Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/92

 them, a shipper in the oil, ivory, and gold-dust trade, who had heard the story of the massacre, took them before a court on a writ of habeas corpus, when they were declared free and were sent home to Old Calabar. Through this means Clarkson, the famous abolitionist, got the authenticated story, and used it with tremendous effect in his crusade against the trade. It was not in the Anglo-Saxon heart to approve such doings, even in the eighteenth century.

Time had been when the long and dangerous voyage had made vikings of those engaged in it, but as the profits grew and swelled before the eyes of the slavers all other views were fogged from sight, and from brave men, really striving to do right, they were, within half a century, degraded to a level beyond which there was no depth conceivable. And degradation is the inevitable fate of everyone who deliberately ignores justice in his treatment of inferiors. Get rich he may, but be degraded hell-low he shall be.

How the degradation of the slaver's deck was contagious; how it spread to the owners of the ships; how these owners, while posing as Christians, became, through inciting such acts, worse than the captains who participated actively in the infamies; how communities and nations were thus made rotten, until at last the greatest slave nation of them all regained health by the most frightful of modern wars, can only be suggested here.

After the end of the eighteenth century the only notable change in the methods of gathering slaves for market was in the establishing of barracoons — that is, what a cowboy might call corrals — in which to herd the slaves awaiting shipment. The trade having