The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 827 pages of information about The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839).

The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 827 pages of information about The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839).
prove that the Slave Trade was the source of the tragedies acted upon that extensive continent.  Some had endeavoured to palliate this circumstance; but there was not one who did not more or less admit it to be true.  By one the Slave Trade was called the concurrent cause, by the majority it was acknowledged to be the principal motive, of the African wars.  The same might be said with respect to those instances of treachery and injustice, in which individuals were concerned.  And here he was sorry to observe that our own countrymen were often guilty.  He would only at present advert to the tragedy at Calabar, where two-large African villages, having been for some time at war, made peace.  This peace was to have, been ratified by intermarriages; but some of our captains, who were there, seeing their trade would be stopped for a while, sowed dissension again between them.  They actually set one village against the other, took a share in the contest, massacred many of the inhabitants, and carried others of them away as slaves.  But shocking as this transaction might appear, there was not a single history of Africa to be read, in which scenes of as atrocious a nature were not related.  They, he said, who defended this trade, were warped and blinded by their own interests, and would not be convinced of the miseries they were daily heaping on their fellow creatures.  By the countenance, they gave it, they had reduced the inhabitants of Africa to a worse state than that of the most barbarous nation.  They had destroyed what ought to have been the bond of union and safety among them; they had introduced discord and anarchy among them; they had set kings against their subjects, and subjects against each other; they had rendered every private family wretched; they had, in short, given birth to scenes of injustice and misery not to be found in any other quarter of the globe.

Having said thus much on the subject of procuring slaves in, Africa, he would now go to that of the transportation of them.  And here he had fondly hoped, that when men with affections and feelings like our own had been torn from their country, and everything dear to them, he should have found some mitigation of their sufferings; but the sad reverse was the case.  This was the most wretched part of the whole subject.  He was incapable, of impressing the House with what he felt upon it.  A description of their conveyance was impossible.  So much misery condensed, in so little room was more than the human imagination had ever before conceived.  Think only of six hundred persons linked together, trying to get rid of each other, crammed in a close vessel with every object that was nauseous and disgusting, diseased, and struggling with all the varieties of wretchedness.  It seemed impossible to add anything more to human misery.  Yet shocking as this description must be felt to be by every man, the transportation had been described by several witnesses from Liverpool to be a comfortable conveyance.  Mr. Norris had

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.