South Carolina. One could not purchase the freehold of a Negro’s liberty and energy, only a ninety-nine years’ lease of it, as it were, but that sufficed. Freedom fell, the charter was abrogated, and under the sway of a royal governor the floodgates[7] of slavery were opened wide. In due time Georgia became one of the worst slave States of the South. It remains to this day one of those where in any case the contemporary record of burning and lynching is most lurid. It would not be unsafe to draw the conclusion that the introduction of slavery did as much harm to the souls of the original Germans, Scots, and English and their descendants as to the Negroes themselves.

[7]

The settlers were, however, loath to employ slaves, and for some years there was little change. It was the rich immigrants from South Carolina and elsewhere who embarked on large enterprises of planting with a labor basis of black slaves. The poor white laboring class was gradually ruined by competition with slave labor. And then it became generally understood that everyone had to employ slaves, and it was unbecoming for a white man to toil with his hands. The poor Whites were if anything more despised than the black slaves, and often indeed actually despised, paradoxically enough, by the latter. In some parts there sprang up bands of white gypsies and robbers called “pinelanders,” who stole from Black and White alike, and lived by their wits.

In Africa the Negro tribes strove with one another in savagery, and sold their prisoners to the Negro traders or White agents, who dragged them to the coast. There they were[8] herded in the holds of noisome slaving vessels, indiscriminately, nakedly, fortuitously, the violent ones tied up or chained, the gentler ones unloosed. None knew whither they were going, and even those victorious tribes who sold them to the white man knew nothing of the destination of the victims they thus despatched. Hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of tribesmen of all kinds and shades of black and brown were thus exported to the Indies and the Colonies and sold into bondage to the civilized world. Arrived in America, the slaves were sold to merchants or auctioned as common cattle and sent up country to work. A healthy male slave of good dimensions and in his prime would fetch a thousand dollars and young women eight hundred dollars, and fair-sized girls five hundred. Olmsted gives a price list which was handed him by a dealer; that was in 1853.[1] In earlier years the price was considerably less, and always varied according to the demand. The raw, first-come Negro slaves were not sold as retinue for the rich, but as colonial utilities to be worked 

 Prev. P 5/182 next