Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/416

 asking that the punishment of one hundred and fifty lashes be abolished.

A short time after this episode, matters came to a culmination. As was usual at the holiday time, slaves congregated in plazas, chose a chief for the day, to whom they did homage. This was a customary feat, tolerated by the authorities of the city. On this particular occasion, a friend of Henderson noticed that a white man was being hanged in effigy. He sniffed trouble. Only a few months later the Bahian authorities were lucky, by timely arrests, to save the whole population from being massacred by the enraged slaves in an impending insurrection, whose purpose was nothing less than the wholesale slaughter of the entire white population of the city, with the exception of the governor, D'Arcos, whom the insurrectos were to raise as their prince. Already they had murdered many whites in the outskirts of the city.

Thus, in the Old South, flight was the leading form of resistance to the institution of slavery; whereas in Brazil the more effective form of resistance by organized uprising was more frequently attempted.

Before concluding the theme, it is imperative that we hurriedly skim over the saddest and most serious by-product of United States slavery, race prejudice. We are familiar enough with the limitations of the men of color in the South today. In the days of slavery, discriminations were just as severe, if not more so, against any man of black skin, whether slave, mulatto, freedman, quadroon, or octoroon. The slightest strain of black in a man's pedigree made him a "nigger." A freedman was better than a slave only in an economic way. Otherwise he had virtually no rights. He could not vote, marry a white, hold office, give testimony in case of a white man on trial, and for militia services was limited to fatigue duty. In many parts, however, the