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.