As soon as the plan was broached a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot, Governor of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and shrewdly sold it to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats.  Other monopolies were granted in 1523, 1527, and 1528[73].  Thus the American trade became established and gradually grew, passing successively into the hands of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English.

At first the trade was of the same kind and volume as that already passing northward over the desert routes.  Soon, however, the American trade developed.  A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor in the West Indies and on the continent of America grew until it culminated in the eighteenth century, when Negro slaves were crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty to one hundred thousand a year.  This called for slave raiding on a scale that drew upon every part of Africa—­upon the west coast, the western and Egyptian Sudan, the valley of the Congo, Abyssinia, the lake regions, the east coast, and Madagascar.  Not simply the degraded and weaker types of Negroes were seized, but the strong Bantu, the Mandingo and Songhay, the Nubian and Nile Negroes, the Fula, and even the Asiatic Malay, were represented in the raids.

There was thus begun in modern days a new slavery and slave trade.  It was different from that of the past, because more and more it came in time to be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a new industrial system.  For four hundred years, from 1450 to 1850, European civilization carried on a systematic trade in human beings of such tremendous proportions that the physical, economic, and moral effects are still plainly to be remarked throughout the world.  To this must be added the large slave trade of Mussulman lands, which began with the seventh century and raged almost unchecked until the end of the nineteenth century.

These were not days of decadence, but a period that gave the world Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Raphael, Haroun-al-Raschid and Abraham Lincoln.  It was the day of the greatest expansion of two of the world’s most pretentious religions and of the beginnings of the modern organization of industry.  In the midst of this advance and uplift this slave trade and slavery spread more human misery, inculcated more disrespect for and neglect of humanity, a greater callousness to suffering, and more petty, cruel, human hatred than can well be calculated.  We may excuse and palliate it, and write history so as to let men forget it; it remains the most inexcusable and despicable blot on modern human history.

The Portuguese built the first slave-trading fort at Elmina, on the Gold Coast, in 1482, and extended their trade down the west coast and up the east coast.  Under them the abominable traffic grew larger and larger, until it became far the most important in money value of all the commerce of the Zambesi basin.  There could be no extension of agriculture, no mining, no progress of any kind where it was so extensively carried on[74].