nor could he, as a man of high attainments, living early
in the sixteenth century, have been ignorant of what had taken place in
the twelfth; or that, by the latter end of this latter century,
christianity had obtained the undisputed honour of having extirpated
slavery from the western part of the European world.
From Spain and Italy I come to England. The first importation of slaves
from Africa, by our countrymen, was in the reign of Elizabeth, in the
year 1562. This great princess seems on the very commencement of the
trade to have questioned its lawfulness. She seems to have entertained a
religious scruple concerning it; and, indeed, to have revolted at the
very thought of it. She seems to have been aware of the evils to which
its continuance might lead, or that, if it were sanctioned, the most
unjustifiable means might be made use of to procure the persons of the
natives of Africa. And in what light she would have viewed any acts of
this kind, had they taken place, we may conjecture from this fact,--that
when Captain (afterwards Sir John) Hawkins returned from his first
voyage to Africa and Hispaniola, whither he had carried slaves, she sent
for him, and, as we learn from Hill's _Naval History_ expressed her
concern lest any of the Africans should be carried off without their
free consent, declaring that "it would be detestable, and call down the
vengeance of heaven upon the undertakers." Captain Hawkins promised to
comply with the injunctions of Elizabeth in this respect, but he did not
keep his word; for when he went to Africa again, he seized many of the
inhabitants and carried them off as slaves, which occasioned Hill, in
the account he gives of his second voyage, to use these remarkable
words:--"Here began the horrid practice of forcing the Africans into
slavery, an injustice and barbarity which, so sure as there is vengeance
in heaven for the worst of crimes, will some time be the destruction of
all who allow or encourage it." That the trade should have been suffered
to continue under such a princess, and after such solemn expressions as
those which she has been described to have uttered, can be only
attributed to the pains taken by those concerned in it to keep her
ignorant of the truth.
From England I now pass over to France. Labat, a Roman missionary, in
his account of the isles of America, mentions that Louis the Thirteenth
was very uneasy when he was about to issue the edict by which all
Africans coming into his colonies were to be made slaves, and that this
uneasiness continued till he was assured that the introduction of them
in this capacity into his foreign dominions was the readiest way of
converting them to the principles of the Christian religion.
These, then, were the first forerunners in the great cause of the
abolition of the Slave Trade: nor have their services towards it been of
small moment; for, in the first place, they have enabled those who came
after them, and who took an active interest in the same cause, to state
the great authority of their opinions and of their example. They have
enabled them, again, to detail the history connected with these, in
consequence of which circumstances have been laid open which it is of
great importance to know; for have they not enabled them to state that
the African Slave Trade never would have been permitted to exist but for
the ignorance of those in authority concerning it--that at its
commencement there was a revolting of nature against it--a suspicion, a
caution, a fear, both as to its unlawfulness and its effects? Have they
not enabled them to state that falsehoods were advanced, and these
concealed under the mask of religion, to deceive those who had the power
to suppress it? Have they not enabled them to state that this trade
began in piracy, and that it was continued upon the principles of force?
And, finally, have not they who have been enabled to make these
statements, knowing all the circumstances connected with them, found
their own zeal increased, and their own courage and perseverance
strengthened; and have they not, by the communication of them to others,
produced many friends and even labourers in the cause?