The German nations made the shores of the Baltic the scenes of the same traffic; and the Dnieper formed the highway on which Russian merchants conveyed slaves from the markets of Russia to Constantinople. The wretched often submitted to bondage as the only refuge from want. But it was the long wars between German and Slavonic tribes which imparted to the slave-trade so great activity that in every country of Western Europe the whole class of bondmen took and still retain the name of Slaves.

In Sicily, natives of Asia and Africa were exposed for sale. From extreme poverty the Arab father would pawn even his children to the Italian merchant. Rome itself long remained a mart where Christian slaves were exposed for sale, to supply the market of Mahometans. The Venetians purchased alike infidels and Christians, and sold them again to the Arabs in Sicily and Spain. Christian and Jewish avarice supplied the slave-market of the Saracens. The trade, though censured by the church and prohibited by the laws of Venice, was not effectually checked till the mere presence in a Venetian ship was made the sufficient evidence of freedom.

In the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III. had written that, "nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty." Yet, as among Mahometans the captive Christian had no alternative but apostasy or servitude, the captive infidel was treated in Christendom with corresponding intolerance. In the camp of the leader whose pious arms redeemed the sepulchre of Christ from the mixed nations of Asia and Libya, the price of a war-horse was three slaves. The Turks, whose law forbade the enslaving of Mussulmans, continued to sell Christian and other captives; and Smith, the third president of Virginia, relates that he was himself a runaway from Turkish bondage.

All this might have had no influence on the destinies of America but for the long and doubtful struggles between Christians and Moors in the west of Europe, where, for more than seven centuries, the two religions were arrayed against each other, and bondage was the reciprocal doom of the captive. France and Italy were filled with Saracen slaves; the number of them sold into Christian bondage exceeded the

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number of all the Christians ever sold by the pirates of Barbary. The clergy felt no sympathy for the unbeliever. The final victory of the Spaniards over the Moors of Granada, an event contemporary with the discovery of America, was signalized by a great emigration of the Moors to the coasts of Northern Africa, where each mercantile city became a nest of pirates, and every Christian the wonted booty of the corsair: an indiscriminate and retaliating bigotry gave to all Africans the denomination of Moors, and without scruple reduced them to bondage.

The clergy had broken up the Christian slave-markets at Bristol and at Hamburg, at Lyons and at Rome. In language addressed half to the courts of law and half to the people, Louis X., by the advice of the jurists of France, in July, 1315, published the ordinance that, by the law of nature, every man ought to be born free; that serfs were held in bondage only by a suspension of their early and natural rights; that liberty should be restored to them throughout the kingdom so far as the royal power extended; and every master of slaves was invited to follow his example by bringing them all back to their original state of freedom. Some years later, John de Wycliffe asserted the unchristian character of slavery. At the epoch of the discovery of America the moral opinion of the civilized world had abolished the trade in Christian slaves, and was demanding the emancipation of the serfs; but the infidel was not yet included within the pale of humanity.

Yet negro slavery is not an invention of the white man. As Greeks enslaved Greeks, as Anglo-Saxons dealt in AngloSaxons, so the earliest accounts of the land of the black men bear witness that negro masters held men of their own race as slaves, and sold them to others. This the oldest Greek historian commemorates. Negro slaves were seen in classic Greece, and were known at Rome and in the Roman empire. About the year 990, Moorish merchants from the Barbary coast reached the cities of Nigritia, and established an uninterrupted exchange of Saracen and European luxuries for the gold and slaves of Central Africa.

Not long after the conquests of the Portuguese in Barbary, their navy frequented the ports of Western Africa; and the

first ships, which, in 1441, sailed so far south as Cape Blanco, returned not with negroes, but with Moors. These were treated as strangers, from whom information respecting their native country was to be derived. Antony Gonzalez, who had brought them to Portugal, was commanded to restore them to their ancient homes. He did so; and the Moors gave him as their ransom not gold only, but "black Moors" with curled hair. Negro slaves immediately became an object of commerce. The historian of the maritime discoveries of Spain even claims that she anticipated the Portuguese. The merchants of Seville imported gold dust and slaves from the western coast of Africa; so that negro slavery was established in Andalusia, and "abounded in the city of Seville," before the first voyage of Columbus.

The adventurers of those days by sea, joining the creed of bigots with the designs of pirates and heroes, esteemed as their rightful plunder the wealth of the countries which they might discover, and the inhabitants, if Christians, as their subjects; if infidels, as their slaves. There was hardly a convenient harbor on the Atlantic frontier of the United States which was not entered by slavers. The red men of the wilderness, unlike the Africans, among whom slavery had existed from immemorial time, would never abet the foreign merchant in the nefarious traffic. Fraud and force remained, therefore, the means by which, near Newfoundland or Florida, on the shores of the Atlantic, or among the Indians of the Mississippi valley, Cortereal and Vasquez de Ayllon, Porcallo and Soto, and private adventurers, transported the natives of North America into slavery in Europe and the Spanish West Indies. Columbus himself, in 1494, enslaving five hundred native Americans, sent them to Spain, that they might be publicly sold at Seville. The generous Isabella, in 1500, commanded the liberation of the Indians held in bondage in her European possessions. Yet her active benevolence extended neither to the Moors nor to the Africans; and even her compassion for the men of the New World was but transient. The commissions for making discoveries, issued a few days before and after her interference to rescue those whom Columbus had enslaved, reserved for herself and Ferdinand a fourth part of the slaves which the

new kingdoms might contain. The slavery of Indians was recognised as lawful.

A royal edict of 1501 permitted negro slaves, born in slavery among Christians, to be transported. Within two years there were such numbers of Africans in Hispaniola that Ovando, the governor of the island, entreated that their coming might be restrained. For a short time the Spanish government forbade the introduction of negro slaves who had been bred in Moorish families, and allowed only those who were said to have been instructed in the Christian faith to be transported to the West Indies, under the plea that they might assist in converting infidel nations. But, after the culture of sugar was begun, the system of slavery easily overcame the scruples of men in power. King Ferdinand himself sent from Seville fifty slaves to labor in the mines, and promised to send more; and, because it was said that one negro could do the work of four Indians, the direct transportation of slaves from Guinea to Hispaniola was, in 1511, enjoined by a royal ordinance, and deliberately sanctioned by successive decrees. Was it not natural that Charles V., a youthful monarch, at his accession in 1516, should have readily granted licenses to the Flemings to transport negroes to the colonies? The benevolent Las Casas, who felt for the native inhabitants of the New World all that the purest missionary zeal could inspire, and who had seen them vanish away like dew before the cruelties of the Spaniards while the African thrived under the tropical sun, in 1517 suggested that negroes might still further be employed to perform the severe toils which they alone could endure. The board of trade at Seville was consulted, to learn how many slaves would be required; four for each Spanish emigrant had been proposed; deliberate calculation fixed the number at four thousand a year. In 1518 the monopoly, for eight years, of annually importing four thousand slaves into the West Indies, was granted by Charles V. to La Bresa, one of his favorites, and was sold to the Genoese. The buyers of the contract purchased their slaves of the Portuguese, to whom a series of papal bulls had indeed granted the exclusive commerce with Western Africa; but the slave-trade between Africa and America was never expressly sanctioned

by the see of Rome. Leo X. declared that "not the Christian religion only, but Nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery." Paul III., two years after he had given authority to make slaves of every English person who would not assist in the expulsion of Henry VIII., in two separate briefs imprecated a curse on the Europeans who should enslave Indians, or any other class of men. Ximenes, the stern grand inquisitor, the austere but ambitious Franciscan, refused to sanction the introduction of negroes into Hispaniola, believing that the favorable climate would increase their numbers, and infallibly lead them to a successful revolt. Hayti, the first spot in America that received African slaves, was the first to set the example of African liberty.

The odious distinction of having first interested England in the slave-trade belongs to Sir John Hawkins. In 1562, he transported a large cargo of Africans to Hispaniola; the rich returns of sugar, ginger, and pearls, attracted the notice of Queen Elizabeth; and five years later she took shares in a new expedition, though the commerce, on the part of the English, in Spanish ports, was by the law of Spain illicit, as well as by the law of morals detestable.

Conditional servitude, under indentures or covenants, had from the first existed in Virginia. Once at least James sent over convicts, and once at least the city of London a hundred homeless children from its streets. The servant stood to his master in the relation of a debtor, bound to discharge by his labor the costs of emigration. White servants came to be a usual article of merchandise. They were sold in England to be transported, and in Virginia were to be purchased on shipboard. Not the Scots only, who were taken in the field of Dunbar, were sold into servitude in New England, but the royalist prisoners of the battle of Worcester. The leaders in the insurrection of Penruddoc, in spite of the remonstrance of Haselrig and Henry Vane, were shipped to America. At the corresponding period, in Ireland, the exportation of Irish Catholics was frequent. In 1672, the average price in the colonies, where five years of service were due, was about ten pounds, while a negro was worth twenty or twenty-five pounds. The condition of apprenticed servants in Virginia differed