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open were obliged, since the arrival of the convicts, "to keep watches on their counting and store houses," since several robberies had recently been committed. Many were caught and imprisoned; others, when convicted a second time, were hanged. The convicts were an ill-featured crew, often pockmarked, sly and cunning, and garbed in all sorts of nondescript clothing, and whether at home or at large their evil propensities and uncleanly habits, together with their proneness to contagious diseases and jail fever, made them a menace to masters and communities alike.

Negroes, the mainstay of labor on the plantations of the South and the West Indies, differed from indentured servants in that their bodies as well as their time and labor were bartered and sold. Though the servant's loss of liberty was temporary, that of the negro was perpetual. Yet in the seventeenth century negroes were viewed in the light of servants rather than of slaves, and it is noteworthy how rarely the word "slave" was used in common parlance at that early period. But by the eighteenth century perpetual servitude had become the rule. Indeed, so essential did it become that before long few indentured servants were to be found on the tobacco plantations and rice fields of

the South, for their places had been everywhere taken by the negroes. Though in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina the whites outnumbered the blacks two or three times to one, in South Carolina and the West Indies the reverse was the case, for there the blacks outnumbered the whites ten and twenty fold.

The negroes came from the western coast of Africa, north as far as Senegambia and south as far as Angola, where lay the factories and "castles" of those engaged in the trade. For Great Britain the business of buying negroes was in the hands of the Royal African Company until 1698, when the monopoly was broken and the trade was thrown open to private firms and individual dealers who controlled the bulk of the business in the eighteenth century. The independent traders were both British and colonial- the former from London, Bristol, and Liverpool, the latter from Boston, Newport, New York, Charleston, and other seaports who brought their negroes direct from Africa or bought them in the West Indies for sale in the colonies. The voyage of a slaver was a dangerous and gruesome experience, and the "Guinea captains," as they were called, were often truculent, inhuman characters.

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The negroes were obtained either at the African Company's factories or from the native chiefs and African slave drivers in exchange for all sorts of cloths, stuffs, hardware, ammunition, and for rum of inferior quality made especially for this trade. The slaves were taken to America chained between decks during the passage, a treatment so brutal that many died or committed suicide on the voyage. In such close and unhealthy confinement epidemics were frequent, and diseases were so often communicated to the white sailors that the mortality on board was usually high-ordinarily from five to ten per cent and sometimes running to more than thirty under particularly unfavorable circumstances. Many cases are recorded of uprisings in which whole crews were murdered and captains and mates tortured and mutilated in revenge for their cruelty.

Male negroes from fifteen to twenty years of age were most in demand, because women were physically less capable and the older negroes were more inclined to moroseness and suicide. Those from the Gold Coast, Windward Coast, and Angola were as a rule preferred, because they were healthier, bigger, and more tractable; those from Gambia were generally rated inferior, though opinions

differed on this point; and those from Calabar, if over seventeen, were not desired because they were given to melancholy and self-destruction. All were brought over naked, but they often received clothing before their arrival, partly for decency's sake and partly for protection against the cold and the water coming through the decks. Some prejudice existed against negroes from the West Indies who spoke English, because they were believed to be great rogues and less amenable to discipline than were the American-born, who always brought higher prices because they could stand the climate and were used to plantation work.

In the North, at Boston and Newport, the negroes were sold directly to the purchaser by the captain or owner, or else were disposed of through the medium of advertisements and intelligence offices. But in Virginia and South Carolina they were more frequently sold in batches to the local merchants, by whom they were bartered singly or in groups of two or three, to the planters for tobacco, rice, indigo, or cash. They were frequently taken to fairs, which were a favorite place for selling slaves. Probably the most active market in the colonies, however, was at Charleston, where many firms were engaged in the Guinea business,

either on their own account or as agents for British houses. Henry Laurens, a "negro merchant" from 1748 to 1762, has given in his letters an admirable account of the way in which negroes were handled in that city. Planters sometimes came seventy miles to purchase slaves and "were so mad after them that some of them went to loggerheads and bid so upon each other that some very fine men sold for £300" in colonial currency, or £40 sterling. "Some of the buyers went to collaring each other and would have come to blows," and, adds Laurens, by the number of purchasers he saw in town he judged that a thousand slaves would not have supplied their wants. Every effort was made to prevent the spread of disease, and vessels with plagues on board were often quarantined or the negroes removed to pens to guard against contagion. In spite of this, however, many negroes arrived "disordered" or "meager," with sore eyes and other ailments. Those that were healthy and not too small were kept in pens or yards until brought to the auction block. The amount for which they were sold depended on the state of the crops and the price of rice and indigo.

As soon as the negroes were purchased, they were taken to the plantation and put to work in the

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