The Gift of Black Folk & The Souls of Black Folk (New Edition) - W. E. B. Du Bois

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States as a boy and became a master of vessels sailing between New York and New Orleans, came to California as manager of the ‘Julia Ann,’ on which he made later trips to the Islands, down to 1845.” His correspondence from 1845, when he became United States Vice-Consul, is a valuable source of historical information. Many Negroes came in the rush of the “forty-niners” as pioneers and miners as well as slaves.

      The Negro’s work as a pioneer extends down until our day. The late Commodore Peary who discovered the North Pole said: “Matthew A. Henson, my Negro assistant, has been with me in one capacity or another since my second trip to Nicaragua in 1887. I have taken him on each and all of my expeditions, except the first, and also without exception on each of my farthest sledge trips. This position I have given him primarily because of his adaptability and fitness for the work, and secondly on account of his loyalty. He is a better dog driver and can handle a sledge better than any man living, except some of the best Esquimo hunters themselves.” This leaves Henson today as the only living human being who has stood at the North Pole.

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       Black Labor

      How the Negro gave his brawn and brain to fell the forests, till the soil and make America a rich and prosperous land.

      The primary reason for the presence of the black man in America was, of course, his labor—and much has been written of the influence of slavery as established by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English. Most writers have written of slavery as a moral and economic evil or of the worker, white and black, as a victim of this system. In this chapter, however, let us think of the slave as a laborer, as one who furnished the original great labor force of the new world and differed from modern labor only in the wages received, the political and civil rights enjoyed, and the cultural surroundings from which he was taken.

      Negro labor has played a peculiar and important part in the history of the modern world. The black man was the pioneer in the hard physical work, which began the reduction of the American wilderness, and which not only hastened the economic development of America directly, but indirectly released for other employment, thousands of white men and thus enabled America to grow economically and spiritually at a rate previously unparalleled anywhere in history. It was black labor that established the modern world commerce, which began first as a commerce in the bodies of the slaves themselves, and was the primary cause of the prosperity of the first great commercial cities of our day. Then black labor was thrown into the production of four great crops—tobacco, sugar, rice and cotton. These crops were not new, but their production on a large, cheap scale was new and had a special significance because they catered to the demands of the masses of men and thus made possible an interchange of goods, such as the luxury trade of the Middle Ages catering to the rich could not build. Black labor, therefore, beneath these crops, became an important part of the Industrial Revo lution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

      Moreover, the black slave brought into common labor certain new spiritual values not yet fully realized. As a tropical product with a sensuous receptivity to the beauty of the world, he was not as easily reduced to be the mechanical draft-horse which the northern European laborer became. He was not easily brought to recognize any ethical sanctions in work as such, but tended to work as the results pleased him, and refused to work or sought to refuse when he did not find the spiritual returns adequate; thus he was easily accused of laziness and driven as a slave when in truth, he brought to modern manual labor a renewed valuation of life.

      The Negro worked as farm hand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it, would have been impossible.

      The numerical growth of the Negro population in America indicates his economic importance. The exact number of slaves exported to America will never be known. Probably 25,000 Negroes a year arrived in America between 1698 and 1707. After 1713 this rose to 30,000 and by 1775 to over 40,000 a year. The American Revolution stopped the trade, but it was revived afterward and reached enormous proportions. One estimate is that a million Negroes came in the sixteenth century, three million in the seven-teenth, seven million in the eighteenth and four million in the nineteenth—or, fifteen million in all. Certainly at least ten million came, and this meant sixty million killed and stolen in Africa because of the methods of capture and the horror of the middle passage. This, with the Asiatic trade, cost black Africa a hundred million souls.21 Bancroft places the total slave population of the con tinental colonies at 59,000 in 1714, 78,000 in 1727, and 293,000 in 1754.

      In the West Indies the whole laboring popula tion early became Negro or Negro with an in filtration of Indian and white blood. In the United States at the beginning of our independent national existence, Negroes formed a fifth of the population of the whole nation. The exact figures are:22

Percentage Negro in the Population
Year United States South
1920 9.9 2.61
1910 10.7 29.8
1900 11.6 32.3
1890 11.9 33.8
1880 13.1 36.0
1870 12.7 36.0
1860 14.1 36.8
1850 15.7 37.3
1840 16.8 38.0
1830 18.1 37.9
1820 18.4 37.2
1810 19.0 36.7
1800 18.9 35.0
1790 19.3 35.2

      If we consider the number of Negroes for each 1,000 whites, we have:

Year United States South
1920 110 369
1910 120 426
1900 132 480
1890 136 512
1880 152 564
1870 145 562
1860 165 582
1850 186 595
1840 203 613
1830 221

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