370 roruLATiON. 



■were Africans, and because they could only be slaves. * The mother 

 country, however, persisted in forcing them upon the colony, maintain- 

 ing, as late as 1745, that " the African slave trade was the great pillar 

 and support of the British plantation trade." 



The negroes were brouglit from the whole western coast of Africa, be- 

 tween the Sahara and Caffre land. There is no record of their lineage. 

 A single ship would bring emigrants of different nations, and from places 

 a thousand miles apart in Africa. They came as strangers to each other ; 

 they brought no common language, no abiding usages, no worship, no 

 nationality. The admixture of diverse people thus inaugurated, was 

 further greatly increased by the numerous and widely remote settlements 

 in America among which the negro emigrants were distributed. Never 

 in the same space of time was any race so rudely mixed, shaken together 

 and sifted out. 



Raynal and Hume compute that, outside of the United States, nine 

 millions of Africans were forcibly imported into the various European 

 settlements. The present treatise is not concerned with their fate, still it 

 may be mentioned, that, of the total import into the British West Indies 

 of two millions of Africans, there remained to enjoy the advantages of 

 emancipation, in 1834, only six hundred and sixty thousand. 



Nor was this fearful mortality due to climatic causes ; for among the 

 British troops in the West Indies, the average annual death rate for the 

 whites was 8.81 per cent., and for the negroes, 3.91 per cent. 



The importations of negroes into the United States never approached 

 these figures. In Macpherson's Annals of Commerce (Vol.VL, p. 150, et seq.), 

 such statements as these are to be found. During the eight months end- 

 ing 12th July, 1753, five hundred and eleven negroes were imported into 

 Charleston ; fourteen hundred and eighty-two Africans were imported 

 into Georgia in the years 1765 and 1766 ; from 1783 to 1787 none were 

 brouglit directly from Africa to the United States, but it was estimated 

 that three hundred came annually from the West Indies. The slave 

 trade was abolished by Act of Congress in 1776, but was reopened for the 

 port of Charleston for four years — 1804 to 1807. During this period the 

 following numbers of African slaves were imported in two hundred and 

 two vessels into Charleston, by citizens of foreign nations and the United 

 States, as here given : 



