Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12.djvu/703

 RACE

627

RACE

Race, Negro. — The term negro, derived from the Spanish and the Latin words meaning "black" i'legro; nigcr), may be applied to a large portion of mankind, but it is more strictly confined to certain peoples and tribes of Central Africa and their de- scendants in various parts of the world. The Blumen- back fivefold division of mankind considers the negro in the first place under Ethiopian, embracing the Kafir, Hottentot, Austrahan, Alforian, and Oceanic negroes. Pritchard and Latham rightly protest against the error of considering the term negro synon- ymous with African. There are dark-skinned people of various tjT5es throughout the tropical countries of the world. The negro properly so called is dark- .skinned, with wooly hair and other characteristics, while differing in minor traits. It is a mistake to hold, a,s some do, that all negroes have common traits. Professor Jerome Dowd, a Southern white man, de- clares that "to speak of all negroes in Africa as one race having common characteristics, is as misleading and is as unscientific as if we should consider all Euro- peans and Americans as of one race and attribute to all of them the same traits". Obser\'ations and the records of the African continent go to show that it is not necessarily the races with the blackest skins that are lowest in the scale of civilization. The negro is originally a native of the Sudan and other parts of West and Central Africa, where there is now a popula- tion of about 128,000,000 blacks. In the West Indies, South America, and the United States they are the descendants of Africans, though in the United States those of mixed blood, the mulattoes, and eveu those with a preponderance of white blood are classed as negroes.

History. — The origin of the negro race dates from the formation of races in the twilight of human his- tory. Like the origin of the human race in general, it is a subject for anthropologists and theologians. The ethnological aspects of the question are many and varied. The original African is said to be the Bush- man, who is rather brown than black; the negro, the real black man, probably came from other regions. This, however, must have occurred at a remote period. The chief divisions of the native population of Africa are the negro, or black, the Bushman, and the Bantu, or mixed, races, generally brown in colour, who in- vaded South Africa, driving out the original Bush- man. But centuries of slavery have so broken and intermingled the different stocks that it is difficult to find the negro without any mixture of foreign blood.

The history of the black man in America, with which this article is more especially concerned, begins with the African slave-trade. Under the compulsion and rod of the slave-master the negro became part of the population of the New World. The negro slav- ery of modern times followed the discovery of Amer- ica. The Portuguese, who possessed a large part of the west African coast, began the employment of negroes as slaves, in which they were followed by others colonizing the New World. The first country in tlu' New World to which negroes were extensively brought was Haiti, or Hispaniola. The aboriginal race had at first been employed in the mines there, but this kind of labour was found so fatal to them that Las C.a,sas. Bishop of Chiapa, the celebrated protector of the Indians, although at a later period he dis- approved of slavery, urged Charles V to substitute African slaves as a stronger race. Accordingly, the emperor, in 1.517, authorized a large importation of negroes. Sir John Hawkins was the first Englishman who engaged in the traffic. Others of his countrymen soon followed his example on an extensive scale. Eng- latid is said to have taken, between 1680 and 1700, no fewer than .300,000 slaves from .\frica. and between 1700 and 17S6 Jamaica alone absorbed 610,000. A Dutch ship brought from the Guinea Coast to James- town, Virginia, a cargo of twenty negroes in 1620;

this was the beginning of slavery in the English col- onies of America. An English company obtained the monopoly of supplying negro slaves to the Spanish colonies for thirty years; the contract was annulled by Spain in 1739, and England thereupon declared war on Spain. The number of slaves annually ex- ported from Africa amounted, at the end of the eighteenth century, to 7-4,000. Between 1680 and 1786 there were 2,130,000 negro slaves brought into the British colonies of America, inclufling the W'est Indies. Altogether it is estimated that probably 12,000,000 slaves were landed in North and South America from the beginning to the end of the slave- trade. An equal number is supposed to have perished in the African slave raids and on their way to America. The slave-trade was u.sually attended with extreme cruelty; the ships which transported the slaves from Africa to America were overcrowded to such an extent that a large proportion died on the pa,ssage. The treat- ment of the slave after his arrival depended much on the character of his master; restraints, however, were imposed by law in the various settlements to protect slaves from injury.

Early in the seventeenth century Cartagena, in Colombia, was a noted slave market. This was the field of labour of St. Peter Claver, of the Society of Jesus, the apostle of the negroes. As many as twelve thousand slaves were landed annually at Cartagena. They were usually in a wretched condition, and the saint sought to alleviate their hard.ships and suffer- ings. In time a strong Christian sentiment asserted itself against the traffic. In Catholic times in Europe and the East, under the benign influence of the Cath- olic Church, the nations gradually emancipated the slaves. From the beginning of the African slave-trade the popes, from Pius II, in the fifteenth century, to Leo XIII, in the nineteenth, issued encyclicals and directed anathemas against the barbarous and in- human treatment of human beings in slavery. The traffic and its cruelties were condemned by the Holy See before the discovery of America. In America the Friends, or Quakers, of Pennsylvania, in 1776, required their members holding slaves to emancipate them. Abolition societies were formed to discourage and oppose the slave-trade. On a great increase in the traffic, action was taken by the British Government and further importation of slaves into the colonies was prohibited in 1805. The United States prohibited the importation of slaves from .Africa in 1808, though to some extent slaves continued to be brought into the country secretly and unlawfully up to the emancipa- tion of the slaves during the Civil War. The importa- tion of slaves was likewise forbidden in the South American repubhcs. Eventually, all the states of Europe passed laws or entered into treaties prohibiting the traffic.

The next thing sought was the total abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves. This was brought about in the British colonies in 1834. The French emancipated their negroes in 1848. In Haiti slavery ceased as far back as 1791; its abolition was one of the results of the negro insurrection of that year. Many of the Spanish- American states abolished slav- ery on declaring their independence; the others have since that time abolished the institution. Brazil passed a law of gradual emancipation in 1871. Pope Leo XIII, in 1888, wrote to the bishops of Brazil setting forth the position of the Church on slavery: he condemned the cruelties of the slave-trade and commended the abolition of slavery. In the United States slavery was firmly established at the time of the Declaration of Independence and was recognized by the Constitution, ratified in 1788. There were then several himdred thousand slaves in the republic. Slavery declined in the Northern states, but not in the South, where negro labour was required for the cultivation of sugar and cotton. The diversity of