THE NEGRO

W.E.B. Du Bois

New York: Holt, 1915

[Transcriber’s Notes for e-book versions:

Hyphenation and accentuation are inconsistent, but are generally left as
found in the edition used for transcription. This edition may or may not
have completely replicated the 1915 edition of the book. Where changes
have been made, they are noted below. If you are using this book for
research, please verify any spelling or punctuation with another source.

A missing quotation mark was inserted at the beginning of this
paragraph: “It is difficult to imagine that Egypt should have obtained it
from Europe where the oldest find (in Hallstadt) cannot be of an earlier
period than 800 B.C., or from Asia, where iron is not known before 1000
B.C., and where, in the times of Ashur Nazir Pal, it was still used
concurrently with bronze, while iron beads have been only recently
discovered by Messrs. G.A. Wainwright and Bushe Fox in a predynastic
grave, and where a piece of this metal, possibly a tool, was found in the
masonry of the great pyramid.”]

CONTENTS

I
AFRICA

II
THE COMING OF BLACK MEN

III
ETHIOPIA AND EGYPT

IV
THE NIGER AND ISLAM

V
GUINEA AND CONGO

VI
THE GREAT LAKES AND ZYMBABWE

VII
THE WAR OF RACES AT LAND’S END

VIII
AFRICAN CULTURE

IX
THE TRADE IN MEN

X
THE WEST INDIES AND LATIN AMERICA

XI
THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES

XII
THE NEGRO PROBLEMS

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

MAPS

The Physical Geography of Africa

Ancient Kingdoms of Africa

Races in Africa

Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern

THE NEGRO

TO
A FAITHFUL HELPER
M.G.A.

PREFACE

The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro
peoples. Archæological research in Africa has just begun, and many
sources of information in Arabian, Portuguese, and other tongues are
not fully at our command; and, too, it must frankly be confessed,
racial prejudice against darker peoples is still too strong in so-called
civilized centers for judicial appraisement of the peoples of Africa.
Much intensive monographic work in history and science is needed
to clear mooted points and quiet the controversialist who mistakes
present personal desire for scientific proof.

Nevertheless, I have not been able to withstand the temptation to
essay such short general statement of the main known facts and their
fair interpretation as shall enable the general reader to know as men
a sixth or more of the human race. Manifestly so short a story must
be mainly conclusions and generalizations with but meager indication
of authorities and underlying arguments. Possibly, if the Public
will, a later and larger book may be more satisfactory on these points.

W.E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS.

New York City, Feb. 1, 1915.

The Physical Geography of Africa

I

AFRICA

Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents.
Its very names reveal its mystery and wide-reaching influence.
It is the “Ethiopia” of the Greek, the “Kush” and “Punt” of the
Egyptian, and the Arabian “Land of the Blacks.” To modern Europe
it is the “Dark Continent” and “Land of Contrasts”; in literature it
is the seat of the Sphinx and the lotus eaters, the home of the
dwarfs, gnomes, and pixies, and the refuge of the gods; in commerce
it is the slave mart and the source of ivory, ebony, rubber, gold, and
diamonds. What other continent can rival in interest this Ancient
of Days?

There are those, nevertheless, who would write universal history
and leave out Africa. But how, asks Ratzel, can one leave out the
land of Egypt and Carthage? and Frobenius declares that in future
Africa must more and more be regarded as an integral part of the
great movement of world history. Yet it is true that the history of
Africa is unusual, and its strangeness is due in no small degree to
the physical peculiarities of the continent. With three times the area
of Europe it has a coast line a fifth shorter. Like Europe it is a
peninsula of Asia, curving southwestward around the Indian Sea.
It has few gulfs, bays, capes, or islands. Even the rivers, though
large and long, are not means of communication with the outer
world, because from the central high plateau they plunge in rapids
and cataracts to the narrow coastlands and the sea.

The general physical contour of Africa has been likened to an
inverted plate with one or more rows of mountains at the edge and
a low coastal belt. In the south the central plateau is three thousand
or more feet above the sea, while in the north it is a little over one
thousand feet. Thus two main divisions of the continent are easily
distinguished: the broad northern rectangle, reaching down as far
as the Gulf of Guinea and Cape Guardafui, with seven million
square miles; and the peninsula which tapers toward the south, with
five million square miles.

Four great rivers and many lesser streams water the continent.
The greatest is the Congo in the center, with its vast curving and
endless estuaries; then the Nile, draining the cluster of the Great
Lakes and flowing northward “like some grave, mighty thought,
threading a dream”; the Niger in the northwest, watering the Sudan
below the Sahara; and, finally, the Zambesi, with its greater Niagara
in the southeast. Even these waters leave room for deserts both south
and north, but the greater ones are the three million square miles
of sand wastes in the north.

More than any other land, Africa lies in the tropics, with a warm,
dry climate, save in the central Congo region, where rain at all seasons
brings tropical luxuriance. The flora is rich but not wide in
variety, including the gum acacia, ebony, several dye woods, the kola
nut, and probably tobacco and millet. To these many plants have
been added in historic times. The fauna is rich in mammals, and
here, too, many from other continents have been widely introduced
and used.

Primarily Africa is the Land of the Blacks. The world has always
been familiar with black men, who represent one of the most ancient
of human stocks. Of the ancient world gathered about the Mediterranean,
they formed a part and were viewed with no surprise or dislike,
because this world saw them come and go and play their part
with other men. Was Clitus the brother-in-law of Alexander the
Great less to be honored because he happened to be black? Was
Terence less famous? The medieval European world, developing
under the favorable physical conditions of the north temperate zone,
knew the black man chiefly as a legend or occasional curiosity, but
still as a fellow man—an Othello or a Prester John or an Antar.

The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond
slave in the West Indies and America. Add to this the fact that the
darker races in other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries,
lagged behind the flying and even feverish footsteps of
Europe, and we face to-day a widespread assumption throughout the
dominant world that color is a mark of inferiority.

The result is that in writing of this, one of the most ancient, persistent,
and widespread stocks of mankind, one faces astounding
prejudice. That which may be assumed as true of white men must be
proven beyond peradventure if it relates to Negroes. One who writes
of the development of the Negro race must continually insist that he
is writing of a normal human stock, and that whatever it is fair to
predicate of the mass of human beings may be predicated of the
Negro. It is the silent refusal to do this which has led to so much
false writing on Africa and of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, the
answer to the apparently simple question “What is a Negro?” We
find the most extraordinary confusion of thought and difference of
opinion. There is a certain type in the minds of most people which,
as David Livingstone said, can be found only in caricature and not
in real life. When scientists have tried to find an extreme type of
black, ugly, and woolly-haired Negro, they have been compelled
more and more to limit his home even in Africa. At least nine-tenths
of the African people do not at all conform to this type, and the
typical Negro, after being denied a dwelling place in the Sudan,
along the Nile, in East Central Africa, and in South Africa, was
finally given a very small country between the Senegal and the
Niger, and even there was found to give trace of many stocks. As
Winwood Reade says, “The typical Negro is a rare variety even
among Negroes.”

As a matter of fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful
stock as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race.
In the case of no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A
“white” man may be of any color, size, or facial conformation and
have endless variety of cranial measurement and physical characteristics.
A “yellow” man is perhaps an even vaguer conception.

In fact it is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition
of race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are
between men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so
insensibly that we can only indicate the main divisions of men in
broad outlines. As Von Luschan says, “The question of the number
of human races has quite lost its raison d’être and has become a subject
rather of philosophic speculation than of scientific research. It
is of no more importance now to know how many human races
there are than to know how many angels can dance on the point of
a needle. Our aim now is to find out how ancient and primitive races
developed from others and how races changed or evolved through
migration and inter-breeding.”[1]

The mulatto (using the term loosely to indicate either an intermediate
type between white and black or a mingling of the two) is
as typically African as the black man and cannot logically be included
in the “white” race, especially when American usage includes
the mulatto in the Negro race.

It is reasonable, according to fact and historic usage, to include
under the word “Negro” the darker peoples of Africa characterized
by a brown skin, curled or “frizzled” hair, full and sometimes everted
lips, a tendency to a development of the maxillary parts of the face,
and a dolichocephalic head. This type is not fixed or definite. The
color varies widely; it is never black or bluish, as some say, and it
becomes often light brown or yellow. The hair varies from curly to
a wool-like mass, and the facial angle and cranial form show wide
variation.

It is as impossible in Africa as elsewhere to fix with any certainty
the limits of racial variation due to climate and the variation due to
intermingling. In the past, when scientists assumed one unvarying
Negro type, every variation from that type was interpreted as meaning
mixture of blood. To-day we recognize a broader normal African
type which, as Palgrave says, may best be studied “among the statues
of the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum; the larger gentle eye,
the full but not over-protruding lips, the rounded contour, and the
good-natured, easy, sensuous expression. This is the genuine African
model.” To this race Africa in the main and parts of Asia have belonged
since prehistoric times.

The color of this variety of man, as the color of other varieties, is
due to climate. Conditions of heat, cold, and moisture, working for
thousands of years through the skin and other organs, have given
men their differences of color. This color pigment is a protection
against sunlight and consequently varies with the intensity of the
sunlight. Thus in Africa we find the blackest men in the fierce sunlight
of the desert, red pygmies in the forest, and yellow Bushmen
on the cooler southern plateau.

Next to the color, the hair is the most distinguishing characteristic
of the Negro, but the two characteristics do not vary with each
other. Some of the blackest of the Negroes have curly rather than
woolly hair, while the crispest, most closely curled hair is found
among the yellow Hottentots and Bushmen. The difference between
the hair of the lighter and darker races is a difference of degree, not
of kind, and can be easily measured. If the hair follicles of a China-man,
a European, and a Negro are cut across transversely, it will be
found that the diameter of the first is 100 by 77 to 85, the second
100 by 62 to 72, while that of the Negro is 100 by 40 to 60. This
elliptical form of the Negro’s hair causes it to curl more or less
tightly.

There have been repeated efforts to discover, by measurements of
various kinds, further and more decisive differences which would
serve as really scientific determinants of race. Gradually these efforts
have been given up. To-day we realize that there are no hard and
fast racial types among men. Race is a dynamic and not a static conception,
and the typical races are continually changing and developing,
amalgamating and differentiating. In this little book, then, we
are studying the history of the darker part of the human family,
which is separated from the rest of mankind by no absolute physical
line, but which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a social group distinct
in history, appearance, and to some extent in spiritual gift.

We cannot study Africa without, however, noting some of the
other races concerned in its history, particularly the Asiatic Semites.
The intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia has
been so close and long-continued that it is impossible to-day to disentangle
the blood relationships. Negro blood certainly appears in
strong strain among the Semites, and the obvious mulatto groups in
Africa, arising from ancient and modern mingling of Semite and
Negro, has given rise to the term “Hamite,” under cover of which
millions of Negroids have been characteristically transferred to the
“white” race by some eager scientists.

The earliest Semites came to Africa across the Red Sea. The
Phoenicians came along the northern coasts a thousand years before
Christ and began settlements which culminated in Carthage and
extended down the Atlantic shores of North Africa nearly to the
Gulf of Guinea.

From the earliest times the Greeks have been in contact with
Africa as visitors, traders, and colonists, and the Persian influence
came with Cambyses and others. Roman Africa was bounded by the
desert, but at times came into contact with the blacks across the
Sahara and in the valley of the Nile. After the breaking up of the
Roman Empire the Greek and Latin Christians filtered through
Africa, followed finally by a Germanic invasion in 429 A.D.

In the seventh century the All-Mother, Asia, claimed Africa again
for her own and blew a cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism all across
North Africa, veiling the dark continent from Europe for a thousand
years and converting vast masses of the blacks to Islam. The Portuguese
began to raise the veil in the fifteenth century, sailing down
the Atlantic coast and initiating the modern slave trade. The Spanish,
French, Dutch, and English followed them, but as traders in
men rather than explorers.

The Portuguese explored the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, visiting
the interior kingdoms, and then passing by the mouth of the Congo
proceeded southward. Eventually they rounded the Cape of Good
Hope and pursued their explorations as far as the mountains of
Abyssinia. This began the modern exploration of Africa, which is a
curious fairy tale, and recalls to us the great names of Livingstone,
Burton, Speke, Stanley, Barth, Schweinfurth, and many others. In
this way Africa has been made known to the modern world.

The difficulty of this modern lifting of the veil of centuries emphasizes
two physical facts that underlie all African history: the
peculiar inaccessibility of the continent to peoples from without,
which made it so easily possible for the great human drama played
here to hide itself from the ears of other worlds; and, on the other
hand, the absence of interior barriers—the great stretch of that central
plateau which placed practically every budding center of culture
at the mercy of barbarism, sweeping a thousand miles, with no Alps
or Himalayas or Appalachians to hinder.

With this peculiarly uninviting coast line and the difficulties in
interior segregation must be considered the climate of Africa. While
there is much diversity and many salubrious tracts along with vast
barren wastes, yet, as Sir Harry Johnston well remarks, “Africa is
the chief stronghold of the real Devil—the reactionary forces of Nature
hostile to the uprise of Humanity. Here Beelzebub, King of the
Flies, marshals his vermiform and arthropod hosts—insects, ticks,
and nematode worms—which more than in other continents (excepting
Negroid Asia) convey to the skin, veins, intestines, and
spinal marrow of men and other vertebrates the microorganisms
which cause deadly, disfiguring, or debilitating diseases, or themselves
create the morbid condition of the persecuted human being,
beasts, bird, reptile, frog, or fish.”[2] The inhabitants of this land have
had a sheer fight for physical survival comparable with that in no
other great continent, and this must not be forgotten when we consider
their history.

II

THE COMING OF BLACK MEN

The movements of prehistoric man can be seen as yet but dimly in
the uncertain mists of time. This is the story that to-day seems most
probable: from some center in southern Asia primitive human beings
began to differentiate in two directions. Toward the south appeared
the primitive Negro, long-headed and with flattened hair follicle. He
spread along southern Asia and passed over into Africa, where he
survives to-day as the reddish dwarfs of the center and the Bushmen
of South Africa.

Northward and eastward primitive man became broader headed
and straight-haired and spread over eastern Asia, forming the Mongolian
type. Either through the intermingling of these two types or,
as some prefer to think, by the direct prolongation of the original
primitive man, a third intermediate type of human being appeared
with hair and cranial measurement intermediate between the primitive
Negro and Mongolian. All these three types of men intermingled
their blood freely and developed variations according to climate
and environment.

Other and older theories and legends of the origin and spread of
mankind are of interest now only because so many human beings
have believed them in the past. The biblical story of Shem, Ham,
and Japheth retains the interest of a primitive myth with its measure
of allegorical truth,

[3]
but has, of course, no historic basis.

The older “Aryan” theory assumed the migration into Europe of
one dominant Asiatic race of civilized conquerors, to whose blood
and influence all modern culture was due. To this “white” race Semitic
Asia, a large part of black Africa, and all Europe was supposed
to belong. This “Aryan” theory has been practically abandoned in the
light of recent research, and it seems probable now that from the
primitive Negroid stock evolved in Asia the Semites either by local
variation or intermingling with other stocks; later there developed
the Mediterranean race, with Negroid characteristics, and the modern
Negroes. The blue-eyed, light-haired Germanic people may have
arisen as a modern variation of the mixed peoples produced by the
mingling of Asiatic and African elements. The last word on this development
has not yet been said, and there is still much to learn and
explain; but it is certainly proved to-day beyond doubt that the so-called
Hamites of Africa, the brown and black curly and frizzly-haired
inhabitants of North and East Africa, are not “white” men if
we draw the line between white and black in any logical way.

The primitive Negroid race of men developed in Asia wandered
eastward as well as westward. They entered on the one hand
Burmah and the South Sea Islands, and on the other hand they came
through Mesopotamia and gave curly hair and a Negroid type to
Jew, Syrian, and Assyrian. Ancient statues of Indian divinities show
the Negro type with black face and close-curled hair, and early
Babylonian culture was Negroid. In Arabia the Negroes may have
divided, and one stream perhaps wandered into Europe by way of
Syria. Traces of these Negroes are manifest not only in skeletons,
but in the brunette type of all South Europe. The other branch
proceeded to Egypt and tropical Africa. Another, but perhaps less
probable, theory is that ancient Negroes may have entered Africa
from Europe, since the most ancient skulls of Algeria are Negroid.

The primitive African was not an extreme type. One may judge
from modern pygmy and Bushmen that his color was reddish or
yellow, and his skull was sometimes round like the Mongolian. He
entered Africa not less than fifty thousand years ago and settled
eventually in the broad region between Lake Chad and the Great
Lakes and remained there long stretches of years.

After a lapse of perhaps thirty thousand years there entered Africa
a further migration of Asiatic people, Negroid in many characteristics,
but lighter and straighter haired than the primitive Negroes.
From this Mediterranean race was developed the modern inhabitants
of the shores of the Mediterranean in Europe, Asia, and Africa and,
by mingling with the primitive Negroes, the ancient Egyptians and
modern Negroid races of Africa.

As we near historic times the migrations of men became more frequent
from Asia and from Europe, and in Africa came movements
and minglings which give to the whole of Africa a distinct mulatto
character. The primitive Negro stock was “mulatto” in the sense of
being not widely differentiated from the dark, original Australoid
stock. As the earlier yellow Negro developed in the African tropics
to the bigger, blacker type, he was continually mingling his blood
with similar types developed in temperate climes to sallower color
and straighter hair.

We find therefore, in Africa to-day, every degree of development
in Negroid stocks and every degree of intermingling of these developments,
both among African peoples and between Africans, Europeans,
and Asiatics. The mistake is continually made of considering
these types as transitions between absolute Caucasians and absolute
Negroes. No such absolute type ever existed on either side. Both
were slowly differentiated from a common ancestry and continually
remingled their blood while the differentiating was progressing.
From prehistoric times down to to-day Africa is, in this sense, primarily
the land of the mulatto. So, too, was earlier Europe and Asia;
only in these countries the mulatto was early bleached by the climate,
while in Africa he was darkened.

It is not easy to summarize the history of these dark African peoples,
because so little is known and so much is still in dispute. Yet,
by avoiding the real controversies and being unafraid of mere questions
of definition, we may trace a great human movement with
considerable definiteness.

Three main Negro types early made their appearance: the lighter
and smaller primitive stock; the larger forest Negro in the center
and on the west coast, and the tall, black Nilotic Negro in the
eastern Sudan. In the earliest times we find the Negroes in the valley
of the Nile, pressing downward from the interior. Here they
mingled with Semitic types, and after a lapse of millenniums there
arose from this mingling the culture of Ethiopia and Egypt, probably
the first of higher human cultures.

To the west of the Nile the Negroes expanded straight across the
continent to the Atlantic. Centers of higher culture appeared very
early along the Gulf of Guinea and curling backward met Egyptian,
Ethiopian, and even European and Asiatic influences about Lake
Chad. To the southeast, nearer the primitive seats of the earliest
African immigrants and open to Egyptian and East Indian influences,
the Negro culture which culminated at Zymbabwe arose, and
one may trace throughout South Africa its wide ramifications.

All these movements gradually aroused the central tribes to unrest.
They beat against the barriers north, northeast, and west, but gradually
settled into a great southeastward migration. Calling themselves
proudly La Bantu (The People), they grew by agglomeration
into a warlike nation, speaking one language. They eventually conquered
all Africa south of the Gulf of Guinea and spread their influence
to the northward.

While these great movements were slowly transforming Africa, she
was also receiving influences from beyond her shores and sending
influences out. With mulatto Egypt black Africa was always in
closest touch, so much so that to some all evidence of Negro uplift
seem Egyptian in origin. The truth is, rather, that Egypt was herself
always palpably Negroid, and from her vantage ground as almost
the only African gateway received and transmitted Negro ideals.

Phoenician, Greek, and Roman came into touch more or less with
black Africa. Carthage, that North African city of a million men,
had a large caravan trade with Negroland in ivory, metals, cloth,
precious stones, and slaves. Black men served in the Carthaginian
armies and marched with Hannibal on Rome. In some of the North
African kingdoms the infiltration of Negro blood was very large and
kings like Massinissa and Jugurtha were Negroid. By way of the
Atlantic the Carthaginians reached the African west coast. Greek
and Roman influences came through the desert, and the Byzantine
Empire and Persia came into communication with Negroland by
way of the valley of the Nile. The influence of these trade routes,
added to those of Egypt, Ethiopia, Benin, and Yoruba, stimulated
centers of culture in the central and western Sudan, and European
and African trade early reached large volume.

Negro soldiers were used largely in the armies that enabled the
Mohammedans to conquer North Africa and Spain. Beginning in
the tenth century and slowly creeping across the desert into Negroland,
the new religion found an already existent culture and came,
not a conqueror, but as an adapter and inspirer. Civilization received
new impetus and a wave of Mohammedanism swept eastward,
erecting the great kingdoms of Melle, the Songhay, Bornu, and the
Hausa states. The older Negro culture was not overthrown, but, like
a great wedge, pushed upward and inward from Yoruba, and gave
stubborn battle to the newer culture for seven or eight centuries.

Then it was, in the fifteenth century, that the heart disease of
Africa developed in its most virulent form. There is a modern theory
that black men are and always have been naturally slaves. Nothing is
further from the truth. In the ancient world Africa was no more a
slave hunting ground than Europe or Asia, and both Greece and
Rome had much larger numbers of white slaves than of black. It
was natural that a stream of black slaves should have poured into
Egypt, because the chief line of Egyptian conquest and defense lay
toward the heart of Africa. Moreover, the Egyptians, themselves of
Negro descent, had not only Negro slaves but Negroes among their
highest nobility and even among their Pharaohs. Mohammedan conquerors
enslaved peoples of all colors in Europe, Asia, and Africa,
but eventually their empire centered in Asia and Africa and their
slaves came principally from these countries. Asia submitted to Islam
except in the Far East, which was self-protecting. Negro Africa submitted
only partially, and the remaining heathen were in small states
which could not effectively protect themselves against the Mohammedan
slave trade. In this wise the slave trade gradually began to
center in Africa, for religious and political rather than for racial
reasons.

The typical African culture was the culture of family, town, and
small tribe. Hence domestic slavery easily developed a slave trade
through war and commerce. Only the integrating force of state
building could have stopped this slave trade. Was this failure to develop
the great state a racial characteristic? This does not seem a
fair conclusion. In four great centers state building began in Africa.
In Ethiopia several large states were built up, but they tottered before
the onslaughts of Egypt, Persia, Rome, and Byzantium, on the
one hand, and finally fell before the turbulent Bantu warriors from
the interior. The second attempt at empire building began in the
southeast, but the same Bantu hordes, pressing now slowly, now
fiercely, from the congested center of the continent, gradually overthrew
this state and erected on its ruins a series of smaller and more
transient kingdoms.

The third attempt at state building arose on the Guinea coast in
Benin and Yoruba. It never got much beyond a federation of large
industrial cities. Its expansion toward the Congo valley was probably
a prime cause of the original Bantu movements to the southeast.
Toward the north and northeast, on the other hand, these city-states
met the Sudanese armed with the new imperial Mohammedan idea.
Just as Latin Rome gave the imperial idea to the Nordic races, so
Islam brought this idea to the Sudan.

In the consequent attempts at imperialism in the western Sudan
there arose the largest of the African empires. Two circumstances,
however, militated against this empire building: first, the fierce resistance
of the heathen south made war continuous and slaves one
of the articles of systematic commerce. Secondly, the highways of
legitimate African commerce had for millenniums lain to the north.
These were suddenly closed by the Moors in the sixteenth century,
and the Negro empires were thrown into the turmoil of internal war.

It was then that the European slave traders came from the southwest.
They found partially disrupted Negro states on the west coast
and falling empires in the Sudan, together with the old unrest of
over-population and migration in the valley of the Congo. They not
only offered a demand for the usual slave trade, but they increased
it to an enormous degree, until their demand, added to the demand
of the Mohammedan in Africa and Asia, made human beings the
highest priced article of commerce in Africa. Under such circumstances
there could be but one end: the virtual uprooting of ancient
African culture, leaving only misty reminders of the ruin in the customs
and work of the people. To complete this disaster came the
partition of the continent among European nations and the modern
attempt to exploit the country and the natives for the economic benefit
of the white world, together with the transplanting of black nations
to the new western world and their rise and self-assertion there.

III

ETHIOPIA AND EGYPT

Having viewed now the land and movements of African people in
main outline, let us scan more narrowly the history of five main centers
of activity and culture, namely: the valleys of the Nile and of
the Congo, the borders of the great Gulf of Guinea, the Sudan, and
South Africa. These divisions do not cover all of Negro Africa, but
they take in the main areas and the main lines in development.

First, we turn to the valley of the Nile, perhaps the most ancient
of known seats of civilization in the world, and certainly the oldest
in Africa, with a culture reaching back six or eight thousand years.
Like all civilizations it drew largely from without and undoubtedly
arose in the valley of the Nile, because that valley was so easily made
a center for the meeting of men of all types and from all parts of the
world. At the same time Egyptian civilization seems to have been
African in its beginnings and in its main line of development, despite
strong influences from all parts of Asia. Of what race, then,
were the Egyptians? They certainly were not white in any sense of
the modern use of that word—neither in color nor physical measurement,
in hair nor countenance, in language nor social customs. They
stood in relationship nearest the Negro race in earliest times, and
then gradually through the infiltration of Mediterranean and Semitic
elements became what would be described in America as a light
mulatto stock of Octoroons or Quadroons. This stock was varied
continually; now by new infiltration of Negro blood from the south,
now by Negroid and Semitic blood from the east, now by Berber
types from the north and west.

Egyptian monuments show distinctly Negro and mulatto faces.
Herodotus, in an incontrovertible passage, alludes to the Egyptians
as “black and curly-haired”[4]—a peculiarly significant statement from
one used to the brunette Mediterranean type; in another passage,
concerning the fable of the Dodonian Oracle, he again alludes to the
swarthy color of the Egyptians as exceedingly dark and even black.
Æschylus, mentioning a boat seen from the shore, declares that its
crew are Egyptians, because of their black complexions.

Modern measurements, with all their admitted limitations, show
that in the Thebaid from one-seventh to one-third of the Egyptian
population were Negroes, and that of the predynastic Egyptians less
than half could be classed as non-Negroid. Judging from measurements
in the tombs of nobles as late as the eighteenth dynasty, Negroes
form at least one-sixth of the higher class.[5]

Such measurements are by no means conclusive, but they are apt
to be under rather than over statements of the prevalence of Negro
blood. Head measurements of Negro Americans would probably
place most of them in the category of whites. The evidence of language
also connects Egypt with Africa and the Negro race rather
than with Asia, while religious ceremonies and social customs all go
to strengthen this evidence.

The ethnic history of Northeast Africa would seem, therefore, to
have been this: predynastic Egypt was settled by Negroes from
Ethiopia. They were of varied type: the broad-nosed, woolly-haired
type to which the word “Negro” is sometimes confined; the black,
curly-haired, sharper featured type, which must be considered an
equally Negroid variation. These Negroes met and mingled with the
invading Mediterranean race from North Africa and Asia. Thus the
blood of the sallower race spread south and that of the darker race
north. Black priests appear in Crete three thousand years before Christ,
and Arabia is to this day thoroughly permeated with Negro blood.
Perhaps, as Chamberlain says, “one of the prime reasons why no civilization
of the type of that of the Nile arose in other parts of the continent,
if such a thing were at all possible, was that Egypt acted as a
sort of channel by which the genius of Negro-land was drafted off into
the service of Mediterranean and Asiatic culture.”[6]

To one familiar with the striking and beautiful types arising from
the mingling of Negro with Latin and Germanic types in America,
the puzzle of the Egyptian type is easily solved. It was unlike any of
its neighbors and a unique type until one views the modern mulatto;
then the faces of Rahotep and Nefert, of Khafra and Amenemhat I,
of Aahmes and Nefertari, and even of the great Ramessu II, become
curiously familiar.

The history of Egypt is a science in itself. Before the reign of the
first recorded king, five thousand years or more before Christ, there
had already existed in Egypt a culture and art arising by long evolution
from the days of paleolithic man, among a distinctly Negroid
people. About 4777 B.C. Aha-Mena began the first of three successive
Egyptian empires. This lasted two thousand years, with many Pharaohs,
like Khafra of the Fourth Dynasty, of a strongly Negroid cast
of countenance.

At the end of the period the empire fell apart into Egyptian and
Ethiopian halves, and a silence of three centuries ensued. It is quite
possible that an incursion of conquering black men from the south
poured over the land in these years and dotted Egypt in the next
centuries with monuments on which the full-blooded Negro type is
strongly and triumphantly impressed. The great Sphinx at Gizeh, so
familiar to all the world, the Sphinxes of Tanis, the statue from the
Fayum, the statue of the Esquiline at Rome, and the Colossi of
Bubastis all represent black, full-blooded Negroes and are described
by Petrie as “having high cheek bones, flat cheeks, both in one plane,
a massive nose, firm projecting lips, and thick hair, with an austere
and almost savage expression of power.”[7]

Blyden, the great modern black leader of West Africa, said of the
Sphinx at Gizeh: “Her features are decidedly of the African or
Negro type, with ‘expanded nostrils.’ If, then, the Sphinx was placed
here—looking out in majestic and mysterious silence over the empty
plain where once stood the great city of Memphis in all its pride and
glory, as an ’emblematic representation of the king’—is not the inference
clear as to the peculiar type or race to which that king belonged?”[8]

The middle empire arose 3064 B.C. and lasted nearly twenty-four
centuries. Under Pharaohs whose Negro descent is plainly evident,
like Amenemhat I and III and Usertesen I, the ancient glories of
Egypt were restored and surpassed. At the same time there is strong
continuous pressure from the wild and unruly Negro tribes of the
upper Nile valley, and we get some idea of the fear which they inspired
throughout Egypt when we read of the great national rejoicing
which followed the triumph of Usertesen III (c. 2660-22) over
these hordes. He drove them back and attempted to confine them to
the edge of the Nubian Desert above the Second Cataract. Hemmed
in here, they set up a state about this time and founded Nepata.

Notwithstanding this repulse of black men, less than one hundred
years later a full-blooded Negro from the south, Ra Nehesi, was
seated on the throne of the Pharaohs and was called “The king’s
eldest son.” This may mean that an incursion from the far south
had placed a black conqueror on the throne. At any rate, the whole
empire was in some way shaken, and two hundred years later the
invasion of the Hyksos began. The domination of Hyksos kings who
may have been Negroids from Asia[9] lasted for five hundred years.

The redemption of Egypt from these barbarians came from Upper
Egypt, led by the mulatto Aahmes. He founded in 1703 B.C. the
new empire, which lasted fifteen hundred years. His queen, Nefertari,
“the most venerated figure of Egyptian history,”[10] was a Negress
of great beauty, strong personality, and of unusual administrative
force. She was for many years joint ruler with her son, Amenhotep
I, who succeeded his father.[11]

The new empire was a period of foreign conquest and internal
splendor and finally of religious dispute and overthrow. Syria was
conquered in these reigns and Asiatic civilization and influences
poured in upon Egypt. The great Tahutmes III, whose reign was
“one of the grandest and most eventful in Egyptian history,”[12] had a
strong Negroid countenance, as had also Queen Hatshepsut, who
sent the celebrated expedition to reopen ancient trade with the Hottentots
of Punt. A new strain of Negro blood came to the royal line
through Queen Mutemua about 1420 B.C., whose son, Amenhotep
III, built a great temple at Luqsor and the Colossi at Memnon.

The whole of the period in a sense culminated in the great Ramessu
II, the oppressor of the Hebrews, who with his Egyptian,
Libyan, and Negro armies fought half the world. His reign, however,
was the beginning of decline, and foes began to press Egypt
from the white north and the black south. The priests transferred
their power at Thebes, while the Assyrians under Nimrod overran
Lower Egypt. The center of interest is now transferred to Ethiopia,
and we pass to the more shadowy history of that land.

The most perfect example of Egyptian poetry left to us is a celebration
of the prowess of Usertesen III in confining the turbulent
Negro tribes to the territory below the Second Cataract of the Nile.
The Egyptians called this territory Kush, and in the farthest confines
of Kush lay Punt, the cradle of their race. To the ancient Mediterranean
world Ethiopia (i.e., the Land of the Black-faced) was a
region of gods and fairies. Zeus and Poseidon feasted each year
among the “blameless Ethiopians,” and Black Memnon, King of
Ethiopia, was one of the greatest of heroes.

“The Ethiopians conceive themselves,” says Diodorus Siculus
(Lib. III), “to be of greater antiquity than any other nation; and it
is probable that, born under the sun’s path, its warmth may have
ripened them earlier than other men. They suppose themselves also
to be the inventors of divine worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies,
of sacrifices, and every religious practice. They affirm that the
Egyptians are one of their colonies.”

The Egyptians themselves, in later days, affirmed that they and
their civilization came from the south and from the black tribes of
Punt, and certainly “at the earliest period in which human remains
have been recovered Egypt and Lower Nubia appear to have formed
culturally and racially one land.”[13]

The forging ahead of Egypt in culture was mainly from economic
causes. Ethiopia, living in a much poorer land with limited agricultural
facilities, held to the old arts and customs, and at the same
time lost the best elements of its population to Egypt, absorbing
meantime the oncoming and wilder Negro tribes from the south and
west. Under the old empire, therefore, Ethiopia remained in comparative
poverty, except as some of its tribes invaded Egypt with
their handicrafts.

As soon as the civilization below the Second Cataract reached a
height noticeably above that of Ethiopia, there was continued effort
to protect that civilization against the incursion of barbarians. Hundreds
of campaigns through thousands of years repeatedly subdued
or checked the blacks and brought them in as captives to mingle
their blood with the Egyptian nation; but the Egyptian frontier was
not advanced.

A separate and independent Ethiopian culture finally began to
arise during the middle empire of Egypt and centered at Nepata and
Meroe. Widespread trade in gold, ivory, precious stones, skins, wood,
and works of handicraft arose.[14] The Negro began to figure as the
great trader of Egypt.

This new wealth of Ethiopia excited the cupidity of the Pharaohs
and led to aggression and larger intercourse, until at last, when the
dread Hyksos appeared, Ethiopia became both a physical and cultural
refuge for conquered Egypt. The legitimate Pharaohs moved
to Thebes, nearer the boundaries of Ethiopia, and from here, under
Negroid rulers, Lower Egypt was redeemed.

The ensuing new empire witnessed the gradual incorporation of
Ethiopia into Egypt, although the darker kingdom continued to
resist. Both mulatto Pharaohs, Aahmes and Amenhotep I, sent expeditions
into Ethiopia, and in the latter’s day sons of the reigning
Pharaoh began to assume the title of “Royal Son of Kush” in some
such way as the son of the King of England becomes the Prince of
Wales.

Trade relations were renewed with Punt under circumstances
which lead us to place that land in the region of the African lakes.
The Sudanese tribes were aroused by these and other incursions,
until the revolts became formidable in the fourteenth century before
Christ.

Egyptian culture, however, gradually conquered Ethiopia where
her armies could not, and Egyptian religion and civil rule began to
center in the darker kingdom. When, therefore, Shesheng I, the
Libyan, usurped the throne of the Pharaohs in the tenth century
B.C., the Egyptian legitimate dynasty went to Nepata as king priests
and established a theocratic monarchy. Gathering strength, the
Ethiopian kingdom under this dynasty expanded north about 750
B.C. and for a century ruled all Egypt.

The first king, Pankhy, was Egyptian bred and not noticeably Negroid,
but his successors showed more and more evidence of Negro
blood—Kashta the Kushite, Shabaka, Tarharqa, and Tanutamen.
During the century of Ethiopian rule a royal son was appointed to
rule Egypt, just as formerly a royal Egyptian had ruled Kush. In
many ways this Ethiopian kingdom showed its Negro peculiarities:
first, in its worship of distinctly Sudanese gods; secondly, in the rigid
custom of female succession in the kingdom, and thirdly, by the
election of kings from the various royal claimants to the throne. “It
was the heyday of the Negro. For the greater part of the century … Egypt
itself was subject to the blacks, just as in the new empire
the Sudan had been subject to Egypt.”[15]

Egypt now began to fall into the hands of Asia and was conquered
first by the Assyrians and then by the Persians, but the Ethiopian
kings kept their independence. Aspeluta, whose mother and sister
are represented as full-blooded Negroes, ruled from 630 to 600 B.C.
Horsiatef (560-525 B.C.) made nine expeditions against the warlike
tribes south of Meroe, and his successor, Nastosenen (525-500 B.C.)
was the one who repelled Cambyses. He also removed the capital
from Nepata to Meroe, although Nepata continued to be the religious
capital and the Ethiopian kings were still crowned on its
golden throne.

From the fifth to the second century B.C. we find the wild Sudanese
tribes pressing in from the west and Greek culture penetrating
from the east. King Arg-Amen (Ergamenes) showed strong
Greek influences and at the same time began to employ the Ethiopian
speech in writing and used a new Ethiopian alphabet.

While the Ethiopian kings were still crowned at Nepata, Meroe
gradually became the real capital and supported at one time four
thousand artisans and two hundred thousand soldiers. It was here
that the famous Candaces reigned as queens. Pliny tells us that one
Candace of the time of Nero had had forty-four predecessors on the
throne, while another Candace figures in the New Testament.[16]

It was probably this latter Candace who warred against Rome at
the time of Augustus and received unusual consideration from her
formidable foe. The prestige of Ethiopia at this time was considerable
throughout the world. Pseudo-Callisthenes tells an evidently
fabulous story of the visit of Alexander the Great to Candace, Queen
of Meroe, which nevertheless illustrates her fame: Candace will not
let him enter Ethiopia and says he is not to scorn her people because
they are black, for they are whiter in soul than his white folk. She
sent him gold, maidens, parrots, sphinxes, and a crown of emeralds
and pearls. She ruled eighty tribes, who were ready to punish those
who attacked her.

The Romans continued to have so much trouble with their Ethiopian
frontier that finally, when Semitic mulattoes appeared in the
east, the Emperor Diocletian invited the wild Sudanese tribe of
Nubians (Nobadæ) from the west to repel them. These Nubians
eventually embraced Christianity, and northern Ethiopia came to be
known in time as Nubia.

The Semitic mulattoes from the east came from the highlands
bordering the Red Sea and Asia. On both sides of this sea Negro
blood is strongly in evidence, predominant in Africa and influential
in Asia. Ludolphus, writing in the seventeenth century, says that the
Abyssinians “are generally black, which [color] they most admire.”
Trade and war united the two shores, and merchants have passed
to and fro for thirty centuries.

In this way Arabian, Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman influences
spread slowly upon the Negro foundation. Early legendary
history declares that a queen, Maqueda, or Nikaula of Sheba, a state
of Central Abyssinia, visited Solomon in 1050 B.C. and had her son
Menelik educated in Jerusalem. This was the supposed beginning
of the Axumite kingdom, the capital of which, Axume, was a flourishing
center of trade. Ptolemy Evergetes and his successors did
much to open Abyssinia to the world, but most of the population of
that day was nomadic. In the fourth century Byzantine influences
began to be felt, and in 330 St. Athanasius of Alexandria consecrated
Fromentius as Bishop of Ethiopia. He tutored the heir to the Abyssinian
kingdom and began its gradual christianization. By the early
part of the sixth century Abyssinia was trading with India and Byzantium
and was so far recognized as a Christian country that the
Emperor Justinian appealed to King Kaleb to protect the Christians
in southwestern Arabia. Kaleb conquered Yemen in 525 and held it
fifty years.

Eventually a Jewish princess, Judith, usurped the Axumite throne;
the Abyssinians were expelled from Arabia, and a long period begins
when as Gibbon says, “encompassed by the enemies of their religion,
the Ethiopians slept for nearly a thousand years, forgetful of the
world by whom they were forgotten.” Throughout the middle ages,
however, the legend of a great Christian kingdom hidden away in
Africa persisted, and the search for Prester John became one of the
world quests.

It was the expanding power of Abyssinia that led Rome to call in
the Nubians from the western desert. The Nubians had formed a
strong league of tribes, and as the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia declined
they drove back the Abyssinians, who had already established
themselves at Meroe.

In the sixth century the Nubians were converted to Christianity
by a Byzantine priest, and they immediately began to develop. A
new capital, Dongola, replaced Nepata and Meroe, and by the
twelfth century churches and brick dwellings had appeared. As the
Mohammedan flood pressed up the Nile valley it was the Nubians
that held it back for two centuries.

Farther south other wild tribes pushed out of the Sudan and began
a similar development. Chief among these were the Fung, who fixed
their capital at Senaar, at the junction of the White and Blue Nile.
When the Mohammedan flood finally passed over Nubia, the Fung
diverted it by declaring themselves Moslems. This left the Fung as
the dominant power in the fifteenth century from the Three Cataracts
to Fazogli and from the Red Sea at Suakin to the White Nile.
Islam then swept on south in a great circle, skirted the Great Lakes,
and then curled back to Somaliland, completely isolating Abyssinia.

Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the Egyptian
Sudan became a congeries of Mohammedan kingdoms with Arab,
mulatto, and Negro kings. Far to the west, near Lake Chad, arose
in 1520 the sultanate of Baghirmi, which reached its highest power
in the seventh century. This dynasty was overthrown by the Negroid
Mabas, who established Wadai to the eastward about 1640.
South of Wadai lay the heathen and cannibals of the Congo valley,
against which Islam never prevailed. East of Wadai and nearer the
Nile lay the kindred state of Darfur, a Nubian nation whose sultans
reigned over two hundred years and which reached great prosperity
in the early seventeenth century under Soliman Solon.

Before the Mohammedan power reached Abyssinia the Portuguese
pioneers had entered the country from the east and begun to open
the country again to European knowledge. Without doubt, in the
centuries of silence, a civilization of some height had flourished in
Abyssinia, but all authentic records were destroyed by fire in the
tenth century. When the Portuguese came, the older Axumite kingdom
had fallen and had been succeeded by a number of petty states.

The Sudanese kingdoms of the Sudan resisted the power of the
Mameluke beys in Egypt, and later the power of the Turks until
the nineteenth century, when the Sudan was made nominally a part
of Egypt. Continuous upheaval, war, and conquest had by this time
done their work, and little of ancient Ethiopian culture survived
except the slave trade.

The entrance of England into Egypt, after the building of the
Suez Canal, stirred up eventually revolt in the Sudan, for political,
economic, and religious reasons. Led by a Sudanese Negro, Mohammed
Ahmad, who claimed to be the Messiah (Mahdi), the
Sudan arose in revolt in 1881, determined to resist a hated religion,
foreign rule, and interference with their chief commerce, the trade
in slaves. The Sudan was soon aflame, and the able mulatto general,
Osman Digna, aided by revolt among the heathen Dinka, drove
Egypt and England out of the Sudan for sixteen years. It was not
until 1898 that England reëntered the Sudan and in petty revenge
desecrated the bones of the brave, even if misguided, prophet.

Meantime this Mahdist revolt had delayed England’s designs on
Abyssinia, and the Italians, replacing her, attempted a protectorate.
Menelik of Shoa, one of the smaller kingdoms of Abyssinia, was a
shrewd man of predominantly Negro blood, and had been induced
to make a treaty with the Italians after King John had been killed
by the Mahdists. The exact terms of the treaty were disputed, but
undoubtedly the Italians tried by this means to reduce Menelik to
vassalage. Menelik stoutly resisted, and at the great battle of Adua,
one of the decisive battles of the modern world, the Abyssinians on
March 1, 1896, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians, killing
four thousand of them and capturing two thousand prisoners. The
empress, Taitou, a full-blooded Negress, led some of the charges. By
this battle Abyssinia became independent.

Such in vague and general outline is the strange story of the
valley of the Nile—of Egypt, the motherland of human culture and

IV

THE NIGER AND ISLAM

The Arabian expression “Bilad es Sudan” (Land of the Blacks) was
applied to the whole region south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic
to the Nile. It is a territory some thirty-five hundred miles by six
hundred miles, containing two million square miles, and has to-day
a population of perhaps eighty million. It is thus two-thirds the size
of the United States and quite as thickly settled. In the western
Sudan the Niger plays the same role as the Nile in the east. In this
chapter we follow the history of the Niger.

The history of this part of Africa was probably something as follows:
primitive man, entering Africa from Arabia, found the Great
Lakes, spread in the Nile valley, and wandered westward to the
Niger. Herodotus tells of certain youths who penetrated the desert
to the Niger and found there a city of black dwarfs. Succeeding
migrations of Negroes and Negroids pushed the dwarfs gradually
into the inhospitable forests and occupied the Sudan, pushing on to
the Atlantic. Here the newcomers, curling northward, met the Mediterranean
race coming down across the western desert, while to the
southward the Negro came to the Gulf of Guinea and the thick forests
of the Congo valley. Indigenous civilizations arose on the west coast in
Yoruba and Benin, and contact of these with the Mediterranean race
in the desert, and with Egyptian and Arab from the east, gave rise
to centers of Negro culture in the Sudan at Ghana and Melle and
in Songhay, Nupe, the Hausa states, and Bornu.

The history of the Sudan thus leads us back again to Ethiopia,
that strange and ancient center of world civilization whose inhabitants
in the ancient world were considered to be the most pious and
the oldest of men. From this center the black originators of African
culture, and to a large degree of world culture, wandered not simply
down the Nile, but also westward. These Negroes developed the
original substratum of culture which later influences modified but
never displaced.

We know that Egyptian Pharaohs in several cases ventured into
the western Sudan and that Egyptian influences are distinctly traceable.
Greek and Byzantine culture and Phoenician and Carthaginian
trade also penetrated, while Islam finally made this whole land her
own. Behind all these influences, however, stood from the first an
indigenous Negro culture. The stone figures of Sherbro, the megaliths
of Gambia, the art and industry of the west coast are all too
deep and original evidences of civilization to be merely importations
from abroad.

Nor was the Sudan the inert recipient of foreign influence when
it came. According to credible legend, the “Great King” at Byzantium
imported glass, tin, silver, bronze, cut stones, and other treasure
from the Sudan. Embassies were sent and states like Nupe recognized
the suzerainty of the Byzantine emperor. The people of Nupe
especially were filled with pride when the Byzantine people learned
certain kinds of work in bronze and glass from them, and this intercourse
was only interrupted by the Mohammedan conquest.

To this ancient culture, modified somewhat by Byzantine and
Christian influences, came Islam. It approached from the northwest,
coming stealthily and slowly and being handed on particularly by
the Mandingo Negroes. About 1000-1200 A.D. the situation was
this: Ghana was on the edge of the desert in the north, Mandingoland
between the Niger and the Senegal in the south and the western
Sahara, Djolof was in the west on the Senegal, and the Songhay on
the Niger in the center. The Mohammedans came chiefly as traders
and found a trade already established. Here and there in the great
cities were districts set aside for these new merchants, and the Mohammedans
gave frequent evidence of their respect for these black
nations.

Islam did not found new states, but modified and united Negro
states already ancient; it did not initiate new commerce, but developed
a widespread trade already established. It is, as Frobenius says,
“easily proved from chronicles written in Arabic that Islam was only
effective in fact as a fertilizer and stimulant. The essential point is
the resuscitative and invigorative concentration of Negro power in
the service of a new era and a Moslem propaganda, as well as the
reaction thereby produced.”[17]

Early in the eighth century Islam had conquered North Africa
and converted the Berbers. Aided by black soldiers, the Moslems
crossed into Spain; in the following century Berber and Arab armies
crossed the west end of the Sahara and came to Negroland. Later in
the eleventh century Arabs penetrated the Sudan and Central Africa
from the east, filtering through the Negro tribes of Darfur, Kanem,
and neighboring regions. The Arabs were too nearly akin to Negroes
to draw an absolute color line. Antar, one of the great pre-Islamic
poets of Arabia, was the son of a black woman, and one of the great
poets at the court of Haroun al Raschid was black. In the twelfth
century a learned Negro poet resided at Seville, and Sidjilmessa,
the last town in Lower Morocco toward the desert, was founded in
757 by a Negro who ruled over the Berber inhabitants. Indeed,
many towns in the Sudan and the desert were thus ruled, and felt
no incongruity in this arrangement. They say, to be sure, that the
Moors destroyed Audhoghast because it paid tribute to the black
town of Ghana, but this was because the town was heathen and not
because it was black. On the other hand, there is a story that a
Berber king overthrew one of the cities of the Sudan and all the
black women committed suicide, being too proud to allow themselves
to fall into the hands of white men.

In the west the Moslems first came into touch with the Negro
kingdom of Ghana. Here large quantities of gold were gathered in
early days, and we have names of seventy-four rulers before 300 A.D.
running through twenty-one generations. This would take us back
approximately a thousand years to 700 B.C., or about the time that
Pharaoh Necho of Egypt sent out the Phoenician expedition which
circumnavigated Africa, and possibly before the time when Hanno,
the Carthaginian, explored the west coast of Africa.

By the middle of the eleventh century Ghana was the principal
kingdom in the western Sudan. Already the town had a native and
a Mussulman quarter, and was built of wood and stone with surrounding
gardens. The king had an army of two hundred thousand
and the wealth of the country was great. A century later the king
had become Mohammedan in faith and had a palace with sculptures
and glass windows. The great reason for this development was the
desert trade. Gold, skins, ivory, kola nuts, gums, honey, wheat, and
cotton were exported, and the whole Mediterranean coast traded in
the Sudan. Other and lesser black kingdoms like Tekrou, Silla, and
Masina surrounded Ghana.

In the early part of the thirteenth century the prestige of Ghana
began to fall before the rising Mandingan kingdom to the west.
Melle, as it was called, was founded in 1235 and formed an open
door for Moslem and Moorish traders. The new kingdom, helped
by its expanding trade, began to grow, and Islam slowly surrounded
the older Negro culture west, north, and east. However, a great mass
of the older heathen culture, pushing itself upward from the Guinea
coast, stood firmly against Islam down to the nineteenth century.

Steadily Mohammedanism triumphed in the growing states which
almost encircled the protagonists of ancient Atlantic culture. Mandingan
Melle eventually supplanted Ghana in prestige and power,
after Ghana had been overthrown by the heathen Su Su from the
south.

The territory of Melle lay southeast of Ghana and some five
hundred miles north of the Gulf of Guinea. Its kings were known
by the title of Mansa, and from the middle of the thirteenth century
to the middle of the fourteenth the Mellestine, as its dominion was
called, was the leading power in the land of the blacks. Its greatest
king, Mari Jalak (Mansa Musa), made his pilgrimage to Mecca in
1324, with a caravan of sixty thousand persons, including twelve
thousand young slaves gowned in figured cotton and Persian silk.
He took eighty camel loads of gold dust (worth about five million
dollars) to defray his expenses, and greatly impressed the people of
the East with his magnificence.

On his return he found that Timbuktu had been sacked by the
Mossi, but he rebuilt the town and filled the new mosque with
learned blacks from the University of Fez. Mansa Musa reigned
twenty-five years and “was distinguished by his ability and by the
holiness of his life. The justice of his administration was such that
the memory of it still lives.”[18] The Mellestine preserved its preëminence
until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the rod
of Sudanese empire passed to Songhay, the largest and most famous
of the black empires.

The known history of Songhay covers a thousand years and three
dynasties and centers in the great bend of the Niger. There were
thirty kings of the First Dynasty, reigning from 700 to 1335. During
the reign of one of these the Songhay kingdom became the vassal
kingdom of Melle, then at the height of its glory. In addition to this
the Mossi crossed the valley, plundered Timbuktu in 1339, and
separated Jenne, the original seat of the Songhay, from the main
empire. The sixteenth king was converted to Mohammedanism in
1009, and after that all the Songhay princes were Mohammedans.
Mansa Musa took two young Songhay princes to the court of Melle
to be educated in 1326. These boys when grown ran away and
founded a new dynasty in Songhay, that of the Sonnis, in 1355.
Seventeen of these kings reigned, the last and greatest being Sonni
Ali, who ascended the throne in 1464. Melle was at this time declining,
other cities like Jenne, with its seven thousand villages, were
rising, and the Tuaregs (Berbers with Negro blood) had captured
Timbuktu.

Sonni Ali was a soldier and began his career with the conquest
of Timbuktu in 1469. He also succeeded in capturing Jenne and
attacked the Mossi and other enemies on all sides. Finally he concentrated
his forces for the destruction of Melle and subdued nearly
the whole empire on the west bend of the Niger. In summing up
Sonni Ali’s military career the chronicle says of him, “He surpassed
all his predecessors in the numbers and valor of his soldiery. His
conquests were many and his renown extended from the rising to
the setting of the sun. If it is the will of God, he will be long
spoken of.”[19]

Sonni Ali was a Songhay Negro whose father was a Berber. He
was succeeded by a full-blooded black, Mohammed Abou Bekr, who
had been his prime minister. Mohammed was hailed as “Askia”
(usurper) and is best known as Mohammed Askia. He was strictly
orthodox where Ali was rather a scoffer, and an organizer where Ali
was a warrior. On his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1495 there was nothing
of the barbaric splendor of Mansa Musa, but a brilliant group
of scholars and holy men with a small escort of fifteen hundred soldiers
and nine hundred thousand dollars in gold. He stopped and
consulted with scholars and politicians and studied matters of taxation,
weights and measures, trade, religious tolerance, and manners.
In Cairo, where he was invested by the reigning caliph of Egypt, he
may have heard of the struggle of Europe for the trade of the Indies,
and perhaps of the parceling of the new world between Portugal
and Spain. He returned to the Sudan in 1497, instituted a standing
army of slaves, undertook a holy war against the indomitable Mossi,
and finally marched against the Hausa. He subdued these cities and
even imposed the rule of black men on the Berber town of Agades,
a rich city of merchants and artificers with stately mansions. In fine
Askia, during his reign, conquered and consolidated an empire two
thousand miles long by one thousand wide at its greatest diameters;
a territory as large as all Europe. The territory was divided into four
vice royalties, and the system of Melle, with its semi-independent
native dynasties, was carried out. His empire extended from the
Atlantic to Lake Chad and from the salt mines of Tegazza and the
town of Augila in the north to the 10th degree of north latitude toward
the south.

It was a six months’ journey across the empire and, it is said, “he
was obeyed with as much docility on the farthest limits of the empire
as he was in his own palace, and there reigned everywhere
great plenty and absolute peace.”[20] The University of Sankore became
a center of learning in correspondence with Egypt and North
Africa and had a swarm of black Sudanese students. Law, literature,
grammar, geography and surgery were studied. Askia the Great
reigned thirty-six years, and his dynasty continued on the throne
until after the Moorish conquest in 1591.

Meanwhile, to the eastward, two powerful states appeared. They
never disputed the military supremacy of Songhay, but their industrial
development was marvelous. The Hausa states were formed by
seven original cities, of which Kano was the oldest and Katsena the
most famous. Their greatest leaders, Mohammed Rimpa and Ahmadu
Kesoke, arose in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The land was subject to the Songhay, but the cities became industrious
centers of smelting, weaving, and dyeing. Katsena especially,
in the middle of the sixteenth century, is described as a place thirteen
or fourteen miles in circumference, divided into quarters for
strangers, for visitors from various other states, and for the different
trades and industries, as saddlers, shoemakers, dyers, etc.

Beyond the Hausa states and bordering on Lake Chad was Bornu.
The people of Bornu had a large infiltration of Berber blood, but
were predominantly Negro. Berber mulattoes had been kings in
early days, but they were soon replaced by black men. Under the
early kings, who can be traced back to the third century, these people
had ruled nearly all the territory between the Nile and Lake
Chad. The country was known as Kanem, and the pagan dynasty
of Dugu reigned there from the middle of the ninth to the end of
the eleventh century. Mohammedanism was introduced from Egypt
at the end of the eleventh century, and under the Mohammedan
kings Kanem became one of the first powers of the Sudan. By the
end of the twelfth century the armies of Kanem were very powerful
and its rulers were known as “Kings of Kanem and Lords of Bornu.”
In the thirteenth century the kings even dared to invade the southern
country down toward the valley of the Congo.

Meantime great things were happening in the world beyond the
desert, the ocean, and the Nile. Arabian Mohammedanism had succumbed
to the wild fanaticism of the Seljukian Turks. These new
conquerors were not only firmly planted at the gates of Vienna, but
had swept the shores of the Mediterranean and sent all Europe
scouring the seas for their lost trade connections with the riches of
India. Religious zeal, fear of conquest, and commercial greed inflamed
Europe against the Mohammedan and led to the discovery
of a new world, the riches of which poured first on Spain. Oppression
of the Moors followed, and in 1502 they were driven back into
Africa, despoiled and humbled. Here the Spaniards followed and
harassed them and here the Turks, fighting the Christians, captured
the Mediterranean ports and cut the Moors off permanently from
Europe. In the slow years that followed, huddled in Northwest
Africa, they became a decadent people and finally cast their eyes
toward Negroland.

The Moors in Morocco had come to look upon the Sudan as a
gold mine, and knew that the Sudan was especially dependent upon
salt. In 1545 Morocco claimed the principal salt mines at Tegazza,
but the reigning Askia refused to recognize the claim.

When the Sultan Elmansour came to the throne of Morocco, he
increased the efficiency of his army by supplying it with fire arms
and cannon. Elmansour determined to attack the Sudan and sent
four hundred men under Pasha Djouder, who left Morocco in 1590.
The Songhay, with their bows and arrows, were helpless against
powder and shot, and they were defeated at Tenkadibou April 12,
1591. Askia Ishak, the king, offered terms, and Djouder Pasha
referred them to Morocco. The sultan, angry with his general’s delay,
deposed him and sent another, who crushed and treacherously
murdered the king and set up a puppet. Thereafter there were two
Askias, one under the Moors at Timbuktu and one who maintained
himself in the Hausa states, which the Moors could not subdue.
Anarchy reigned in Songhay. The Moors tried to put down disorder
with a high hand, drove out and murdered the distinguished men of
Timbuktu, and as a result let loose a riot of robbery and decadence
throughout the Sudan. Pasha now succeeded pasha with revolt and
misrule until in 1612 the soldiers elected their own pasha and deliberately
shut themselves up in the Sudan by cutting off approach
from the north.

Hausaland and Bornu were still open to Turkish and Mohammedan
influence from the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the slave
trade from the south, but the face of the finest Negro civilization
the modern world had ever produced was veiled from Europe and
given to the defilement of wild Moorish soldiers. In 1623 it is written
“excesses of every kind are now committed unchecked by the
soldiery,” and “the country is profoundly convulsed and oppressed.”[21]
The Tuaregs marched down from the desert and deprived the Moors
of many of the principal towns. The rest of the empire of the Songhay
was by the end of the eighteenth century divided among separate
Moorish chiefs, who bought supplies from the Negro peasantry
and were “at once the vainest, proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted,
ferocious, and intolerant of all the nations of the south.”[22] They
lived a nomadic life, plundering the Negroes. To such depths did the
mighty Songhay fall.

As the Songhay declined a new power arose in the nineteenth
century, the Fula. The Fula, who vary in race from Berber mulattoes
to full-blooded Negroes, may be the result of a westward migration
of some people like the “Leukoæthiopi” of Pliny, or they may have
arisen from the migration of Berber mulattoes in the western oases,
driven south by Romans and Arabs.

These wandering herdsmen lived on the Senegal River and the
ocean in very early times and were not heard of until the nineteenth
century. By this time they had changed to a Negro or dark mulatto
people and lived scattered in small communities between the Atlantic
and Darfur. They were without political union or national
sentiment, but were all Mohammedans. Then came a sudden
change, and led by a religious fanatic, these despised and persecuted
people became masters of the central Sudan. They were the ones
who at last broke down that great wedge of resisting Atlantic culture,
after it had been undermined and disintegrated by the American
slave trade.

Thus Islam finally triumphed in the Sudan and the ancient culture
combined with the new. In the Sudan to-day one may find
evidences of the union of two classes of people. The representatives
of the older civilization dwell as peasants in small communities,
carrying on industries and speaking a large number of different languages.
With them or above them is the ruling Mohammedan caste,
speaking four main languages: Mandingo, Hausa, Fula, and Arabic.
These latter form the state builders. Negro blood predominates among
both classes, but naturally there is more Berber blood among the
Mohammedan invaders.

Europe during the middle ages had some knowledge of these
movements in the Sudan and Africa. Melle and Songhay appear on
medieval maps. In literature we have many allusions: the mulatto
king, Feirifis, was one of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s heroes; Prester
John furnished endless lore; Othello, the warrior, and the black king
represented by medieval art as among the three wise men, and the
various black Virgin Marys’ all show legendary knowledge of what
African civilization was at that time doing.

It is a curious commentary on modern prejudice that most of this
splendid history of civilization and uplift is unknown to-day, and
men confidently assert that Negroes have no history.

V

GUINEA AND CONGO

One of the great cities of the Sudan was Jenne. The chronicle says
“that its markets are held every day of the week and its populations
are very enormous. Its seven thousand villages are so near to one
another that the chief of Jenne has no need of messengers. If he
wishes to send a note to Lake Dibo, for instance, it is cried from
the gate of the town and repeated from village to village, by which
means it reaches its destination almost instantly.”[23]

From the name of this city we get the modern name Guinea,
which is used to-day to designate the country contiguous to the great
gulf of that name—a territory often referred to in general as West
Africa. Here, reaching from the mouth of the Gambia to the mouth
of the Niger, is a coast of six hundred miles, where a marvelous
drama of world history has been enacted. The coast and its hinterland
comprehends many well-known names. First comes ancient
Guinea, then, modern Sierra Leone and Liberia; then follow the
various “coasts” of ancient traffic—the grain, ivory, gold, and slave
coasts—with the adjoining territories of Ashanti, Dahomey, Lagos,
and Benin, and farther back such tribal and territorial names as
those of the Mandingoes, Yorubas, the Mossi, Nupe, Borgu, and
others.

Recent investigation makes it certain that an ancient civilization
existed on this coast which may have gone back as far as three thousand
years before Christ. Frobenius, perhaps fancifully, identified
this African coast with the Atlantis of the Greeks and as part of
that great western movement in human culture, “beyond the pillars
of Hercules,” which thirteen centuries before Christ strove with
Egypt and the East. It is, at any rate, clear that ancient commerce
reached down the west coast. The Phoenicians, 600 B.C., and the
Carthaginians, a century or more later, record voyages, and these
may have been attempted revivals of still more ancient intercourse.

These coasts at some unknown prehistoric period were peopled
from the Niger plateau toward the north and west by the black
West African type of Negro, while along the west end of the desert
these Negroes mingled with the Berbers, forming various Negroid
races.

Movement and migration is evident along this coast in ancient and
modern times. The Yoruba-Benin-Dahomey peoples were among the
earliest arrivals, with their remarkable art and industry, which places
them in some lines of technique abreast with the modern world.
Behind them came the Mossi from the north, and many other peoples
in recent days have filtered through, like the Limba and Temni
of Sierra Leone and the Agni-Ashanti, who moved from Borgu some
two thousand years ago to the Gold and Ivory coasts.

We have already noted in the main the history of black men along
the wonderful Niger and seen how, pushing up from the Gulf of
Guinea, a powerful wedge of ancient culture held back Islam for
a thousand years, now victorious, now stubbornly disputing every
inch of retreat. The center of this culture lay probably, in oldest
times, above the Bight of Benin, along the Slave Coast, and reached
east, west, and north. We trace it to-day not only in the remarkable
tradition of the natives, but in stone monuments, architecture, industrial
and social organization, and works of art in bronze, glass,
and terra cotta.

Benin art has been practiced without interruption for centuries,
and Von Luschan says that it is “of extraordinary significance that
by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local and monumental
art had been learned in Benin which in many respects equaled
European art and developed a technique of the very highest accomplishment.”[24]

Summing up Yoruban civilization, Frobenius concluded that “the
technical summit of that civilization was reached in the terra-cotta
industry, and that the most important achievements in art were not
expressed in stone, but in fine clay baked in the furnace; that hollow
casting was thoroughly known, too, and practiced by these people;
that iron was mainly used for decoration; that, whatever their purpose,
they kept their glass beads in stoneware urns within their own
locality, and that they manufactured both earthen and glass ware;
that the art of weaving was highly developed among them; that the
stone monuments, it is true, show some dexterity in handling and
are so far instructive, but in other respects evidence a cultural condition
insufficiently matured to grasp the utility of stone monumental
material; and, above all, that the then great and significant idea of
the universe as imaged in the Templum was current in those
days.”[25]

Effort has naturally been made to ascribe this civilization to white
people. First it was ascribed to Portuguese influence, but much of it
is evidently older than the Portuguese discovery. Egypt and India
have been evoked and Greece and Carthage. But all these explanations
are far-fetched. If ever a people exhibited unanswerable evidence
of indigenous civilization, it is the west-coast Africans. Undoubtedly
they adapted much that came to them, utilized new
ideas, and grew from contact. But their art and culture is Negro
through and through.

Yoruba forms one of the three city groups of West Africa; another
is around Timbuktu, and a third in the Hausa states. The Timbuktu
cities have from five to fifteen hundred towns, while the Yoruba
cities have one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants and more.
The Hausa cities are many of them important, but few are as large
as the Yoruba cities and they lie farther apart. AH three centers,
however, are connected with the Niger, and the group nearest the
coast—that is, the Yoruba cities—has the greatest numbers of towns,
the most developed architectural styles, and the oldest institutions.

The Yoruba cities are not only different from the Sudanese in
population, but in their social relations. The Sudanese cities were
influenced from the desert and the Mediterranean, and form nuclei
of larger surrounding monarchial states. The Yoruba cities, on the
other hand, remained comparatively autonomous organizations down
to modern times, and their relative importance changed from time
to time without developing an imperialistic idea or subordinating
the group to one overpowering city.

This social and industrial state of the Yorubas formerly spread
and wielded great influence. We find Yoruba reaching out and subduing
states like Nupe toward the northward. But the industrial
democracy and city autonomy of Yoruba lent itself indifferently to
conquest, and the state fell eventually a victim to the fanatical
Fula Mohammedans and was made a part of the modern sultanate
of Gando.

West of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, an
ancient state which in 1897 traced its twenty-three kings back one
thousand years; some legends even named a line of sixty kings. It
seems probable that Benin developed the imperial idea and once extended
its rule into the Congo valley. Later and also to the west of
the Yoruba come two states showing a fiercer and ruder culture,
Dahomey and Ashanti. The state of Dahomey was founded by
Tacondomi early in the seventeenth century, and developed into a
fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder. The king had a
body of two thousand to five thousand Amazons renowned for their
bravery and armed with rifles. The kingdom was overthrown by the
French in 1892-93. Under Sai Tutu, Ashanti arose to power in the
seventeenth century. A military aristocracy with cruel blood sacrifices
was formed. By 1816 the king had at his disposal two hundred
thousand soldiers. The Ashanti power was crushed by the English
in the war of 1873-74.

In these states and in later years in Benin the whole character of
west-coast culture seems to change. In place of the Yoruban culture,
with its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized
industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey. What
was it that changed the character of the west coast from this to the
orgies of war and blood sacrifice which we read of later in these
lands?

There can be but one answer: the slave trade. Not simply the
sale of men, but an organized traffic of such proportions and widely
organized ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men
from nearly all other industries, encourage war and all the cruelest
passions of war, and concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of
Africa farthest from the ancient Mediterranean lines of trade.

We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute.
Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it
was not dominant or tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey
showed traces of skill, culture, and industry along with inexplicable
cruelty and bloodthirstiness. But it was the slave trade that turned
the balance and set these lands backward. Dahomey was the last
word in a series of human disasters which began with the defeat of
the Askias at Tenkadibou.[26]

From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth
centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated
the coast morally, socially, and physically. European rum and
fire arms were traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787
that any measures were taken to counteract this terrible scourge. In
that year the idea arose of repatriating stolen Negroes on that coast
and establishing civilized centers to supplant the slave trade. About
four hundred Negroes from England were sent to Sierra Leone, to
whom the promoters considerately added sixty white prostitutes as
wives. The climate on the low coast, however, was so deadly that
new recruits were soon needed. An American Negro, Thomas
Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton in the
British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of
land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him
and offered free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of
Nova Scotia. As a result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred
and ninety Negroes in 1792. Arriving in Africa, they found the
chief white man in control there so drunk that he soon died of
delirium tremens. John Clarkson, however, brother of Thomas
Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually took the lead, founded Freetown,
and the colony began its checkered career. In 1896 the colony
was saved from insurrection by the exiled Maroon Negroes from
Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies took
place, severer measures against the slave trade was possible and the
colony began to grow. To-day its imports and exports amount to
fifteen million dollars a year.

Liberia was a similar American experiment. In 1816 American
philanthropists decided that slavery was bound to die out, but that
the problem lay in getting rid of the freed Negroes, of which there
were then two hundred thousand in the United States. Accordingly
the American Colonization Society was proposed this year and
founded January 1, 1817, with Bushrod Washington as President.
It was first thought to encourage migration to Sierra Leone, and
eighty-eight Negroes were sent, but they were not welcomed. As a
result territory was bought in the present confines of Liberia, December
15, 1821, and colonists began to arrive. A little later an African
depot for recaptured slaves taken in the contraband slave trade,
provided for in the Act of 1819, was established and an agent was
sent to Africa to form a settlement. Gradually this settlement was
merged with the settlement of the Colonization Society, and from
this union Liberia was finally evolved.

The last white governor of Liberia died in 1841 and was succeeded
by the first colored governor, Joseph J. Roberts, a Virginian.
The total population in 1843 was about twenty-seven hundred and
ninety, and with this as a beginning in 1847 Governor Roberts declared
the independence of the state. The recognition of Liberian
independence by all countries except the United States followed in
1849. The United States, not wishing to receive a Negro minister,
did not recognize Liberia until 1862.

No sooner was the independence of Liberia announced than England
and France began a long series of aggressions to limit her territory
and sovereignty. Considerable territory was lost by treaty, and
in the effort to get capital to develop the rest, Liberia was saddled
with a debt of four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received
less than one hundred thousand dollars in actual cash. Finally the
Liberians turned to the United States for capital and protection. As
a result the Liberian customs have been put under international
control and Major Charles Young, the ranking Negro officer in the
United States army, with several colored assistants, has been put in
charge of the making of roads and drilling a constabulary to keep
order in the interior.

To-day Liberia has an area of forty thousand square miles, about
three hundred and fifty miles of coast line, and an estimated total
population of two million of which fifty thousand are civilized. The
revenue amounted in 1913 to $531,500. The imports in 1912 were
$1,667,857 and the exports $1,199,152. The latter consisted chiefly
of rubber, palm oil and kernels, coffee, piassava fiber, ivory, ginger,
camwood, and arnotto.

Perhaps Liberia’s greatest citizen was the late Edward Wilmot
Blyden, who migrated in early life from the Danish West Indies
and became a prophet of the renaissance of the Negro race.

Turning now from Guinea we pass down the west coast. In 1482
Diego Cam of Portugal, sailing this coast, set a stone at the mouth
of a great river which he called “The Mighty,” but which eventually
came to be known by the name of the powerful Negro kingdom
through which it flowed—the Congo.

We must think of the valley of the Congo with its intricate interlacing
of water routes and jungle of forests as a vast caldron shut
away at first from the African world by known and unknown physical
hindrances. Then it was penetrated by the tiny red dwarfs and
afterward horde after horde of tall black men swirled into the valley
like a maelstrom, moving usually from north to east and from south
to west.

The Congo valley became, therefore, the center of the making of
what we know to-day as the Bantu nations. They are not a unified
people, but a congeries of tribes of considerable physical diversity,
united by the compelling bond of language and other customs imposed
on the conquered by invading conquerors.

The history or these invasions we must to-day largely imagine.
Between two and three thousand years ago the wilder tribes of
Negroes began to move out of the region south or southeast of Lake
Chad. This was always a land of shadows and legends, where fearful
cannibals dwelt and where no Egyptian or Ethiopian or Sudanese
armies dared to go. It is possible, however, that pressure from civilization
in the Nile valley and rising culture around Lake Chad was
at this time reënforced by expansion of the Yoruba-Benin culture
on the west coast. Perhaps, too, developing culture around the
Great Lakes in the east beckoned or the riotous fertility of the
Congo valleys became known. At any rate the movement commenced,
now by slow stages, now in wild forays. There may have
been a preliminary movement from east to west to the Gulf of
Guinea. The main movement, however, was eastward, skirting the
Congo forests and passing down by the Victoria Nyanza and Lake
Tanganyika. Here two paths beckoned: the lakes and the sea to the
east, the Congo to the west. A great stream of men swept toward the
ocean and, dividing, turned northward and fought its way down the
Nile valley and into the Abyssinian highlands; another branch
turned south and approached the Zambesi, where we shall meet it
again.

Another horde of invaders turned westward and entered the valley
of the Congo in three columns. The northern column moved along
the Lualaba and Congo rivers to the Cameroons; the second column
became the industrial and state-building Luba and Lunda peoples in
the southern Congo valley and Angola; while the third column
moved into Damaraland and mingled with Bushman and Hottentot.

In the Congo valley the invaders settled in village and plain,
absorbed such indigenous inhabitants as they found or drove them
deeper into the forest, and immediately began to develop industry
and political organization. They became skilled agriculturists, raising
in some localities a profusion of cereals, fruit, and vegetables such
as manioc, maize, yams, sweet potatoes, ground nuts, sorghum,
gourds, beans, peas, bananas, and plantains. Everywhere they
showed skill in mining and the welding of iron, copper, and other
metals. They made weapons, wire and ingots, cloth, and pottery, and
a widespread system of trade arose. Some tribes extracted rubber
from the talamba root; others had remarkable breeds of fowl and
cattle, and still others divided their people by crafts into farmers,
smiths, boat builders, warriors, cabinet makers, armorers, and
speakers. Women here and there took part in public assemblies and
were rulers in some cases. Large towns were built, some of which
required hours to traverse from end to end.

Many tribes developed intelligence of a high order. Wissmann
called the Ba Luba “a nation of thinkers.” Bateman found them
“thoroughly and unimpeachably honest, brave to foolhardiness, and
faithful to each other and to their superiors.” One of their kings,
Calemba, “a really princely prince,” Bateman says would “amongst
any people be a remarkable and indeed in many respects a magnificent
man.”[27]

These beginnings of human culture were, however, peculiarly
vulnerable to invading hosts of later comers. There were no natural
protecting barriers like the narrow Nile valley or the Kong mountains
or the forests below Lake Chad. Once the pathways to the valley
were open and for hundreds of years the newcomers kept arriving,
especially from the welter of tribes south of the Sudan and west
of the Nile, which rising culture beyond kept in unrest and turmoil.

Against these intruders there was but one defense, the State.
State building was thus forced on the Congo valley. How early it
started we cannot say, but when the Portuguese arrived in the
fifteenth century, there had existed for centuries a large state
among the Ba-Congo, with its capital at the city now known as San
Salvador.

The Negro Mfumu, or emperor, was eventually induced to accept
Christianity. His sons and many young Negroes of high birth
were taken to Portugal to be educated. There several were raised to
the Catholic priesthood and one became bishop; others distinguished
themselves at the universities. Thus suddenly there arose a Catholic
kingdom south of the valley of the Congo, which lasted three centuries,
but was partially overthrown by invading barbarians from the
interior in the seventeenth century. A king of Congo still reigns as
pensioner of Portugal, and on the coast to-day are the remains of
the kingdom in the civilized blacks and mulattoes, who are intelligent
traders and boat builders.

Meantime the Luba-Lunda people to the eastward founded Kantanga
and other states, and in the sixteenth century the larger and
more ambitious realm of the Mwata Yamvo. The last of the fourteen
rulers of this line was feudal lord of about three hundred chiefs, who
paid him tribute in ivory, skins, corn, cloth, and salt. His territory
included about one hundred thousand square miles and two million
or more inhabitants. Eventually this state became torn by internal
strife and revolt, especially by attacks from the south across the
Congo-Zambesi divide.

Farther north, among the Ba-Lolo and the Ba-Songo, the village
policy persisted and the cannibals of the northeast pressed down on
the more settled tribes. The result was a curious blending of war
and industry, artistic tastes and savage customs.

The organized slave trade of the Arabs penetrated the Congo valley
in the sixteenth century and soon was aiding all the forces of
unrest and turmoil. Industry was deranged and many tribes forced
to take refuge in caves and other hiding places.

Here, as on the west coast, disintegration and retrogression followed,
for as the American traffic lessened, the Arabian traffic increased.
When, therefore, Stanley opened the Congo valley to
modern knowledge, Leopold II of Belgium conceived the idea of
founding here a free international state which was to bring civilization
to the heart of Africa. Consequently there was formed in 1878
an international committee to study the region. Stanley was finally
commissioned to inquire as to the best way of introducing European
trade and culture. “I am charged,” he said, “to open and keep open,
if possible, all such districts and countries as I may explore, for the
benefit of the commercial world. The mission is supported by a
philanthropic society, which numbers nobleminded men of several
nations. It is not a religious society, but my instructions are entirely
of that spirit. No violence must be used, and wherever rejected, the
mission must withdraw to seek another field.”[28]

The Bula Matadi or Stone Breaker, as the natives called Stanley,
threw himself energetically into the work and had by 1881 built a
road past the falls to the plateau, where thousands of miles of river
navigation were thus opened. Stations were established, and by 1884
Stanley returned armed with four hundred and fifty “treaties” with
the native chiefs, and the new “State” appealed to the world for
recognition.

The United States first recognized the “Congo Free State,” which
was at last made a sovereign power under international guarantees
by the Congress of Berlin in the year 1885, and Leopold II was
chosen its king. The state had an area of about nine hundred thousand
square miles, with a population of about thirty million.

One of the first tasks before the new state was to check the Arab
slave traders. The Arabs had hitherto acted as traders and middlemen
along the upper Congo, and when the English and Congo state
overthrew Mzidi, the reigning king in the Kantanga country, a general
revolt of the Arabs and mulattoes took place. For a time, 1892-93,
the whites were driven out, but in a year or two the Arabs and
their allies were subdued.

Humanity and commerce, however, did not replace the Arab slave
traders. Rather European greed and serfdom were substituted. The
land was confiscated by the state and farmed out to private Belgian
corporations. The wilder cannibal tribes were formed into a militia
to prey on the industrious, who were taxed with specific amounts of
ivory and rubber, and scourged and mutilated if they failed to pay.
Harris declares that King Leopold’s regime meant the death of
twelve million natives.

“Europe was staggered at the Leopoldian atrocities, and they were
terrible indeed; but what we, who were behind the scenes, felt most
keenly was the fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was the
desolation and murder in the larger sense. The invasion of family
life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering of
every tribal law, the introduction of criminal practices which struck
the chiefs of the people dumb with horror—in a word, a veritable
avalanche of filth and immorality overwhelmed the Congo tribes.”[29]

So notorious did the exploitation and misrule become that Leopold
was forced to take measures toward reform, and finally in 1909
the Free State became a Belgian colony. Some reforms have been
inaugurated and others may follow, but the valley of the Congo will
long stand as a monument of shame to Christianity and European
civilization.

VI

THE GREAT LAKES AND ZYMBABWE

We have already seen how a branch of the conquering Bantus
turned eastward by the Great Lakes and thus reached the sea and
eventually both the Nile and South Africa.

This brought them into the ancient and mysterious land far up
the Nile, south of Ethiopia. Here lay the ancient Punt of the
Egyptians (whether we place it in Somaliland or, as seems far more
likely, around the Great Lakes) and here, as the Egyptians thought,
their civilization began. The earliest inhabitants of the land were
apparently of the Bushman or Hottentot type of Negro. These were
gradually pushed southward and westward by the intrusion of the
Nilotic Negroes. Five thousand years before Christ the mulatto
Egyptians were in the Nile valley below the First Cataract. The
Negroes were in the Nile valley down as far as the Second Cataract
and between the First and Second Cataracts were Negroes into
whose veins Semitic blood had penetrated more or less. These
mixed elements became the ancestors of the modern Somali, Gala,
Bishari, and Beja and spread Negro blood into Arabia beyond the
Red Sea. The Nilotic Negroes to the south early became great
traders in ivory, gold, leopard skins, gums, beasts, birds, and slaves,
and they opened up systematic trade between Egypt and the Great
Lakes.

The result was endless movement and migration both in ancient
and modern days, which makes the cultural history of the Great
Lakes region very difficult to understand. Three great elements are,
however, clear: first, the Egyptian element, by the northward migration
of the Negro ancestors of predynastic Egypt and the southern
conquests and trade of dynastic Egypt; second, the Semitic influence
from Arabia and Persia; third, the Negro influences from
western and central Africa.

The migration of the Bantu is the first clearly defined movement
of modern times. As we have shown, they began to move southward
at least a thousand years before Christ, skirting the Congo forests
and wandering along the Great Lakes and down to the Zambesi.
What did they find in this land?

We do not know certainly, but from what we do know we may
reconstruct the situation in this way: the primitive culture of the
Hottentots of Punt had been further developed by them and by
other stronger Negro stocks until it reached a highly developed culture.
Widespread agriculture, and mining of gold, silver, and precious
stones started a trade that penetrated to Asia and North Africa.
This may have been the source of the gold of the Ophir.

The state that thus arose became in time strongly organized; it
employed slave labor in crushing the hard quartz, sinking pits, and
carrying underground galleries; it carried out a system of irrigation
and built stone buildings and fortifications. There exists to-day
many remains of these building operations in the Kalahari desert
and in northern Rhodesia. Five hundred groups, covering over an
area of one hundred and fifty thousand square miles, lie between
the Limpopo and Zambesi rivers. Mining operations have been carried
on in these plains for generations, and one estimate is that at
least three hundred and seventy-five million dollars’ worth of gold
had been extracted. Some have thought that the older workings
must date back to one or even three thousand years before the
Christian era.

“There are other mines,” writes De Barros in the seventeenth century,[30]
“in a district called Toroa, which is otherwise known as the
kingdom of Butua, whose ruler is a prince, by name Burrow, a vassal
of Benomotapa. This land is near the other which we said consisted
of extensive plains, and those ruins are the oldest that are known in
that region. They are all in a plain, in the middle of which stands
a square fortress, all of dressed stones within and without, well
wrought and of marvelous size, without any lime showing the
joinings, the walls of which are over twenty-five hands thick, but
the height is not so great compared to the thickness. And above the
gateway of that edifice is an inscription which some Moorish [Arab]
traders who were there could not read, nor say what writing it was.
All these structures the people of this country call Symbaoe [Zymbabwe],
which with them means a court, for every place where
Benomotapa stays is so called.”

Later investigation has shown that these buildings were in many
cases carefully planned and built fortifications. At Niekerk, for instance,
nine or ten hills are fortified on concentric walls thirty to
fifty feet in number, with a place for the village at the top. The
buildings are forts, miniature citadels, and also workshops and cattle
kraals. Iron implements and handsome pottery were found here, and
close to the Zambesi there are extraordinary fortifications. Farther
south at Inyanga there is less strong defense, and at Umtali there
are no fortifications, showing that builders feared invasion from the
north.

These people worked in gold, silver, tin, copper, and bronze and
made beautiful pottery. There is evidence of religious significance
in the buildings, and what is called the temple was the royal residence
and served as a sort of acropolis. The surrounding residences
in the valley were evidently occupied by wealthy traders and were
not fortified. Here the gold was received from surrounding districts
and bartered with traders.

As usual there have been repeated attempts to find an external
and especially an Asiatic origin for this culture. So far, however,
archeological research seems to confirm its African origin. The implements,
weapons, and art are characteristically African and there
is no evident connection with outside sources. How far back this
civilization dates it is difficult to say, a great deal depending upon
the dating of the iron age in South Africa. If it was the same as in
the Mediterranean regions, the earliest limit was 1000 B.C.; it might,
however, have been much earlier, especially if, as seems probable,
the use of iron originated in Africa. On the other hand the culmination
of this culture has been placed by some as late as the modern
middle ages.

What was it that overthrew this civilization? Undoubtedly the
same sort of raids of barbarous warriors that we have known in our
day. For instance, in 1570 there came upon the country of Mozambique,
farther up the coast, “such an inundation of pagans that they
could not be numbered. They came from that part of Monomotapa
where is the great lake from which spring these great rivers. They
left no other signs of the towns they passed but the heaps of ruins
and the bones of inhabitants.” So, too, it is told how the Zimbas
came, “a strange people never before seen there, who, leaving their
own country, traversed a great part of this Ethiopia like a scourge
of God, destroying every living thing they came across. They were
twenty thousand strong and marched without children or women,”
just as four hundred years later the Zulu impi marched. Again in
1602 a horde of people came from the interior called the Cabires,
or cannibals. They entered the kingdom of Monomotapa, and the
reigning king, being weak, was in great terror. Thus gradually the
Monomotapa fell, and its power was scattered until the Kaffir-Zulu
raids of our day.[31]

The Arab writer, Macoudi, in the tenth century visited the East
African coast somewhere north of the equator. He found the Indian
Sea at that time frequented by Arab and Persian vessels, but there
were no Asiatic settlements on the African shore. The Bantu, or as
he calls them, Zenji, inhabited the country as far south as Sofala,
where they bordered upon the Bushmen. These Bantus were under
a ruler with the dynastic title of Waklimi. He was paramount over
all the other tribes of the north and could put three hundred thousand
men in the field. They used oxen as beasts of burden and the
country produced gold in abundance, while panther skin was largely
used for clothing. Ivory was sold to Asia and the Bantu used iron
for personal adornment instead of gold or silver. They rode on their
oxen, which ran with great speed, and they ate millet and honey
and the flesh of animals.

Inland among the Bantu arose later the line of rulers called the
Monomotapa among the gifted Makalanga. Their state was very
extensive, ranging from the coast far into the interior and from
Mozambique down to the Limpopo. It was strongly organized, with
feudatory allied states, and carried on an extensive commerce by
means of the traders on the coast. The kings were converted to
nominal Christianity by the Portuguese.

There are indications of trade between Nupe in West Africa and
Sofala on the east coast, and certainly trade between Asia and East
Africa is earlier than the beginning of the Christian era. The Asiatic
traders settled on the coast and by means of mulatto and Negro
merchants brought Central Africa into contact with Arabia, India,
China, and Malaysia.

The coming of the Asiatics was in this wise: Zaide, great-grandson
of Ali, nephew and son-in-law of Mohammed, was banished from
Arabia as a heretic. He passed over to Africa and formed temporary
settlements. His people mingled with the blacks, and the resulting
mulatto traders, known as the Emoxaidi, seem to have wandered as
far south as the equator. Soon other Arabian families came over on
account of oppression and founded the towns of Magadosho and
Brava, both not far north of the equator. The first town became a
place of importance and other settlements were made. The Emoxaidi,
whom the later immigrants regarded as heretics, were driven
inland and became the interpreting traders between the coast and
the Bantu. Some wanderers from Magadosho came into the Port of
Sofala and there learned that gold could be obtained. This led to a
small Arab settlement at that place.

Seventy years later, and about fifty years before the Norman
conquest of England, certain Persians settled at Kilwa in East Africa,
led by Ali, who had been despised in his land because he was the
son of a black Abyssinian slave mother. Kilwa, because of this,
eventually became the most important commercial station on the
East African coast, and in this and all these settlements a very large
mulatto population grew up, so that very soon the whole settlement
was indistinguishable in color from the Bantu.

In 1330 Ibn Batuta visited Kilwa. He found an abundance of
ivory and some gold and heard that the inhabitants of Kilwa had
gained victories over the Zenji or Bantu. Kilwa had at that time
three hundred mosques and was “built of handsome houses of stone
and lime, and very lofty, with their windows like those of the
Christians; in the same way it has streets, and these houses have got
terraces, and the wood-work is with the masonry, with plenty of
gardens, in which there are many fruit trees and much water.”[32]
Kilwa after a time captured Sofala, seizing it from Magadosho.
Eventually Kilwa became mistress of the island of Zanzibar, of
Mozambique, and of much other territory. The forty-third ruler of
Kilwa after Ali was named Abraham, and he was ruling when the
Portuguese arrived. The latter reported that these people cultivated
rice and cocoa, built ships, and had considerable commerce with
Asia. All the people, of whatever color, were Mohammedans, and
the richer were clothed in gorgeous robes of silk and velvet. They
traded with the inland Bantus and met numerous tribes, receiving
gold, ivory, millet, rice, cattle, poultry, and honey.

On the islands the Asiatics were independent, but on the main
lands south of Kilwa the sheiks ruled only their own people, under
the overlordship of the Bantus, to whom they were compelled to
pay large tribute each year.

Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and
went north on the east coast as far as India. In the next ten years
the Portuguese had occupied more than six different points on that
coast, including Sofala.[33]

Thus civilization waxed and waned in East Africa among prehistoric
Negroes, Arab and Persian mulattoes on the coast, in the
Zend or Zeng empire of Bantu Negroes, and later in the Bantu rule
of the Monomotapa. And thus, too, among later throngs of the
fiercer, warlike Bantu, the ancient culture of the land largely died.
Yet something survived, and in the modern Bantu state, language,
and industry can be found clear links that establish the essential
identity of the absorbed peoples with the builders of Zymbabwe.

So far we have traced the history of the lands into which the
southward stream of invading Bantus turned, and have followed
them to the Limpopo River. We turn now to the lands north from
Lake Nyassa.

The aboriginal Negroes sustained in prehistoric time invasions
from the northeast by Negroids of a type like the ancient Egyptians
and like the modern Gallas, Masai, and Somalis. To these migrations
were added attacks from the Nile Negroes to the north and
the Bantu invaders from the south. This has led to great differences
among the groups of the population and in their customs. Some are
fierce mountaineers, occupying hilly plateaus six thousand feet above
the sea level; others, like the Wa Swahili, are traders on the coast.
There are the Masai, chocolate-colored and frizzly-haired, organized
for war and cattle lifting; and Negroids like the Gallas, who, blending
with the Bantus, have produced the race of modern Uganda.

It was in this region that the kingdom of Kitwara was founded
by the Galla chief, Kintu. About the beginning of the nineteenth
century the empire was dismembered, the largest share falling to
Uganda. The ensuing history of Uganda is of great interest. When
King Mutesa came to the throne in 1862, he found Mohammedan
influences in his land and was induced to admit English Protestants
and French Catholics. Uganda thereupon became an extraordinary
religious battlefield between these three beliefs. Mutesa’s successor,
Mwanga, caused an English bishop to be killed in 1885, believing
(as has since proven quite true) that the religion he offered would
be used as a cloak for conquest. The final result was that, after
open war between the religions, Uganda was made an English protectorate
in 1894.

The Negroes of Uganda are an intelligent people who had organized
a complex feudal state. At the head stood the king, and
under him twelve feudal lords. The present king, Daudi Chua, is
the young grandson of Mutesa and rules under the overlordship of
England.

Many things show the connection between Egypt and this part of
Africa. The same glass beads are found in Uganda and Upper
Egypt, and similar canoes are built. Harps and other instruments
bear great resemblance. Finally the Bahima, as the Galla invaders
are called, are startlingly Egyptian in type; at the same time they
are undoubtedly Negro in hair and color. Perhaps we have here the
best racial picture of what ancient Egyptian and upper Nile regions
were in predynastic times and later.

Thus in outline was seen the mission of The People—La Bantu
as they called themselves. They migrated, they settled, they tore
down, and they learned, and they in turn were often overthrown by
succeeding tribes of their own folk. They rule with their tongue
and their power all Africa south of the equator, save where the
Europeans have entered. They have never been conquered, although
the gold and diamond traders have sought to debauch them, and
the ivory and rubber capitalists have cruelly wronged their weaker
groups. They are the Africans with whom the world of to-morrow
must reckon, just as the world of yesterday knew them to its cost.

VII

THE WAR OF RACES AT LAND’S END

Primitive man in Africa is found in the interior jungles and down
at Land’s End in South Africa. The Pygmy people in the jungles
represent to-day a small survival from the past, but a survival of
curious interest, pushed aside by the torrent of conquest. Also pushed
on by these waves of Bantu conquest, moved the ancient Abatwa or
Bushmen. They are small in stature, yellow in color, with crisp-curled
hair. The traditions of the Bushmen say that they came southward
from the regions of the Great Lakes, and indeed the king and
queen of Punt, as depicted by the Egyptians, were Bushmen or
Hottentots.

Their tribes may be divided, in accordance with their noticeable
artistic talents, into the painters and the sculptors. The sculptors
entered South Africa by moving southward through the more central
portions of the country, crossing the Zambesi, and coming down
to the Cape. The painters, on the other hand, came through Damaraland
on the west coast; when they came to the great mountain
regions, they turned eastward and can be traced as far as the mountains
opposite Delagoa Bay. The mass of them settled down in the
lower part of the Cape and in the Kalahari desert. The painters were
true cave dwellers, but the sculptors lived in large communities on
the stony hills, which they marked with their carvings.

These Bushmen believed in an ancient race of people who preceded
them in South Africa. They attributed magic power to these
unknown folk, and said that some of them had been translated as
stars to the sky. Before their groups were dispersed the Bushmen
had regular government. Tribes with their chiefs occupied well-defined
tracts of country and were subdivided into branch tribes
under subsidiary chiefs. The great cave represented the dignity and
glory of the entire tribe.

The Bushmen suffered most cruelly in the succeeding migrations
and conquests of South Africa. They fought desperately in self-defense;
they saw their women and children carried into bondage
and they themselves hunted like wild beasts. Both savage and civilized
men appropriated their land. Still they were brave people. “In
this struggle for existence their bitterest enemies, of whatever shade
of color they might be, were forced to make an unqualified acknowledgement
of the courage and daring they so invariably exhibited.”[34]

Here, to a remote corner of the world, where, as one of their
number said, they had supposed that the only beings in the world
were Bushmen and lions, came a series of invaders. It was the outer
ripples of civilization starting far away, the indigenous and external
civilizations of Africa beating with great impulse among the Ethiopians
and the Egyptian mulattoes and Sudanese Negroes and
Yorubans, and driving the Bantu race southward. The Bantus
crowded more and more upon the primitive Bushmen, and probably
a mingling of the Bushmen and the Bantus gave rise to the Hottentots.

The Hottentots, or as they called themselves, Khoi Khoin (Men
of Men), were physically a stronger race than the Abatwa and gave
many evidences of degeneration from a high culture, especially in
the “phenomenal perfection” of a language which “is so highly developed,
both in its rich phonetic system, as represented by a very
delicately graduated series of vowels and diphthongs, and in its
varied grammatical structure, that Lepsius sought for its affinities in
the Egyptian at the other end of the continent.”

When South Africa was first discovered there were two distinct
types of Hottentot. The more savage Hottentots were simply large,
strong Bushmen, using weapons superior to the Bushmen, without
domestic cattle or sheep. Other tribes nearer the center of South
Africa were handsomer in appearance and raised an Egyptian breed
of cattle which they rode.

In general the Hottentots were yellow, with close-curled hair,
high cheek bones, and somewhat oblique eyes. Their migration commenced
about the end of the fourteenth century and was, as is usual
in such cases, a scattered, straggling movement. The traditions of
the Hottentots point to the lake country of Central Africa as their
place of origin, whence they were driven by the Bechuana tribes of
the Bantu. They fled westward to the ocean and then turned south
and came upon the Bushmen, whom they had only partially subdued
when the Dutch arrived as settlers in 1652.

The Dutch “Boers” began by purchasing land from the Hottentots
and then, as they grew more powerful, they dispossessed the dark
men and tried to enslave them. There grew up a large Dutch-Hottentot
class. Indeed the filtration of Negro blood noticeable in
modern Boers accounts for much curious history. Soon after the
advent of the Dutch some of the Hottentots, of whom there were
not more than thirty or forty thousand, led by the Korana clans,
began slowly to retreat northward, followed by the invading Dutch
and fighting the Dutch, each other, and the wretched Bushmen. In
the latter part of the eighteenth century the Hottentots had reached
the great interior plain and met the on-coming outposts of the Bantu
nations.

The Bechuana, whom the Hottentots first met, were the most
advanced of the Negro tribes of Central Africa. They had crossed
the Zambesi in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; their government
was a sort of feudal system with hereditary chiefs and vassals; they
were careful agriculturists, laid out large towns with great regularity,
and were the most skilled of smiths. They used stone in building,
carved on wood, and many of them, too, were keen traders. These
tribes, coming southward, occupied the east-central part of South
Africa comprising modern Bechuanaland. Apparently they had
started from the central lake country somewhere late in the fifteenth
century, and by the middle of the eighteenth century one of their
great chiefs, Tao, met the on-coming Hottentots.

The Hottentots compelled Tao to retreat, but the mulatto Gricquas
arrived from the south, and, allying themselves with the
Bechuana, stopped the rout. The Gricquas sprang from and took
their name from an old Hottentot tribe. They were led by Kok and
Barends, and by adding other elements they became, partly through
their own efforts and partly through the efforts of the missionaries, a
community of fairly well civilized people. In Gricqualand West the
mulatto Gricquas, under their chiefs Kok and Waterboer, lived until
the discovery of diamonds.

The Griquas and Bechuana tribes were thus gradually checking
the Hottentots when, in the nineteenth century, there came two
new developments: first, the English took possession of Cape Colony,
and the Dutch began to move in larger numbers toward the
interior; secondly, a newer and fiercer element of the Bantu tribes,
the Zulu-Kaffirs, appeared. The Kaffirs, or as they called themselves,
the Amazosas, claimed descent from Zuide, a great chief of the fifteenth
century in the lake country. They are among the tallest people
in the world, averaging five feet ten inches, and are slim, well-proportioned,
and muscular. The more warlike tribes were usually
clothed in leopard or ox skins. Cattle formed their chief wealth,
stock breeding and hunting and fighting their main pursuits. Mentally
they were men of tact and intelligence, with a national religion
based upon ancestor worship, while their government was a
patriarchal monarchy limited by an aristocracy and almost feudal in
character. The common law which had grown up from the decisions
of the chiefs made the head of the family responsible for the conduct
of its branches, a village for all its residents, and the clan for
all its villages. Finally there was a paramount chief, who was the
civil and military father of his people. These people laid waste to
the coast regions and in 1779 came in contact with the Dutch. A
series of Dutch-Kaffir wars ensued between 1779 and 1795 in which
the Dutch were hard pressed.

In 1806 the English took final possession of Cape Colony. At that
time there were twenty-five thousand Boers, twenty-five thousand
pure and mixed Hottentots, and twenty-five thousand slaves secured
from the east coast. Between 1811 and 1877 there were six Kaffir-English
wars. One of these in 1818 grew out of the ignorant interference
of the English with the Kaffir tribal system; then there came
a terrible war between 1834 and 1835, followed by the annexation
of all the country as far as the Kei River. The war of the Axe
(1846-48) led to further annexation by the British.

Hostilities broke out again in 1856 and 1863. In the former year,
despairing of resistance to invading England, a prophet arose who
advised the wholesale destruction of all Kaffir property except weapons,
in order that this faith might bring back their dead heroes. The
result was that almost a third of the nation perished from hunger.
Fresh troubles occurred in 1877, when the Ama-Xosa confederacy
was finally broken up, and to-day gradually these tribes are passing
from independence to a state of mild vassalage to the British.

Meantime the more formidable part of the Zulu-Kaffirs had been
united under the terrible Chief Chaka. He had organized a military
system, not a new one by any means, but one of which we hear
rumors back in the lake regions in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. McDonald says, “There has probably never been a more
perfect system of discipline than that by which Chaka ruled his
army and kingdom. At a review an order might be given in the most
unexpected manner, which meant death to hundreds. If the regiment
hesitated or dared to remonstrate, so perfect was the discipline
and so great the jealousy that another was ready to cut them down.
A warrior returning from battle without his arms was put to death
without trial. A general returning unsuccessful in the main purpose
of his expedition shared the same fate. Whoever displeased the king
was immediately executed. The traditional courts practically ceased
to exist so far as the will and action of the tyrant was concerned.”
With this army Chaka fell on tribe after tribe. The Bechuana fled
before him and some tribes of them were entirely destroyed. The
Hottentots suffered severely and one of his rival Zulu tribes under
Umsilikatsi fled into Matabililand, pushing back the Bechuana. By
the time the English came to Port Natal, Chaka was ruling over
the whole southeastern seaboard, from the Limpopo River to Cape
Colony, including the Orange and Transvaal states and the whole
of Natal. Chaka was killed in 1828 and was eventually succeeded
by his brother Dingan, who reigned twelve years. It was during
Dingan’s reign that England tried to abolish slavery in Cape
Colony, but did not pay promptly for the slaves, as she had promised;
the result was the so-called “Great Trek,” about 1834, when
thousands of Boers went into the interior across the Orange and
Vaal rivers.

Dingan and these Boers were soon engaged in a death struggle in
which the Zulus were repulsed and Dingan replaced by Panda.
Under this chief there was something like repose for sixteen years,
but in 1856 civil war broke out between his sons, one of whom,
Cetewayo, succeeded his father in 1882. He fell into border disputes
with the English, and the result was one of the fiercest clashes
of Europe and Africa in modern days. The Zulus fought desperately,
annihilating at one time a whole detachment and killing the young
prince Napoleon. But after all it was assagais against machine guns,
and the Zulus were finally defeated at Ulundi, July 4, 1879. Thereupon
Zululand was divided among thirteen semi-independent chiefs
and became a British protectorate.

Ancient Kingdoms of Africa

Since then the best lands have been gradually reoccupied by a
large number of tribes—Kaffirs from the south and Zulus from the
north. The tribal organization, without being actually broken up,
has been deprived of its dangerous features by appointing paid village
headmen and transforming the hereditary chief into a British
government official. In Natal there are about one hundred and
seventy tribal chiefs, and nearly half of these have been appointed
by the governor.

Umsilikatsi, who had been driven into Matabililand by the terrible
Chaka in 1828 and defeated by the Dutch in 1837, had finally
reestablished his headquarters in Rhodesia in 1838. Here he introduced
the Zulu military system and terrorized the peaceful and
industrious Bechuana populations. Lobengula succeeded Umsilikatsi
in 1870 and, realizing that his power was waning, began to retreat
northward toward the Zambesi. He was finally defeated by the
British and native forces in 1893 and the land was incorporated into
South Central Africa.

The result of all these movements was to break the inhabitants
of Bechuanaland into numerous fragments. There were small numbers
of mulatto Gricquas in the southwest and similar Bastaards in
the northwest. The Hottentots and Bushmen were dispersed into
groups and seem doomed to extinction, the last Hottentot chief being
deposed in 1810 and replaced by an English magistrate. Partially
civilized Hottentots still live grouped together in their kraals and
are members of Christian churches. The Bechuana hold their own
in several centers; one is in Basutoland, west of Natal, where a
number of tribes were welded together under the far-sighted Moshesh
into a modern and fairly well civilized nation. In the north part
of Bechuanaland are the self-governing Bamangwato and the Batwana,
the former ruled by Khama, one of the canniest of modern
rulers in Africa.

Meantime, in Portuguese territory south of the Zambesi, there
arose Gaza, a contemporary and rival of Chaka. His son, Manikus,
was deputed by Dingan, Chaka’s successor, to drive out the Portuguese.
This Manikus failed to do, and to escape vengeance he
migrated north of the Limpopo. Here he established his military
kraal in a district thirty-six hundred and fifty feet above the sea and
one hundred and twenty miles inland from Sofala. From this place
his soldiery nearly succeeded in driving the Portuguese out of East
Africa. He was succeeded by his son, Umzila, and Umzila’s brother,
Guzana (better known as Gungunyana), who exercised for a time
joint authority. Gungunyana was finally overthrown in November,
1895, captured, and removed to the Azores.

Races in Africa

North of the Zambesi, in British territory, the chief role in recent
times has been played by the Bechuana, the first of the Bantu to
return northward after the South African migration. Livingstone
found there the Makolo, who with other tribes had moved northward
on account of the pressure of the Dutch and Zulus below, and
by conquering various tribes in the Zambesi region had established
a strong power. This kingdom was nearly overthrown by the rebellion
of the Barotse, and in 1875 the Barotse kingdom comprised a large
territory. To-day their king, Lewanika, rules directly and indirectly
fifty thousand square miles, with a population between one and two
and a half million. They are under a protectorate of the British.

In Southwest Africa, Hottentot mulattoes crossing from the Cape
caused widespread change. They were strong men and daring fighters
and soon became dominant in what is now German Southwest
Africa, where they fought fiercely with the Bantu Ova-Hereros.
Armed with fire arms, these Namakwa Hottentots threatened Portuguese
West Africa, but Germany intervened, ostensibly to protect
missionaries. By spending millions of dollars and thousands of soldiers
Germany has nearly exterminated these brave men.

Thus we have between the years 1400 and 1900 a great period
of migration up to 1750, when Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu, and
Dutch appeared in succession at Land’s End. In the latter part of
the eighteenth century we have the clash of the Hottentots and
Bechuana, followed in the nineteenth century by the terrible wars
of Chaka, the Kaffirs, and Matabili. Finally, in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, we see the gradual subjection of the Kaffir-Zulus
and the Bechuana under the English and the final conquest
of the Dutch. The resulting racial problem in South Africa is one
of great intricacy.

To the racial problem has been added the tremendous problem
of modern capital brought by the discovery of gold and diamond
mines, so that the future of the Negro race is peculiarly bound up
in developments here at Land’s End, where the ship of the Flying
Dutchman beats back and forth on its endless quest.

VIII

AFRICAN CULTURE

We have followed the history of mankind in Africa down the valley
of the Nile, past Ethiopia to Egypt; we have seen kingdoms arise
along the great bend of the Niger and strive with the ancient culture
at its mouth. We have seen the remnants of mankind at Land’s
End, the ancient culture at Punt and Zymbabwe, and followed the
invading Bantu east, south, and west to their greatest center in the
vast jungle of the Congo valleys.

We must now gather these threads together and ask what manner
of men these were and how far and in what way they progressed
on the road of human culture.

That Negro peoples were the beginners of civilization along the
Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Nile seems proven. Early Babylon
was founded by a Negroid race. Hammurabi’s code, the most ancient
known, says “Anna and Bel called me, Hammurabi the exalted
prince, the worshiper of the gods; to cause justice to prevail in the
land, to destroy the wicked, to prevent the strong from oppressing
the weak, to go forth like the sun over the black-head race, to
enlighten the land, and to further the welfare of the people.” The
Assyrians show a distinct Negroid strain and early Egypt was predominantly
Negro. These earliest of cultures were crude and primitive,
but they represented the highest attainment of mankind after
tens of thousands of years in unawakened savagery.

It has often been assumed that the Negro is physically inferior
to other races and markedly distinguishable from them; modern
science gives no authority for such an assumption. The supposed
inferiority cannot rest on color,[35] for that is “due to the combined
influences of a great number of factors of environment working
through physiological processes,” and “however marked the contrasts
may be, there is no corresponding difference in anatomical structure
discoverable.”[36] So, too, difference in texture of hair is a matter of
degree, not kind, and is caused by heat, moisture, exposure, and the
like.

The bony skeleton presents no distinctly racial lines of variation.
Prognathism “presents too many individual varieties to be taken as
a distinctive character of race.”[37] Difference in physical measurements
does not show the Negro to be a more primitive evolutionary form.
Comparative ethnology to-day affords “no support to the view which
sees in the so-called lower races of mankind a transition stage from
beast to man.”[38]

Much has been made of the supposed smaller brain of the Negro
race; but this is as yet an unproved assumption, based on the uncritical
measurement of less than a thousand Negro brains as compared
with eleven thousand or more European brains. Even if future
measurement prove the average Negro brain lighter, the vast majority
of Negro brain weights fall within the same limits as the whites;
and finally, “neither size nor weight of the brain seems to be of
importance” as an index of mental capacity. We may, therefore, say
with Ratzel, “There is only one species of man. The variations are
numerous, but do not go deep.”[39]

To this we may add the word of the Secretary of the First Races
Congress: “We are, then, under the necessity of concluding that an
impartial investigator would be inclined to look upon the various
important peoples of the world as to all intents and purposes essentially
equal in intellect, enterprise, morality, and physique.”[40]

If these conclusions are true, we should expect to see in Africa
the human drama play itself out much as in other lands, and such
has actually been the fact. At the same time we must expect peculiarities
arising from the physiography of the land—its climate, its
rainfall, its deserts, and the peculiar inaccessibility of the coast.

Three principal zones of habitation appear: first, the steppes and
deserts around the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari desert in
the south; secondly, the grassy highlands bordering the Great Lakes
and connecting these two regions; thirdly, the forests and rivers of
Central and West Africa. In the deserts are the nomads, and the
Pygmies are in the forest fastnesses. Herdsmen and their cattle cover
the steppes and highlands, save where the tsetse fly prevents. In the
open forests and grassy highlands are the agriculturists.

Among the forest farmers the village is the center of life, while
in the open steppes political life tends to spread into larger political
units. Political integration is, however, hindered by an ease of internal
communication almost as great as the difficulty of reaching
outer worlds beyond the continent. The narrow Nile valley alone
presented physical barriers formidable enough to keep back the
invading barbarians of the south, and even then with difficulty.
Elsewhere communication was all too easy. For a while the Congo
forests fended away the restless, but this only temporarily.

On the whole Africa from the Sahara to the Cape offered no
great physical barrier to the invader, and we continually have whirlwinds
of invading hosts rushing now southward, now northward,
from the interior to the coast and from the coast inland, and hurling
their force against states, kingdoms, and cities. Some resisted for
generations, some for centuries, some but a few years. It is, then,
this sudden change and the fear of it that marks African culture,
particularly in its political aspects, and which makes it so difficult
to trace this changing past. Nevertheless beneath all change rests
the strong substructure of custom, religion, industry, and art well
worth the attention of students.

Starting with agriculture, we learn that “among all the great
groups of the ‘natural’ races, the Negroes are the best and keenest
tillers of the ground. A minority despise agriculture and breed
cattle; many combine both occupations. Among the genuine tillers
the whole life of the family is taken up in agriculture, and hence
the months are by preference called after the operations which they
demand. Constant clearings change forests to fields, and the ground
is manured with the ashes of the burnt thicket. In the middle of
the fields rise the light watch-towers, from which a watchman scares
grain-eating birds and other thieves. An African cultivated landscape
is incomplete without barns. The rapidity with which, when
newly imported, the most various forms of cultivation spread in
Africa says much for the attention which is devoted to this branch
of economy. Industries, again, which may be called agricultural, like
the preparation of meal from millet and other crops, also from
cassava, the fabrication of fermented drinks from grain, or the manufacture
of cotton, are widely known and sedulously fostered.”[41]

Bücher reminds us of the deep impression made upon travelers
when they sight suddenly the well-attended fields of the natives on
emerging from the primeval forests. “In the more thickly populated
parts of Africa these fields often stretch for many a mile, and the
assiduous care of the Negro women shines in all the brighter light
when we consider the insecurity of life, the constant feuds and
pillages, in which no one knows whether he will in the end be able
to harvest what he has sown. Livingstone gives somewhere a graphic
description of the devastations wrought by slave hunts; the people
were lying about slain, the dwellings were demolished; in the fields,
however, the grain was ripening and there was none to harvest it.”[42]

Sheep, goat, and chickens are domestic animals all over Africa,
and Von Franzius considers Africa the home of the house cattle and
the Negro as the original tamer. Northeastern Africa especially is
noted for agriculture, cattle raising, and fruit culture. In the eastern
Sudan, and among the great Bantu tribes extending from the Sudan
down toward the south, cattle are evidences of wealth; one tribe,
for instance, having so many oxen that each village had ten or
twelve thousand head. Lenz (1884), Bouet-Williaumez (1848),
Hecquard (1854), Bosman (1805), and Baker (1868) all bear witness
to this, and Schweinfurth (1878) tells us of great cattle parks
with two to three thousand head and of numerous agricultural and
cattle-raising tribes. Von der Decken (1859-61) described the
paradise of the dwellers about Kilimanjaro—the bananas, fruit, beans
and peas, cattle raising with stall feed, the fertilizing of the fields,
and irrigation. The Negroid Gallas have seven or eight cattle to
each inhabitant. Livingstone bears witness to the busy cattle raising
of the Bantus and Kaffirs. Hulub (1881) and Chapman (1868) tell
of agriculture and fruit raising in South Africa. Shutt (1884) found
the tribes in the southwestern basin of the Congo with sheep, swine,
goats, and cattle. On this agricultural and cattle-raising economic
foundation has arisen the organized industry of the artisan, the
trader, and the manufacturer.

While the Pygmies, still living in the age of wood, make no iron
or stone implements, they seem to know how to make bark cloth
and fiber baskets and simple outfits for hunting and fishing. Among
the Bushmen the art of making weapons and working in hides is
quite common. The Hottentots are further advanced in the industrial
arts, being well versed in the manufacture of clothing, weapons,
and utensils. In the dressing of skins and furs, as well as in the
plaiting of cords and the weaving of mats, we find evidences of their
workmanship. In addition they are good workers in iron and copper,
using the sheepskin bellows for this purpose. The Ashantis of the
Gold Coast know how to make “cotton fabrics, turn and glaze
earthenware, forge iron, fabricate instruments and arms, embroider
rugs and carpets, and set gold and precious stones.”[43] Among the
people of the banana zone we find rough basket work, coarse pottery,
grass cloth, and spoons made of wood and ivory. The people
of the millet zone, because of uncertain agricultural resources, quite
generally turn to manufacturing. Charcoal is prepared by the smiths,
iron is smelted, and numerous implements are manufactured. Among
them we find axes, hatchets, hoes, knives, nails, scythes, and other
hardware. Cloaks, shoes, sandals, shields, and water and oil vessels
are made from leather which the natives have dressed. Soap is manufactured
in the Bautschi district, glass is made, formed, and colored
by the people of Nupeland, and in almost every city cotton is spun
and woven and dyed. Barth tells us that the weaving of cotton was
known in the Sudan as early as the eleventh century. There is also
extensive manufacture of wooden ware, tools, implements, and
utensils.

In describing particular tribes, Baker and Felkin tell of smiths of
wonderful adroitness, goatskins prepared better than a European
tanner could do, drinking cups and kegs of remarkable symmetry,
and polished clay floors. Schweinfurth says, “The arrow and the
spear heads are of the finest and most artistic work; their bristlelike
barbs and points are baffling when one knows how few tools these
smiths have.” Excellent wood carving is found among the Bongo,
Ovambo, and Makololo. Pottery and basketry and careful hut building
distinguish many tribes. Cameron (1877) tells of villages so
clean, with huts so artistic, that, save in book knowledge, the people
occupied no low plane of civilization. The Mangbettu work both
iron and copper. “The masterpieces of the Monbutto [Mangbettu]
smiths are the fine chains worn as ornaments, and which in perfection
of form and fineness compare well with our best steel chains.”
Shubotz in 1911 called the Mangbettu “a highly cultivated people”
in architecture and handicraft. Barth found copper exported from
Central Africa in competition with European copper at Kano.

Nor is the iron industry confined to the Sudan. About the Great
Lakes and other parts of Central Africa it is widely distributed.
Thornton says, “This iron industry proves that the East Africans
stand by no means on so low a plane of culture as many travelers
would have us think. It is unnecessary to be reminded what a people
without instruction, and with the rudest tools to do such skilled
work, could do if furnished with steel tools.” Arrows made east of
Lake Nyanza were found to be nearly as good as the best Swedish
iron in Birmingham. From Egypt to the Cape, Livingstone assures
us that the mortar and pestle, the long-handled axe, the goatskin
bellows, etc., have the same form, size, etc., pointing to a migration
southwestward. Holub (1879), on the Zambesi, found fine workers
in iron and bronze. The Bantu huts contain spoons, wooden dishes,
milk pails, calabashes, handmills, and axes.

Kaffirs and Zulus, in the extreme south, are good smiths, and the
latter melt copper and tin together and draw wire from it, according
to Kranz (1880). West of the Great Lakes, Stanley (1878) found
wonderful examples of smith work: figures worked out of brass and
much work in copper. Cameron (1878) saw vases made near Lake
Tanganyika which reminded him of the amphorae in the Villa of
Diomedes, Pompeii. Horn (1882) praises tribes here for iron and
copper work. Livingstone (1871) passed thirty smelting houses in
one journey, and Cameron came across bellows with valves, and
tribes who used knives in eating. He found tribes which no Europeans
had ever visited, who made ingots of copper in the form of
the St. Andrew’s cross, which circulated even to the coast. In the
southern Congo basin iron and copper are worked; also wood and
ivory carving and pottery making are pursued. In equatorial West
Africa, Lenz and Du Chaillu (1861) found iron workers with
charcoal, and also carvers of bone and ivory. Near Cape Lopez,
Hübbe-Schleiden found tribes making ivory needles inlaid with
ebony, while the arms and dishes of the Osaka are found among
many tribes even as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Wilson (1856)
found natives in West Africa who could repair American watches.

Gold Coast Negroes make gold rings and chains, forming the
metal into all kinds of forms. Soyaux says, “The works in relief
which natives of Lower Guinea carve with their own knives out
of ivory and hippopotamus teeth are really entitled to be called
works of art, and many wooden figures of fetishes in the Ethnographical
Museum of Berlin show some understanding of the proportions
of the human body.” Great Bassam is called by Hecquard
the “Fatherland of Smiths.” The Mandingo in the northwest are
remarkable workers in iron, silver, and gold, we are told by Mungo
Park (1800), while there is a mass of testimony as to the work in the
north-west of Africa in gold, tin, weaving, and dyeing. Caille found
the Negroes in Bambana manufacturing gunpowder (1824-28), and
the Hausa make soap; so, too, Negroes in Uganda and other parts
have made guns after seeing European models.

So marked has been the work of Negro artisans and traders in the
manufacture and exchange of iron implements that a growing number
of archeologists are disposed to-day to consider the Negro as the
originator of the art of smelting iron. Gabriel de Mortillet (1883)
declared Negroes the only iron users among primitive people. Some
would, therefore, argue that the Negro learned it from other folk,
but Andree declares that the Negro developed his own “Iron Kingdom.”
Schweinfurth, Von Luschan, Boaz, and others incline to the
belief that the Negroes invented the smelting of iron and passed it
on to the Egyptians and to modern Europe.

Boaz says, “It seems likely that at a time when the European was
still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented or
adopted the art of smelting iron. Consider for a moment what this
invention has meant for the advance of the human race. As long as
the hammer, knife, saw, drill, the spade, and the hoe had to be
chipped out of stone, or had to be made of shell or hard wood,
effective industrial work was not impossible, but difficult. A great
progress was made when copper found in large nuggets was hammered
out into tools and later on shaped by melting, and when
bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life
did not begin until the hard iron was discovered. It seems not unlikely
that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing
iron ores by smelting were the African Negroes. Neither ancient
Europe, nor ancient western Asia, nor ancient China knew the iron,
and everything points to its introduction from Africa. At the time of
the great African discoveries toward the end of the past century, the
trade of the blacksmith was found all over Africa, from north to
south and from east to west. With his simple bellows and a charcoal
fire he reduced the ore that is found in many parts of the continent
and forged implements of great usefulness and beauty.”[44]

Torday has argued recently, “I feel convinced by certain arguments
that seem to prove to my satisfaction that we are indebted to
the Negro for the very keystone of our modern civilization and that
we owe him the discovery of iron. That iron could be discovered by
accident in Africa seems beyond doubt: if this is so in other parts of
the world, I am not competent to say. I will only remind you that
Schweinfurth and Petherick record the fact that in the northern
part of East Africa smelting furnaces are worked without artificial
air current and, on the other hand, Stuhlmann and Kollmann found
near Victoria Nyanza that the natives simply mixed powdered ore
with charcoal and by introduction of air currents obtained the metal.
These simple processes make it simple that iron should have been
discovered in East or Central Africa. No bronze implements have
ever been found in black Africa; had the Africans received iron
from the Egyptians, bronze would have preceded this metal and all
traces of it would not have disappeared. Black Africa was for a long
time an exporter of iron, and even in the twelfth century exports to
India and Java are recorded by Idrisi.

“It is difficult to imagine that Egypt should have obtained it from
Europe where the oldest find (in Hallstadt) cannot be of an earlier
period than 800 B.C., or from Asia, where iron is not known before
1000 B.C., and where, in the times of Ashur Nazir Pal, it was still
used concurrently with bronze, while iron beads have been only
recently discovered by Messrs. G.A. Wainwright and Bushe Fox
in a predynastic grave, and where a piece of this metal, possibly a
tool, was found in the masonry of the great pyramid.”[45]

The Negro is a born trader. Lenz says, “our sharpest European
merchants, even Jews and Armenians, can learn much of the cunning
and trade of the Negroes.” We know that the trade between
Central Africa and Egypt was in the hands of Negroes for thousands
of years, and in early days the cities of the Sudan and North Africa
grew rich through Negro trade.

Leo Africanus, writing of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century,
said, “It is a wonder to see what plentie of Merchandize is daily
brought hither and how costly and sumptuous all things be….
Here are many shops of artificers and merchants and especially of
such as weave linnen and cloth.”

Long before cotton weaving was a British industry, West Africa
and the Sudan were supplying a large part of the world with cotton
cloth. Even to-day cities like Kuka on the west shore of Lake Chad
and Sokota are manufacturing centers where cotton is spun and
woven, skins tanned, implements and iron ornaments made.

“Travelers,” says Bücher, “have often observed this tribal or local
development of industrial technique. ‘The native villages,’ relates
a Belgian observer of the Lower Congo, ‘are often situated in
groups. Their activities are based upon reciprocality, and they are to
a certain extent the complements of one another. Each group has its
more or less strongly defined specialty. One carries on fishing; another
produces palm wine; a third devotes itself to trade and is broker
for the others, supplying the community with all products from outside;
another has reserved to itself work in iron and copper, making
weapons for war and hunting, various utensils, etc. None may, however,
pass beyond the sphere of its own specialty without exposing
itself to the risk of being universally proscribed.'”

From the Loango Coast, Bastian tells of a great number of centers
for special products of domestic industry. “Loango excels in mats
and fishing baskets, while the carving of elephants’ tusks is specially
followed in Chilungo. The so-called Mafooka hats with raised patterns
are drawn chiefly from the bordering country of Kakongo and
Mayyume. In Bakunya are made potter’s wares, which are in great
demand; in Basanza, excellent swords; in Basundi, especially beautiful
ornamented copper rings; on the Congo, clever wood and tablet
carvings; in Loango, ornamented clothes and intricately designed
mats; in Mayumbe, clothing of finely woven mat-work; in Kakongo,
embroidered hats and also burnt clay pitchers; and among the
Bayakas and Mantetjes, stuffs of woven grass.”[46]

A native Negro student tells of the development of trade among
the Ashanti. “It was a part of the state system of Ashanti to encourage
trade. The king once in every forty days, at the Adai custom,
distributed among a number of chiefs various sums of gold
dust with a charge to turn the same to good account. These chiefs
then sent down to the coast caravans of tradesmen, some of whom
would be their slaves, sometimes some two or three hundred strong,
to barter ivory for European goods, or buy such goods with gold dust,
which the king obtained from the royal alluvial workings. Down to
1873 a constant stream of Ashanti traders might be seen daily
wending their way to the merchants of the coast and back again,
yielding more certain wealth and prosperity to the merchants of the
Gold Coast and Great Britain than may be expected for some time
yet to come from the mining industry and railway development put
together. The trade chiefs would, in due time, render a faithful
account to the king’s stewards, being allowed to retain a fair portion
of the profit. In the king’s household, too, he would have special
men who directly traded for him. Important chiefs carried on the
same system of trading with the coast as did the king. Thus every
member of the state, from the king downward, took an active interest
in the promotion of trade and in the keeping open of trade routes
into the interior.”[47]

The trade thus encouraged and carried on in various parts of West
Africa reached wide areas. From the Fish River to Kuka, and from
Lagos to Zanzibar, the markets have become great centers of trade,
the leading implement to civilization. Permanent markets are found
in places like Ujiji and Nyangwe, where everything can be bought
and sold from earthenware to wives; from the one to three thousand
traders flocked here.

“How like is the market traffic, with all its uproar and sound of
human voices, to one of our own markets! There is the same rivalry
in praising the goods, the violent, brisk movements, the expressive
gesture, the inquiring, searching glance, the changing looks of
depreciation or triumph, of apprehension, delight, approbation. So
says Stanley. Trade customs are not everywhere alike. If when
negotiating with the Bangalas of Angola you do not quickly give
them what they want, they go away and do not come back. Then
perhaps they try to get possession of the coveted object by means of
theft. It is otherwise with the Songos and Kiokos, who let you deal
with them in the usual way. To buy even a small article you must
go to the market; people avoid trading anywhere else. If a man says
to another; ‘Sell me this hen’ or ‘that fruit,’ the answer as a rule will
be, ‘Come to the market place.’ The crowd gives confidence to individuals,
and the inviolability of the visitor to the market, and of the
market itself, looks like an idea of justice consecrated by long
practice. Does not this remind us of the old Germanic ‘market
place’?”[48]

Turning now to Negro family and social life we find, as among
all primitive peoples, polygamy and marriage by actual or simulated
purchase. Out of the family develops the typical African village
organization, which is thus described in Ashanti by a native Gold
Coast writer: “The headman, as his name implies, is the head of a
village community, a ward in a township, or of a family. His position
is important, inasmuch as he has directly to deal with the composite
elements of the general bulk of the people.

“It is the duty of the head of a family to bring up the members
thereof in the way they should go; and by ‘family’ you must understand
the entire lineal descendants of a materfamilias, if I may coin a
convenient phrase. It is expected of him by the state to bring up his
charge in the knowledge of matters political and traditional. It is
his work to train up his wards in the ways of loyalty and obedience
to the powers that be. He is held responsible for the freaks of recalcitrant
members of his family, and he is looked to to keep them within
bounds and to insist upon conformity of their party with the customs,
laws, and traditional observances of the community. In early
times he could send off to exile by sale a troublesome relative who
would not observe the laws of the community.

“It is a difficult task that he is set to, but in this matter he has all-powerful
helpers in the female members of the family, who will be
either the aunts, or the sisters, or the cousins, or the nieces of the
headman; and as their interests are identical with his in every particular,
the good women spontaneously train up their children to implicit
obedience to the headman, whose rule in the family thus becomes
a simple and an easy matter. ‘The hand that rocks the cradle
rules the world.’ What a power for good in the native state system
would the mothers of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become by judicious
training upon native lines!

“The headman is par excellence the judge of his family or ward.
Not only is he called upon to settle domestic squabbles, but frequently
he sits judge over more serious matters arising between one
member of the ward and another; and where he is a man of ability
and influence, men from other wards bring him their disputes to
settle. When he so settles disputes, he is entitled to a hearing fee,
which, however, is not so much as would be payable in the regular
court of the king or chief.

“The headman is naturally an important member of his company
and often is a captain thereof. When he combines the two
offices of headman and captain, he renders to the community a very
important service. For in times of war, where the members of the
ward would not serve cordially under a stranger, they would in all
cases face any danger with their own kinsman as their leader. The
headman is always succeeded by his uterine brother, cousin, or
nephew—the line of succession, that is to say, following the customary
law.”[49]

We may contrast this picture with the more warlike Bantus of
Southeast Africa. Each tribe lived by itself in a town with from
five to fifteen thousand inhabitants, surrounded by gardens of millet,
beans, and watermelon. Beyond these roamed their cattle, sheep, and
goats. Their religion was ancestor worship with sacrifice to spirits
and the dead, and some of the tribes made mummies of the corpses
and clothed them for burial. They wove cloth of cotton and bark,
they carved wood and built walls of unhewn stone. They had a
standing military organization, and the tribes had their various
totems, so that they were known as the Men of Iron, the Men of the
Sun, the Men of the Serpents, Sons of the Corn Cleaners, and the
like. Their system of common law was well conceived and there
were organized tribunals of justice. In difficult cases precedents
were sought and learned antiquaries consulted. At the age of fifteen
or sixteen the boys were circumcised and formed into guilds. The
land was owned by the tribe and apportioned to the chief by each
family, and the main wealth of the tribe was in its cattle.

In general, among the African clans the idea of private property
was but imperfectly developed and never included land. The main
mass of visible wealth belonged to the family and clan rather than
to the individual; only in the matter of weapons and ornaments was
exclusive private ownership generally recognized.

The government, vested in fathers and chiefs, varied in different
tribes from absolute despotisms to limited monarchies, almost republican.
Viewing the Basuto National Assembly in South Africa,
Lord Bryce recently wrote, “The resemblance to the primary assemblies
of the early peoples of Europe is close enough to add another
to the arguments which discredit the theory that there is any such
thing as an Aryan type of institutions.”[50]

While women are sold into marriage throughout Africa, nevertheless
their status is far removed from slavery. In the first place the
tracing of relationships through the female line, which is all but
universal in Africa, gives the mother great influence. Parental affection
is very strong, and throughout Negro Africa the mother is the
most influential councilor, even in cases of tyrants like Chaka or
Mutesa.

“No mother can love more tenderly or be more deeply beloved
than the Negro mother. Robin tells of a slave in Martinique who,
with his savings, freed his mother instead of himself. ‘Everywhere in
Africa,’ writes Mungo Park, ‘I have noticed that no greater affront
can be offered a Negro than insulting his mother. ‘Strike me,’ cried
a Mandingo to his enemy, ‘but revile not my mother!’ … The
Herero swears ‘By my mother’s tears!’.. The Angola Negroes have
a saying, ‘As a mist lingers on the swamps, so lingers the love of
father and mother.'”[51]

Black queens have often ruled African tribes. Among the Ba-Lolo,
we are told, women take part in public assemblies where all-important
questions are discussed. The system of educating children
among such tribes as the Yoruba is worthy of emulation by many
more civilized peoples.

Close knit with the family and social organization comes the religious
life of the Negro. The religion of Africa is the universal animism
or fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching
monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of
Christian and Islamic missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension.
It is not mere senseless degradation. It is a philosophy
of life. Among primitive Negroes there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds
us, no such divorce of religion from practical life as is common
in civilized lands. Religion is life, and fetish an expression of
the practical recognition of dominant forces in which the Negro
lives. To him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says, “If you
want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature
according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement
of it made than is made by Goethe in his superb ‘Prometheus.'”[52]
Fetish is a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms
of good and malignant spirits.

“It is this power of being able logically to account for everything
that is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of fetish
in Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that
white men who live in the districts where death and danger are
everyday affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe
in fetish, though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind
has been soaked in fetish during his early and most impressionable
years, the voice of fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes
to him.”[53]

Ellis tells us of the spirit belief of the Ewe people, who believe
that men and all nature have the indwelling “Kra,” which is immortal;
that the man himself after death may exist as a ghost, which
is often conceived of as departed from the “Kra,” a shadowy continuing
of the man. Bryce, speaking of the Kaffirs of South Africa,
says, “To the Kaffirs, as to the most savage races, the world was full
of spirits—spirits of the rivers, the mountains, and the woods. Most
important were the ghosts of the dead, who had power to injure or
help the living, and who were, therefore, propitiated by offerings at
stated periods, as well as on occasions when their aid was especially
desired. This kind of worship, the worship once most generally diffused
throughout the world, and which held its ground among the
Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient civilization,
as it does in China and Japan to-day, was, and is, virtually the
religion of the Kaffirs.”[54]

African religion does not, however, stop with fetish, but, as in the
case of other peoples, tends toward polytheism and monotheism.
Among the Yoruba, for instance, Frobenius shows that religion and
city-state go hand in hand.

“The first experienced glance will here detect the fact that this
nation originally possessed a clear and definite organization so duly
ordered and so logical that we but seldom meet with its like among
all the peoples of the earth. And the basic idea of every clan’s progeniture
is a powerful God; the legitimate order in which the
descendants of a particular clan unite in marriage to found new
families, the essential origin of every new-born babe’s descent in the
founder of its race and its consideration as a part of the God in
Chief; the security with which the newly wedded wife not only may,
but should, minister to her own God in an unfamiliar home.”[55]

The Yoruba have a legend of a dying divinity. “This people …
give evidence of a generalized system; a theocratic scheme, a well-conceived
perceptible organization, reared in rhythmically proportioned
manner.”

Miss Kingsley says, “The African has a great Over God.”[56] Nassau,
the missionary, declares, “After more than forty years’ residence
among these tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with
their customs, dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with
them in the various relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master,
fellow-traveler, and guest, and in my special office as missionary,
searching after their religious thought (and therefore being allowed
a deeper entrance into the arcana of their soul than would be accorded
to a passing explorer), I am able unhesitatingly to say that
among all the multitude of degraded ones with whom I have met, I
have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was only a
superstition.

“Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom
their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to
him, ‘I have come to speak to your people,’ I do not need to begin
by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage
of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of
gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands
soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have
hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white with the manioc
dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and children checked
in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from their dusty
street pursuit of dog or goat,—I have yet to be asked, ‘Who is
God?'”[57]

The basis of Egyptian religion was “of a purely Nigritian character,”[58]
and in its developed form Sudanese tribal gods were invoked
and venerated by the priests. In Upper Egypt, near the confines of
Ethiopia, paintings repeatedly represent black priests conferring on
red Egyptian priests the instruments and symbols of priesthood. In
the Sudan to-day Frobenius distinguishes four principal religions:
first, earthly ancestor worship; next, the social cosmogony of the
Atlantic races; third, the religion of the Bori, and fourth, Islam. The
Bori religion spreads from Nubia as far as the Hausa, and from Lake
Chad in the Niger as far as the Yoruba. It is the religion of possession
and has been connected by some with Asiatic influences.

From without have come two great religious influences, Islam and
Christianity. Islam came by conquest, trade, and proselytism. As a
conqueror it reached Egypt in the seventh century and had by the
end of the fourteenth century firm footing in the Egyptian Sudan.
It overran the central Sudan by the close of the seventeenth century,
and at the beginning of the nineteenth century had swept over
Senegambia and the whole valley of the Niger down to the Gulf of
Guinea. On the east Islam approached as a trader in the eighth century;
it spread into Somaliland and overran Nubia in the fourteenth
century. To-day Islam dominates Africa north of ten degrees north
latitude and is strong between five and ten degrees north latitude.
In the east it reaches below the Victoria Nyanza.

Christianity early entered Africa; indeed, as Mommsen says, “It
was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the
world. Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from
Sicca Veneria, Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius
Felix, in spite of their Latin names, were natives of Africa, and not
less so Augustine. In Africa the Church found its most zealous confessors
of the faith and its most gifted defenders.”[59]

The Africa referred to here, however, was not Negroland, but
Africa above the desert, where Negro blood was represented in the
ancient Mediterranean race and by intercourse across the desert. On
the other hand Christianity was early represented in the valley of
the Nile under “the most holy pope and patriarch of the great city
of Alexandria and of all of the land of Egypt, of Jerusalem, the
holy city, of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Pentapolis, and all the preaching
of St. Mark.” This patriarchate had a hundred bishoprics in
the fourth century and included thousands of black Christians.
Through it the Cross preceded the Crescent in some of the remotest
parts of black Africa.

All these beginnings were gradually overthrown by Islam except
among the Copts in Egypt, and in Abyssinia. The Portuguese in the
sixteenth century began to replant the Christian religion and for a
while had great success, both on the east and west coasts. Roman
Catholic enterprise halted in the eighteenth century and the Protestants
began. To-day the west coast is studded with English and German
missions, South Africa is largely Christian through French and
English influence, and the region about the Great Lakes is becoming
christianized. The Roman Catholics have lately increased their activities,
and above all the Negroes of America have entered with
their own churches and with the curiously significant “Ethiopian”
movement.

Coming now to other spiritual aspects of African culture, we can
speak at present only in a fragmentary way. Roughly speaking,
Africa can be divided into two language zones: north of the fifth
degree of north latitude is the zone of diversity, with at least a hundred
groups of widely divergent languages; south of the line there
is one minor language (Bushman-Hottentot), spoken by less than
fifty thousand people, and elsewhere the predominant Bantu tongue
with its various dialects, spoken by at least fifty million. The Bantu
tongue, which thus rules all Central, West, and South Africa, is an
agglutinative tongue which makes especial use of prefixes. The hundreds
of Negro tongues or dialects in the north represent most probably
the result of war and migration and the breaking up of ancient
centers of culture. In Abyssinia and the great horn of East Africa
the influence of Semitic tongues is noted. Despite much effort on
the part of students, it has been impossible to show any Asiatic origin
for the Egyptian language. As Sergi maintains, “everything
favors an African origin.”[60] The most brilliant suggestion of modern
days links together the Egyptian of North Africa and the Hottentot
and Bushmen tongues of South Africa.

Language was reduced to writing among the Egyptians and Ethiopians
and to some extent elsewhere in Africa. Over 100 manuscripts
of Ethiopian and Ethiopic-Arabian literature are extant, including a
version of the Bible and historical chronicles. The Arabic was used
as the written tongue of the Sudan, and Negroland has given us in
this tongue many chronicles and other works of black authors. The
greatest of these, the Epic of the Sudan (Tarikh-es-Soudan), deserves
to be placed among the classics of all literature. In other
parts of Africa there was no written language, but there was, on the
other hand, an unusual perfection of oral tradition through bards,
and extraordinary efficiency in telegraphy by drum and horn.

The folklore and proverbs of the African tribes are exceedingly
rich. Some of these have been made familiar to English writers
through the work of “Uncle Remus.” Others have been collected by
Johnston, Ellis, and Theal.

A black bard of our own day has described the onslaught of the
Matabili in poetry of singular force and beauty:

There can be no doubt of the Negro’s deep and delicate sense of
beauty in form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry,
“Whoever denies to them independent invention and individual
taste in their work either shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly
evident facts, or lack of knowledge renders him an incompetent
judge.”[62] M. Rutot had lately told us how the Negro race
brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe. The bones of the
European Negroids are almost without exception found in company
with drawings and sculpture in high and low relief; some of their
sculptures, like the Wellendorff “Venus,” are unusually well finished
for primitive man. So, too, the painting and carving of the
Bushmen and their forerunners in South Africa has drawn the admiration
of students. The Negro has been prolific in the invention
of musical instruments and has given a new and original music to
the western world.

Schweinfurth, who has preserved for us much of the industrial art
of the Negroes, speaks of their delight in the production of works of
art for the embellishment and convenience of life. Frobenius expressed
his astonishment at the originality of the African in the Yoruba
temple which he visited. “The lofty veranda was divided from
the passageway by fantastically carved and colored pillars. On the
pillars were sculptured knights, men climbing trees, women, gods,
and mythical beings. The dark chamber lying beyond showed a
splendid red room with stone hatchets, wooden figures, cowry beads,
and jars. The whole picture, the columns carved in colors in front
of the colored altar, the old man sitting in the circle of those who
reverenced him, the open scaffolding of ninety rafters, made a magnificent
impression.”[63]

The Germans have found, in Kamarun, towns built, castellated,
and fortified in a manner that reminds one of the prehistoric cities
of Crete. The buildings and fortifications of Zymbabwe have already
been described and something has been said of the art of Benin,
with its brass and bronze and ivory. All the work of Benin in bronze
and brass was executed by casting, and by methods so complicated
that it would be no easy task for a modern European craftsman to
imitate them.

Perhaps no race has shown in its earlier development a more magnificent
art impulse than the Negro, and the student must not forget
how far Negro genius entered into the art in the valley of the
Nile from Meroe and Nepata down to the great temples of Egypt.

Frobenius has recently directed the world’s attention to art in
West Africa. Quartz and granite he found treated with great dexterity.
But more magnificent than the stone monument is the proof
that at some remote era glass was made and molded in Yorubaland
and that the people here were brilliant in the production of terra-cotta
images. The great mass of potsherds, lumps of glass, heaps of
slag, etc., “proves, at all events, that the glass industry flourished in
this locality in ages past. It is plain that the glass beads found to
have been so very common in Africa were not only not imported,
but were actually manufactured in great quantities at home.”

The terra-cotta pieces are “remains of another ancient and fine
type of art” and were “eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy
of form, and practically a reminiscence of the ancient Greeks.” The
antique bronze head Frobenius describes as “a head of marvelous
beauty, wonderfully cast,” and “almost equal in beauty and, at least,
no less noble in form, and as ancient as the terra-cotta heads.”[64]

In a park of monuments Frobenius saw the celebrated forge and
hammer: a mighty mass of iron, like a falling drop in shape, and a
block of quartz fashioned like a drum. Frobenius thinks these were
relics dating from past ages of culture, when the manipulation of
quartz and granite was thoroughly understood and when iron manipulation
gave evidence of a skill not met with to-day.

Even when we contemplate such revolting survivals of savagery
as cannibalism we cannot jump too quickly at conclusions. Cannibalism
is spread over many parts of Negro Africa, yet the very tribes
who practice cannibalism show often other traits of industry and
power. “These cannibal Bassonga were, according to the types we
met with, one of those rare nations of the African interior which
can be classed with the most esthetic and skilled, most discreet and
intelligent of all those generally known to us as the so-called natural
races. Before the Arabic and European invasion they did not dwell
in ‘hamlets,’ but in towns with twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants,
in towns whose highways were shaded by avenues of splendid palms
planted at regular intervals and laid out with the symmetry of
colonnades. Their pottery would be fertile in suggestion to every
art craftsman in Europe. Their weapons of iron were so perfectly
fashioned that no industrial art from abroad could improve upon
their workmanship. The iron blades were cunningly ornamented
with damascened copper, and the hilts artistically inlaid with the
same metal. Moreover, they were most industrious and capable husbandmen,
whose careful tillage of the suburbs made them able competitors
of any gardener in Europe. Their sexual and parental relations
evidenced an amount of tact and delicacy of feelings unsurpassed
among ourselves, either in the simplicity of the country or the
refinements of the town. Originally their political and municipal
system was organized on the lines of a representative republic. True,
it is on record that these well-governed towns often waged an internecine
warfare; but in spite of this it had been their invariable
custom from time immemorial, even in times of strife, to keep the
trade routes open and to allow their own and foreign merchants to
go their ways unharmed. And the commerce of these nations ebbed
and flowed along a road of unknown age, running from Itimbiri to
Batubenge, about six hundred miles in length. This highway was
destroyed by the ‘missionaries of civilization’ from Arabia only toward
the close of the eighteenth century. But even in my own time
there were still smiths who knew the names of places along that
wonderful trade route driven through the heart of the ‘impenetrable
forests of the Congo.’ For every scrap of imported iron was carried
over it.”[65]

In disposition the Negro is among the most lovable of men. Practically
all the great travelers who have spent any considerable time in
Africa testify to this and pay deep tribute to the kindness with
which they were received. One has but to remember the classic
story of Mungo Park, the strong expressions of Livingstone, the
words of Stanley and hundreds of others to realize this.

Ceremony and courtesy mark Negro life. Livingstone again and
again reminds us of “true African dignity.” “When Ilifian men or
women salute each other, be it with a plain and easy curtsey (which
is here the simplest form adopted), or kneeling down, or throwing
oneself upon the ground, or kissing the dust with one’s forehead, no
matter which, there is yet a deliberateness, a majesty, a dignity, a
devoted earnestness in the manner of its doing, which brings to light
with every gesture, with every fold of clothing, the deep significance
and essential import of every single action. Everyone may, without
too greatly straining his attention, notice the very striking precision
and weight with which the upper and lower native classes observe
these niceties of intercourse.”[66]

All this does not mean that the African Negro is not human with
the all-too-well-known foibles of humanity. Primitive life among
them is, after all, as bare and cruel as among primitive Germans or
Chinese, but it is not more so, and the more we study the Negro the
more we realize that we are dealing with a normal human stock
which under reasonable conditions has developed and will develop
in the same lines as other men. Why is it, then, that so much of
misinformation and contempt is widespread concerning Africa and
its people, not simply among the unthinking mass, but among men
of education and knowledge?

One reason lies undoubtedly in the connotation of the term
“Negro.” In North America a Negro may be seven-eights white,
since the term refers to any person of Negro descent. If we use the
term in the same sense concerning the inhabitants of the rest of
world, we may say truthfully that Negroes have been among the
leaders of civilization in every age of the world’s history from ancient
Babylon to modern America; that they have contributed wonderful
gifts in art, industry, political organization, and religion, and that
they are doing the same to-day in all parts of the world.

In sharp contrast to this usage the term “Negro” in Africa has
been more and more restricted until some scientists, late in the last
century, declared that the great mass of the black and brown
people of Africa were not Negroes at all, and that the “real” Negro
dwells in a small space between the Niger and the Senegal. Ratzel
says, “If we ask what justifies so narrow a limitation, we find that
the hideous Negro type, which the fancy of observers once saw all
over Africa, but which, as Livingstone says, is really to be seen only
as a sign in front of tobacco shops, has on closer inspection evaporated
from all parts of Africa, to settle no one knows how in just
this region. If we understand that an extreme case may have been
taken for the genuine and pure form, even so we do not comprehend
the ground of its geographical limitation and location; for wherever
dark, woolly-haired men dwell, this ugly type also crops up. We
are here in the presence of a refinement of science which to an unprejudiced
eye will hardly hold water.”[67]

In this restricted sense the Negro has no history, culture, or
ability, for the simple fact that such human beings as have history
and evidence culture and ability are not Negroes! Between these
two extreme definitions, with unconscious adroitness, the most
extraordinary and contradictory conclusions have been reached.

Let it therefore be said, once for all, that racial inferiority is not
the cause of anti-Negro prejudice. Boaz, the anthropologist, says,
“An unbiased estimate of the anthropological evidence so far brought
forward does not permit us to countenance the belief in a racial inferiority
which would unfit an individual of the Negro race to take
his part in modern civilization. We do not know of any demand
made on the human body or mind in modern life that anatomical or
ethnological evidence would prove to be beyond the powers of the
Negro.”[68]

“We have every reason to suppose that all races are capable,
under proper guidance, of being fitted into the complex scheme of
our modern civilization, and the policy of artificially excluding them
from its benefits is as unjustifiable scientifically as it is ethically abhorrent.”[69]
What is, then, this so-called “instinctive” modern prejudice
against black folk?

Lord Bryce says of the intermingling of blacks and whites in
South America, “The ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled
by marriage with the Indian tribes—and the Portuguese
have done the like, not only with the Indians, but with the more
physically dissimilar Negroes—shows that race repugnance is no
such constant and permanent factor in human affairs as members
of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of being, as we
Teutons suppose, the rule in the matter, we are rather the exception,
for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race
repulsion.”

In nearly every age and land men of Negro descent have distinguished
themselves. In literature there is Terence in Rome,
Nosseyeb and Antar in Arabia, Es-Sa’di in the Sudan, Pushkin in
Russia, Dumas in France, Al Kanemi in Spain, Heredia in the West
Indies, and Dunbar in the United States, not to mention the alleged
Negro strain in Æsop and Robert Browning. As rulers and warriors
we remember such Negroes as Queen Nefertari and Amenhotep III
among many others in Egypt; Candace and Ergamenes in Ethiopia;
Mansa Musa, Sonni Ali, and Mohammed Askai in the Sudan; Diaz
in Brazil, Toussaint L’Ouverture in Hayti, Hannivalov in Russia,
Sakanouye Tamuramaro in Japan, the elder Dumas in France,
Cazembe and Chaka among the Bantu, and Menelik, of Abyssinia;
the numberless black leaders of India, and the mulatto strain of
Alexander Hamilton. In music and art we recall Bridgewater, the
friend of Beethoven, and the unexplained complexion of Beethoven’s
own father; Coleridge-Taylor in England, Tanner in America, Gomez
in Spain; Ira Aldridge, the actor, and Johnson, Cook, and Burleigh,
who are making the new American syncopated music. In the
Church we know that Negro blood coursed in the veins of many of
the Catholic African fathers, if not in certain of the popes; and
there were in modern days Benoit of Palermo, St. Benedict, Bishop
Crowther, the Mahdi who drove England from the Sudan, and
Americans like Allen, Lot Carey, and Alexander Crummell. In science,
discovery, and invention the Negroes claim Lislet Geoffroy of
the French Academy, Latino and Amo, well known in European
university circles; and in America the explorers Dorantes and Henson;
Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone improver;
McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who revolutionized
shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of
genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are
strong human testimony to the ability of this race.

We must, then, look for the origin of modern color prejudice not
to physical or cultural causes, but to historic facts. And we shall
find the answer in modern Negro slavery and the slave trade.

IX

THE TRADE IN MEN

Color was never a badge of slavery in the ancient or medieval
world, nor has it been in the modern world outside of Christian
states. Homer sings of a black man, a “reverend herald”

Greece and Rome had their chief supplies of slaves from Europe
and Asia. Egypt enslaved races of all colors, and if there were more
blacks than others among her slaves, there were also more blacks
among her nobles and Pharaohs, and both facts are explained by her
racial origin and geographical position. The fall of Rome led to a
cessation of the slave trade, but after a long interval came the white
slave trade of the Saracens and Moors, and finally the modern trade
in Negroes.

Slavery as it exists universally among primitive people is a system
whereby captives in war are put to tasks about the homes and in the
fields, thus releasing the warriors for systematic fighting and the
women for leisure. Such slavery has been common among all peoples
and was wide-spread in Africa. The relative number of African
slaves under these conditions was small and the labor not hard; they
were members of the family and might and did often rise to high
position in the tribe.

Remembering that in the fifteenth century there was no great disparity
between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe,
what made the striking difference in subsequent development? European
civilization, cut off by physical barriers from further incursions
of barbaric races, settled more and more to systematic industry and
to the domination of one religion; African culture and industries were
threatened by powerful barbarians from the west and central regions
of the continent and by the Moors in the north, and Islam had only
partially converted the leading peoples.

When, therefore, a demand for workmen arose in America, European
exportation was limited by religious ties and economic stability.
African exportation was encouraged not simply by the Christian attitude
toward heathen, but also by the Moslem enmity toward the
unconverted Negroes. Two great modern religions, therefore, agreed
at least in the policy of enslaving heathen blacks, while the overthrow
of black Askias by the Moors at Tenkadibou brought that
economic chaos among the advanced Negro peoples and movement
among the more barbarous tribes which proved of prime advantage
to the development of a systematic trade in men.

The modern slave trade began with the Mohammedan conquests
in Africa, when heathen Negroes were seized to supply the harems,
and as soldiers and servants. They were bought from the masters
and seized in war, until the growing wealth and luxury of the conquerors
demanded larger numbers. Then Negroes from the Egyptian
Sudan, Abyssinia, and Zanzibar began to pass into Arabia, Persia,
and India in increased numbers. As Negro kingdoms and tribes rose
to power they found the slave trade lucrative and natural, since the
raids in which slaves were captured were ordinary inter-tribal wars.
It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the demand
for slaves in Christian lands made slaves the object, and not
the incident, of African wars.

In Mohammedan countries there were gleams of hope in slavery.
In fiction and in truth the black slave had a chance. Once converted
to Islam, he became a brother to the best, and the brotherhood of the
faith was not the sort of idle lie that Christian slave masters made
it. In Arabia black leaders arose like Antar; in India black slaves
carved out principalities where their descendants still rule.

Some Negro slaves were brought to Europe by the Spaniards in
the fourteenth century, and a small trade was continued by the Portuguese,
who conquered territory from the “tawny” Moors of North
Africa in the early fifteenth century. Later, after their severe repulse
at Al-Kasr-Al-Kabu, the Portuguese began to creep down the west
coast in quest of trade. They reached the River of Gold in 1441,
and their story is that their leader seized certain free Moors and the
next year exchanged them for ten black slaves, a target of hide,
ostrich eggs, and some gold dust. The trade was easily justified on
the ground that the Moors were Mohammedans and refused to be
converted to Christianity, while heathen Negroes would be better
subjects for conversion and stronger laborers. In the next few years
a small number of Negroes continued to be imported into Spain
and Portugal as servants. We find, for instance, in 1474, that Negro
slaves were common in Seville. There is a letter from Ferdinand
and Isabella in the year 1474 to a celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid,
commonly called the “Negro Count” (El Conde Negro), nominating
him to the office of “mayoral of the Negroes” in Seville.
The slaves were apparently treated kindly, allowed to keep their
own dances and festivals, and to have their own chief, who represented
them in the courts, as against their own masters, and settled
their private quarrels.

Between 1455 and 1492 little mention is made of slaves in the
trade with Africa. Columbus is said to have suggested Negroes for
America, but Ferdinand and Isabella refused. Nevertheless, by 1501,
we have the first incidental mention of Negroes going to America in
a declaration that Negro slaves “born in the power of Christians
were to be allowed to pass to the Indies, and the officers of the royal
revenue were to receive the money to be paid for their permits.”

About 1501 Ovando, Governor of Spanish America, was objecting
to Negro slaves and “solicited that no Negro slaves should be sent to
Hispaniola, for they fled amongst the Indians and taught them bad
customs, and never could be captured.” Nevertheless a letter from
the king to Ovando, dated Segovia, the fifteenth of September, 1505,
says, “I will send more Negro slaves as you request; I think there
may be a hundred. At each time a trustworthy person will go with
them who may have some share in the gold they may collect and
may promise them ease if they work well.”[70] There is a record of a
hundred slaves being sent out this very year, and Diego Columbus
was notified of fifty to be sent from Seville for the mines in 1510.

After this time frequent notices show that Negroes were common
in the new world.[71] When Pizarro, for instance, had been slain in
Peru, his body was dragged to the cathedral by two Negroes. After
the battle of Anaquito the head of the viceroy was cut off by a Negro,
and during the great earthquake in Guatemala a most remarkable
figure was a gigantic Negro seen in various parts of the city.
Nunez had thirty Negroes with him on the top of the Sierras, and
there was rumor of an aboriginal tribe of Negroes in South America.
One of the last acts of King Ferdinand was to urge that no more
Negroes be sent to the West Indies, but under Charles V, Bishop
Las Casas drew up a plan of assisted migration to America and asked
in 1517 the right for immigrants to import twelve Negro slaves, in
return for which the Indians were to be freed.

Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error: “This advice that
license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the
Clerigo Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which
the Portuguese take them and make them slaves; which advice,
after he had apprehended the nature of the thing, he would not
have given for all he had in the world. For he always held that
they had been made slaves unjustly and tyrannically; for the same
reason holds good of them as of the Indians[72].”

As soon as the plan was broached a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot,
Governor of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and
shrewdly sold it to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats.
Other monopolies were granted in 1523, 1527, and 1528[73]. Thus the
American trade became established and gradually grew, passing successively
into the hands of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French,
and the English.

At first the trade was of the same kind and volume as that already
passing northward over the desert routes. Soon, however, the American
trade developed. A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor
in the West Indies and on the continent of America grew until it
culminated in the eighteenth century, when Negro slaves were
crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty to one hundred thousand a
year. This called for slave raiding on a scale that drew upon every
part of Africa—upon the west coast, the western and Egyptian Sudan,
the valley of the Congo, Abyssinia, the lake regions, the east
coast, and Madagascar. Not simply the degraded and weaker types
of Negroes were seized, but the strong Bantu, the Mandingo and
Songhay, the Nubian and Nile Negroes, the Fula, and even the
Asiatic Malay, were represented in the raids.

There was thus begun in modern days a new slavery and slave
trade. It was different from that of the past, because more and more
it came in time to be founded on racial caste, and this caste was
made the foundation of a new industrial system. For four hundred
years, from 1450 to 1850, European civilization carried on a systematic
trade in human beings of such tremendous proportions that
the physical, economic, and moral effects are still plainly to be remarked
throughout the world. To this must be added the large slave
trade of Mussulman lands, which began with the seventh century
and raged almost unchecked until the end of the nineteenth century.

These were not days of decadence, but a period that gave the
world Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Raphael, Haroun-al-Raschid
and Abraham Lincoln. It was the day of the greatest expansion of
two of the world’s most pretentious religions and of the beginnings
of the modern organization of industry. In the midst of this advance
and uplift this slave trade and slavery spread more human misery,
inculcated more disrespect for and neglect of humanity, a greater
callousness to suffering, and more petty, cruel, human hatred than
can well be calculated. We may excuse and palliate it, and write
history so as to let men forget it; it remains the most inexcusable
and despicable blot on modern human history.

The Portuguese built the first slave-trading fort at Elmina, on the
Gold Coast, in 1482, and extended their trade down the west coast
and up the east coast. Under them the abominable traffic grew
larger and larger, until it became far the most important in money
value of all the commerce of the Zambesi basin. There could be no
extension of agriculture, no mining, no progress of any kind where
it was so extensively carried on[74].

It was the Dutch, however, who launched the oversea slave trade
as a regular institution. They began their fight for freedom from
Spain in 1579; in 1595, as a war measure against Spain, who at
that time was dominating Portugal, they made their first voyage to
Guinea. By 1621 they had captured Portugal’s various slave forts
on the west coast and they proceeded to open sixteen forts along
the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. Ships sailed from Holland to
Africa, got slaves in exchange for their goods, carried the slaves to
the West Indies or Brazil, and returned home laden with sugar. In
1621 the private companies trading in the west were all merged
into the Dutch West India Company, which sent in four years
fifteen thousand four hundred and thirty Negroes to Brazil, carried
on war with Spain, supplied even the English plantations, and gradually
became the great slave carrier of the day.

The commercial supremacy of the Dutch early excited the envy
and emulation of the English. The Navigation Ordinance of 1651
was aimed at them, and two wars were necessary to wrest the slave
trade from them and place it in the hands of the English. The final
terms of peace, among other things, surrendered New Netherlands
to England and opened the way for England to become henceforth
the world’s greatest slave trader.

The English trade began with Sir John Hawkins’ voyages in 1562
and later, in which “the Jesus, our chiefe shippe” played a leading
part. Desultory trade was kept up by the English until the middle
of the seventeenth century, when English chartered slave-trading
companies began to appear. In 1662 the “Royal Adventurers,” including
the king, the queen dowager, and the Duke of York, invested
in the trade, and finally the Royal African Company, which
became the world’s chief slave trader, was formed in 1672 and carried
on a growing trade for a quarter of a century. Jamaica had
finally been captured and held by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 and
formed a West Indian base for the trade in men.

The chief contract for trade in Negroes was the celebrated
“Asiento” or agreement of the King of Spain to the importation of
slaves into Spanish domains. The Pope’s Bull or Demarkation, 1493,
debarred Spain from African possessions, and compelled her to
contract with other nations for slaves. This contract was in the
hands of the Portuguese in 1600; in 1640 the Dutch received it,
and in 1701 the French. The War of the Spanish Succession
brought this monopoly to England.

This Asiento of 1713 was an agreement between England and
Spain by which the latter granted the former a monopoly of the
Spanish colonial slave trade for thirty years, and England engaged
to supply the colonies within that time with at least one hundred
and forty-four thousand slaves at the rate of forty-eight hundred per
year. The English counted this prize as the greatest result of the
Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the mighty struggle against
the power of Louis XIV. The English held the monopoly until the
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), although they had to go to war
over it in 1739.

From this agreement the slave traders reaped a harvest. The trade
centered at Liverpool, and that city’s commercial greatness was built
largely on this foundation. In 1709 it sent out one slaver of
thirty tons’ burden; encouraged by Parliamentary subsidies which
amounted to nearly half a million dollars between 1729 and 1750,
the trade amounted to fifty-three ships in 1751; eighty-six in 1765,
and at the beginning of the nineteenth century one hundred and
eighty-five, which carried forty-nine thousand two hundred and
thirteen slaves in one year.

The slave trade thus begun by the Portuguese, enlarged by the
Dutch, and carried to its culmination by the English centered on
the west coast near the seat of perhaps the oldest and most interesting
culture of Africa. It came at a critical time. The culture of
Yoruba, Benin, Mossiland, and Nupe had exhausted itself in a
desperate attempt to stem the on-coming flood of Mohammedan culture.
It has succeeded in maintaining its small, loosely federated
city-states suited to trade, industry, and art. It had developed strong
resistance toward the Sudan state builders toward the north, as in
the case of the fighting Mossi; but behind this warlike resistance lay
the peaceful city life which gave industrial ideas to Byzantium and
shared something of Ethiopian and Mediterranean culture.

The first advent of the slave traders increased and encouraged
native industry, as is evidenced by the bronze work of Benin; but
soon this was pushed into the background, for it was not bronze
metal but bronze flesh that Europe wanted. A new tyranny, blood-thirsty,
cruel, and built on war, forced itself forward in the Niger
delta. The powerful state of Dahomey arose early in the eighteenth
century and became a devastating tyranny, reaching its highest
power early in the nineteenth century. Ashanti, a similar kingdom,
began its conquests in 1719 and grew with the slave trade. Thus
state building in West Africa began to replace the city economy,
but it was a state built on war and on war supported and encouraged
largely for the sake of trade in human flesh. The native industries
were changed and disorganized. Family ties and government were
weakened. Far into the heart of Africa this devilish disintegration,
coupled with Christian rum and Mohammedan raiding, penetrated.
The face of Africa was turned south on these slave traders instead
of northward toward the Mediterranean, where for two thousand
years and more Europe and Africa had met in legitimate trade and
mutual respect. The full significance of the battle of Tenkadibou,
which overthrew the Askias, was now clear. Hereafter Africa for
centuries was to appear before the world, not as the land of gold
and ivory, of Mansa Musa and Meroe, but as a bound and captive
slave, dumb and degraded.

The natural desire to avoid a painful subject has led historians to
gloss over the details of the slave trade and leave the impression that
it was a local west-coast phenomenon and confined to a few years.
It was, on the contrary, continent wide and centuries long and an
economic, social, and political catastrophe probably unparalleled in
human history.

The exact proportions of the slave trade can be estimated only
approximately. From 1680 to 1688 we know that the English African
Company alone sent 249 ships to Africa, shipped there 60,783
Negro slaves, and after losing 14,387 on the middle passage, delivered
46,396 in America.

It seems probable that 25,000 Negroes a year arrived in America
between 1698 and 1707. After the Asiento of 1713 this number rose
to 30,000 annually, and before the Revolutionary War it had reached
at least 40,000 and perhaps 100,000 slaves a year.

The total number of slaves imported is not known. Dunbar estimates
that nearly 900,000 came to America in the sixteenth century,
2,750,000 in the seventeenth, 7,000,000 in the eighteenth, and over
4,000,000 in the nineteenth, perhaps 15,000,000 in all. Certainly it
seems that at least 10,000,000 Negroes were expatriated. Probably
every slave imported represented on the average five corpses in
Africa or on the high seas. The American slave trade, therefore,
meant the elimination of at least 60,000,000 Negroes from their fatherland.
The Mohammedan slave trade meant the expatriation or
forcible migration in Africa of nearly as many more. It would be
conservative, then, to say that the slave trade cost Negro Africa
100,000,000 souls. And yet people ask to-day the cause of the stagnation
of culture in that land since 1600!

Such a large number of slaves could be supplied only by organized
slave raiding in every corner of Africa. The African continent gradually
became revolutionized. Whole regions were depopulated,
whole tribes disappeared; villages were built in caves and on hills
or in forest fastnesses; the character of peoples like those of Benin
developed their worst excesses of cruelty instead of the already
flourishing arts of peace. The dark, irresistible grasp of fetish took
firmer hold on men’s minds.

Further advances toward civilization became impossible. Not only
was there the immense demand for slaves which had its outlet on the
west coast, but the slave caravans were streaming up through the
desert to the Mediterranean coast and down the valley of the Nile
to the centers of Mohammedanism. It was a rape of a continent to
an extent never paralleled in ancient or modern times.

In the American trade there was not only the horrors of the slave
raid, which lined the winding paths of the African jungles with
bleached bones, but there was also the horrors of what was called
the “middle passage,” that is, the voyage across the Atlantic. As Sir
William Dolben said, “The Negroes were chained to each other
hand and foot, and stowed so close that they were not allowed above
a foot and a half for each in breadth. Thus crammed together like
herrings in a barrel, they contracted putrid and fatal disorders; so
that they who came to inspect them in a morning had occasionally
to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their carcases
from the bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers to whom they had
been fastened[75].”

It was estimated that out of every one hundred lot shipped from
Africa only about fifty lived to be effective laborers across the sea,
and among the whites more seamen died in that trade in one year
than in the whole remaining trade of England in two. The full
realization of the horrors of the slave trade was slow in reaching
the ears and conscience of the modern world, just as to-day the
treatment of dark natives in European colonies is brought to publicity
with the greatest difficulty. The first move against the slave
trade in England came in Parliament in 1776, but it was not until
thirty-one years later, in 1807, that the trade was banned through
the arduous labors of Clarkson, Wilberforce, Sharpe, and others.

Denmark had already abolished the trade, and the United States
attempted to do so the following year. Portugal and Spain were induced
to abolish the trade between 1815 and 1830. Notwithstanding
these laws, the contraband trade went on until the beginning
of the Civil War in America. The reasons for this were the enormous
profit of the trade and the continued demand of the American slave
barons, who had no sympathy with the efforts to stop their source
of cheap labor supply.

However, philanthropy was not working alone to overthrow Negro
slavery and the slave trade. It was seen, first in England and
later in other countries, that slavery as an industrial system could
not be made to work satisfactorily in modern times. Its cost was too
great, and one of the causes of this cost was the slave insurrections
from the very beginning, when the slaves rose on the plantation of
Diego Columbus down to the Civil War in America. Actual and
potential slave insurrection in the West Indies, in North and South
America, kept the slave owners in apprehension and turmoil, or
called for a police system difficult to maintain. In North America
revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the North,
and this, with the growing scarcity of suitable land and the moral
revolt, led to the Civil War and the disappearance of the American
slave trade.

There was still, however, the Mohammedan slave trade to deal
with, and this has been the work of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century ten
thousand slaves annually were being distributed on the southern
and eastern coast of the Mediterranean and at the great slave market
in Bornu.

On the east coast of Africa in 1862 nineteen thousand slaves were
passed into Zanzibar and thence into Arabia and Persia. As late as
1880, three thousand annually were being thus transplanted, but
now the trade is about stopped. To-day the only centers of actual
slave trading may be said to be the cocoa plantations of the Portuguese
Islands on the west coast of Africa, and the Congo Free State.

Such is the story of the Rape of Ethiopia—a sordid, pitiful, cruel
tale. Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton
sung; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives
wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four
hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred
years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of
a transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth
her hands unto God.

X

THE WEST INDIES AND LATIN AMERICA

That was a wonderful century, the fifteenth, when men realized
that beyond the scowling waste of western waters were dreams come
true. Curious and yet crassly human it is that, with all this poetry
and romance, arose at once the filthiest institution of the modern
world and the costliest. For on Negro slavery in America was built,
not simply the abortive cotton kingdom, but the foundations of that
modern imperialism which is based on the despising of backward
men.

According to some accounts Alonzo, “the Negro,” piloted one of
the ships of Columbus, and certainly there was Negro blood among
his sailors. As early as 1528 there were nearly ten thousand Negroes
in the new world. We hear of them in all parts. In Honduras, for
instance, a Negro is sent to burn a native village; in 1555 the town
council of Santiago de Chile voted to allow an enfranchised Negro
possession of land in the town, and evidently treated him just as
white applicants were treated. D’Allyon, who explored the coast of
Virginia in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, used Negro
slaves (who afterward revolted) to build his ships and help in exploration;
Balboa had with him thirty Negroes, who, in 1513, helped
to build the first ships on the Pacific coast; Cortez had three hundred
Negro porters in 1522.

Before 1530 there were enough Negroes in Mexico to lead to an
insurrection, where the Negroes fought desperately, but were overcome
and their ringleaders executed. Later the followers of another
Negro insurgent, Bayano, were captured and sent back to Spain.
Negroes founded the town of Santiago del Principe in 1570, and in
1540 a Negro slave of Hernandez de Alarcon was the only one of
the party to carry a message across the country to the Zunis of New
Mexico. A Negro, Stephen Dorantes, discovered New Mexico. This
Stephen or “Estevanico” was sent ahead by certain Spanish friars
to the “Seven Cities of Cibola.” “As soon as Stephen had left said
friars, he determined to earn all the reputation and honor for himself,
and that the boldness and daring of having alone discovered
those villages of high stories so much spoken of throughout that
country should be attributed to him; and carrying along with him
the people who followed him, he endeavored to cross the wilderness
which is between Cibola and the country he had gone through, and
he was so far ahead of the friars that when they arrived at Chichilticalli,
which is on the edge of the wilderness, he was already at
Cibola, which is eighty leagues of wilderness beyond.” But the Indians
of the new and strange country took alarm and concluded that
Stephen “must be a spy or guide for some nations who intended to
come and conquer them, because it seemed to them unreasonable
for him to say that the people were white in the country from which
he came, being black himself and being sent by them.”[76]

Slaves imported under the Asiento treaties went to all parts of
the Americas. Spanish America had by the close of the eighteenth
century ten thousand in Santo Domingo, eighty-four thousand in
Cuba, fifty thousand in Porto Rico, sixty thousand in Louisiana and
Florida, and sixty thousand in Central and South America.

The history of the Negro in Spanish America centered in Cuba,
Venezuela, and Central America. In the sixteenth century slaves
began to arrive in Cuba and Negroes joined many of the exploring
expeditions from there to various parts of America. The slave trade
greatly increased in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and
after the revolution in Hayti large numbers of French emigrants
from that island settled in Cuba. This and Spanish greed increased
the harshness of slavery and eventually led to revolt among the
Negroes. In 1844 Governor O’Donnell began a cruel persecution of
the blacks on account of a plot discovered among them. Finally in
1866 the Ten Years’ War broke out in which Negro and white
rebels joined. They demanded the abolition of slavery and equal
political rights for natives and foreigners, whites and blacks. The
war was cruel and bloody but ended in 1878 with the abolition of
slavery, while a further uprising the following year secured civil
rights for Negroes. Spanish economic oppression continued, however,
and the leading chiefs of the Ten Years’ War including such
leaders as the mulatto, Antonio Maceo, with large numbers of
Negro soldiers, took the field again in 1895. The result was the
freeing of Cuba by the intervention of the United States. Negro
regiments from the United States played here a leading role. A
number of leaders in Cuba in political, industrial, and literary lines
have been men of Negro descent.

Slavery was abolished by Guatemala in 1824 and by Mexico in
1829. Argentine, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Paraguay ceased to recognize
it about 1825. Between 1840 and 1845 it came to an end in
Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecquador. Bolivar, Paez, Sucre, and
other South American leaders used Negro soldiers in fighting for
freedom (1814-16), and Hayti twice at critical times rendered
assistance and received Bolivar twice as a refugee.

Brazil was the center of Portuguese slavery, but slaves were not
introduced in large numbers until about 1720, when diamonds were
discovered in the territory above Rio Janeiro. Gradually the seaboard
from Pernambuco to Rio Janeiro and beyond became filled
with Negroes, and although the slave trade north of the equator
was theoretically abolished by Portugal in 1815 and south of the
equator in 1830, and by Brazil in these regions in 1826 and 1830,
nevertheless between 1825 and 1850 over a million and a quarter of
Negroes were introduced. Not until Brazil abolished slavery in 1888
did the importation wholly cease. Brazilian slavery allowed the slave
to purchase his freedom, and the color line was not strict. Even in
the eighteenth century there were black clergy and bishops; indeed
the Negro clergy seem to have been on a higher moral level than the
whites.

Insurrection was often attempted, especially among the Mohammedan
Negroes around Bahia. In 1695 a tribe of revolted slaves held
out for a long time. In 1719 a widespread conspiracy failed, but
many of the leaders fled to the forest. In 1828 a thousand rose in
revolt at Bahia, and again in 1830. From 1831 to 1837 revolt was in
the air, and in 1835 came the great revolt of the Mohammedans,
who attempted to enthrone a queen. The Negroes fought with
furious bravery, but were finally defeated.

By 1872 the number of free Negroes had very greatly increased,
so that emancipation did not come as a shock. While Mohammedan
Negroes still gave trouble and were in some cases sent back to
Africa, yet on the whole emancipation was peaceful, and whites,
Negroes, and Indians are to-day amalgamating into a new race. “At
the present moment there is scarcely a lowly or a highly placed
federal or provincial official at the head of or within any of the great
departments of state that has not more or less Negro or Amer-Indian
blood in his veins.”[77]

Lord Bryce says, “It is hardly too much to say that along the coast
from Rio to Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the interior
behind these two cities, the black population predominates….
The Brazilian lower class intermarries freely with the black
people; the Brazilian middle class intermarries with mulattoes and
Quadroons. Brazil is the one country in the world, besides the
Portuguese colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa, in which
a fusion of the European and African races is proceeding unchecked
by law or custom. The doctrines of human equality and human
solidarity have here their perfect work. The result is so far satisfactory
that there is little or no class friction. The white man does not
lynch or maltreat the Negro; indeed I have never heard of a lynching
anywhere in South America except occasionally as part of a
political convulsion. The Negro is not accused of insolence and does
not seem to develop any more criminality than naturally belongs to
any ignorant population with loose notions of morality and property.

“What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will have on the
European element in Brazil I will not venture to predict. If one may
judge from a few remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce
the intellectual standard. One of the ablest and most refined Brazilians
I have known had some color; and other such cases have been
mentioned to me. Assumptions and preconceptions must be eschewed,
however plausible they may seem.”[78]

A Brazilian writer said at the First Races Congress: “The coöperation
of the metis[79] in the advance of Brazil is notorious and far from
inconsiderable. They played the chief part during many years in
Brazil in the campaign for the abolition of slavery. I could quote
celebrated names of more than one of these metis who put themselves
at the head of the literary movement. They fought with
firmness and intrepidity in the press and on the platform. They faced
with courage the gravest perils to which they were exposed in their
struggle against the powerful slave owners, who had the protection
of a conservative government. They gave evidence of sentiments of
patriotism, self-denial, and appreciation during the long campaign
in Paraguay, fighting heroically at the boarding of the ships in the
naval battle of Riachuelo and in the attacks on the Brazilian army,
on numerous occasions in the course of this long South American
war. It was owing to their support that the republic was erected on
the ruins of the empire.”[80]

The Dutch brought the first slaves to the North American continent.
John Rolfe relates that the last of August, 1619, there came
to Virginia “a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars.”[81]
This was probably one of the ships of the numerous private Dutch
trading companies which early entered into the developed and the
lucrative African slave trade. Although the Dutch thus commenced
the continental slave trade they did not actually furnish a very large
number of slaves to the English colonies outside the West Indies. A
small trade had by 1698 brought a few thousand to New York and
still fewer to New Jersey.

The Dutch found better scope for slaves in Guiana, which they
settled in 1616. Sugar cane became the staple crop, but the Negroes
early began to revolt and the Dutch brought in East Indian coolies.
The slaves were badly treated and the runaways joined the revolted
Bush Negroes in the interior. From 1715 to 1775 there was continuous
fighting with the Bush Negroes or insurrections, until at last
in 1749 a formal treaty between sixteen hundred Negroes and the
Dutch was made. Immediately a new group revolted under a Mohammedan,
Arabi, and they obtained land and liberty. In 1763 the
coast Negroes revolted. They were checked, but made terms and
settled in the interior. The Bush Negroes fought against both French
and English to save Guiana to the Dutch, but Guiana was eventually
divided between the three. The Bush Negroes still maintain
their independence and vigor.

The French encouraged settlements in the West Indies in the
seventeenth century, but at last, finding that French immigrants
would not come, they began about 1642 to import Negroes. Owing
to wars with England, slaves were supplied by the Dutch and Portuguese,
although the Royal Senegal Company held the coveted Asiento
from 1701 to 1713.

It was in the island of Hayti, however, that French slavery centered.
Pirates from many nations, but chiefly French, began to frequent
the island, and in 1663 the French annexed the eastern part,
thus dividing the island between France and Spain. By 1680 there
were so many slaves and mulattoes that Louis XIV issued his celebrated
Code Noir, which was notable in compelling bachelor masters,
fathers of slave children, to marry their concubines. Children
followed the condition of the mother as to slavery or freedom; they
could have no property; harsh punishments were provided for, but
families could not be separated by sale except in the case of grown
children; emancipation with full civil rights was made possible for
any slave twenty years of age or more. When Louisiana was settled
and the Alabama coast, slaves were introduced there. Louisiana was
transferred to Spain in 1762, against the resistance of both settlers
and slaves, but Spain took possession in 1769 and introduced more
Negroes.

Later, in Hayti, a more liberal policy encouraged trade; war was
over and capital and slaves poured in. Sugar, coffee, chocolate,
indigo, dyes, and spices were raised. There were large numbers of
mulattoes, many of whom were educated in France, and many masters
married Negro women who had inherited large properties, just
as in the United States to-day white men are marrying eagerly the
landed Indian women in the West. When white immigration increased
in 1749, however, prejudice arose against these mulattoes
and severe laws were passed depriving them of civil rights, entrance
into the professions, and the right to hold office; severe edicts were
enforced as to clothing, names, and social intercourse. Finally, after
1777, mulattoes were forbidden to come to France.

When the French Revolution broke out, the Haytians managed
to send two delegates to Paris. Nevertheless the planters maintained
the upper hand, and one of the colored delegates, Oge, on returning,
started a small rebellion. He and his companions were killed
with great brutality. This led the French government to grant full
civil rights to free Negroes, Immediately planters and free Negroes
flew to arms against each other and then, suddenly, August 22, 1791,
the black slaves, of whom there were four hundred and fifty-two
thousand, arose in revolt to help the free Negroes.

For many years runaway slaves had hidden in the mountains under
their own chiefs. One of the earliest of these chiefs was Polydor, in
1724, who was succeeded by Macandal. The great chief of these
runaways or “Maroons” at the time of the slave revolt was Jean
François, who was soon succeeded by Biassou.

Pierre Dominic Toussaint, known as Toussaint L’Ouverture,
joined these Maroon bands, where he was called “the doctor of the
armies of the king,” and soon became chief aid to Jean François and
Biassou. Upon their deaths Toussaint rose to the chief command. He
acquired complete control over the blacks, not only in military matters,
but in politics and social organization; “the soldiers regarded
him as a superior being, and the farmers prostrated themselves before
him. All his generals trembled before him (Dessalines did not
dare to look in his face), and all the world trembled before his
generals.”[82]

The revolt once started, blacks and mulattoes murdered whites
without mercy and the whites retaliated. Commissioners were sent
from France, who asked simply civil rights for freedmen, and not
emancipation. Indeed that was all that Toussaint himself had as yet
demanded. The planters intrigued with the British and this, together
with the beheading of the king (an impious act in the eyes of Negroes),
induced Toussaint to join the Spaniards. In 1793 British
troops were landed and the French commissioners in desperation declared
the slaves emancipated. This at once won back Toussaint from
the Spaniards. He became supreme in the north, while Rigaud,
leader of the mulattoes, held the south and the west. By 1798 the
British, having lost most of their forces by yellow fever, surrendered
Mole St. Nicholas to Toussaint and departed. Rigaud finally left for
France, and Toussaint in 1800 was master of Hayti. He promulgated
a constitution under which Hayti was to be a self-governing colony;
all men were equal before the law, and trade was practically free.
Toussaint was to be president for life, with the power to name his
successor.

Napoleon Bonaparte, master of France, had at this time dreams
of a great American empire, and replied to Toussaint’s new government
by sending twenty-five thousand men under his brother-in-law
to subdue the presumptuous Negroes, as a preliminary step to his
occupation and development of the Mississippi valley. Fierce fighting
and yellow fever decimated the French, but matters went hard
with the Negroes too, and Toussaint finally offered to yield. He
was courteously received with military honors and then, as soon as
possible, treacherously seized, bound, and sent to France. He was
imprisoned at Fort Joux and died, perhaps of poison, after studied
humiliations, April 7, 1803.

Thus perished the greatest of American Negroes and one of the
great men of all time, at the age of fifty-six. A French planter said,
“God in his terrestrial globe did not commune with a purer spirit.”[83]
Wendell Phillips said, “Some doubt the courage of the Negro. Go
to Hayti and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers
France ever had and ask them what they think of the Negro’s sword.
I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire
over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke
his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a
soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his
grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held
slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave
trade in the humblest village of his dominions. You think me a
fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your
prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the
Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the
Roman, Hampden for the English, La Fayette for France, choose
Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization,
then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear
blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the
martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture.”

The treacherous killing of Toussaint did not conquer Hayti. In
1802 and 1803 some forty thousand French soldiers died of war
and fever. A new colored leader, Dessalines, arose and all the eight
thousand remaining French surrendered to the blockading British
fleet.

The effect of all this was far-reaching. Napoleon gave up his
dream of American empire and sold Louisiana for a song. “Thus, all
of Indian Territory, all of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa and
Wyoming and Montana and the Dakotas, and most of Colorado
and Minnesota, and all of Washington and Oregon states, came to
us as the indirect work of a despised Negro. Praise, if you will, the
work of a Robert Livingstone or a Jefferson, but to-day let us not
forget our debt to Toussaint L’Ouverture, who was indirectly the
means of America’s expansion by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.”[84]

With the freedom of Hayti in 1801 came a century of struggle
to fit the people for the freedom they had won. They were yet slaves,
crushed by a cruel servitude, without education or religious instruction.
The Haytian leaders united upon Dessalines to maintain
the independence of the republic. Dessalines, like Toussaint and
his lieutenant Christophe, was noted in slavery days for his severity
toward his fellows and the discipline which he insisted on. He had
other characteristics of African chieftains. “There were seasons
when he broke through his natural sullenness and showed himself
open, affable, and even generous. His vanity was excessive and
manifested itself in singular perversities.”[85] He was a man of great
personal bravery and succeeded in maintaining the independence of
Hayti, which had already cost the Frenchmen fifty thousand lives.

On January 1, 1804, at the place whence Toussaint had been
treacherously seized and sent to France, the independence of Hayti
was declared by the military leaders. Dessalines was made governor-general
for life and afterward proclaimed himself emperor. This
was not an act of grandiloquence and mimicry. “It is truer to say
that in it both Dessalines and later Christophe were actuated by a
clear insight into the social history and peculiarities of their people.
There was nothing in the constitution which did not have its companion
in Africa, where the organization of society was despotic,
with elective hereditary chiefs, royal families, polygamic marriages,
councils, and regencies.”[86]

The population was divided into soldiers and laborers. The territory
was parceled out to chiefs, and the laborers were bound to the
soil and worked under rigorous inspection; part of the products were
reserved for their support, and the rest went to the chiefs, the king,
the general government, and the army. The army was under stern
discipline and military service was compulsory. Women did much
of the agricultural labor. Under Toussaint the administration of this
system was committed to Dessalines, who carried it out with rigor;
it was afterward followed by Christophe. The latter even imported
four thousand Negroes from Africa, from whom he formed a national
guard for patrolling the land. These regulations brought back
for a time a large part of the former prosperity of the island.

The severity with which Dessalines enforced the laws soon began
to turn many against him. The educated mulattoes especially objected
to submission to the savage African mores. Dessalines started
to suppress their revolt, but was killed in ambush in October, 1806.

Great Britain now began to intrigue for a protectorate over the
island and the Spanish end of the island threatened attack. These
difficulties were overcome, but at a cost of great internal strain. After
the death of Dessalines it seemed that Hayti was about to dissolve
into a number of petty subdivisions. At one time Christophe was
ruling as king in the north, Petion as president at Port au Prince,
Rigaud in the south, and a semi-brigand, Goman, in the extreme
southwest. Very soon, however, the rivalry narrowed down to Petion
and Christophe. Petion was a man of considerable ability and did
much, not simply for Hayti, but for South America. Already as early
as 1779, before the revolution in Hayti, the Haytian Negroes had
helped the United States. The British had captured Savannah in
1778. The French fleet appeared on the coast of Georgia late that
year and was ordered to recruit men in Hayti. Eight hundred young
freedmen, blacks and mulattoes, offered to take part in the expedition,
and they fought valiantly in the siege and covered themselves
with glory. It was this legion that made the charge on the British
and saved the retreating American army. Among the men who
fought there was Christophe.

When Simon Bolivar, Commodore Aury, and many Venezuelan
families were driven from their country in 1815, they and their ships
took temporary refuge in Hayti. Notwithstanding the embarrassed
condition of the republic, Petion received them and gave them four
thousand rifles with ammunition, provisions, and last and best a
printing press. He also settled some international quarrels among
members of the groups, and Bolivar expressed himself afterward as
being “overwhelmed with magnanimous favors.”[87]

Petion died in 1818 and was succeeded by his friend Boyer.
Christophe committed suicide the following year and Boyer became
not simply ruler of western Hayti, but also, by arrangement with
the eastern end of the island, gained the mastery there, where they
were afraid of Spanish aggression. Thus from 1822 to 1843 Boyer,
a man of much ability, ruled the whole of the island and gained
the recognition of Haytian independence from France and other
nations.

France, under Charles X, demanded an indemnity of thirty million
dollars to reimburse the planters for confiscated lands and
property. This Hayti tried to pay, but the annual installment was a
tremendous burden to the impoverished country. Further negotiations
were entered into. Finally in 1838 France recognized the independence
of the republic and the indemnity was reduced to twelve
million dollars. Even this was a large burden for Hayti, and the
payment of it for years crippled the island.

The United States and Great Britain in 1825-26 recognized the
independence of Hayti. A concordat was arranged with the Pope
for governing the church in Hayti, and finally in 1860 the church
placed under the French hierarchy. Thus Boyer did unusually well;
but his necessary concessions to France weakened his influence at
home, and finally an earthquake, which destroyed several towns in
1842, raised the superstitious of the populace against him. He resigned
in 1843, leaving the treasury well filled; but with his withdrawal
the Spanish portion of the island was lost to Hayti.

The subsequent history of Hayti since 1843 has been the struggle
of a small divided country to maintain political independence. The
rich resources of the country called for foreign capital, but outside
capital meant political influence from abroad, which the little nation
rightly feared. Within, the old antagonism between the freedman
and the slave settled into a color line between the mulatto and
the black, which for a time meant the difference between educated
liberalism and reactionary ignorance. This difference has largely disappeared,
but some vestiges of the color line remain. The result has
been reaction and savagery under Soulouque, Dominique, and Nord
Alexis, and decided advance under presidents like Nissage-Saget,
Solomon, Legitime, and Hyppolite.

In political life Hayti is still in the sixteenth century; but in economic
life she has succeeded in placing on their own little farms
the happiest and most contented peasantry in the world, after raising
them from a veritable hell of slavery. If modern capitalistic
greed can be restrained from interference until the best elements of
Hayti secure permanent political leadership the triumph of the
revolution will be complete.

In other parts of the French-American dominion the slaves
achieved freedom also by insurrection. In Guadeloupe they helped
the French drive out the British, and thus gained emancipation. In
Martinique it took three revolts and a civil war to bring freedom.

The English slave empire in America centered in the Bermudas,
Barbadoes, Jamaica and the lesser islands, and in the United States.
Barbadoes developed a savage slave code, and the result was attempted
slave insurrections in 1674, 1692, and 1702. These were
not successful, but a rising in 1816 destroyed much property under
the leadership of a mulatto, Washington Franklin, and the repeal
of bad laws and eventual enfranchisement of the colored people
followed. One Barbadian mulatto, Sir Conrad Reeves, has held the
position of chief justice in the island and was knighted. A Negro
insurrection in Dominica under Farcel greatly exercised England in
1791 and 1794 and delayed slave trade abolition; in 1844 and 1847
further uprisings took place, and these continued from 1853 to
1893.

The chief island domain of English slavery was Jamaica. It was
Oliver Cromwell who, in his zeal for God and the slave trade, sent
an expedition to seize Hayti. His fleet, driven off there, took Jamaica
in 1655. The English found the mountains already infested with
runaway slaves known as “Maroons,” and more Negroes joined
them when the English arrived. In 1663 the freedom of the Maroons
was acknowledged, land was given them, and their leader, Juan de
Bolas, was made a colonel in the militia. He was killed, however, in
the following year, and from 1664 to 1738 the three thousand or
more black Maroons fought the British Empire in guerrilla warfare.
Soldiers, Indians, and dogs were sent against them, and finally in
1738 Captain Cudjo and other chiefs made a formal treaty of peace
with Governor Trelawney. They were granted twenty-five hundred
acres and their freedom was recognized.

The peace lasted until 1795, when they rebelled again and gave
the British a severe drubbing, besides murdering planters. Bloodhounds
again were imported. The Maroons offered to surrender on
the express condition that none of their number should be deported
from the island, as the legislature wished. General Walpole
hesitated, but could get peace on no other terms and gave his word.
The Maroons surrendered their arms, and immediately the whites
seized six hundred of the ringleaders and transported them to the
snows of Nova Scotia! The legislature then voted a sword worth
twenty-five hundred dollars to General Walpole, which he indignantly
refused to accept. Eventually these exiled Maroons found
their way to Sierra Leone, West Africa, in time to save that colony
to the British crown.[88]

The pressing desire for peace with the Maroons on the part of
the white planters arose from the new sugar culture introduced in
1673. A greatly increased demand for slaves followed, and between
1700 and 1786 six hundred and ten thousand slaves were imported;
nevertheless, so severely were they driven, that there were only three
hundred thousand Negroes in Jamaica in the latter year.

Despite the Moravian missions and other efforts late in the eighteenth
century, unrest among the Jamaica slaves and freedmen grew
and was increased by the anti-slavery agitation in England and the
revolt in Hayti. There was an insurrection in 1796; and in 1831
again the Negroes of northwest Jamaica, impatient because of the
slow progress of the emancipation, arose in revolt and destroyed
nearly three and a half million dollars’ worth of property, well-nigh
ruining the planters there. The next year two hundred and fifty-five
thousand slaves were set free, for which the planters were paid
nearly thirty million dollars. There ensued a discouraging condition
of industry. The white officials sent out in these days were arbitrary
and corrupt. Little was done for the mass of the people and there
was outrageous over-taxation. Nevertheless the backwardness of the
colony was attributed to the Negro. Governor Eyre complained in
1865 that the young and strong were good for nothing and were
filling the jails; but a simultaneous report by a missionary told the
truth concerning the officials. This aroused the colored people, and
a mulatto, George William Gordon, called a meeting. Other meetings
were afterward held, and finally the Negro peasantry began
a riot in 1861, in which eighteen people were killed, only a few of
whom were white.

The result was that Governor Eyre tried and executed by court-martial
354 persons, and in addition to this killed without trial 85,
a total of 439. One thousand Negro homes were burned to the
ground and thousands of Negroes flogged or mutilated. Children
had their brains dashed out, pregnant women were murdered, and
Gordon was tried by court-martial and hanged. In fact the punishment
was, as the royal commissioners said, “reckless and positively
barbarous.”[89]

This high-handed act aroused England. Eyre was not punished,
but the island was made a crown colony in 1866, and given representation
in the legislature in 1886.

In the island of St. Vincent, Indians first sought to enslave the
fugitive Negroes wrecked there, but the Negroes took the Carib
women and then drove the Indian men away. These “black Caribs”
fought with Indians, English, and others for three quarters of a
century, until the Indians were exterminated. The British took possession
in 1763. The black Caribs resisted, and after hard fighting
signed a treaty in 1773, receiving one-third of the island as their
property. They afterward helped the French against the British, and
were finally deported to the island of Ruatan, off Honduras. In
Trinidad and British Guiana there have been mutinies and rioting
of slaves and a curious mingling of races.

Other parts of South America must be dismissed briefly, because
of insufficient data. Colombia and Venezuela, with perhaps eight
million people, have at least one-third of their population of Negro
and Indian descent. Here Simon Bolivar with his Negro, mulatto,
and Indian forces began the war that liberated South America. Central
America has a smaller proportion of Negroids, perhaps one hundred
thousand in all. Bolivia and Peru have small amounts of Negro
blood, while Argentine and Uruguay have very little. The Negro
population in these lands is everywhere in process of rapid amalgamation
with whites and Indians.

XI

THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES

There were half a million slaves in the confines of the United States
when the Declaration of Independence declared “that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.” The land that thus magniloquently heralded its
advent into the family of nations had supported the institution of
human slavery for one hundred and fifty-seven years and was destined
to cling to it eighty-seven years longer.

The greatest experiment in Negro slavery as a modern industrial
system was made on the mainland of North America and in the
confines of the present United States. And this experiment was on
such a scale and so long-continued that it is profitable for study and
reflection. There were in the United States in its dependencies, in
1910, 9,828,294 persons of acknowledged Negro descent, not including
the considerable infiltration of Negro blood which is not
acknowledged and often not known. To-day the number of persons
called Negroes is probably about ten and a quarter million. These
persons are almost entirely descendants of African slaves, brought to
America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries.

The importation of Negroes to the mainland of North America
was small until the British got the coveted privilege of the Asiento
in 1713. Before that Northern States like New York had received
some slaves from the Dutch, and New England had early developed
a trade by which she imported a number of house servants. Ships
went out to the African coast with rum, sold the rum, and brought
the slaves to the West Indies; there they exchanged the slaves for
sugar and molasses and brought the molasses back to New England,
to be made into rum for further exploits. After the Asiento treaty
the Negro population increased in the eighteenth century from
about 50,000 in 1710 to 220,000 in 1750 and to 462,000 in 1770.
When the colonies became independent, the foreign slave trade was
soon made illegal; but illicit trade, annexation of territory and
natural increase enlarged the Negro population from a little over a
million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to four and a
half millions at the outbreak of the Civil War and to about ten
and a quarter millions in 1914.

The present so-called Negro population of the United States is:

1. A mixture of the various African populations, Bantu, Sudanese,
west-coast Negroes, some dwarfs, and some traces of Arab, Berber,
and Semitic blood.

2. A mixture of these strains with the blood of white Americans
through a system of concubinage of colored women in slavery days,
together with some legal intermarriage.

The figures as to mulattoes[90] have been from time to time officially
acknowledged to be understatements. Probably one-third of the
Negroes of the United States have distinct traces of white blood.
This blending of the races has led to interesting human types, but
racial prejudice has hitherto prevented any scientific study of the
matter. In general the Negro population in the United States is
brown in color, darkening to almost black and shading off in the
other direction to yellow and white, and is indistinguishable in
some cases from the white population.

Much has been written of the black man in America, but most
of this has been from the point of view of the whites, so that we
know of the effect of Negro slavery on the whites, the strife among
the whites for and against abolition, and the consequent problem
of the Negro so far as the white population is concerned.

This chapter, however, is dealing with the matter more from the
point of view of the Negro group itself, and seeking to show what
slavery meant to them, how they reacted against it, what they did
to secure their freedom, and what they are doing with their partial
freedom to-day.

The slaves landing from 1619 onward were received by the
colonies at first as laborers, on the same plane as other laborers. For
a long time there was in law no distinction between the indented white
servant from England and the black servant from Africa, except in
the term of their service. Even here the distinction was not always
observed, some of the whites being kept beyond term of their service
and Negroes now and then securing their freedom. Gradually
the planters realized the advantage of laborers held for life, but they
were met by certain moral difficulties. The opposition to slavery had
from the first been largely stilled when it was stated that this was a
method of converting the heathen to Christianity. The corollary was
that when a slave was converted he became free. Up to 1660 or
thereabouts it seemed accepted in most colonies and in the English
West Indies that baptism into a Christian church would free a
Negro slave. Masters therefore, were reluctant in the seventeenth
century to have their slaves receive Christian instruction. Massachusetts
first apparently legislated on this matter by enacting in 1641
that slavery should be confined to captives in just wars “and such
strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us,”[91] meaning by
“strangers” apparently heathen, but saying nothing as to the effect
of conversion. Connecticut adopted similar legislation in 1650, and
Virginia declared in 1661 that Negroes “are incapable of making
satisfaction” for time lost in running away by lengthening their
time of services, thus implying that they were slaves for life. Maryland
declared in 1663 that Negro slaves should serve durante vita,
but it was not until 1667 that Virginia finally plucked up courage
to attack the issue squarely and declared by law: “Baptism doth not
alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom, in
order that diverse masters freed from this doubt may more carefully
endeavor the propagation of Christianity.”[92]

The transplanting of the Negro from his African clan life to the
West Indian plantation was a social revolution. Marriage became
geographical and transient, while women and girls were without
protection.

The private home as a self-protective, independent unit did not
exist. That powerful institution, the polygamous African home, was
almost completely destroyed, and in its place in America arose sexual
promiscuity, a weak community life, with common dwelling, meals,
and child nurseries. The internal slave trade tended further to
weaken natural ties. A small number of favored house servants and
artisans were raised above this—had their private homes, came in
contact with the culture of the master class, and assimilated much
of American civilization. This was, however, exceptional; broadly
speaking, the greatest social effect of American slavery was to substitute
for the polygamous Negro home a new polygamy less
guarded, less effective, and less civilized.

At first sight it would seem that slavery completely destroyed
every vestige of spontaneous movement among the Negroes. This is
not strictly true. The vast power of the priest in the African state is
well known; his realm alone—the province of religion and medicine—remained
largely unaffected by the plantation system. The Negro
priest, therefore, early became an important figure on the plantation
and found his function as the interpreter of the supernatural, the
comforter of the sorrowing, and as the one who expressed, rudely
but picturesquely, the longing and disappointment and resentment
of a stolen people. From such beginnings arose and spread with marvelous
rapidity the Negro church, the first distinctively Negro
American social institution. It was not at first by any means a Christian
church, but a mere adaptation of those rites of fetish which in
America is termed obe worship, or “voodooism.”[93] Association and
missionary effort soon gave these rites a veneer of Christianity and
gradually, after two centuries, the church became Christian, with a
simple Calvinistic creed, but with many of the old customs still
clinging to the services. It is this historic fact, that the Negro church
of to-day bases itself upon the sole surviving social institution of the
African fatherland, that accounts for its extraordinary growth and
vitality.

The slave codes at first were really labor codes based on an attempt
to reestablish in America the waning feudalism of Europe.
The laborers were mainly black and were held for life. Above them
came the artisans, free whites with a few blacks, and above them
the master class. The feudalism called for the plantation system,
and the plantation system as developed in America, and particularly
in Virginia, was at first a feudal domain. On these plantations the
master was practically supreme. The slave codes in early days were
but moderately harsh, allowing punishment by the master, but restraining
him in extreme cases and providing for care of the slaves
and of the aged. With the power, however, solely in the hands of
the master class, and with the master supreme on his own plantation,
his power over the slave was practically what he wished it to
be. In some cases the cruelty was as great as on the worst West
Indian plantations. In other cases the rule was mild and paternal.

Up through this American feudalism the Negro began to rise.
He learned in the eighteenth century the English language, he
began to be identified with the Christian church, he mingled his
blood to a considerable extent with the master class. The house
servants particularly were favored, in some cases receiving education,
and the number of free Negroes gradually increased.

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions
of Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid
and gentle patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and
retainers, ease and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous
cruelty and unbridled power and wide oppression of men.
Which is the true picture? The answer is simple: both are true.
They are not opposite sides of the same shield; they are different
shields. They are pictures, on the one hand, of house service in the
great country seats and in the towns, and on the other hand of the
field laborers who raised the great tobacco, rice, and cotton crops.
We have thus not only carelessly mixed pictures of what were really
different kinds of slavery, but of that which represented different
degrees in the development of the economic system. House service
was the older feudal idea of personal retainership, developed in Virginia
and Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It
had all the advantages and disadvantages of such a system; the advantage
of the strong personal tie and disadvantage of unyielding
caste distinctions, with the resultant immoralities. At its worst, however,
it was a matter primarily of human relationships.

Out of this older type of slavery in the northern South there developed,
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the
southern South the type of slavery which corresponds to the modern
factory system in its worst conceivable form. It represented production
of a staple product on a large scale; between the owner and
laborer were interposed the overseer and the drivers. The slaves were
whipped and driven to a mechanical task system. Wide territory
was needed, so that at last absentee landlordship was common. It
was this latter type of slavery that marked the cotton kingdom, and
the extension of the area of this system southward and westward
marked the aggressive world-conquering visions of the slave barons.
On the other hand it was the milder and far different Virginia house
service and the personal retainership of town life in which most
white children grew up; it was this that impressed their imaginations
and which they have so vividly portrayed. The Negroes, however,
knew the other side, for it was under the harsher, heartless driving
of the fields that fully nine-tenths of them lived.

There early began to be some internal development and growth
of self-consciousness among the Negroes: for instance, in New
England towns Negro “governors” were elected. This was partly an
African custom transplanted and partly an endeavor to put the regulation
of the slaves into their own hands. Negroes voted in those
days: for instance, in North Carolina until 1835 the Constitution
extended the franchise to every freeman, and when Negroes were
disfranchised in 1835, several hundred colored men were deprived
of the vote. In fact, as Albert Bushnell Hart says, “In the colonies
freed Negroes, like freed indentured white servants, acquired property,
founded families, and came into the political community if
they had the energy, thrift, and fortune to get the necessary property.”[94]

The humanitarian movement of the eighteenth century was active
toward Negroes, because of the part which they played in the Revolutionary
War. Negro regiments and companies were raised in Connecticut
and Rhode Island, and a large number of Negroes were
members of the continental armies elsewhere. Individual Negroes
distinguished themselves. It is estimated that five thousand Negroes
fought in the American armies.

The mass of the Americans considered at the time of the adoption
of the Constitution that Negro slavery was doomed. There soon
came a series of laws emancipating slaves in the North: Vermont
began in 1779, followed by judicial decision in Massachusetts in
1780 and gradual emancipation in Pennsylvania beginning the same
year; emancipation was accomplished in New Hampshire in 1783,
and in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. The momentous
exclusion of slavery in the Northwest Territory took place in 1787,
and gradual emancipation began in New York and New Jersey in
1799 and 1804.

Beneficial and insurance societies began to appear among colored
people. Nearly every town of any size in Virginia in the early eighteenth
century had Negro organizations for caring for the sick and
burying the dead. As the number of free Negroes increased, particularly
in the North, these financial societies began to be openly
formed. One of the earliest was the Free African Society of Philadelphia.
This eventually became the present African Methodist
Church, which has to-day half a million members and over eleven
million dollars’ worth of property.

Negroes began to be received into the white church bodies in
separate congregations, and before 1807 there is the record of the
formation of eight such Negro churches. This brought forth leaders
who were usually preachers in these churches. Richard Allen, the
founder of the African Methodist Church, was one; Lot Carey, one
of the founders of Liberia, was another. In the South there was John
Chavis, who passed through a regular course of studies at what is
now Washington and Lee University. He started a school for young
white men in North Carolina and had among his pupils a United
States senator, sons of a chief justice of North Carolina, a governor
of the state, and many others. He was a full-blooded Negro, but a
Southern writer says that “all accounts agree that John Chavis was
a gentleman. He was received socially among the best whites and
asked to table.”[95]

In the war of 1812 thirty-three hundred Negroes helped Jackson
win the battle of New Orleans, and numbers fought in New York
State and in the navy under Perry, Channing, and others. Phyllis
Wheatley, a Negro girl, wrote poetry, and the mulatto, Benjamin
Banneker, published one of the first American series of almanacs.

In fine, it seemed in the early years of the nineteenth century that
slavery in the United States would gradually disappear and that the
Negro would have, in time, a man’s chance. A change came, however,
between 1820 and 1830, and it is directly traceable to the industrial
revolution of the nineteenth century.

Between 1738 and 1830 there had come a remarkable series of
inventions which revolutionized the methods of making cloth. This
series included the invention of the fly shuttle, the carding machine,
the steam engine, and the power loom. The world began to look
about for a cheaper and larger supply of fiber for weaving. It was
found in the cotton plant, and the southern United States was especially
adapted to its culture. The invention of the cotton gin removed
the last difficulties. The South now had a crop which could
be attended to by unskilled labor and for which there was practically
unlimited demand. There was land, and rich land, in plenty.
The result was that the cotton crop in the United States increased
from 8,000 bales in 1790 to 650,000 bales in 1820, to 2,500,000 bales
in 1850, and to 4,000,000 bales in 1860.

In this growth one sees the economic foundation of the new
slavery in the United States, which rose in the second decade of the
nineteenth century. Manifestly the fatal procrastination in dealing
with slavery in the eighteenth century received in the nineteenth
century its terrible reward. The change in the attitude toward slavery
was manifest in various ways. The South no longer excused slavery,
but began to defend it as an economic system. The enforcement of
the slave trade laws became notoriously lax and there was a tendency
to make slave codes harsher.

This led to retaliation on the part of the Negroes. There had not
been in the United States before this many attempts at insurrection.
The slaves were distributed over a wide territory, and before they
became intelligent enough to cooperate the chance of emancipation
was held before them. Several small insurrections are alluded to in
South Carolina early in the eighteenth century, and one by Cato at
Stono in 1740 caused widespread alarm. The Negro plot in New
York in 1712 put the city into hysterics. There was no further plotting
on any scale until the Haytian revolt, when Gabriel in Virginia
made an abortive attempt. In 1822 a free Negro, Denmark Vesey,
in South Carolina, failed in a well-laid plot, and ten years after that,
in 1831, Nat Turner led his insurrection in Virginia and killed
fifty-one persons. The result of this insurrection was to crystallize
tendencies toward harshness which the economic revolution was
making advisable.

A wave of legislation passed over the South, prohibiting the slaves
from learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and
interfering with Negro religious meetings. Virginia declared in 1831
that neither slaves nor free Negroes might preach, nor could they
attend religious service at night without permission. In North Carolina
slaves and free Negroes were forbidden to preach, exhort, or
teach “in any prayer meeting or other association for worship where
slaves of different families are collected together” on penalty of not
more than thirty-nine lashes. Maryland and Georgia and other states
had similar laws.

The real effective revolt of the Negro against slavery was not,
however, by fighting, but by running away, usually to the North,
which had been recently freed from slavery. From the beginning of
the nineteenth century slaves began to escape in considerable numbers.
Four geographical paths were chiefly followed: one, leading
southward, was the line of swamps along the coast from Norfolk,
Virginia, to the northern border of Florida. This gave rise to the
Negro element among the Indians in Florida and led to the two
Seminole wars of 1817 and 1835. These wars were really slave raids
to make the Indians give up the Negro and half-breed slaves domiciled
among them. The wars cost the United States ten million
dollars and two thousand lives.

The great Appalachian range, with its abutting mountains, was
the safest path northward. Through Tennessee and Kentucky and
the heart of the Cumberland Mountains, using the limestone caverns,
was the third route, and the valley of the Mississippi was the
western tunnel.

These runaways and the freedmen of the North soon began to
form a group of people who sought to consider the problem of
slavery and the destiny of the Negro in America. They passed
through many psychological changes of attitude in the years from
1700 to 1850. At first, in the early part of the eighteenth century,
there was but one thought: revolt and revenge. The development
of the latter half of the century brought an attitude of hope and
adjustment and emphasized the differences between the slave and
the free Negro. The first part of the nineteenth century brought
two movements: among the free Negroes an effort at self-development
and protection through organization; among slaves and recent
fugitives a distinct reversion to the older idea of revolt.

As the new industrial slavery, following the rise of the cotton
kingdom, began to press harder, a period of storm and stress ensued
in the black world, and in 1829 came the first full-voiced, almost
hysterical protest of a Negro against slavery and the color line in
David Walker’s Appeal, which aroused Southern legislatures to
action.

The decade 1830-40 was a severe period of trial. Not only were
the chains of slavery tighter in the South, but in the North the
free Negro was beginning to feel the ostracism and competition of
white workingmen, native and foreign. In Philadelphia, between
1829 and 1849, six mobs of hoodlums and foreigners murdered and
maltreated Negroes. In the Middle West harsh black laws which
had been enacted in earlier days were hauled from their hiding places
and put into effect. No Negro was allowed to settle in Ohio unless
he gave bond within twenty days to the amount of five thousand
dollars to guarantee his good behavior and support. Harboring or
concealing fugitives was heavily fined, and no Negro could give
evidence in any case where a white man was party. These laws
began to be enforced in 1829 and for three days riots went on in
Cincinnati and Negroes were shot and killed. Aroused, the Negroes
sent a deputation to Canada where they were offered asylum. Fully
two thousand migrated from Ohio. Later large numbers from other
parts of the United States joined them.

In 1830-31 the first Negro conventions were called in Philadelphia
to consider the desperate condition of the Negro population,
and in 1833 the convention met again and local societies were
formed. The first Negro paper was issued in New York in 1827,
while later emancipation in the British West Indies brought some
cheer in the darkness.

A system of separate Negro schools was established and the little
band of abolitionists led by Garrison and others appeared. In spite
of all the untoward circumstances, therefore, the internal development
of the free Negro in the North went on. The Negro population
increased twenty-three per cent between 1830 and 1840; Philadelphia
had, in 1838, one hundred small beneficial societies, while
Ohio Negroes had ten thousand acres of land. The slave mutiny on
the Creole, the establishment of the Negro Odd Fellows, and the
growth of the Negro churches all indicated advancement.

Between 1830 and 1850 the concerted coöperation to assist fugitives
came to be known as the Underground Railroad. It was an organization
not simply of white philanthropists, but the coöperation of
Negroes in the most difficult part of the work made it possible.
Hundreds of Negroes visited the slave states to entice the slaves
away, and the list of Underground Railroad operators given by
Siebert contains one hundred and twenty-eight names of Negroes.
In Canada and in the northern United States there was a secret
society, known as the League of Freedom, which especially worked
to help slaves run away. Harriet Tubman was one of the most
energetic of these slave conductors and brought away several thousand
slaves. William Lambert, a colored man, was reputed between
1829 and 1862 to have aided in the escape of thirty thousand.

The decade 1840-50 was a period of hope and uplift for the
Negro group, with clear evidences of distinct self-assertion and advance.
A few well-trained lawyers and physicians appeared, and
colored men took their place among the abolition orators. The catering
business in Philadelphia and other cities fell largely into their
hands, and some small merchants arose here and there. Above all,
Frederick Douglass made his first speech in 1841 and thereafter
became one of the most prominent figures in the abolition crusade.
A new series of national conventions began to assemble late in the
forties, and the delegates were drawn from the artisans and higher
servants, showing a great increase of efficiency in the rank and file
of the free Negroes.

By 1850 the Negroes had increased to three and a half million.
Those in Canada were being organized in settlements and were
accumulating property. The escape of fugitive slaves was systematized
and some of the most representative conventions met. One
particularly, in 1854, grappled frankly with the problem of emigration.
It looked as though it was going to be impossible for Negroes
to remain in the United States and be free. As early as 1788 a
Negro union of Newport, Rhode Island, had proposed a general
exodus to Africa. John and Paul Cuffe, after petitioning for the
right to vote in 1780, started in 1815 for Africa, organizing an expedition
at their own expense which cost four thousand dollars. Lot
Carey organized the African Mission Society in 1813, and the first
Negro college graduate went to Liberia in 1829 and became superintendent
of public schools. The Colonization Society encouraged
this migration, and the Negroes themselves had organized the Canadian
exodus.

The Rochester Negro convention in 1853 pronounced against
migration, but nevertheless emissaries were sent in various directions
to see what inducements could be offered. One went to the Niger
valley, one to Central America, and one to Hayti. The Haytian trip
was successful and about two thousand black emigrants eventually
settled in Hayti.

Delaney, who went to Africa, concluded a treaty with eight kings
offering inducements to Negroes, but nothing came of it. In 1853
Negroes like Purvis and Barbadoes helped in the formation of the
American Anti-slavery society, and for a while colored men coöperated
with John Brown and probably would have given him considerable
help if they had thoroughly known his plans. As it was,
six or seven of his twenty-two followers were Negroes.

Meantime the slave power was impelled by the high price of slaves
and the exhaustion of cotton land to make increased demands. Slavery
was forced north of Mason and Dixon’s line in 1820; a new slave
empire with thousands of slaves was annexed in 1850, and a fugitive
slave law was passed which endangered the liberty of every free
Negro; finally a determined attempt was made to force slavery into
the Northwest in competition with free white labor, and less effective
but powerful movements arose to annex more slave territory to
the south and to reopen the African slave trade.

It looked like a triumphal march for the slave barons, but each
step cost more than the last. Missouri gave rise to the early abolitionist
movement. Mexico and the fugitive slave law aroused deep
opposition in the North, and Kansas developed an attack upon the
free labor system, not simply of the North, but of the civilized world.
The result was war; but the war was not against slavery. It was
fought to protect free white laborers against the competition of
slaves, and it was thought possible to do this by segregating slavery.

The first thing that vexed the Northern armies on Southern soil
during the war was the question of the disposition of the fugitive
slaves, who immediately began to arrive in increasing numbers.
Butler confiscated them, Fremont freed them, and Halleck caught
and returned them; but their numbers swelled to such large proportions
that the mere economic problem of their presence overshadowed
everything else, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln was glad to have them come after once he realized
their strength to the Confederacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation was forced, not simply by the
necessity of paralyzing industry in the South, but also by the necessity
of employing Negro soldiers. During the first two years of the
war no one wanted Negro soldiers. It was declared to be a “white
man’s war.” General Hunter tried to raise a regiment in South
Carolina, but the War Department disavowed the act. In Louisiana
the Negroes were anxious to enlist, but were held off. In the meantime
the war did not go as well as the North had hoped, and on
the twenty-sixth of January, 1863, the Secretary of War authorized
the Governor of Massachusetts to raise two regiments of Negro
troops. Frederick Douglass and others began the work with enthusiasm,
and in the end one hundred and eighty-seven thousand
Negroes enlisted in the Northern armies, of whom seventy thousand
were killed and wounded. The conduct of these troops was exemplary.
They were indispensable in camp duties and brave on the
field, where they fought in two hundred and thirteen battles. General
Banks wrote, “Their conduct was heroic. No troops could be more
determined or more daring.”[96]

The assault on Fort Wagner, led by a thousand black soldiers
under the white Colonel Shaw, is one of the greatest deeds of desperate
bravery on record. On the other hand the treatment of Negro
soldiers when captured by the Confederates was barbarous. At Fort
Pillow, after the surrender of the federal troops, the colored regiment
was indiscriminately butchered and some of them were buried
alive.

Abraham Lincoln said, “The slightest knowledge of arithmetic
will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed
with Democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the
North to do it. There are now in the service of the United States
near two hundred thousand able-bodied colored men, most of them
under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory…. Abandon
all the posts now garrisoned by black men; take two hundred
thousand men from our side and put them in the battlefield or cornfield
against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in
three weeks.”[97] Emancipation thus came as a war measure to break
the power of the Confederacy, preserve the Union, and gain the
sympathy of the civilized world.

However, two hundred and forty-four years of slavery could not be
stopped by edict. There were legal difficulties, the whole slow problem
of economic readjustment, and the subtle and far-reaching questions
of future race relations.

The peculiar circumstances of emancipation forced the legal and
political difficulties to the front, and these were so striking that they
have since obscured the others in the eyes of students. Quite unexpectedly
and without forethought the nation had emancipated
four million slaves. Once the deed was done, the majority of the
nation was glad and recognized that this was, after all, the only
result of a fearful four years’ war which in any degree justified it.
But how was the result to be secured for all time? There were three
possibilities: (1) to declare the slave free and leave him at the
mercy of his former masters; (2) to establish a careful government
guardianship designed to guide the slave from legal to real economic
freedom; (3) to give the Negro the political power to guard
himself as well as he could during this development. It is very easy
to forget that the United States government tried each one of these
in succession and was literally forced to adopt the third, because
the first had utterly failed and the second was thought too “paternal”
and especially too costly. To leave the Negroes helpless after
a paper edict of emancipation was manifestly impossible. It would
have meant that the war had been fought in vain.

Carl Schurz, who traversed the South just after the war, said, “A
veritable reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South. The
Negro found scant justice in the local courts against the white man.
He could look for protection only to the military forces of the
United States still garrisoning the states lately in rebellion and to
the Freedmen’s Bureau.”[98] This Freedmen’s Bureau was proposed
by Charles Sumner. If it had been presented to-day instead of fifty
years ago, it would have been regarded as a proposal far less revolutionary
than the state insurance of England and Germany. A half
century ago, however, and in a country which gave the laisser faire
economics their extremest trial, the Freedmen’s Bureau struck the
whole nation as unthinkable, save as a very temporary expedient
and to relieve the more pointed forms of distress following war. Yet
the proposals of the Bureau were both simple and sensible:

1. To oversee the making and enforcement of wage contracts for
freedmen.

2. To appear in the courts as the freedmen’s best friend.

3. To furnish the freedmen with a minimum of land and of
capital.

4. To establish schools.

5. To furnish such institutions of relief as hospitals, outdoor relief
stations, etc.

How a sensible people could expect really to conduct a slave
into freedom with less than this it is hard to see. Even with such
tutelage extending over a period of two or three decades, the ultimate
end had to be enfranchisement and political and social freedom
for those freedmen who attained a certain set standard. Otherwise
the whole training had neither object nor guarantee. Precisely
on this account the former masters opposed the Freedmen’s Bureau
with all their influence. They did not want the Negro trained or
really freed, and they criticized mercilessly the many mistakes of the
new Bureau.

The North at first thought to pay for the main cost of the Freedmen’s
Bureau by confiscating the property of former slave owners;
but finding this not in accordance with law, they realized that they
were embarking on an enterprise which bade fair to add many millions
to the already staggering cost of the war. When, therefore,
they saw that the abolition of slavery could not be left to the white
South and could not be done by the North without time and money,
they determined to put the responsibility on the Negro himself. This
was without a doubt a tremendous experiment, but with all its
manifest mistakes it succeeded to an astonishing degree. It made
the immediate reëstablishment of the old slavery impossible, and it
was probably the only quick method of doing this. It gave the freedmen’s
sons a chance to begin their education. It diverted the energy
of the white South slavery to the recovery of political power, and
in this interval, small as it was, the Negro took his first steps toward
economic freedom.

The difficulties that stared reconstruction politicians in the face
were these: (1) They must act quickly. (2) Emancipation had increased
the political power of the South by one-sixth. Could this
increased political power be put in the hands of those who, in defense
of slavery, had disrupted the Union? (3) How was the abolition
of slavery to be made effective? (4) What was to be the political
position of the freedmen?

The Freedmen’s Bureau in its short life accomplished a great task.
Carl Schurz, in 1865, felt warranted in saying that “not half of the
labor that has been done in the South this year, or will be done
there next year, would have been or would be done but for the exertions
of the Freedmen’s Bureau…. No other agency except one
placed there by the national government could have wielded that
moral power whose interposition was so necessary to prevent Southern
society from falling at once into the chaos of a general collision
between its different elements.”[99] Notwithstanding this the Bureau
was temporary, was regarded as a makeshift, and soon abandoned.

Meantime partial Negro suffrage seemed not only just, but almost
inevitable. Lincoln, in 1864, “cautiously” suggested to Louisiana’s
private consideration “whether some of the colored people
may not be let in as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially
those who fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help
in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty in the family
of freedom.” Indeed, the “family of freedom” in Louisiana being
somewhat small just then, who else was to be intrusted with the
“jewel”? Later and for different reasons Johnson, in 1865, wrote to
Mississippi, “If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons
of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English
and write their name, and to all persons of color who own real
estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars, and pay
taxes thereon, you would completely disarm the adversary and set
an example the other states will follow. This you can do with perfect
safety, and you thus place the Southern States, in reference to
free persons of color, upon the same basis with the free states. I hope
and trust your convention will do this.”

The Negroes themselves began to ask for the suffrage. The
Georgia convention in Augusta (1866) advocated “a proposition to
give those who could write and read well and possessed a certain
property qualification the right of suffrage.” The reply of the South
to these suggestions was decisive. In Tennessee alone was any action
attempted that even suggested possible Negro suffrage in the future,
and that failed. In all other states the “Black Codes” adopted were
certainly not reassuring to the friends of freedom. To be sure, it was
not a time to look for calm, cool, thoughtful action on the part of
the white South. Their economic condition was pitiable, their fear
of Negro freedom genuine. Yet it was reasonable to expect from
them something less than repression and utter reaction toward
slavery. To some extent this expectation was fulfilled. The abolition
of slavery was recognized on the statute book, and the civil rights of
owning property and appearing as a witness in cases in which he
was a party were generally granted the Negro; yet with these in
many cases went harsh and unbearable regulations which largely
neutralized the concessions and certainly gave ground for an assumption
that, once free, the South would virtually reenslave the Negro.
The colored people themselves naturally feared this, protesting, as in
Mississippi, “against the reactionary policy prevailing and expressing
the fear that the legislature will pass such prescriptive laws as will
drive the freedmen from the state, or practically reënslave them.”

The codes spoke for themselves. As Burgess says, “Almost every
act, word, or gesture of the Negro, not consonant with good taste
and good manners as well as good morals, was made a crime or misdemeanor
for which he could first be fined by the magistrates and
then be consigned to a condition of almost slavery for an indefinite
time, if he could not pay the bill.”[100]

All things considered, it seems probable that, if the South had
been permitted to have its way in 1865, the harshness of Negro
slavery would have been mitigated so as to make slave trading difficult,
and so as to make it possible for a Negro to hold property and
appear in some cases in court; but that in most other respects the
blacks would have remained in slavery.

What could prevent this? A Freedmen’s Bureau established for
ten, twenty, or forty years, with a careful distribution of land and
capital and a system of education for the children, might have prevented
such an extension of slavery. But the country would not
listen to such a comprehensive plan. A restricted grant of the suffrage
voluntarily made by the states would have been a reassuring
proof of a desire to treat the freedmen fairly and would have balanced
in part, at least, the increased political power of the South.
There was no such disposition evident.

In Louisiana, for instance, under the proposed reconstruction “not
one Negro was allowed to vote, though at that very time the wealthy
intelligent free colored people of the state paid taxes on property
assessed at fifteen million dollars and many of them were well
known for their patriotic zeal and love for the Union.”[101]

Thus the arguments for universal Negro suffrage from the start
were strong and are still strong, and no one would question their
strength were it not for the assumption that the experiment failed.
Frederick Douglass said to President Johnson, “Your noble and
humane predecessor placed in our hands the sword to assist in saving
the nation, and we do hope that you, his able successor, will
favorably regard the placing in our hands the ballot with which to
save ourselves.”[102]

Carl Schurz wrote, “It is idle to say that it will be time to speak
of Negro suffrage when the whole colored race will be educated, for
the ballot may be necessary to him to secure his education.”[103]

The granting of full Negro suffrage meant one of two alternatives
to the South: (1) The uplift of the Negro for sheer self-preservation.
This is what Schurz and the saner North expected. As one
Southern school superintendent said, “The elevation of this class is
a matter of prime importance, since a ballot in the hands of a black
citizen is quite as potent as in the hands of a white one.” Or (2)
Negro suffrage meant a determined concentration of Southern effort
by actual force to deprive the Negro of the ballot or nullify its use.
This last is what really happened. But even in this case, so much
energy was taken in keeping the Negro from voting that the plan
for keeping him in virtual slavery and denying him education partially
failed. It took ten years to nullify Negro suffrage in part and
twenty years to escape the fear of federal intervention. In these
twenty years a vast number of Negroes had arisen so far as to escape
slavery forever. Debt peonage could be fastened on part of the rural
South and was; but even here the new Negro landholder appeared.
Thus despite everything the Fifteenth Amendment, and that alone,
struck the death knell of slavery.

The steps toward the Fifteenth Amendment were taken slowly.
First Negroes were allowed to take part in reconstructing the state
governments. This was inevitable if loyal governments were to be
obtained. Next the restored state governments were directed to enfranchise
all citizens, black or white, or have their representation in
Congress cut down proportionately. Finally the United States said
the last word of simple justice: the states may regulate the suffrage,
but no state may deprive a person of the right to vote simply because
he is a Negro or has been a slave.

For such reasons the Negro was enfranchised. What was the result?
No language has been spared to describe these results as the
worst imaginable. This is not true. There were bad results, and bad
results arising from Negro suffrage; but those results were not so bad
as usually painted, nor was Negro suffrage the prime cause of many
of them. Let us not forget that the white South believed it to be of
vital interest to its welfare that the experiment of Negro suffrage
should fail ignominiously and that almost to a man the whites were
willing to insure this failure either by active force or passive acquiescence;
that besides this there were, as might be expected, men,
black and white, Northern and Southern, only too eager to take
advantage of such a situation for feathering their own nests. Much
evil must result in such case; but to charge the evil to Negro suffrage
is unfair. It may be charged to anger, poverty, venality, and ignorance,
but the anger and poverty were the almost inevitable aftermath
of war; the venality was much greater among whites than
Negroes both North and South, and while ignorance was the curse
of Negroes, the fault was not theirs and they took the initiative to
correct it.

The chief charges against the Negro governments are extravagance,
theft, and incompetency of officials. There is no serious
charge that these governments threatened civilization or the foundations
of social order. The charge is that they threatened property and
that they were inefficient. These charges are in part undoubtedly
true, but they are often exaggerated. The South had been terribly
impoverished and saddled with new social burdens. In other words,
states with smaller resources were asked not only to do a work of
restoration, but a larger social work. The property holders were
aghast. They not only demurred, but, predicting ruin and revolution,
they appealed to secret societies, to intimidation, force, and
murder. They refused to believe that these novices in government
and their friends were aught but scamps and fools. Under the circumstances
occurring directly after the war, the wisest statesman
would have been compelled to resort to increased taxation and would
have, in turn, been execrated as extravagant, dishonest, and incompetent.
It is easy, therefore, to see what flaming and incredible stories
of Reconstruction governments could gain wide currency and belief.
In fact the extravagance, although great, was not universal, and
much of it was due to the extravagant spirit pervading the whole
country in a day of inflated currency and speculation.

That the Negroes led by the astute thieves, became at first tools
and received some small share of the spoils is true. But two considerations
must be added: much of the legislation which resulted in
fraud was represented to the Negroes as good legislation, and thus
their votes were secured by deliberate misrepresentation. Take, for
instance, the land frauds of South Carolina. A wise Negro leader
of that state, advocating the state purchase of farm lands, said, “One
of the greatest of slavery bulwarks was the infernal plantation system,
one man owning his thousand, another his twenty, another
fifty thousand acres of land. This is the only way by which we will
break up that system, and I maintain that our freedom will be of no
effect if we allow it to continue. What is the main cause of the
prosperity of the North? It is because every man has his own farm
and is free and independent. Let the lands of the South be similarly
divided.”[104]

From such arguments the Negroes were induced to aid a scheme
to buy land and distribute it. Yet a large part of eight hundred thousand
dollars appropriated was wasted and went to the white landholders’
pockets.

The most inexcusable cheating of the Negroes took place through
the Freedmen’s Bank. This bank was incorporated by Congress in
1865 and had in its list of incorporators some of the greatest names
in America including Peter Cooper, William Cullen Bryan and
John Jay. Yet the bank was allowed to fail in 1874 owing the freedmen
their first savings of over three millions of dollars. They have
never been reimbursed.

Many Negroes were undoubtedly venal, but more were ignorant
and deceived. The question is: Did they show any signs of a disposition
to learn to better things? The theory of democratic government
is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather
that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a
chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience. This
is precisely what the Negro voters showed indubitable signs of
doing. First they strove for schools to abolish ignorance, and second,
a large and growing number of them revolted against the extravagance
and stealing that marred the beginning of Reconstruction, and
joined with the best elements to institute reform. The greatest stigma
on the white South is not that it opposed Negro suffrage and resented
theft and incompetence, but that, when it saw the reform
movements growing and even in some cases triumphing, and a larger
and larger number of black voters learning to vote for honesty and
ability, it still preferred a Reign of Terror to a campaign of education
and disfranchised Negroes instead of punishing rascals.

No one has expressed this more convincingly than a Negro who
was himself a member of the Reconstruction legislature of South
Carolina, and who spoke at the convention which disfranchised
him against one of the onslaughts of Tillman. “We were eight years
in power. We had built school houses, established charitable institutions,
built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for
the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails and court
houses, rebuilt the bridges, and reestablished the ferries. In short,
we had reconstructed the state and placed it upon the road to prosperity,
and at the same time, by our acts of financial reform, transmitted
to the Hampton government an indebtedness not greater by
more than two and a half million dollars than was the bonded debt
of the state in 1868, before the Republican Negroes and their white
allies came into power.”[105]

So, too, in Louisiana in 1872, and in Mississippi later, the better
element of the Republicans triumphed at the polls and, joining with
the Democrats, instituted reforms, repudiated the worst extravagance,
and started toward better things. Unfortunately there was one thing
that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance,
and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and
efficiency.

In the midst of all these difficulties the Negro governments in the
South accomplished much of positive good. We may recognize three
things which Negro rule gave to the South: (1) democratic government,
(2) free public schools, (3) new social legislation.

In general, the words of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a white “carpet
bagger,” are true when he says of the Negro governments,
“They obeyed the Constitution of the United States and annulled
the bonds of states, counties, and cities which had been issued to
carry on the War of Rebellion and maintain armies in the field
against the Union. They instituted a public school system in a realm
where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot
box and the jury box to thousands of white men who had been
debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced
home rule into the South. They abolished the whipping post,
the branding iron, the stocks, and other barbarous forms of punishment
which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital
felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance
they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works.
In all of that time no man’s rights of persons were invaded under
the forms of law. Every Democrat’s life, home, fireside, and business
were safe. No man obstructed any white man’s way to the ballot
box, interfered with his freedom of speech, or boycotted him on account
of his political faith.”[106]

A thorough study of the legislation accompanying these constitutions
and its changes since shows the comparatively small amount
of change in law and government which the overthrow of Negro
rule brought about. There were sharp and often hurtful economies
introduced, marking the return of property to power; there was a
sweeping change of officials, but the main body of Reconstruction
legislation stood. The Reconstruction democracy brought forth new
leaders and definitely overthrew the old Southern aristocracy. Among
these new men were Negroes of worth and ability. John R. Lynch,
when Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, was
given a public testimonial by Republicans and Democrats, and the
leading white paper said, “His bearing in office had been so proper,
and his rulings in such marked contrasts to the partisan conduct of
the ignoble whites of his party who have aspired to be leaders of the
blacks, that the conservatives cheerfully joined in the testimonial.”[107]

Of the colored treasurer of South Carolina the white Governor
Chamberlain said, “I have never heard one word or seen one act of
Mr. Cardoza’s which did not confirm my confidence in his personal
integrity and his political honor and zeal for the honest administration
of the state government. On every occasion, and under all circumstances,
he has been against fraud and robbery and in favor of
good measures and good men.”[108]

Jonathan C. Gibbs, a colored man and the first state superintendent
of instruction in Florida, was a graduate of Dartmouth. He
established the system and brought it to success, dying in harness
in 1874. Such men—and there were others—ought not to be forgotten
or confounded with other types of colored and white Reconstruction
leaders.

There is no doubt that the thirst of the black man for knowledge,
a thirst which has been too persistent and durable to be mere
curiosity or whim, gave birth to the public school system of the
South. It was the question upon which black voters and legislators
insisted more than anything else, and while it is possible to find
some vestiges of free schools in some of the Southern States before
the war, yet a universal, well-established system dates from the day
that the black man got political power.

Finally, in legislation covering property, the wider functions of
the state, the punishment of crime and the like, it is sufficient to
say that the laws on these points established by Reconstruction legislatures
were not only different from and even revolutionary to the
laws in the older South, but they were so wise and so well suited to
the needs of the new South that, in spite of a retrogressive movement
following the overthrow of the Negro governments, the mass
of this legislation, with elaborations and development, still stands
on the statute books of the South.[109]

The triumph of reaction in the South inaugurated a new era in
which we may distinguish three phases: the renewed attempt to
reduce the Negroes to serfdom, the rise of the Negro metayer, and
the economic disfranchisement of the Southern working class.

The attempt to replace individual slavery had been frustrated by
the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Fifteenth Amendment. The disfranchisement
of 1876 was followed by the widespread rise of
“crime” peonage. Stringent laws on vagrancy, guardianship, and
labor contracts were enacted and large discretion given judge and
jury in cases of petty crime. As a result Negroes were systematically
arrested on the slightest pretext and the labor of convicts leased to
private parties. This “convict lease system” was almost universal in
the South until about 1890, when its outrageous abuses and cruelties
aroused the whole country. It still survives over wide areas, and
is not only responsible for the impression that the Negro is a natural
criminal, but also for the inability of the Southern courts to
perform their normal functions after so long a prostitution to ends
far removed from justice.

In more normal economic lines the employers began with the
labor contract system. Before the war they owned labor, land, and
subsistence. After the war they still held the land and subsistence.
The laborer was hired and the subsistence “advanced” to him while
the crop was growing. The fall of the Freedmen’s Bureau hindered
the transmutation of this system into a modern wage system, and
allowed the laborers to be cheated by high interest charges on the
subsistence advanced and actual cheating often in book accounts.

The black laborers became deeply dissatisfied under this system
and began to migrate from the country to the cities, where there was
an increasing demand for labor. The employing farmers complained
bitterly of the scarcity of labor and of Negro “laziness,” and secured
the enactment of harsher vagrancy and labor contract laws, and
statutes against the “enticement” of laborers. So severe were these
laws that it was often impossible for a laborer to stop work without
committing a felony. Nevertheless competition compelled the landholders
to offer more inducements to the farm hand. The result was
the rise of the black share tenant: the laborer securing better wages
saved a little capital and began to hire land in parcels of forty to
eighty acres, furnishing his own tools and seed and practically raising
his own subsistence. In this way the whole face of the labor
contract in the South was, in the decade 1880-90, in process of
change from a nominal wage contract to a system of tenantry. The
great plantations were apparently broken up into forty and eighty
acre farms with black farmers. To many it seemed that emancipation
was accomplished, and the black folk were especially filled with
joy and hope.

It soon was evident, however, that the change was only partial.
The landlord still held the land in large parcels. He rented this in
small farms to tenants, but retained direct control. In theory the
laborer was furnishing capital, but in the majority of cases he was
borrowing at least a part of this capital from some merchant.

The retail merchant in this way entered on the scene as middle
man between landlord and laborer. He guaranteed the landowner
his rent and relieved him of details by taking over the furnishing of
supplies to the laborer. He tempted the laborer by a larger stock of
more attractive goods, made a direct contract with him, and took a
mortgage on the growing crop. Thus he soon became the middle
man to whom the profit of the transaction largely flowed, and he
began to get rich.

If the new system benefited the merchant and the landlord, it also
brought some benefits to the black laborers. Numbers of these were
still held in peonage, and the mass were laborers working for scant
board and clothes; but above these began to rise a large number of
independent tenants and farm owners.

In 1890, therefore, the South was faced by this question: Are we
willing to allow the Negro to advance as a free worker, peasant
farmer, metayer, and small capitalist, with only such handicaps as
naturally impede the poor and ignorant, or is it necessary to erect
further artificial barriers to restrain the advance of the Negroes? The
answer was clear and unmistakable. The advance of the freedmen
had been too rapid and the South feared it; every effort must be
made to “keep the Negro in his place” as a servile caste.

To this end the South strove to make the disfranchisement of the
Negroes effective and final. Up to this time disfranchisement was
illegal and based on intimidation. The new laws passed between
1890 and 1910 sought on their face to base the right to vote on
property and education in such a way as to exclude poor and illiterate
Negroes and admit all whites. In fact they could be administered
so as to exclude nearly all Negroes. To this was added a series
of laws designed publicly to humiliate and stigmatize Negro blood:
as, for example, separate railway cars; separate seats in street cars,
and the like; these things were added to the separation in schools
and churches, and the denial of redress to seduced colored women,
which had long been the custom in the South. All these new enactments
meant not simply separation, but subordination, caste, humiliation,
and flagrant injustice.

To all this was added a series of labor laws making the exploitation
of Negro labor more secure. All this legislation had to be accomplished
in the face of the labor movement throughout the
world, and particularly in the South, where it was beginning to enter
among the white workers. This was accomplished easily, however,
by an appeal to race prejudice. No method of inflaming the darkest
passions of men was unused. The lynching mob was given its glut
of blood and egged on by purposely exaggerated and often wholly
invented tales of crime on the part of perhaps the most peaceful and
sweet-tempered race the world has ever known. Under the flame
of this outward noise went the more subtle and dangerous work.
The election laws passed in the states where three-fourths of the
Negroes live, were so ingeniously framed that a black university
graduate could be prevented from voting and the most ignorant
white hoodlum could be admitted to the polls. Labor laws were so
arranged that imprisonment for debt was possible and leaving an
employer could be made a penitentiary offense. Negro schools were
cut off with small appropriations or wholly neglected, and a determined
effort was made with wide success to see that no Negro had
any voice either in the making or the administration of local, state,
or national law.

The acquiescence of the white labor vote of the South was further
insured by throwing white and black laborers, so far as possible,
into rival competing groups and making each feel that the one
was the cause of the other’s troubles. The neutrality of the white
people of the North was secured through their fear for the safety of
large investments in the South, and through the fatalistic attitude
common both in America and Europe toward the possibility of real
advance on the part of the darker nations.

The reaction of the Negro Americans upon this wholesale and
open attempt to reduce them to serfdom has been interesting. Naturally
they began to organize and protest and in some cases to appeal
to the courts. Then, to their astonishment, there arose a colored
leader, Mr. Booker T. Washington, who advised them to yield to
disfranchisement and caste and wait for greater economic strength
and general efficiency before demanding full rights as American
citizens. The white South naturally agreed with Mr. Washington,
and the white North thought they saw here a chance for peace
in the racial conflict and safety for their Southern investments.

For a time the colored people hesitated. They respected Mr.
Washington for shrewdness and recognized the wisdom of his
homely insistence on thrift and hard work; but gradually they came
to see more and more clearly that, stripped of political power and
emasculated by caste, they could never gain sufficient economic
strength to take their place as modern men. They also realized that
any lull in their protests would be taken advantage of by Negro
haters to push their caste program. They began, therefore, with
renewed persistence to fight for their fundamental rights as American
citizens. The struggle tended at first to bitter personal dissension
within the group. But wiser counsels and the advice of white friends
eventually prevailed and raised it to the broad level of a fight for the
fundamental principles of democracy. The launching of the “Niagara
Movement” by twenty-nine daring colored men in 1905, followed
by the formation of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People in 1910, marked an epoch in the advance
of the Negro. This latter organization, with its monthly organ, The
Crisis, is now waging a nation-wide fight for justice to Negroes.
Other organizations, and a number of strong Negro weekly papers
are aiding in this fight. What has been the net result of this struggle
of half a century?

In 1863 there were about five million persons of Negro descent in
the United States. Of these, four million and more were just being
released from slavery. These slaves could be bought and sold, could
move from place to place only with permission, were forbidden to
learn to read or write, and legally could never hold property or
marry. Ninety per cent were totally illiterate, and only one adult in
six was a nominal Christian.

Fifty years later, in 1913, there were in the United States ten and
a quarter million persons of Negro descent, an increase of one hundred
and five per cent. Legal slavery has been abolished leaving,
however, vestiges in debt slavery, peonage, and the convict lease
system. The mass of the freedmen and their sons have

1. Earned a living as free and partially free laborers.

2. Shared the responsibilities of government.

3. Developed the internal organization of their race.

4. Aspired to spiritual self-expression.

The Negro was freed as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant
laborer. There were a few free Negroes who owned property in the
South, and a larger number who owned property in the North; but
ninety-nine per cent of the race in the South were penniless field
hands and servants.

To-day there are two and a half million laborers, the majority of
whom are efficient wage earners. Above these are more than a
million servants and tenant farmers; skilled and semi-skilled workers
make another million and at the top of the economic column are
600,000 owners and managers of farms and businesses, cash tenants,
officials, and professional men. This makes a total of 5,192,535
colored breadwinners in 1910.

More specifically these breadwinners include 218,972 farm owners
and 319,346 cash farm tenants and managers. There were in all
62,755 miners, 288,141 in the building and hand trades; 28,515
workers in clay, glass, and stone; 41,739 iron and steel workers;
134,102 employees on railways; 62,822 draymen, cab drivers, and
liverymen; 133,245 in wholesale and retail trade; 32,170 in the public
service; and 69,471 in professional service, including 29,750
teachers, 17,495 clergymen, and 4,546 physicians, dentists, trained
nurses, etc. Finally, we must not forget 2,175,000 Negro homes,
with their housewives, and 1,620,000 children in school.

Fifty years ago the overwhelming mass of these people were not
only penniless, but were themselves assessed as real estate. By 1875
the Negroes probably had gotten hold of something between 2,000,000
and 4,000,000 acres of land through their bounties as soldiers
and the low price of land after the war. By 1880 this was increased
to about 6,000,000 acres; in 1890 to about 8,000,000 acres; in 1900
to over 12,000,000 acres. In 1910 this land had increased to nearly
20,000,000 acres, a realm as large as Ireland.

The 120,738 farms owned by Negroes in 1890 increased to
218,972 in 1910, or eighty-one per cent. The value of these farms
increased from $179,796,639 in 1900 to $440,992,439 in 1910; Negroes
owned in 1910 about 500,000 homes out of a total of 2,175,000.
Their total property in 1900 was estimated at $300,000,000 by
the American Economic Association. On the same basis of calculation
it would be worth to-day not less than $800,000,000.

Despite the disfranchisement of three-fourths of his voting population,
the Negro to-day is a recognized part of the American government.
He holds 7,500 offices in the executive service of the
nation, besides furnishing four regiments in the army and a large
number of sailors. In the state and municipal service he holds nearly
20,000 other offices, and he furnishes 500,000 of the votes which
rule the Union.

In these same years the Negro has relearned the lost art of organization.
Slavery was the almost absolute denial of initiative and
responsibility. To-day Negroes have nearly 40,000 churches, with
edifices worth at least $75,000,000 and controlling nearly 4,000,000
members. They raise themselves $7,500,000 a year for these
churches.

There are 200 private schools and colleges managed and almost
entirely supported by Negroes, and these and other public and
private Negro schools have received in 40 years $45,000,000 of
Negro money in taxes and donations. Five millions a year are raised
by Negro secret and beneficial societies which hold at least $6,000,000
in real estate. Negroes support wholly or in part over 100 old
folks’ homes and orphanages, 30 hospitals, and 500 cemeteries. Their
organized commercial life is extending rapidly and includes over
22,000 small retail businesses and 40 banks.

Above and beyond this material growth has gone the spiritual
uplift of a great human race. From contempt and amusement they
have passed to the pity, perplexity, and fear on the part of their
neighbors, while within their own souls they have arisen from
apathy and timid complaint to open protest and more and more
manly self-assertion. Where nine-tenths of them could not read or
write in 1860, to-day over two-thirds can; they have 300 papers and
periodicals, and their voice and expression are compelling attention.
Already in poetry, literature, music, and painting the work of
Americans of Negro descent has gained notable recognition. Instead
of being led and defended by others, as in the past, American
Negroes are gaining their own leaders, their own voices, their own
ideals. Self-realization is thus coming slowly but surely to another
of the world’s great races, and they are to-day girding themselves to
fight in the van of progress, not simply for their own rights as men,
but for the ideals of the greater world in which they live: the
emancipation of women, universal peace, democratic government,
the socialization of wealth, and human brotherhood.

XII

THE NEGRO PROBLEMS

It is impossible to separate the population of the world accurately
by race, since that is no scientific criterion by which to divide races.
If we divide the world, however, roughly into African Negroes and
Negroids, European whites, and Asiatic and American brown and
yellow peoples, we have approximately 150,000,000 Negroes, 500,000,000
whites, and 900,000,000 yellow and brown peoples. Of the
150,000,000 Negroes, 121,000,000 live in Africa, 27,000,000[110] in the
new world, and 2,000,000 in Asia.

What is to be the future relation of the Negro race to the rest of
the world? The visitor from Altruria might see here no peculiar
problem. He would expect the Negro race to develop along the lines
of other human races. In Africa his economic and political development
would restore and eventually outrun the ancient glories of
Egypt, Ethiopia, and Yoruba; overseas the West Indies would become
a new and nobler Africa, built in the very pathway of the
new highway of commerce between East and West—the real sea
route to India; while in the United States a large part of its citizenship
(showing for perhaps centuries their dark descent, but nevertheless
equal sharers of and contributors to the civilization of the
West) would be the descendants of the wretched victims of the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century slave trade.

This natural assumption of a stranger finds, however, lodging in
the minds of few present-day thinkers. On the contrary, such an
outcome is usually dismissed summarily. Most persons have accepted
that tacit but clear modern philosophy which assigns to the white
race alone the hegemony of the world and assumes that other races,
and particularly the Negro race, will either be content to serve the
interests of the whites or die out before their all-conquering march.
This philosophy is the child of the African slave trade and of the
expansion of Europe during the nineteenth century.

The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce,
followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves
as an article of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid.
When the Americas had enough black laborers for their immediate
demand, the moral action of the eighteenth century had a chance
to make its faint voice heard.

The moral repugnance was powerfully reënforced by the revolt
of the slaves in the West Indies and South America, and by the fact
that North America early began to regard itself as the seat of advanced
ideas in politics, religion, and humanity.

Finally European capital began to find better investments than
slave shipping and flew to them. These better investments were the
fruit of the new industrial revolution of the nineteenth century,
with its factory system; they were also in part the result of the
cheapened price of gold and silver, brought about by slavery and
the slave trade to the new world. Commodities other than gold, and
commodities capable of manufacture and exploitation in Europe out
of materials furnishable by America, became enhanced in value; the
bottom fell out of the commercial slave trade and its suppression
became possible.

The middle of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the
rise of the modern working class. By means of political power the laborers
slowly but surely began to demand a larger share in the
profiting industry. In the United States their demand bade fair to
be halted by the competition of slave labor. The labor vote, therefore,
first confined slavery to limits in which it could not live, and
when the slave power sought to exceed these territorial limits, it
was suddenly and unintentionally abolished.

As the emancipation of millions of dark workers took place in
the West Indies, North and South America, and parts of Africa at
this time, it was natural to assume that the uplift of this working
class lay along the same paths with that of European and American
whites. This was the first suggested solution of the Negro problem.
Consequently these Negroes received partial enfranchisement, the
beginnings of education, and some of the elementary rights of wage
earners and property holders, while the independence of Liberia
and Hayti was recognized. However, long before they were strong
enough to assert the rights thus granted or to gather intelligence
enough for proper group leadership, the new colonialism of the
later nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to dawn. The new
colonial theory transferred the reign of commercial privilege and
extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working
class to the exploitation of backward races under the political domination
of Europe. For the purpose of carrying out this idea the
European and white American working class was practically invited
to share in this new exploitation, and particularly were flattered by
popular appeals to their inherent superiority to “Dagoes,” “Chinks,”
“Japs,” and “Niggers.”

This tendency was strengthened by the fact that the new colonial
expansion centered in Africa. Thus in 1875 something less than
one-tenth of Africa was under nominal European control, but the
Franco-Prussian War and the exploration of the Congo led to new
and fateful things. Germany desired economic expansion and, being
shut out from America by the Monroe Doctrine, turned to Africa.
France, humiliated in war, dreamed of an African empire from the
Atlantic to the Red Sea. Italy became ambitious for Tripoli and
Abyssinia. Great Britain began to take new interest in her African
realm, but found herself largely checkmated by the jealousy of all
Europe. Portugal sought to make good her ancient claim to the
larger part of the whole southern peninsula. It was Leopold of Belgium
who started to make the exploration and civilization of Africa
an international movement. This project failed, and the Congo Free
State became in time simply a Belgian colony. While the project
was under discussion, the international scramble for Africa began.
As a result the Berlin Conference and subsequent wars and treaties
gave Great Britain control of 2,101,411 square miles of African territory,
in addition to Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan with 1,600,000
square miles. This includes South Africa, Bechuanaland and Rhodesia,
East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, Nigeria, and British
West Africa. The French hold 4,106,950 square miles, including
nearly all North Africa (except Tripoli) west of the Niger valley
and Libyan Desert, and touching the Atlantic at four points. To
this is added the Island of Madagascar. The Germans have 910,150
square miles, principally in Southeast and South-west Africa and
the Kamerun. The Portuguese retain 787,500 square miles in Southeast
and Southwest Africa. The Belgians have 900,000 square miles,
while Liberia (43,000 square miles) and Abyssinia (350,000 square
miles) are independent. The Italians have about 600,000 square
miles and the Spanish less than 100,000 square miles.

This partition of Africa brought revision of the ideas of Negro
uplift. Why was it necessary, the European investors argued, to
push a continent of black workers along the paths of social uplift
by education, trades-unionism, property holding, and the electoral
franchise when the workers desired no change, and the rate of
European profit would suffer?

There quickly arose then the second suggestion for settling the
Negro problem. It called for the virtual enslavement of natives in
certain industries, as rubber and ivory collecting in the Belgian
Congo, cocoa raising in Portuguese Angola, and diamond mining in
South Africa. This new slavery or “forced” labor was stoutly defended
as a necessary foundation for implanting modern industry
in a barbarous land; but its likeness to slavery was too clear and it
has been modified, but not wholly abolished.

The third attempted solution of the Negro sought the result of
the second by less direct methods. Negroes in Africa, the West
Indies, and America were to be forced to work by land monopoly,
taxation, and little or no education. In this way a docile industrial
class working for low wages, and not intelligent enough to unite in
labor unions, was to be developed. The peonage systems in parts of
the United States and the labor systems of many of the African
colonies of Great Britain and Germany illustrate this phase of solution.[111]
It is also illustrated in many of the West Indian islands where
we have a predominant Negro population, and this population freed
from slavery and partially enfranchised. Land and capital, however,
have for the most part been so managed and monopolized that the
black peasantry have been reduced to straits to earn a living in one
of the richest parts of the world. The problem is now going to be
intensified when the world’s commerce begins to sweep through
the Panama Canal.

All these solutions and methods, however, run directly counter to
modern philanthropy, and have to be carried on with a certain concealment
and half-hypocrisy which is not only distasteful in itself,
but always liable to be discovered and exposed by some liberal or
religious movement of the masses of men and suddenly overthrown.
These solutions are, therefore, gradually merging into a fourth
solution, which is to-day very popular. This solution says: Negroes
differ from whites in their inherent genius and stage of development.
Their development must not, therefore, be sought along European
lines, but along their own native lines. Consequently the effort is
made to-day in British Nigeria, in the French Congo and Sudan,
in Uganda and Rhodesia to leave so far as possible the outward
structure of native life intact; the king or chief reigns, the popular
assemblies meet and act, the native courts adjudicate, and native
social and family life and religion prevail. All this, however, is subject
to the veto and command of a European magistracy supported
by a native army with European officers. The advantage of this
method is that on its face it carries no clue to its real working. Indeed
it can always point to certain undoubted advantages: the
abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of war and feud, the
encouragement of peaceful industry. On the other hand, back of
practically all these experiments stands the economic motive—the
determination to use the organization, the land, and the people, not
for their own benefit, but for the benefit of white Europe. For this
reason education is seldom encouraged, modern religious ideas are
carefully limited, sound political development is sternly frowned
upon, and industry is degraded and changed to the demands of
European markets. The most ruthless class of white mercantile exploiters
is allowed large liberty, if not a free hand, and protected by
a concerted attempt to deify white men as such in the eyes of the
native and in their own imagination.[112]

White missionary societies are spending perhaps as much as five
million dollars a year in Africa and accomplishing much good, but
at the same time white merchants are sending at least twenty million
dollars’ worth of European liquor into Africa each year, and
the debauchery of the almost unrestricted rum traffic goes far to
neutralize missionary effort.

Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern

Under this last mentioned solution of the Negro problems we
may put the attempts at the segregation of Negroes and mulattoes
in the United States and to some extent in the West Indies. Ostensibly
this is “separation” of the races in society, civil rights, etc. In
practice it is the subordination of colored people of all grades under
white tutelage, and their separation as far as possible from contact
with civilization in dwelling place, in education, and in public life.

On the other hand the economic significance of the Negro to-day
is tremendous. Black Africa to-day exports annually nearly two
hundred million dollars’ worth of goods, and its economic development
has scarcely begun. The black West Indies export nearly one
hundred million dollars’ worth of goods; to this must be added the
labor value of Negroes in South Africa, Egypt, the West Indies,
North, Central, and South America, where the result is blended
in the common output of many races. The economic foundation of
the Negro problem can easily be seen to be a matter of many hundreds
of millions to-day, and ready to rise to the billions tomorrow.

Such figures and facts give some slight idea of the economic
meaning of the Negro to-day as a worker and industrial factor.
“Tropical Africa and its peoples are being brought more irrevocably
every year into the vortex of the economic influences that sway the
western world.”[113]

What do Negroes themselves think of these their problems and
the attitude of the world toward them? First and most significant,
they are thinking. There is as yet no great single centralizing of
thought or unification of opinion, but there are centers which are
growing larger and larger and touching edges. The most significant
centers of this new thinking are, perhaps naturally, outside Africa
and in America: in the United States and in the West Indies; this
is followed by South Africa and West Africa and then, more
vaguely, by South America, with faint beginnings in East Central
Africa, Nigeria, and the Sudan.

The Pan-African movement when it comes will not, however, be
merely a narrow racial propaganda. Already the more far-seeing
Negroes sense the coming unities: a unity of the working classes
everywhere, a unity of the colored races, a new unity of men. The
proposed economic solution of the Negro problem in Africa and
America has turned the thoughts of Negroes toward a realization of
the fact that the modern white laborer of Europe and America has
the key to the serfdom of black folk, in his support of militarism
and colonial expansion. He is beginning to say to these workingmen
that, so long as black laborers are slaves, white laborers cannot be
free. Already there are signs in South Africa and the United States
of the beginning of understanding between the two classes.

In a conscious sense of unity among colored races there is to-day
only a growing interest. There is slowly arising not only a curiously
strong brotherhood of Negro blood throughout the world, but the
common cause of the darker races against the intolerable assumptions
and insults of Europeans has already found expression. Most men
in this world are colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in
colored men. The future world will, in all reasonable probability, be
what colored men make it. In order for this colored world to come
into its heritage, must the earth again be drenched in the blood of
fighting, snarling human beasts, or will Reason and Good Will prevail?
That such may be true, the character of the Negro race is the
best and greatest hope; for in its normal condition it is at once the
strongest and gentlest of the races of men: “Semper novi quid ex
Africa!”

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

There is no general history of the Negro race. Perhaps Sir Harry
H. Johnston, in his various works on Africa, has come as near covering
the subject as any one writer, but his valuable books have
puzzling inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Keane’s Africa is a helpful
compendium, despite the fact that whenever Keane discovers
intelligence in an African he immediately discovers that its possessor
is no “Negro.” The articles in the latest edition of the Encyclopædia
Britannica are of some value, except the ridiculous article on the
“Negro” by T.A. Joyce. Frobenius’ newly published Voice of
Africa is broad-minded and informing, and Brown’s Story of Africa
and its Explorers brings together much material in readable form.
The compendiums by Keltie and White, and Johnston’s Opening
up of Africa are the best among the shorter treatises.

None of these authors write from the point of view of the Negro
as a man, or with anything but incidental acknowledgment of the
existence or value of his history. We may, however, set down certain
books under the various subjects which the chapters have
treated. These books will consist of (1) standard works for wider
reading and (2) special works on which the author has relied for his
statements or which amplify his point of view. The latter are starred.

THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF AFRICA

A.S. White: The Development of Africa, 2d ed., 1892.

Stanford’s Compendium of Geography: Africa, by A.H. Keane, 2d ed., 1904-7.

E. Reclus: Universal Geography, Vols. X-XIII.

RACIAL DIFFERENCES AND THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTERISTICS
OF NEGROES

J. Deniker: The Races of Man, etc., New York, 1904.

*J. Finot: Race Prejudice (tr. by Wade-Evans), New York, 1907.

*W.Z. Ripley: The Races of Europe, etc., New York, 1899.

*Jacques Loeb: in The Crisis, Vol. VIII, p. 84, Vol. IX, p. 92.

*Papers on Inter-Racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal
Races Congress, etc. (ed. by G. Spiller), 1911.

*G. Sergi: The Mediterranean Race, etc., London, 1901.

*Franz Boas: The Mind of Primitive Man, New York, 1911.

C.B. Davenport: Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses, 1913.

EARLY MOVEMENTS OF THE NEGRO RACE

*Sir Harry H. Johnston: The Opening up of Africa (Home University Library).

—- A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races, Cambridge, 1905.

*G.W. Stowe: The Native Races of South Africa (ed. by G.M. Theal), London, 1910.

(Consult also Johnston’s other works on Africa, and his article in Vol.
XLIII of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland; also Inter-Racial Problems, and Deniker, noted above.)

NEGRO IN ETHIOPIA AND EGYPT

(The works of Breasted and Petrie, Maspero, Budge and Newberry
and Garstang are the standard books on Egypt. They mention the Negro,
but incidentally and often slightingly.)

*A.F. Chamberlain: “The Contribution of the Negro to Human Civilization”
(Journal of Race Development, Vol. I, April, 1911).

T.E.S. Scholes: Glimpses of the Ages, etc., London, 1905.

W.H. Ferris: The African Abroad, etc., 2 vols., New Haven, 1913.

E.A.W. Budge: The Egyptian Sudan, 2 vols., 1907.

*Archeological Survey of Nubia.

*A. Thompson and D. Randal McIver: The Ancient Races of the Thebaid, 1905.

ABYSSINIA

Job Ludolphus: A New History of Ethiopia (tr. by Gent), London, 1682.

W.S. Harris: Highlands of Æthiopia, 3 vols., London, 1844.

R.S. Whiteway: The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia … as narrated
by Castanhosa, etc., 1902.

THE NIGER RIVER AND ISLAM

*F.L. Shaw (Lady Lugard): A Tropical Dependency, etc., London,
1906.

(The reader may dismiss as worthless Lady Lugard’s definition of “Negro.”
Otherwise her book is excellent.)

*Es-Sa’di, Abderrahman Ben Abdallah, etc., translated into French by
O. Houdas, Paris, 1900.

*F. DuBois: Timbuktu the Mysterious (tr. by White), 1896.

*W.D. Cooley: The Negroland of the Arabs, etc., 1841.

*H. Barth: Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, etc., 5
vols., 1857-58.

*Ibn Batuta: Travels, etc. (tr. by Lee), 1829.

*Leo Africanus: The History and Description of Africa, etc. (tr. by Pory,
ed. by R. Brown), 3 vols., 1896.

*E.W. Blyden: Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race.

*Leo Frobenius: The Voice of Africa (tr. by Blind), 2 vols., 1913.

Mungo Park: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 1799.

THE NEGRO ON THE GUINEA COAST

*Leo Frobenius (as above).

Sir Harry H. Johnston: Liberia, 2 vols., New York, 1906.

H.H. Foote: Africa and the American Flag, New York, 1859.

T.H.T. McPherson: A History of Liberia, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
Studies.

T.J. Alldridge: A Transformed Colony (Sierra Leone), London, 1910.

E.D. Morel: Affairs of West Africa, 1902.

H.L. Roth: Great Benin and Its Customs, 1903.

*F. Starr: Liberia, 1913.

W. Jay: An Inquiry, etc., 1835.

*A.B. Ellis: The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887.

—- The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 1890.

—- The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 1894.

C.H. Read and O.M. Dalton: Antiquities from the City of Benin, etc.,
1899.

*M.H. Kingsley: West African Studies, 2d. ed., 1904.

*G.W. Ellis: Negro Culture in West Africa (Vai-speaking peoples),
1914.

THE CONGO VALLEY

*G. Schweinfurth: The Heart of Africa, Vol. II, 1873.

*H.M. Stanley: Through the Dark Continent, 2 vols., 1878.

—- In Darkest Africa, 2 vols., 1890.

—- The Congo, etc., 2 vols., London, 1885.

H. von Wissman: My Second Journey through Equatorial Africa, 1891.

*H.R. Fox-Bourne: Civilization in Congoland, 1903.

Sir Harry H. Johnston: George Grenfell and the Congo, 2 vols., London,
1908.

*E.D. Morel: Red Rubber, London, 1906.

THE NEGRO IN THE REGION OF THE GREAT LAKES

*Sir Harry H. Johnston: The Uganda Protectorate, 2d ed., 2 vols., 1904.

—- British Central Africa, 1897.

—- The Nile Quest, 1903.

*D. Randal McIver: Mediæval Rhodesia, 1906.

*The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa (ed. by
H. Waller), 1874.

J. Dos Santos: Ethiopia Oriental (Theal’s Records of South Africa, Vol.
VII).>

C. Peters: “Ophir and Punt in South Africa” (African Society Journal,
Vol. I).

De Barros: De Asia.

R. Burton: Lake Regions of Central Africa, 1860.

R.P. Ashe: Chronicles of Uganda, 1894.

(See also Stanley’s works, as above.)

THE NEGRO IN SOUTH AFRICA

*G.M. Theal: History and Ethnography of South Africa of the Zambesi
to 1795, 3 vols., 1907-10.

—- History of South Africa since September, 1795, 5 vols., 1908.

—- Records of South Eastern Africa, 9 vols., 1898-1903.

*J. Bryce: Impressions of South Africa, 1897.

D. Livingstone: Missionary Travels in South Africa, 1857.

*South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903-5, Reports, etc., 5 vols.,
Cape Town, 1904-5.>

G. Lagden: The Basutos, London, 1909.

J. Stewart: Lovedale, 1884.

(See also Stowe, as above.)

ON NEGRO CIVILIZATION

J. Dowd: The Negro Races, 1907, 1914.

*H. Gregoire: An Inquiry concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties
and Literature of Negroes, etc. (tr. by Warden), Brooklyn,
1810.

C. Bücher: Industrial Evolution (tr. by Wickett), New York, 1904.

*Franz Boas: “The Real Race Problem” (The Crisis, December, 1910).

—- Commencement Address (Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19).

*F. Ratzel: The History of Mankind (tr. by Butler), 3 vols., 1904.

C. Hayford: Gold Coast Institutions, 1903.

A.B. Camphor: Missionary Sketches and Folk Lore from Africa, 1909.

R.H. Nassau: Fetishism in West Africa, 1907.

*William Schneider: Die Culturfähigkeit des Negers, Frankfort, 1885.

*G. Schweinfurth: Artes Africanae, etc., 1875.

Duke of Mecklenburg: From the Congo to the Niger and the Nile (English
tr.), Philadelphia, 1914.

D. Crawford: Thinking Black.

R.N. Cust: Sketch of Modern Language of Africa, 2 vols., 1883.

H. Chatelain: The Folk Lore of Angola.

D. Kidd: The Essential Kaffir, 1904.

—- Savage Childhood, 1906.

—- Kaffir Socialism and the Dawn of Individualism, 1908.

M.H. Tongue: Bushman Paintings, Oxford, 1909.

(See also the works of A.B. Ellis, Miss Kingsley, Sir Harry H. Johnston,
Frobenius, Stowe, Theal, and Ibn Batuta; and particularly
Chamberlain’s article in the Journal of Race Development.)

THE SLAVE TRADE

T.K. Ingram: History of Slavery and Serfdom, London, 1895. (Same
article revised in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition.)
John R. Spears: The American Slave Trade, 1900.

*T.F. Buxton: The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy, etc., 1896.

T. Clarkson: History … of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade,
etc., 2 vols., 1808.

R. Drake: Revelations of a Slave Smuggler, New York, 1860.

*Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council, etc., London, 1789.

*B. Mayer: Captain Canot or Twenty Years of an African Slaver, etc.,
1854.

W.E.B. DuBois: The suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the
U.S.A., 1896.

(See also Bryan Edwards’ West Indies.)

THE WEST INDIES AND SOUTH AMERICA

Fletcher and Kidder: Brazil and the Brazilians, 1879.

*Bryan Edwards: History … of the British West Indies, 5 editions,
Vols. II-V, 1793-1819.

*Sir Harry H. Johnston: The Negro in the New World, 1910.

T.G. Steward: The Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804, 1914.

J.N. Leger: Haiti, etc., 1907.

J. Bryce: South America, etc., 1912.

*J.B. de Lacerda: “The Metis or Half-Breeds of Brazil” (Inter-Racial
Problems, etc.)

A.K. Fiske: History of the West Indies, 1899.

THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES

*Walker’s Appeal, 1829.

*G.W. Williams: History of the Negro Race in America, 1619-1880,
1882.

B.G. Brawley: A Short History of the American Negro, 1913.

B.T. Washington: Up from Slavery, 1901.

—- The Story of the Negro, 2 vols., 1909.

*The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912.

*G.E. Stroud: Sketch of the Laws relating to Slavery, etc., 1827.

The Human Way: Addresses on Race Problems at the Southern Sociological
Congress, Atlanta, 1913 (ed. by J.E. McCulloch).

W.J. Simmons: Men of Mark, 1887.

*J.R. Giddings: The Exiles of Florida, 1858.

W.E. Nell: The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, etc., 1855.

C.W. Chesnutt: The Marrow of Tradition, 1901.

P.L. Dunbar: Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896.

*Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, revised edition, 1892.

*H.E. Kreihbel: Afro-American Folk Songs, etc., 1914.

T.P. Fenner and others: Cabin and Plantation Songs, 3d ed., 1901.

W.F. Allen and others: Slave Songs of the United States, 1867.

W.E.B. DuBois: “The Negro Race in the United States of America”
(Inter-Racial Problems, etc.).

—- “The Economics of Negro Emancipation” (Sociological Review,
October, 1911).

—- John Brown.

—- The Philadelphia Negro, 1899.

W.E.B. DuBois: “Reconstruction and its Benefits” (American Historical
Review, Vol. XV, No. 4).

—- editor, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, monthly, 1910.

—- editor, The Atlanta University Studies:
No. 1. Mortality Among Negroes in Cities, 1896.
No. 2. Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities, 1897.
No. 3. Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Betterment, 1898.
No. 4. The Negro in Business, 1899.
No. 5. The College Bred Negro, 1900.
No. 6. The Negro Common School, 1901.
No. 7. The Negro Artisan, 1902.
No. 8. The Negro Church, 1903.
No. 9. Notes on Negro Crime, 1904.
No. 10. A Select Bibliography of the Negro American, 1905.
No. 11. Health and Physique of the Negro American, 1906.
No. 12. Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans, 1907.
No. 13. The Negro American Family, 1908.
No. 14. Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans, 1909.
No. 15. The College Bred Negro American, 1910.
No. 16. The Common School and the Negro American, 1911.
No. 17. The Negro American Artisan, 1912.
No. 18. Morals and Manners among Negro Americans, 1913.

*G.W. Cable: The Silent South, etc., 1885.

*J.R. Lynch: The Facts of Reconstruction, 1913.

*J.T. Wilson: The Black Phalanx, 1897.

William Goodell: Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1852.

G.S. Merriam: The Negro and the Nation, 1906.

A.B. Hart: The Southern South, 1910.

*G. Livermore: An Historical Research respecting the Opinions of the
Founders of the Republic on Negroes, etc., 1862.

Hartshorn and Penniman: An Era of Progress and Promise, 1910 (profusely
illustrated).

*James Brewster: Sketches of Southern Mystery, Treason, and Murder.

Willcox and DuBois: Negroes in the United States (United States Census
of 1900, Bulletin No. 8).>

THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO RACE

*J.S. Keltie: The Partition of Africa, 2d ed., 1895.

B.T. Washington: The Future of the Negro.

W.E.B. DuBois: “The Future of the Negro Race in America” (East
and West, Vol. II, No. 5).

—- Souls of Black Folk, 1913.

—- Quest of the Silver Fleece.

Alexander Crummell: The Future of Africa, 2d ed., 1862.

*Casely Hayford: Ethiopia Unbound, 1911.

Kelly Miller: Out of the House of Bondage, 1914.

—- Race Adjustment, 1908.

*J. Royce: Race Questions, etc., 1908.

*R.S. Baker: Following the Color Line, 1908.

N.S. Shaler: The Neighbor.

E.D. Morel: “Free Labor in Tropical Africa” (Nineteenth Century and
After, 1914).

(See also Finot, Boas, Inter-Racial Problems, and White’s Development
of Africa.)