Africa's Gift to America - J. A. Rogers

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That, however, was the year of America’s independence and when two shiploads of convicts arrived, she refused to let them land. As a result London’s Newgate Prison overflowed. Knapp and Baldwin say in Newgate Calendar, “The year 1783 which gave independence to America crowded the prisons to a degree never before known.” (Vol. 3, p. 124, 1824-28.)

      Finally in this matter of colonization there was a factor more important than the type of immigrant, good or bad, which came. It is that Europe hadn’t the populatioh to spare. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) had left most of the nations, including England and France, weaker. The War of the Spanish Succession that followed depeopled Europe still more. One nearby continent had millions available, whose people could be dragged off with impunity, and who, though called heathen, were free from vice and crime, and needed neither bolt nor bar to protect their posessions from one another: Africa.

      NOTES

      1. Esclavitud de la raza africana, t. 1, pp. 77-78, 1879.

      la. Life and Times of Yancey, p. 176. 1892.

      2. Hist. and Present State of Virginia, para. 3.

      2a. Travels in America, etc., Vol. 1, p. 156. 1799.

      3. Ford II, 88. 1776.

      4. Bolton and Marshall. Coloni. of N. America, p. 23, 1921.

      5. N. Y. Times, March 3, 1958.

      6. New England Memorial, pp. 40-41. 1926 ed.

      7. Hist. and Present State of Virginia, para. 65.

      8. Brown, Alex. First Republic in America, p. 219. 1898.

      8a. Colonial Civilization of N. America, pp. 31, 33, 1949.

      9. White Servitude in New Jersey. Americana, Vol. 15, p. 26, 1921.

      10. Brown, Alex., p. 249.

      11. Transportation of Convicts to the American Colonies, Vol. 23, p. 232. 1933-34.

      12. Maryland Maga. of History. A List of Convicts Transported to America. Vol. 43, pp. 55-60. 1948.

      13. Brief Hist. Relations (1678-1714), Vol 2. 1857.

      15. Voyages to Sierra Leone, 1791-2-3, pp. 64-66. Utting, F. A. Sierra Leone, p. 81, 1931.

      16. D’Auvergne, E. B. Human Livestock, p. 160. 1933.

      17. Documentary Hist. of American Indus. Society, Vol. 2, p. 165, 1910.

      18. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Vol. 3 p. 36. 1824.

      19. British Convicts shipped to America, p. 33. 1896.

      20. Hist. of the Plymouth Plantation, p. 459. 1898 ed.

       “The discovery of African labor was an American enterprise. It was the introduction of a hitherto unknown muscular force, proving on trial to be the most perfect agent of production then known to commerce … African labor fixed with eagerness the marvellous power in the varied and exhaustless wealth of the South.” — J. W. DuBose.

      The United States, both as a colony and a young nation, wasn’t highly thought of in Europe. When Thomas Jefferson was president he offered to give a site in Washington to any European nation that would build a legation on it; none accepted. Many leading writers even considered the new nation hopeless, among them Count Gobineau, Sydney Smith, and James McSparran. Gobineau was expressing a sentiment long popular in Europe when he said “Americans represent the most varied specimens of the races of Old Europe of whom the least possible can be expected. They are the refuse of all the ages—Irish; Germans, often mixed-blood; some French; and Italians, who outnumber all the others. The mixture of all these degenerate types, gives, and will continue to give birth to new ethnic confusions. These mixtures have in them nothing good. Italian, Frenchman, Anglo-Saxon will amalgamate in the Southern States with the Indian, Negro, Spaniard and Portuguese already there. From such a mixture one can imagine nothing but horrible racial results—nothing but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most degraded beings.”1 Still another writer called America, “the graveyard of the white race,” and American-born Bayard Taylor said an American is “an Anglo-Saxon relapsed into barbarism.”

      In the Bible it was asked what good could come out of Nazareth. In a similar vein, Sydney Smith, celebrated writer and wit, asked in 1820, “In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or sleep in American blankets?”2

      But less than a century after that, America was not only doing all it was said she couldn’t do, but had taken the lead of all the nations on earth. Indeed, the rise of America from a wilderness over which roamed Indians and buffaloes to world power; and from a people once so pressed by hunger that some were driven to cannibalism3 to a nation with enormous surpluses of food is nothing short of the miraculous. Britain took 1920 years to become the world’s foremost power—1643 years from Julius Caesar’s invasion, 55 B.C., to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; and another 277 years to Waterloo, 1815. The United States took only 353 years, that is, from the founding of St. Augustine, Florida, to the end of World War I.

      Coming centuries later, America had, of course, the advantages of man’s knowledge accumulated since but she had also some terrific disadvantages, not the least of which was the long struggle with the Indians, which sometimes ended in massacre of the colonists as in Virginia in 1622. In spite of hardships greater than those met by colonists south of the Rio Grande, the British North American colonies, a little over a century after the founding of St. Augustine, took the lead in the New World. Cuba, Hispaniola, Mexico, Puerto Rico, were colonized before the United States. They, too, had the advantage of man’s accumulated knowledge. Why did they drop behind?

      Those who attribute human advancement to “race” will say, America was a “white man’s land,” that her racial origin was North European. It is true that the Spaniards and Portuguese, pioneers in the lands to the south, were mixed with Africans from very early times and very much so after the Moorish invasion of 711 A.D., but why were the South Europeans at the top in 1492 and the Nordics so far below them? Also, why did the United States outstrip Canada, which has been and still is, more racially Nordic?

      THE REASON FOR AMERICA’S ADVANCE

      Why did America take the lead so early in the New World? The answer is Trade.

      Trade in what? The reply to that sounds so utterly preposterous now that one must be bold to state it. However, there were those living then who did not hesitate to say it as well, as certain candid writers of our time. It was trade in Molasses. A pro-American bulletin of 1731 said, “The molasses trade is the most (if not the only valuable one) of New England.”4 And John Adams, second president of the United States, said, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence.”5 He added that Washington also thought highly of molasses. Which Washington certainly did. In 1776, he sent one of his slaves, Tom, by a ship-captain to be exchanged for molasses. (Washington, Writings of, Vol. 2, p. 211. 1889)

       THE MOLASSES TRADE

      Why molasses? Molasses meant rum. Why rum? Rum was for exchange of Africans on the African West Coast. In short, it was the sale of Africans in the New World—the Slave Trade—that laid the financial foundation of the United States. It was Africa’s great gift to America.

      More will be said of this in the proper place.

       THE COMING OF THE AFRICANS

      Africa as a source of labor was discovered by the Portuguese in 1440, that is, for the period of which we are speaking. The first batch of Africans brought to Lagos, Portugal,

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