There is a touch of the dramatic in every phase of the negro’s contact with America:  his unwilling coming, his forcible detention, his final submission, his emancipation, his struggle to adapt himself to freedom, his futile competition with a superior economic order.  Every step from the kidnaping, through “the voiceless woe of servitude” and the attempted redemption of his race, has been accompanied by tragedy.  How else could it be when peoples of two such diverse epochs in racial evolution meet?

His coming was almost contemporaneous with that of the white man.  “American slavery,” says Channing,[7] “began with Columbus, possibly because he was the first European who had a chance to introduce it:  and negroes were brought to the New World at the suggestion of the saintly Las Casas to alleviate the lot of the unhappy and fast disappearing red man” They were first employed as body servants and were used extensively in the West Indies before their common use in the colonies on the continent.  In the first plantations of Virginia a few of them were found as laborers.  In 1619 what was probably the first slave ship on that coast—­it was euphemistically called a “Dutch man-of-war”—­landed its human cargo in Virginia.  From this time onward the numbers of African slaves steadily increased.  Bancroft estimated their number at 59,000 in 1714, 78,000 in 1727, and 263,000 in 1754.  The census of 1790 recorded 697,624 slaves in the United States.  This almost incredible increase was not due alone to the fecundity of the negro.  It was due, in large measure, to the unceasing slave trade.

It is difficult to imagine more severe ordeals than the negroes endured in the day of the slave trade.  Their captors in the jungles of Africa—­usually neighboring tribesmen in whom the instinct for capture, enslavement, and destruction was untamed—­soon learned that the aged, the inferior, the defective, were not wanted by the trader.  These were usually slaughtered.  Then followed for the less fortunate the long and agonizing march to the seaboard.  Every one not robust enough to endure the arduous journey was allowed to perish by the way.  On the coast, the agent of the trader or the middle-man awaited the captive.  He was an expert at detecting those evidences of weakness and disease which had eluded the eye of the captor or the rigor of the march.  “An African factor of fair repute,” said a slave captain,[8] “is ever careful to select his human cargo with consummate prudence, so as not only to supply his employers with athletic laborers, but to avoid any taint of disease.”  But the severest test of all was the hideous “middle passage” which remained to every imported slave a nightmare to the day of his death.  The unhappy captives were crowded into dark, unventilated holds and were fed scantily on food which was strange to their lips; they were unable to understand the tongue of their masters and often unable to understand the dialects of their companions in misfortune; they were