The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 65, March, 1863. Various

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        The day-star of Freedom brings midnight for you!

      THE HORRORS OF SAN DOMINGO.2

      CHAPTER V

      It will be necessary for the present to omit the story of the settlement and growth of the French Colony, and of the pernicious commercial restrictions which swelled the unhappy heritage of the island, in order that we may reach, in this and a succeeding article, the great points of interest connected with the Negro, his relation to the Colony and complicity with its final overthrow.

      The next task essential to our plan is to trace the entrance of Negro Slavery into the French part of the island, to describe the victims, and the legislation which their case inspired.

      The first French Company which undertook a regular trade with the west coast of Africa was an association of merchants of Dieppe, without authority or privileges. They settled a little island in the Senegal, which was called St. Louis. This property soon passed into the hands of a more formal association of Rouen merchants, who carried on the trade till 1664, the date of the establishment of the West-India Company, to which they were obliged to sell their privileges for one hundred and fifty thousand livres. This great Company managed its African business so badly, that it was withdrawn from their hands in 1673, and made over as a special interest to a Senegal Company. The trade, in palm-oil, ivory, etc., was principally with France, and negro slaves for the colonies do not yet appear in numbers to attract attention.3 But in 1679 this Company engaged with the Crown to deliver yearly, for a term of eight years, two thousand negroes, to be distributed among the French Antilles. This displaced a previous engagement, made in 1675, for the delivery of eight hundred negroes. The Company had also to furnish as many negroes for the galleys at Marseilles as His Majesty should find convenient. And the Crown offered a bounty of thirteen livres per head for every negro, to be paid in "pieces of India."

      This is a famous phrase in the early annals of the slave-trade. Reckoning by "pieces" was customary in the transaction of business upon the coast of Africa. Merchandise, provisions, and presents to the native princes had their value thus expressed, as well as slaves. If the negro merchant asked ten pieces for a slave, the European trader offered his wares divided into ten portions, each portion being regarded as a "piece," without counting the parts which made it up. Thus, ten coarse blankets made one piece, a musket one piece, a keg of powder weighing ten pounds was one, a piece of East-India blue calico four pieces, ten copper kettles one piece, one piece of chintz two pieces, which made the ten for which the slave was exchangeable: and at length he became commercially known as a "piece of India." The bounty of thirteen livres was computed in France upon the wholesale value of the trinkets and notions which were used in trade with Africa.

      The traffic by pieces is as old as the age of Herodotus;4 it was originally a dumb show of goods between two trading parties ignorant of each other's language, but at length it represented a transaction which the parties should have been ashamed to mention.

      Although this second Senegal Company was protected by the rigid exclusion, under pain of fine and confiscation, of all other Frenchmen from the trade, it soon fell into debt and parted with its privilege to a third Company, and this in turn was restricted by the formation of a Guinea Company, so that it soon sold out to a fourth Senegal Company, which passed in 1709 into the hands of Rouen merchants who started a fifth; and this too was merged in the West-India Company which was formed in 1718. So little did the agriculture of the islands, overstocked with engagés, justify as yet the slave-traders in the losses and expenses which they incurred.

      The Guinea Company was bound to import only one thousand yearly into all the French Antilles; but it did not flourish until it became an Asiento Company, when, during the War of Succession, a Bourbon mounted the throne of Spain. It was called Asiento because the Spanish Government let, or farmed by treaty, the privilege of supplying its colonies with slaves. The two principal articles of this contract, which was to expire in 1712, related to the number of negroes and the rent of the privilege. If the war continued, the СКАЧАТЬ