Forty-six men and one woman were thus done to death:
"When the woman was hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect, and she was thrown overboard living, and was seen to struggle some time in the water before she sunk"; and deponent further says, "that after this was over, they brought up and flogged about twenty men and six women. The flesh of some of them where they were flogged putrefied, and came off, in some cases, six or eight inches in diameter, and in places half an inch thick."
This was in 1839, a time when Americans were very sure that for civilization, progress, humanity, and the Christian virtues, they were at least on as high a plane as the most exalted peoples of the earth.
Infectious disease was one of the grave perils with which the slavers had to reckon. The overcrowding of the slaves, the lack of exercise and fresh air, the wretched and insufficient food, all combined to make grave, general sickness an incident of almost every voyage, and actual epidemics not infrequent. This was a peril that moved even the callous captains and their crews, for scurvy or yellow-jack developing in the hold was apt to sweep the decks clear as well. A most gruesome story appears in all the books on the slave trade, of the experience of the French slaver, Rodeur. With a cargo of 165 slaves, she was on the way to Guadaloupe in 1819, when opthalmia — a virulent disease of the eyes — appeared among the blacks. It spread rapidly, though the captain, in hopes of checking its ravages, threw thirty-six negroes into the sea alive. Finally it attacked the crew, and in a short time all save one man became totally blind. Groping in the dark, the helpless sailors made shift to handle the ropes, while the one man still having eyesight clung to the wheel. For days, in this wretched state, they made their slow way along the deep, helpless and hopeless. At last a sail was sighted. The Rodeur's prow is turned toward it, for there is hope, there rescue! As the stranger draws nearer, the straining eyes of the French helmsman discerns something strange and terrifying about her appearance. Her rigging is loose and slovenly, her course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the wheel. A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue. But she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing strip of sea and is answered from the Rodeur. The two vessels draw near. There can be no launching of boats by blind men, but the story of the stranger is soon told. She, too, is a slaver, a Spaniard, the Leon, and on her, too, every soul is blind from opthalmia originating among the slaves. Not even a steersman has the Leon. All light has gone out from her, and the Rodeur sheers away, leaving her to an unknown fate, for never again is she heard from. How wonderful the fate — or the Providence — that directed that upon all the broad ocean teeming with ships, engaged in honest or in criminal trade, the two that should meet must be the two on which the hand of God was laid most heavily in retribution for the suffering and the woes which white men and professed Christians were bringing to the peaceful and innocent blacks of Africa.
It will be readily understood that the special and always menacing dangers attending the slave trade made marine insurance upon that sort of cargoes exceedingly high. Twenty pounds in the hundred was the usual figure in the early days. This heavy insurance led to a new form of wholesale murder committed by the captains. The policies covered losses resulting from jettisoning, or throwing overboard the cargo; they did not insure against loss from disease. Accordingly, when a slaver found his cargo infected, he would promptly throw into the sea all the ailing negroes, while still alive, in order to save the insurance. Some of the South American states, where slaves were bought, levied an import duty upon blacks, and cases are on record of captains going over their cargo outside the harbor and throwing into the sea all who by disease or for other causes, were rendered unsalable — thus saving both duty and insurance.
In the clearer light which illumines the subject to-day, the prolonged difficulty which attended the destruction of the slave trade seems incredible. It appears that two such powerful maritime nations as Great Britain and the United States had only to decree the trade criminal and it would be abandoned. But we must remember that slaves were universally regarded as property, and an attempt to interfere with the right of their owners to carry them where they would on the high seas was denounced as an interference with property rights. We see that even to-day men are very tenacious of "property rights," and the law describes them as sacred — however immoral or repugnant to common sense and common humanity they may be. So the effort to abolish the "right" of a slaver to starve, suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required more than half a century to attain complete success.
The first serious blow to the slave trade fell in 1772, when an English court declared that any slave coming into England straightway became free. That closed all English ports to the slavers. Two years after the American colonists, then on the threshold of the revolt against Great Britain, thought to put America on a like high plane, and formally resolved that they would "not purchase any slave imported after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it." But to this praiseworthy determination the colonists were unable to live up, and in 1776, when Jefferson proposed to put into the Declaration of Independence the charge that the British King had forced the slave trade on the colonies, a proper sense of their own guilt made the delegates oppose it.
It was in England that the first earnest effort to break up the slave trade began. It was under the Stars and Stripes that the slavers longest protected their murderous traffic. For a time the effort of the British humanitarians was confined to the amelioration of the conditions of the trade, prescribing space to be given each slave, prescribing surgeons, and offering bounties to be paid captains who lost less than two per cent, of their cargoes on the voyage. It is not recorded that the bounty was often claimed. On the contrary, the horrors of what was called "the middle passage" grew with the greed of the slave captains. But the revelations of inhumanity made during the parliamentary investigation were too shocking for even the indifferent and callous public sentiment of that day. Humane people saw at once that to attempt to regulate a traffic so abhorrent to every sense of humanity, was for the nation to go into partnership with murderers and manstealers, and so the demand for the absolute prohibition of the traffic gained strength from the futile attempt to regulate it. Bills for its abolition failed, now in the House of Lords, then in the House of Commons; but in 1807 a law prohibiting all participation in the trade by British ships or subjects was passed. The United States moved very slowly. Individual States under the old confederation prohibited slavery within their borders, and in some cases the slave trade; but when our forefathers came together to form that Constitution under which the nation still exists, the opposition of certain Southern States was so vigorous that the best which could be done was to authorize a tax on slaves of not more than ten dollars a head, and to provide that the traffic should not be prohibited before 1808. But there followed a series of acts which corrected the seeming failure of the constitutional convention. One prohibited American citizens "carrying on the slave trade from the United States to any foreign place or country." Another forbade the introduction of slaves into the Mississippi Territory. Others made it unlawful to carry slaves to States which prohibited the traffic, or to fit out ships for the foreign slave trade, or to serve on a slaver. The discussion caused by all these measures did much to build up a healthy public sentiment, and when 1808 — the date set by the Constitution — came round, a prohibitory law was passed, and the President was authorized to use the armed vessels of the United States to give it force and effect. Notwithstanding this, however, the slave trade, though now illegal and outlawed, continued for fully half a century. Slaves were still stolen on the coast of Africa by New England sea captains, subjected to the pains and horrors of the middle passage, and smuggled into Georgia or South Carolina, to be eagerly bought by the Southern planters. A Congressman estimated that 20,000 blacks were thus smuggled into the United States annually. Lafitte's nest of pirates at Barataria was a regular slave depot; so, too, was Amelia Island, Florida. The profit on a slave smuggled into the United States amounted to $350 or $500, and the temptation was too great for men to be restrained by fear of a law, which prescribed but light penalties. It is even matter of record that a governor of Georgia resigned his office to enter the smuggling trade on a large scale. The scandal was notorious, and the rapidly growing abolition sentiment demanded that Congress so amend its laws as to make manstealers at least as subject to them as other malefactors. But Congress tried the politician's device of passing laws which would satisfy the abolitionists, the slave trader, and the slave owner as well. To-day the duty of the nation seems to have been so clear that we have scant patience with the paltering policy of Congress and the Executive that permitted half a century of profitable law-breaking. But we must remember that slaves were property, that dealing in them was immensely profitable, and that while New England wanted this profit the South wanted the blacks. Macaulay said that if any considerable financial interest could be served by denying the attraction of gravitation, there would be a very vigorous attack on that great physical truth. And so, as there were many financial interests concerned in protecting slavery, every effort to effectually abolish the trade was met by an outcry and by shrewd political opposition. The slaves were better off in the United States than at home, Congress was assured; they had the blessings of Christianity; were freed from the endless wars and perils of the African jungle. Moreover, they were needed to develop the South, while in the trade, the hardy and daring sailors were trained, who in time would make the American navy the great power of the deep. Political chicanery in Congress reinforced the clamor from without, and though act after act for the destruction of the traffic was passed, none proved to be enforcible — in each was what the politicians of a later day called a "little joker," making it ineffective. But in 1820 a law was passed declaring slave trading piracy, and punishable with death. So Congress had done its duty at last, but it was long years before the Executive rightly enforced the law.