The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 65, March, 1863

Their pure African origin is, however, still a contested point. Many ethnologists are unwilling to attribute so much capacity to a native negro tribe. D'Eichthal objects, that "a pretended negro people, pastoral, nomadic, warlike, propagating a religious faith, to say nothing of the difference in physical characteristics, offers an anomaly which nothing can explain. It would force us to attribute to the black race, whether for good or for evil, acts and traits that are foreign to its nature. To cite only one striking example, let me recall that Job Ben Salomon, the African, who in the last century was carried to America and thence to England, and was admired by all who knew him for the loftiness of his character, the energy of his religious fanaticism, and the extent of his intelligence,—this Ben Salomon, who has been cited as a model of that which the negro race could produce, did not belong to that race; he was a Foulah."⁷

D'Eichthal develops at great length his theory, that the Foulahs are descended from some Eastern people of strong Malay characters, who found their way to their present site through Madagascar, along the coast, to Cordofan, Darfour, and Haoussa. They are bronzed, or copper-colored, or like polished mahogany,—the red predominating over the black. Their forms are tall and slim, with small hands and feet, thin curved noses, long hair braided into several queues, and an erect profile. Certain negro traits do not exist in them.

Burmeister, who saw Ira Aldridge, the Foulah actor, play in Macbeth, Othello, and his other famous parts, saw nothing negro about him, except the length of his arm, the shrillness of his voice in excitement, the terrible animality of the murder-scenes, and his tendency to exaggerate. "The bright-colored nails were very evident, and his whole physiognomy, in spite of his beard, was completely negro-like."⁸

But if Ira Aldridge's exaggerated style of acting points to an African origin, would it not be better, if some of our distinguished actors, who are presumptively white before the foot-lights, took out free-papers at once? We have seen Macbeth and Othello so "created" by the Caucasian models of the stage, that but one line of Shakspeare remained in our memory, and narrowly escaped the lips,—"Out, hyperbolical fiend!"

It is not unlikely that the Felatah was mixed with Moorish or Kabylic blood to make the Foulah. If so, it proves the important fact, that, when the good qualities of the negro are crossed with a more advanced race, the product will be marked with intelligence, mobility, spiritual traits, and an organizing capacity. Felatah blood has mixed with white blood in the Antilles; the Jolof and the Eboe have yielded primitive affections and excellences to a new mulatto breed. This great question of the civilizable qualities of a race cannot be decided by quoting famous isolated cases belonging to pure breeds, but only by observing and comparing the average quality of the pure or mixed.

When we approach the Slave Coast itself, strong contrasts in appearance and culture are observable among the inhabitants; they are all negroes, but in different social conditions, more or less liable to injury from the presence of the slaver, and yielding different temperaments and qualities to colonial life. The beautiful and fertile amphitheatre called Whidah, in North latitude 6°, with Dahomey just behind it, is populous with a superior race. Where did it come from? The area which it occupies has only about fifty miles of coast and less than thirty of interior; its people are as industrious and thrifty as any on the face of the earth. They never raised sugar and indigo with enthusiasm, but at home their activity would have interpreted to Mr. Carlyle a soul above pumpkins. They cultivated every square foot of ground up to the threshold of their dwellings; the sides of ditches, hedges, and inclosures were planted with melons and vegetables, and the roads between the villages shrank to foot-paths in the effort to save land for planting. On the day when a crop was harvested, another was sown.

Their little State was divided into twenty-six provinces or counties, ruled by hereditary lords. The King was simply the most important one of these. Here were institutions which would have deserved the epithet patriarchal, save for the absence of overseers and the auction-block. The men worked in the field, the women spun at home. Two markets were held every four days in two convenient places, which were frequented by five or six thousand traders. Every article for sale had its appropriate place, and the traffic was conducted without tumult or fraud. A judge and four inspectors went up and down to hear and settle grievances. The women had their stalls, at which they sold articles of their own manufacture from cotton or wood, plates, wooden cups, red and blue paper, salt, cardamom-seeds, palm-oil, and calabashes.

How did it happen that such a thrifty little kingdom learned the shiftlessness of slave-trading? Early navigators discovered that they had one passion, that of gaming. This was sedulously cultivated by the French and Portuguese who had colonies at stake. A Whidah man, after losing all his money and merchandise, would play for his wife and children, and finally for himself. A slave-trader was always ready to purchase him and his interesting family from the successful gamester, who, in turn, often took passage in the same vessel. In this way Whidah learned to procure slaves for itself, who could be gambled away more conveniently: the markets exposed for sale monthly one thousand human beings, taken from the inferior tribes of the coast. The whole administration of justice of these superior tribes was overthrown by the advent of the European, who taught them to punish theft, adultery, and other crimes by putting up the criminal for sale.

The Whidah people were Fetich-worshippers; so were the inhabitants of Benin. But the latter had the singularity of refusing to sell a criminal, adjudged to slavery, to the foreign slave-traders, unless it was a woman. They procured, however, a great many slaves from the interior for the Portuguese and French. The Benin people dealt in magic and the ordeal; they believed in apparitions, and filled up their cabins with idols to such an extent as nearly to eject the family.

The slaves of the river Calabar and the Gaboon were drawn from very inferior races, who lived in a state of mutual warfare for the purpose of furnishing each other to the trader. They kidnapped men in the interior, and their expeditions sometimes went so far that the exhausted victims occasioned the slaver a loss of sixty per cent, upon his voyage. The toughest of these people were the Eboes; the most degraded were the Papels and Bissagos.

The Congo negro was more intelligent than these; he understood something of agriculture and the keeping of cattle. He made Tombo wine and some kinds of native cloth. The women worked in the fields with their children slung to their backs. The Congo temperament near the coast was mild and even, like the climate; but there dwelt in the mountains the Auziko and N'teka, who were cannibals. The Congoes in Cuba had the reputation of being stupid, sensual, and brutal; but these African names have always been applied without much discrimination.

The slavers collected great varieties of negroes along the coasts of Loango and Benguela; some of them were tall, well-made, and vigorous, others were stunted and incapable. They were all pagans, accustomed to Fetich- and serpent-worship, very superstitious, without manliness and dignity, stupid and unimpressible.

The Benguela women learned the panel game from the Portuguese. This is an ugly habit of enticing men to such a point of complicity, that an indignant husband, and a close calculator, can appear suddenly and denounce the victim. Many a slave was furnished in this way.—But we restrain the pen from tracing the villanous and savage methods, suggested by violence or fraud or lust, to keep those decks well stocked over which the lilies of France drooped with immunity.

All these negroes differed much in their sensitiveness to the condition of slavery. Many of them suffered silently, and soon disappeared, killed by labor and homesickness. Others committed suicide, in the belief that their spirits would return to the native scenes. It was not uncommon for a whole family to attempt to reinhabit their old cabin in this way. The planters attributed these expensive deeds of manumission to a depraved taste or mania; but we do not know that they laid Greek under contribution for a term, as Dr. Cartwright did, who applied the word drapetomania to the malady of the American fugitive. Many negroes sought relief in a marooning life; but their number was not so great as we might expect. After two or three days' experience, hunger and exposure drove them back, if they were not caught before. The number of permanent maroons did not reach a thousand.

But a few tribes were so turbulent and sullen that the planter avoided buying them, unless his need of field-hands was very urgent. He was obliged to be circumspect, however; for the traders knew how to jockey a man with a sick, disabled, or impracticable negro. The Jews made a good business of buying refuse negroes and furbishing them up for the market. The French traders thought it merit to deceive a Jew; but the latter feigned to be abjectly helpless, in order to enjoy this refitting branch of the business.

The Coromantine negroes were especial objects of suspicion, on account of their quarrelsome and incendiary temper. Such powerful and capable men ought to have valued more highly the privileges of their position; but they could never quite conquer their prejudices, and were continually interpreting the excellent constitutional motto, Vera pro gratis, into, Liberty instead of sugar! An English physician of the last century, James Grainger by name, wrote a poem in four books upon the "Sugar-Cane," published in 1764. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he exhibited a dose; but the production yields the following lines which show that the Coromantine of Jamaica was no better than his brother of San Domingo:—

 
  "Yet, if thine own, thy children's life, be dear,
  Buy not a Cormantee, though healthy, young,
  Of breed too generous for the servile field:
  They, born to freedom in their native land,
  Choose death before dishonorable bonds;
  Or, fired with vengeance, at the midnight hour
  Sudden they seize thine unsuspecting watch,
  And thine own poniard bury in thy breast."
 

All these kinds of negroes, and many others whom it would be tedious to mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.⁹ They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one Fetich for another. The delighted negroes went to mass as to their favorite Calenda; the tawdry garments and detestable drone of the priest, whose only Catholicism was his indiscriminate viciousness, appeared to them a superior sorcery; the Host was a great Gree-gree; the muttered liturgy was a palaver with the spirits; music, incense, and gilding charmed them for a while away from the barbarous ritual of their midnight serpent-worship. The priests were white men, for the negroes thought that black baptism would not stick; but they were fortune-hunters, like the rest of the colony, mere agents of the official will, and seekers of their pleasures in the huts of the negro-quarter.¹⁰ The curates declared that the innate stupidity of the African baffled all their efforts to instil a truth or rectify an error. The secret practice of serpent-worship was punishable, as the stolen gatherings for dancing were, because it unfitted them for the next day's toil, and excited notions of vengeance in their minds. But the curates declined the trouble of teaching them the difference in spiritual association between the wafer in a box and the snake in a hamper. On the whole, the negro loved to thump his sheepskin drum, and work himself up to the frantic climax of a barbarous chant, better than to hear the noises in a church. He admired the pomp, but was continually stealing away to renew the shadowy recollection of some heathen rite. What elevating influence could there be in the Colonial Church for these children of Nature, who were annually reinforcing Church and Colony at a frightful pace with heathenism? Twenty or thirty tribes of pagans were imported at the rate of twenty thousand living heads per annum, turned loose and mixed together, with a sense of original wrong and continual cruelty rankling amid their crude and wild emotions, and prized especially for their alleged deficiency of soul, and animal ability to perform unwholesome labor. Slavery never wore so black a face. The only refining element was the admixture of superior tribes, a piece of good-fortune for the colony, which the planter endeavored as far as possible to miss by distributing the fresh cargoes according to their native characters. A fresh Eboe was put under the tutelage of a naturalized Eboe, a Jolof with a Jolof, and so on: their depressed and unhealthy condition upon landing, and their ignorance of the Creole dialect, rendered this expedient.¹¹

But these distinctions could not be preserved upon such a limited area and amid these jostling tribes. People of a dozen latitudes swarmed in the cabins of a single negro-quarter. Even the small planter could not stock his habitation with a single kind of negro: the competition at each trade-sale of slaves prevented it. So did a practice of selling them by the scramble. This was to shut two or three hundred of them into a large court-yard, where they were all marked at the same price, and the gates thrown open to purchasers. A greedy crowd rushed in, with yells and fighting, each man struggling to procure a quota, by striking them with his fists, tying handkerchiefs or pieces of string to them, fastening tags around their necks, regardless of tribe, family, or condition. The negroes, not yet recovered from their melancholy voyage, were amazed and panic-stricken at this horrible onslaught of avaricious men; they frequently scaled the walls, and ran frantically up and down the town.

As soon as the slaves were procured, by sale on shipboard, by auction, or by scramble, they received the private marks of their owners. Each planter had a silver plate, perforated with his letter, figure, or cipher, which he used to designate his own slaves by branding. If two planters happened to be using the same mark, the brand was placed upon different spots of the body. The heated plate, with an interposing piece of oiled or waxed paper, was touched lightly to the body; the flesh swelled, and the form of the brand could never be obliterated. Many slaves passed from one plantation to another, being sold and resold, till their bodies were as thick with marks as an obelisk. How different from the symbols of care in the furrowed face and stooping form of a free laborer, where the history of a humble home, planted in marriage and nursed by independent sorrow, is printed by the hand of God!

By this fusion of native races a Creole nation of slaves was slowly formed and maintained. The old qualities were not lost, but new qualities resulted from the new conditions. The bozal negro was easily to be distinguished from the Creole. Bozal is from the Spanish, meaning muzzled, that is, ignorant of the Creole language and not able to talk. ¹² Creole French was created by the negroes, who put into it very few words of their native dialects, but something of the native construction, and certain euphonic peculiarities. It is interesting to trace their love of alliteration and a concord of sounds in this mongrel French, which became a new colonial language. The bright and sparkling French appears as if submitted to great heat and just on the point of running together. There is a great family of African dialects in which a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to satisfy a sweetish ear. It is like the charming gabble of children, who love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes. Mr. Grout¹³ and other missionaries note examples of this: Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile, is a sentence to illustrate this native disposition. The alliteration is sometimes obscured by elisions and contractions, but never quite disappears. Mr. Grout says: "So strong is the influence of this inclination to concord produced by the repetition of initials, that it controls the distinction of number, and quite subordinates that of gender, and tends to mould the pronoun after the likeness of the initial element of the noun to which it refers; as, Izintombi zake zi ya hamba, 'The daughters of him they do walk.'" These characteristics appear in the formation of the Creole French, in connection with another childlike habit of the negro, who loves to put himself in the objective case, and to say me instead of I, as if he knew that he had to be a chattel.

The article un, une, could not have been pronounced by a negro. It became in his mouth nion. The personal pronouns je, tu, il, were converted into mo, to, ly, and the possessive mon, ton, son into à moue, à toue, à ly, and were placed after the noun, which negro dialects generally start their sentences with. Possessive pronouns had the unmeaning syllable quien before them, as, Nous gagné quien à nous, for Nous avons les nôtres; and demonstrative pronouns were changed in this way: Mo voir z'animaux là yo, for J'ai vu ces animaux, and Ci la yo qui té vivre, for Ceux qui ont vécu. A few more examples will suffice to make other changes clear. A negro was asked to lend his horse; he replied, Mouchée (Monsieur), mo pas gagné choual, mais mo connais qui gagné ly; si ly pas gagné ly, ly faut mo gagné ly, pour vous gagné: "Massa, me no got horse, but me know who got um; if him no got um, him get me um for you." Quelquechose becomes quichou; zozo = oiseau; gourneé = combattre; gueté = voir; zombi = revenant; bougé = demeurer; helé = appeler, etc.¹⁴

The dialect thus formed by the aid of traits common to many negro tribes was a solution into which their differences fell to become modified; when the barriers of language were broken down, the common African nature, with all its good and evil, appeared in a Creole form. The forced labor, the caprice of masters, and the cruel supervision of the overseers engendered petty vices of theft, concealment, and hypocrisy. The slave became meaner than the native African in all respects; even his passions lost their extravagant sincerity, but part of the manliness went with it. Intelligence, ability, adroitness were exercised in a languid way; rude and impetuous tribes became more docile and manageable, but those who were already disposed to obedience did not find either motive or influence to lift their natures into a higher life. An average slave-character, not difficult to govern, but without instinct to improve, filled the colony. A colonist would hardly suspect the fiery Africa whose sun ripened the ancestors of his slaves, unless he caught them by accident in the midst of their voluptuous Calenda, or watched behind some tree the midnight orgy of magic and Fetichism. A slave-climate gnawed at the bold edges of their characters and wore them down, as the weather rusted out more rapidly than anywhere else all the iron tools and implements of the colony. The gentler traits of the African character, mirth and jollity, affectionateness, domestic love, regard and even reverence for considerate masters, were the least impaired; for these, with a powerful religiosity, are indigenous, like the baobab and palm, and give a great accent to the name of Africa. What other safeguard had a planter with his wife and children, who lived with thirty slaves or more, up to six hundred, upon solitary plantations that were seldom visited by the maréchaussée, or rural police? The root of such a domination was less in the white man's superiority than in the docile ability of those who ought to have been his natural enemies. "Totidem esse hostes quot servos" said Seneca; but he was thinking of the Scythian and Germanic tribes. A North-American Indian, or a Carib, though less pagan than a native African, could never become so subdued. Marooning occurred every day, and cases of poisoning, perpetrated generally by Ardra negroes, who were addicted to serpent-worship, were not infrequent; but they poisoned a rival or an enemy of their own race as often as a white man. The "Affiches Américaines," which was published weekly at Port-au-Prince, had always a column or two describing fugitive negroes; but local disturbances or insurrectionary attempts were very rare: a half-dozen cannot be counted since the Jolofs of Diego Columbus frightened Spaniards from the colony. If this be so in an island whose slaves were continually reinforced by native Africans, bringing Paganism to be confirmed by a corrupt Catholicism, where every influence was wanton and debased, and the plantation-cruelties, as we shall shortly see, outheroded everything that slave-holding annals can reveal, how much less likely is it that we shall find the slave insurrectionary in the United States, whence the slave-trade has been excluded for nearly two generations, and where the African, modified by climate, and by religious exercises of his own which are in harmony with his native disposition and enjoin him not to be of a stout mind, waits prayerfully till liberty shall be proclaimed! If the slaveholder ever lived in dread, it was not so much from what he expected as from what he knew that he deserved. But the African is more merciful than the conscience of a slaveholder. Blessed are these meek ones: they shall yet inherit earth in America!

France was always more humane than her colonies, for every rising sun did not rekindle there the dreadful paradox that sugar and sweetness were incompatible, and she could not taste the stinging lash as the crystals melted on her tongue.¹⁵ An ocean rolled between. She always endeavored to protect the slave by legislation; but the Custom of Paris, when it was gentle, was doubly distasteful to the men who knew how impracticable it was. Louis XIII. would not admit that a single slave lived in his dominions, till the priests convinced him that it was possible through the slave-trade to baptize the Ethiopian again. Louis XIV. issued the famous Code Noir in 1685, when the colonists had already begun to shoot a slave for a saucy gesture, and to hire buccaneers to hunt marooning negroes at ten dollars per head. ¹⁶

The Code Noir was the basis of all the colonial legislation which affected the condition of the slave, and it is important to notice its principal articles. We have only room to present them reduced to their essential substance.

Negroes must be instructed in the Catholic religion, and bozals must be baptized within eight days after landing. All overseers must be Catholic. Sundays and fête days are days of rest for the negro; no sale of negroes or any other commodity can take place on those days.

Free men who have children by slaves, and masters who permit the connection, are liable to a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar. If the guilty person be a master, his slave and her children are confiscated for the benefit of the hospital, and cannot be freed.

If a free man is not married to any white person during concubinage with his slave, and shall marry said slave, she and her children shall become enfranchised.

No consent of father and mother is essential for marriage between slaves, but no master can constrain slaves to marry against their will.

If a slave has a free black or colored woman for his wife, the male and female children shall follow the condition of the mother; and if a slave-woman has a free husband, the children shall follow his condition.

The weekly ration for a slave of ten years old and upwards consists of five Paris pints of manioc meal, or three cassava loaves, each weighing two and a half pounds, with two pounds of salt beef, or three of fish, or other things in proportion, but never any tafia¹⁷ in the place of a ration; and no master can avoid giving a slave his ration by offering him a day for his own labor. Weaned children to the age of ten are entitled to half the above ration. Each slave must also have two suits of clothes yearly, or cloth in proportion.

Slaves who are not properly nourished and clothed by their masters can lodge a complaint against them. If it be well-founded, the masters can be prosecuted without cost to the slave.

Slaves who are old, infirm, diseased, whether incurable or not, must be supported. If they are abandoned by masters, they are to be sent to the hospital, and the masters must pay six sols daily for their support.

A slave's testimony can be received as a statement to serve the courts in procuring light elsewhere; but no judge can draw presumption, conjecture, or proof therefrom.

The slave who strikes his master or mistress, or their children, so as to draw blood, or in the face, may be punished even with death; and all excesses or offences committed by slaves against free persons shall be severely punished, even with death, if the case shall warrant.

Any free or enfranchised person who shall shelter a fugitive shall be fined three hundred pounds of sugar for each day.

A slave who is condemned to death shall be valued before execution, and the estimated price paid to the master, provided the latter has not made a pretended complaint.

Masters may chain and whip their slaves, but not mutilate, torture, or kill them.

If a master or overseer shall kill a slave, he shall be prosecuted; but if he can convince the court of cause, he may be discharged without pardon from the King.

Masters who are twenty years old can free their slaves at will or by testamentary act, without being held to give a reason for it; and if a slave is named by testament a general legatee, or an executor, or guardian of children, he shall be considered enfranchised.

An enfranchised slave shall be regarded as free as any person born in France, without letters of naturalization; he can enjoy the advantages of natives everywhere, even if he was born in a foreign country.

An enfranchised slave must pay singular respect to his ancient master, his widow, and children; an injury done to them will be punished more severely than if done to others. But he is free, and quit of all service, charge, and tenure that may be pretended by his former master, either respecting his person or property and succession.

An enfranchised slave shall enjoy the same rights, privileges, and immunities as if he had been born free. The King desires that he may merit his acquired liberty, and that it may confer upon him, as well in his person as estate, the same effects which the blessing of natural liberty confers upon French subjects.

* * * * *

The last article, and all that related to enfranchisement, are notable for their political effect upon the colony. The free mulattoes interpreted the liberal clauses of the Code into an extension of the rights of citizenship to them, as the natural inference from their freed condition. The lust of masters and the defencelessness of the slave-woman sowed thickly another retribution in the fated soil.

The custom of enfranchising children of mixed blood, and sometimes their mothers, commenced in the earliest times of the French colonies, when the labor of engagés was more valuable than that of slaves, and the latter were objects of buccaneering license as much as of profit. The colonist could not bear to see his offspring inventoried as chattels. In this matter the nations of the South of Europe appear to atone for acts of passion by after-thoughts of humanity. The free descendants of mulattoes who were enfranchised by French masters in Louisiana, and who form a respectable and flourishing class in that State, now stand beneath the American flag at the call of General Butler. But the Anglo-American alone seems willing to originate a chattel and to keep him so. His passion will descend as low for gratification as a Frenchman's or a Spaniard's, but his heart will not afterwards mount as high.

Acts of enfranchisement required at first the sanction of the Government, until in 1682 the three sovereign courts of St. Christophe, Martinique, and Guadeloupe offered the project of a law which favored enfranchisements; it led to the articles upon that subject in the Edict of 1685, quoted above, which sought at once to restrain the license of masters and to afford them a legal way to be humane and just.¹⁸

In 1703 there were only one hundred and fifty freed persons in San Domingo. In 1711 a colonial ordinance proscribed every enfranchisement which did not have the approbation of the colonial government. The King sanctioned this ordinance in 1713, and declared that all masters who neglected the formality should lose their slaves by confiscation.

In 1736 the number of freed slaves, black and mulatto, was two thousand. The Government, alarmed at the increase, imposed a sum upon the master for each act of enfranchisement, in the hope to check his license. But the master evaded this and every other salutary provision; the place and climate, so distant from the Custom of Paris, where men dishonored only complexions like their own, lent occasion and immunity. Colonial Nature was more potent than paper restrictions. In 1750 there were four thousand freed persons.