Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/102

 race, agreeing never to enslave each other, but to make the blacks the slaves of all alike. Thus, this race of human beings has been singled out, whether owing to the accident of color, or to their peculiar fitness for certain kinds of labor, for infamy and misfortune; and the abolition of the practice of promiscuous slavery in the modern world, was purchased by the introduction of a slavery confined entirely to negroes.

The nations and tribes of negroes in Africa, who thus ultimately became the universal prey of Europeans, were themselves equally guilty in subjecting men to perpetual bondage. In the most remote times, every Ethiopian man of consequence had his slaves, just as a Greek or Roman master had. Savage as he was, he at least resembled the citizen of a civilized state in this. He possessed his domestic slaves, or bondmen, hereditary on his property; and besides these, he was always acquiring slaves by whatever means he could, whether by purchase from slave-dealers, or by war with neighboring tribes. The slaves of a negro master in this case would be his own countrymen, cr at least men of his own race and color; some of them born on the same spot with himself, some of them captives who had been brought from a distance of a thousand miles. Of course, the farther a captive was taken from his home, the more valuable he would be, as having less chance of escape; and therefore it would" be a more common practice to sell a slave taken in war with a neighboring tribe, than to retain him as a laborer so near his home. And just as in the cities of the civilized countries, we find the slave population often outnumbering the free, so in the villages of the interior of Africa the negro slaves were often more numerous than the negro masters. Park, in his travels among the negroes, found that in many villages the slaves were three times as numerous as the free persons; and it is likely that the proportion was not very different in more ancient times. In ancient times, the Garamantes used to sell negroes to the Libyans; and so a great proportion of the slaves of the Carthaginians and the Egyptians must have been blacks brought northwards across the desert. From Carthage and Egypt, again, these negroes would be exported into different countries of southern Europe; and a stray negro might even find his way into the more northern regions. They seem always to have been valued for their patience, their mild temper, and their extraordinary power of endurance; and for many purposes negro slaves would be preferred by their Roman masters to all others, even to the shaggy, scowling Picts. But though it is quite certain that negroes were used as slaves in ancient Europe, still the negro never came to enjoy that miserable preeminence which later times have assigned to him, treating him as the born drudge of the human family. White-skinned men were slaves as well as he; and if, among the Carthaginians and Egyptians, negro slaves were more common than any other, it was only because they were more easily procurable.

The Portuguese were the first to set the example of stealing negroes; they were the first to become acquainted with Africa. Till the fifteenth century, no part of Africa was known except the chain of countries on the coast of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, beginning with Morocco, and ending with