The raids made upon the West Coast to obtain slaves began in the fifteenth century with the discovery of the West Indies, and it was to spare the natives of these islands, who were unused and unfitted for manual labor and who in consequence were cruelly treated by the Spaniards, that Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapa, first imported slaves from West Africa.  He lived to see them suffer so much more terribly than had the Indians who first obtained his sympathy, that even to his eightieth year he pleaded with the Pope and the King of Spain to undo the wrong he had begun.  But the tide had set west, and Las Casas might as well have tried to stop the Trades.  In 1800 Wilberforce stated in the House of Commons that at that time British vessels were carrying each year to the Indies and the American colonies 38,000 slaves, and when he spoke the traffic had been going on for two hundred and fifty years.  After the Treaty of Utrecht, Queen Anne congratulated her Peers on the terms of the treaty which gave to England “the fortress of Gibraltar, the Island of Minorca, and the monopoly in the slave trade for thirty years,” or, as it was called, the asiento (contract).  This was considered so good an investment that Philip V of Spain took up one-quarter of the common stock, and good Queen Anne reserved another quarter, which later she divided among her ladies.  But for a time she and her cousin of Spain were the two largest slave merchants in the world.  The point of view of those then engaged in the slave trade is very interesting.  When Queen Elizabeth sent Admiral Hawkins slave-hunting, she presented him with a ship, named, with startling lack of moral perception, after the Man of Sorrows.  In a book on the slave trade I picked up at Sierra Leone there is the diary of an officer who accompanied Hawkins.  “After,” he writes, “going every day on shore to take the inhabitants by burning and despoiling of their towns,” the ship was becalmed.  “But,” he adds gratefully, “the Almighty God, who never suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the breeze.”

The slave book shows that as late as 1780 others of the “elect” of our own South were publishing advertisements like this, which is one of the shortest and mildest.  It is from a Virginia newspaper:  “The said fellow is outlawed, and I will give ten pounds reward for his head severed from his body, or forty shillings if brought alive.”

At about this same time an English captain threw overboard, chained together, one hundred and thirty sick slaves.  He claimed that had he not done so the ship’s company would have also sickened and died, and the ship would have been lost, and that, therefore, the insurance companies should pay for the slaves.  The jury agreed with him, and the Solicitor-General said:  “What is all this declamation about human beings!  This is a case of chattels or goods.  It is really so—­it is the case of throwing over goods.  For the purpose—­the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property; whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it.”  In 1807 England declared the slave trade illegal.  A year later the United States followed suit, but although on the seas her frigates chased the slavers, on shore a part of our people continued to hold slaves, until the Civil War rescued both them and the slaves.