For that number Bancroft places the gross returns as
not far from four hundred millions of dollars.
All this is history, and to the reader familiar, but I do not
apologize for reviewing it here, as without the background of the
slave trade, the West Coast, as it is to-day, is difficult to
understand. As we have seen, to kings, to chartered "Merchant
Adventurers," to the cotton planters of the West Indies and of our
South, and to the men of the North who traded in black ivory, the
West Coast gave vast fortunes. The price was the lives of millions
of slaves. And to-day it almost seems as though the sins of the
fathers were being visited upon the children; as though the juju of
the African, under the spell of which his enemies languish and die,
has been cast upon the white man. We have to look only at home. In
the millions of dead, and in the misery of the Civil War, and
to-day in race hatred, in race riots, in monstrous crimes and as
monstrous lynchings, we seem to see the fetish of the West Coast,
the curse, falling upon the children to the third and fourth
generation of the million slaves that were thrown, shackled, into
the sea.
The first mention in history of Sierra Leone is when in 480 B.C.,
Hanno, the Carthaginian, anchored at night in its harbor, and then
owing to "fires in the forests, the beating of drums, and strange
cries that issued from the bushes," before daylight hastened away.
We now skip nineteen hundred years.
Pages:
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27