[Footnote 56:  These data were generously assembled for me by Professor Chauncey S. Boucher of Washington University, St. Louis, from a file of the Royal Gazette of Kingston, Jamaica, for the year 1803, which is preserved in the Charleston, S.C.  Library.]

This huge maritime slave traffic had great consequences for all the countries concerned.  In Liverpool it made millionaires,[57] and elsewhere in England, Europe and New England it brought prosperity not only to ship owners but to the distillers of rum and manufacturers of other trade goods.  In the American plantation districts it immensely stimulated the production of the staple crops.  On the other hand it kept the planters constantly in debt for their dearly bought labor, and it left a permanent and increasingly complex problem of racial adjustments.  In Africa, it largely transformed the primitive scheme of life, and for the worse.  It created new and often unwholesome wants; it destroyed old industries and it corrupted tribal institutions.  The rum, the guns, the utensils and the gewgaws were irresistible temptations.  Every chief and every tribesman acquired a potential interest in slave getting and slave selling.  Charges of witchcraft, adultery, theft and other crimes were trumped up that the number of convicts for sale might be swelled; debtors were pressed that they might be adjudged insolvent and their persons delivered to the creditors; the sufferings of famine were left unrelieved that parents might be forced to sell their children or themselves; kidnapping increased until no man or woman and especially no child was safe outside a village; and wars and raids were multiplied until towns by hundreds were swept from the earth and great zones lay void of their former teeming population.[58]

[Footnote 57:  Gomer Williams, chap. 6.]

[Footnote 58:  C.B.  Wadstrom, Observations on the Slave Trade (London, 1789); Lord Muncaster, Historical Sketches of the Slave Trade and of its Effects in Africa (London, 1792); Jerome Dowd, The Negro Races, vol. 3, chap. 2 (MS).]

The slave trade has well been called the systematic plunder of a continent.  But in the irony of fate those Africans who lent their hands to the looting got nothing but deceptive rewards, while the victims of the rapine were quite possibly better off on the American plantations than the captors who remained in the African jungle.  The only participants who got unquestionable profit were the English, European and Yankee traders and manufacturers.

CHAPTER III

THE SUGAR ISLANDS

As regards negro slavery the history of the West Indies is inseparable from that of North America.  In them the plantation system originated and reached its greatest scale, and from them the institution of slavery was extended to the continent.  The industrial system on the islands, and particularly on those occupied by the British, is accordingly instructive as an introduction and a parallel to the continental regime.