Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/404

 ? No wonder then, that slavery in the English colonies of North America was very much unlike the institution as it existed in Brazil.

Brazil was being tilled by slave labor long before the settlement of Jamestown, and still boasted of hordes of slaves on its plantations as late as a quarter century after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States had been issued. As early as 1585, Pernambuco could claim 10,000 African slaves and Bahia something like three or four thousand, whereas the first shipment of slaves to the English colonies in America was introduced into Jamestown harbor by a Dutch ship as late as August, 1619.

In Brazil the slave trade received an impetus as a result of royal restrictions and Jesuits' opposition to the enslavement of Indians, thereby compelling the more law-abiding and docile settlers to turn from exploiting the native labor and to seek its labor supply from Africa. The labor demands of the great sugar plantations, cotton fields, tobacco lands, and later the mines, kept the slave poachers on the Guinea and Angola Coast busy, so that by the middle of the eighteenth century slaves were entering Brazil on a vast scale. From 1759 to 1803, according to Keller, the colonial registers give as consigned from Angola to Brazil 642,000 Negroes. Thus, by 1800 fully one half of the total Brazilian population of 3,200,000 was slave, and by 1818 there were 1,930,000 slaves besides some 526,000 free Negroes and mulattoes, in all about sixty-three per cent of the total. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was something like three millions of slaves out of a population of seven and a half millions. Lord Palmerston estimated the total number of slaves in the sixties as being 3,000,000; whereas a writer in the "Revue des deux Mondes" puts the number