Group items tagged

. There was social and racial tension on the ships that carried West Indians and whites across the Atlantic; the long voyage with poor food and confined conditions raised tempers; whites accused blacks of being 'puffed up' while Jamaicans were highly sensitive to real and imagined slights.

As early as the 1770s, Dr Samuel Hopkins, Congregational minister of Newport, Rhode Island, and an opponent of slavery, proposed sending African Americans to Africa as missionaries. A local African fund was created by the Missionary Society of Rhode Island, and two blacks, one a slave, the other free since birth, but both with a knowledge of a 'Guinea language', were sent to Princeton to study theolog

eoples of African descent, but from the outset also to West Africa.20 Africa was the persistent geographical focus of African American missionary thought throughout the nineteenth century. The Second Great Awakening stirred black Christians to a strong belief in the vital purpose of evangelism, and in this Africa had a special significance. The belief in 'providential design' and 'race redemption' was a recurring theme and had a two-fold meaning. By engaging in mission activity, African Americans would not only fulfil the Christian command to preach the Gospel, but also prove their worth to the doubtful white constituency that largely paid to send them to Africa. The idea that God's providential hand had been at work in African slavery was also embraced by some whites

53 The outcome was that Southern Black Baptists organised the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention, in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880, although the body represented regional rather than denominational interests. Fifteen years later a degree of black denominational unity was achieved with the creation of the National Baptist Convention (NBC)

Both the white-led and the African American churches placed considerable emphasis on training men and women for African mission. A later vision of the African American missions was to bring Africans to the United States for education in their new schools and

Missionary Association sponsored The World's Congress on Africa in conjunction with the Chicago World's Fair in August 1893. A further Congress on Africa was held in Atlanta in late 1895 with 'discussions centred around the industrial, intellectual, moral and spiritual "progress" of Afric

n American responses to European colonial rule in Africa were divided. Most black missionaries, predictably, viewed Africa through Western eyes and saw the imposition of European rule as helpful in extending Christianity in the Continent. But there were also black missionary critics of colonialism and particularly of specific colonial rulers. The atrocities carried out by the Congo Free State were publicised by William Sheppard and Henry P. Hawkins, and their white colleague Samuel Lapsley, all of whom worked for the Southern Presbyterians. This led to Sheppard being prosecuted by the Free State authorities.78

difficulties in the way of, the sending of American Negroes to Africa'.85 A guarded and cautious recommendation by the conference offered to support African American missionaries that were sent to Africa provided they went under the auspices of 'responsible societies of recognized and well-established standing'.86 It was hardly the ringing endorsement that African American delegates had hoped for. However, it was the most that white international mission agencies were prepared to offer. They too had deep suspicions about certain African American activities in colonial Africa. The result was that in the interwar years the number of African American missionaries in Africa steadily decline

Slavery was also a form of power relations, so slaves by and large did not have an equal voice in articulating a view of their condition. Their actions, however, spoke loudly of their innermost thoughts and represented their reflections on, and reactions to, the world in which they found themselves. Columbus thought the people he encountered in the Caribbean in 1492 might make good slaves, as he seemed to infer in his log of October 10, 1492, when he wrote: "They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think that they can easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases Our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highness when I depart, in order that they may learn our language" (Columbus, p. 77).

The transatlantic slave trade formally began in 1518, when King Charles I of Spain sanctioned the direct importation of Africans to his colonies in the Americas, finally acknowledging that the potential supply of indigenous slaves was inadequate to maintain the economic viability of his fledgling overseas colonies. Shortly thereafter, the Portuguese started to import Africans to Brazil to create a plantation society and establish an Atlantic bulwark against other Europeans intruding along the coast. As the demand for labor grew, the number of Africans imported as slaves increased, and manual labor throughout the Americas eventually became virtually synonymous with the enslavement of Africans. The transatlantic slave trade became a lucrative international enterprise, and by the time it ended, around 1870, more than ten million Africans had been forcibly transported and made slaves in the Americas. Many millions more died in Africa or at sea in transit to the Americas.

The slave trade responded to an interrelated series of factors operating across Africa, at the supply side, and also in the Americas, at the market level. The trade can be divided into four phases, strongly influenced by the development of colonialism throughout the hemisphere. In the first phase, lasting to about 1620, the Americas were the domain of the Spanish and the Portuguese. These Iberian powers introduced about 125,000 slaves to the Americas, with some 75,000 (or 27 percent of African slave exports of the period) to the Spanish colonies, and about 50,000 (18 percent of the trade) to Brazil. This was a relatively small flow of about 1,000 slaves per year, most of whom were supplied from Portuguese forts along the West African coast. But slavery in the towns, farms, and mines of the Americas then employed less African slaves (about 45 percent of the total Atlantic trade) than in the tropical African islands of Fernando Po and Sâo Tomé, Europe proper, or the islands of the Madeiras, Cape Verdes, and the Azores (about 55 percent of trade). Indeed, the small island of Sâo Tomé alone received more than 76,000 African slaves during the period, exceeding the entire American market.

The period between 1701 and 1810 represented the maturation of the slave system in the Americas. This third phase witnessed the apogee of both the transatlantic slave trade and the system of American slavery. Altogether, nearly six million Africans—amounting to nearly 60 percent of the entire transatlantic slave trade—arrived in American ports. Brazil continued to be the dominant recipient country, accounting for nearly two million Africans, or 31 percent, of the trade during this period. The British Caribbean plantations (mainly on Barbados and Jamaica) received almost a million and a half slaves, accounting for 23 percent of the trade. The French Antilles (mainly Saint-Domingue on western Hispaniola, Martinique, and Guadeloupe) imported almost as many, accounting for 22 percent of the trade. The Spanish Caribbean (mainly Cuba) imported more than 500,000 slaves, or 9.6 percent of the trade. The Dutch Caribbean accounted for nearly 8 percent of the trade, but most of those slaves were re-exported to other areas of the New World. The British North American colonies imported slightly more than 300,000, or slightly less than 6 percent of the trade, while the small Danish colonies of the Caribbean bought about 25,000 slaves, a rather minuscule proportion of the slaves sold in the Americas during this period.

The attack on the slave trade paralleled growing attacks on the system of slavery throughout the Americas. The selfdirected abolition from below that occurred in Saint-Domingue in 1793 was not repeated elsewhere, however. Instead, a combination of internal and external events eventually determined the course of abolition throughout the region. The issue of slavery became a part of the struggle for political independence for the mainland Spanish American colonies. Chile (1823), Mexico, and the new Central America States (1824), abolished slavery immediately after their wars of independence from Spain. The British government abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1834, effectively ending the institution in 1838. Uruguay legally emancipated its few remaining slaves in 1842. The French government ended slavery in the French Antilles in 1848. Colombia effectively abolished slavery in 1851, with Ecuador following in 1852, Argentina in 1853, and Peru and Venezuela in 1854. The United States of America abolished slavery after the U.S. Civil War in 1865. Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1886. Finally, Brazil abolished slavery in 1888.

Opposition to SlaveryThe eighteenth century formed the watershed in the system of American slavery. Although individuals, and even groups such as the Quakers, had always opposed slavery and the slave trade, general disapproval to the system gained strength during the later eighteenth century, primarily due to the growth of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationality, and British Evangelical Protestantism. Opposition to slavery became increasingly more coordinated in England, and it eventually had a profound impact, with the abolition of the English slave trade in 1807. Before that, prodded by Granville Sharp and other abolitionists, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield declared slavery illegal in Great Britain in 1772, giving enormous impetus to the British antislavery movement. The British legal ruling, in time, freed about 15,000 slaves who were then in Britain with their colonial masters, who estimated their "property loss" at approximately £700,000.

In 1776 the British philosopher and economist Adam Smith declared in his classic study The Wealth of Nations that the system of slavery represented an uneconomical use of land and resources, since slaves cost more to maintain than free workers. By the 1780s the British Parliament was considering a series of bills dealing with the legality of the slave trade, and several of the recently independent former North American colonies—then part of the United States of America—began to abolish slavery within their local jurisdictions. After 1808—when Great Britain and the United States legally abolished their component of the transatlantic slave trade—the English initiated a campaign to end all slave trading across the Atlantic, and to replace slave trading within Africa with other forms of legal trade. Through a series of outright bribes, diplomatic pressure, and naval blockades, the trade gradually came to an end around 1870.

Slavery Scholarship and the Place of the Slave in the WorldThe topic of slavery has attracted the attention of a very large number of writers. Before the 1950s, writers tended to view slavery as a monolithic institution. Then, as now, there was much discussion of slavery, and less of the slaves themselves. Standard influential American studies, such as U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), Kenneth M. Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956), and Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), misleadingly described slaves as passive participants to their own cruel denigration and outrageous exploitation. In Phillips's world, everyone was sublimely happy. In the world of Stampp and Elkins, they were not happy—but neither could they help themselves. Apparently neither Stampp nor Elkins read much outside their narrow field—or if they did, they discounted it. Certainly the then available scholarship of Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, or Elsa V. Goveia is not evident in their works. Herbert Aptheker in American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma (1944), and Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen (1946) had tried, in those three intellectually stimulating works, to modify the overall picture, but without much success.

Then, in 1956, Goveia published an outstanding book, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century. As Francisco Scarano notes of Goveia's work: "Goveia's sensitive and profound study of slave society in the British Leewards … is doubtless one of the great works of Caribbean history in any language. The Guyanese historian revealed the ways in which, in a racialized slave society, the imperative of slave subordination permeated all contexts of social interaction, from legal system to education and from religion to leisure. Everything was predicated on the violence necessary to maintain slavocratic order" (Scarano, p. 260). Goveia's approach inculcated the slaves with agency, a fundamental quality of which earlier writers seemed incredibly unaware. Slaves continuously acted in, as well as reacted to, the world in which they existed.

But slavery was not only attacked from above. At the same time that European governments contemplated administrative measures against slavery and the slave trade, the implacable opposition of the enslaved in the overseas colonies increased the overall costs of maintaining the system of slavery. Slave revolts, conspiracies, and rumors of revolts engendered widespread fear among owners and administrators. Small bands of runaway slaves formed stable black communities, legally recognized by their imperial powers in difficult geographical locations such as Esmeraldas in Ecuador, the Colombian coastal areas, Palmares in Brazil, and in the impenetrable mountains of Jamaica. Then, in 1791, the slaves of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, taking their cue somewhat from the French Revolution, staged a successful revolt under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) and a number of other local leaders. The radical French commissioner in the colony, Léger Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813) saw the futility of trying to defeat the local revolt and declared the emancipation of all slaves and their immediate admission to full citizenship (1793), a move ratified the following year by

French colonies. Napoleon Bonaparte revoked the decree of emancipation in 1802, but he failed to make it stick in Saint-Domingue, where the former slaves and their free colored allies declared the independence of Haiti—the second free state in the Americas—in 1804.The fourth and final phase of the transatlantic trade lasted from about 1810 to 1870. During that phase approximately two million Africans were sold as slaves in a greatly reduced area of the Americas. With its trade legal until 1850, Brazil imported some 1,145,400 Africans, or about 60 percent of all slaves sold in the Americas after 1810. The Spanish Antilles—mainly Cuba and Puerto Rico—imported more than 600,000 Africans (32 percent), the great majority of them illegally introduced to Cuba after an Anglo-Spanish treaty to abolish the Spanish

he revolutionary government in Paris, which extended the emancipation to all

in a few

to gav, they cannot go awar too fast; for, even here, my Lady Dedlock has been bored to death. * Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new to mv Lruiy, under tiio worn-out heavens. On last .Sunday, when poor wretches were gay—within tho walls, playing with

family; above all. of my Lady, whom the world jfdmires; hut if my lady would only ho “a little more tree,” not quite so cold and distant. Mrs. Rouncewell thinks she would be moro affable. “ Tis almost a pity.” Mrs. Rouncewell adds—only “almost," because it borders on impiety to suppose that anything could bo bettor than it is, in such an express dispensation as the Dedloek affairs ; “that my lady has no family. lishe had had a daughter now, a grown young lady, to interest her, I think sho would have had tho only kind of excellence she wants.” “ Might not that have made her still more proud, grandmother ?” says Watt; who has been home and come back again, ho is such a good grandson. TO BE CONTINUED. MADAME ALBONI. Wo have already announced tho arrival in this country of Madame Alboni, tho famous European songstress, who is to fill a prominent place in musical comments and criticism, in America for tho next few months.— Our reader willho glad to learn who she is, what sho has done, and what are her pretensions ; and wo copy for their benefit tho following from tho .Vein York Times: Marietta Alboni was horn in Cesena, in 1820, of respectablo parentage. Her scholastic education was necessarily limited, as at tho age of eleven she was placed under the musical pupilage of the famous master Bagioli, one of the first musicians of tho day, from whom sho acquired tho rudiments of her art. For some timo sho enjoyed tho instruction of Rossini, at the Bologna Lycum, and eventually made her debut, about ton years sinco, at the great Theatre of La Seala, inMilan. Her success was brilliant, and was conformed by a run of four successive seasons. Following tho usual path of artistic merit, sho next commenced a series of engagements at Vienna, whence, after the most triumphant reception, she was carried off to >St. Petersburg by the# Czar.— 1ho famo of tho cantatrice, established at Vienna, was fully confirmed at the Russian capital, and given to Europe as a fixed fact. She turned her face Praiseward, giving concerts and entertainments of tho rarest excellence as sho pursued a circuitous journey through Germany, and was hailed at the centre of European taste with unqualified admiration. With tho exception of occasional engagements in London, and a recent journey to Brussels, sho has made her head-quarters at the French capital for tho past two years. One of tho scenes of her residence in Paris was a grand fete at Versailles, at which sho and the Prince President were the ruling spirits. Signorini Alboni is not a handsome woman: hut lias what is better—an untainted reputation, and a character for many virtues, among which liberality is not the least. She brings her train Signors Rove re and Sangoivanni, a tenor and baritone, accustomed to support her admirable voice. The voice of this celebrated cantatrice is, in musical parlance, contralto. Itisofwonderful compass, embracing, with perfect ease, the extreme upper and lower notes, and is managed with a skid and grace only surpassed by its rich melody and power. Though assigned to the contralto parts, at Her Majesty s Theatre, during tho great season of the World's Exhibition, she was the reigning attraction ot that aristocratic establishment. American Influence in Europe. —“ I onnnot help taking a very warm and eager interestin tho fortunes of yourpeople. There is nothing, and tltero never was anything so grand and so promising as the condition and prospects of your country; and nothing I conceive morecertain than that in severity years after this itscondition w illbe by furthe most important element in tho history of Europe. Itis very provoking that wo cannot live to seo it; hut it is very plain to me that the French revolution, or rather perhaps tho continued operation of tho causes which produced that revolution, has laid the foundations all over Europe, of an inextinguishable and fatal struggle between popular rights ami ancient establishments—between democracy and tyranny—between legitimacy and representative government, which may involve the world in sanguinary conflicts for fifty years, and may also end, after all, in the establishment of a brutal and military despotism fora hundred more, hutmust end. I think, in tho triumph of reason over prejudice and tho infinite amelioration of all politics, and the elevation of all national character. Now I cannot help thinking that the example of America, and tho influence and power which sho will every year be more and more able to exert, willhave a most potent and incalculably beneficial effect, both in shortening this conflict, in rendering it less sanguinary, and in insuring and accelerating its happy termination. Itake it for granted that America, either as ono or as many states, will always remain free, and consequently prosperous and powerful. She will naturally take the side of liberty, therefore. in the great European contest—and w hile her growing power and means of compulsion willintimidate i'.s opponents, the example not onlv of the practicability, but of the emin nt advantages, ofa system of perfect freedom, and a disdain and objuration of all prijudiees, cannot fail to incline the great body of all intelligent communities fur its voluntary adoption.’— Jahil J<j '»ry. It 5s surprising our statesmen »'o not s.*e. that is in tJw ir power to give mi ttlrnmt imineufeurabtu increase to the power *>t our nation in Eurep. by simply establishing Cheap f > o:(agc on the Ocean. — linh'fJt ndent. From the Iwlepeodent. I WISH 1 COLLD DU SOBETBIM. ** llare tou read Inclo Tom’s Cabin said a lady to her friend, a few days since. “Yes,” was the reply, “and O, how it makes me long to do something. Men ought to read it. AU mm ought to read it—they can do something.” Rut cannot woman do something? True she cannot nor does she wish to go to the ballot-box. but lies there not a power kick of this? Was not Hannibaleveran enemy to the Homan name?— When only nine years old, his father made hi m take a solemn oath never to he at peace with Rome. Isnot slavery afar greater foe toour country than was [hunt to the Carthaginian nation? And 0 mothers, as we wish our country free ofher greatest enemy, a« we wish bur children to enjoy the blessings of life, liberty, and happiness, temporal and eternal, let us follow the example of liainilcar, and early and parseveringly teach our Abucrtisemcnts. < ASH IVUD I7OR rags, canvas*, Kentucky bagging anil wood, delivered at the (iene»«e Paper Mills, Rochester, .\. V. October 30th, IB.il. PAPER HAMiIVG

y been published.6 It begins at the end of the eighteenth century with the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the French revolutionary wars, the Industrial Revolution and Britain's official conversion to anti-slavery-and ends with the European revol

During the past twenty years historians have given a great deal of increasingly sophisticated attention to the rich and complex history of African slavery in Brazil-in all periods (from its beginnings early in the sixteenth century to its termination at the end of the nineteenth centur

a 'proletarian necess

865. Moreover, slavery still persisted, indeed flourished, in Brazil and Cuba and in the United States (although confined, of course, by this time to the South). Indeed, as a result of the expansion of the frontier in all these remaining slave states during the first half of the nineteenth century, slavery existed over a larger area geographically than at any time in its history. And more Africans and Afro-Americans, some six million, were held in captivity; that is to say, more than twice as many as at the time of the 'first emancipation' in Haiti in 179

r mula

nomic imp

anity among Africans. Partly through the en

missionaries, more Africans took up firearm

sons, most prominently to gain security and to

began to grow scarce, in the middle of the cent

began to grow scarce, in the middle of the ce

LOGY AND CULT

LOGY AND CULTURE OCTOBER 2004 VOL. 45 upper hand in colonial politics. Settler perceptions of the threa

upper hand in colonial politics. Settler perceptions of the threat posed by armed Africans persuaded British conservatives to portray Afri

skilled with firearms, even as they otherwise characterized Afri

racially inferior. The common perception that Boer frontiersm

superior marksmen

superior marksmen had, by the end of the nineteenth century,

historians use sources to assess technological skill? It is an issue of fundamental importance because skill exists at the intersection of the human and the material. Even so, historians tend to overlook the methodological challenge, shortchanging analysis in their discussions of skill. Historians of industrialization in Europe and North America, for example, have written about the ways in which the loss of skill related to the loss of worker pow

n the best available study on that specific subject, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians^ Patrick Malone describes how European settlers introduced guns to New England, pointing out that Native Americans adapted them most adroitly to the local environment. The Native Americans learned to shoot well and combined that capability with their skills in forest warfare to gain a temporary military advantage, until English colonists learned how to fight with guns in forests, too.3 Malone's study is based largely on colonial sources, though, and he does

consider the possibility that English descriptions of Native Americans' skill with guns might have aimed at portraying them as more dangerous than they really may have been, which would have furthered the colonials' aims to dispossess them.

ith weapons, a facility that enabled them to resist colonialism for a while. The Xhosa were both good and bad marksmen, while the Mfengu were skilled and dangerous. The Sotho were "indifferently armed and were poor shots" before the 1870s, when they became "crack marksmen." The Zulu never integrated firearms completely into their military tactics, but by the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 some Zulu shot well because, according to a British government source, they had received instruction from redcoat deserters

Contradictory views of skill are not unique to historians of firearms and colonialism. Little in the historiography of technology goes beyond labor historians' concern with worker de-skilli

were debated extensively in southern Africa in the nineteenth century. Everyday practice as it related to firearms, as well as the representation of everyday practice, was highly ideological, as may be seen in the efforts of those who wished to regulate the spread of guns. Nineteenth-century settler politicians often made highly politicized claims about skill and

an muskets, and so were favored more by hunters than by soldiers.10 OCTOBER 2004 VOL. 45 In the early nineteenth century, military and civilian firearms incorporated a number of technical improvements. Percussion locks came into wide service by the 1840s.11 At around the same time, improvements in ammunition persuaded most soldiers and civilians to replace their smoothbores with more accurate rifles.12 And, finally, by the 1860s design improvements in breech-loading firearms made it possible for most soldiers and civilians to switch from muzzle loaders to breechloa

. Hunting could even provide a better income than cattle farming. The naturalist William Burchell, who traveled in the interior in 1812, observed how Africans became involved in a cash economy as European trade networks reached into the interior.14 Many African hunters worked for European traders, who employed them as trackers and supplied them with guns and ammunitio

t. By hunting, this people would obtain food in a manner so much more agreeable than by agriculture, that grain would probably become but a secondary resource; but the evil would remedy itself, and the more eagerly they pursued the chase, and the more numerous were the guns and the hunters, the sooner would the game be destroyed or driven out of the coun

orated in this fashion sterloop, the star barrel.20 Cape and American guns both demonstrate a hybrid vigor in design, as local needs interacted with traditional patterns. In eastern North America hunters tended to use smaller- caliber firearms because they hunted smaller animals, like deer, while westerners, who might encounter bison, elk, or grizzly bears, preferred larger calibers, though rarely as large as the southern African four-bore.21 Cape gunsmiths and their American counterparts alike were sensitive to both the needs of local hunters and recent technological developments. They refitted flintlock muskets with percussion locks, and in so

ca's emerging capitalist economy, frequently using their wages to buy guns. African gun ownership concerned both British and Boer settlers, who saw firearms not only as tools of civilian life on the frontier but also as instruments of political power. It also concerned British and Boer officials, who incorporated disarmament into their plans to despoil Africans of their land. While developing plans to disarm, dispossess, and disenfranchise Africans, British settlerpoliticians argued that whites should take care to maintain their skills with arms - not to denude the environment of animals but to defend against attacks by dangerous Africans.

male citizen could vote, provided he possessed a certain amount of property. Guns had been subject to.a variety of sporadically enforced regulations since the seventeenth century. In the 1870s, permits to purchase firearms could be issued by unsalaried justices of the peace as well as by salaried resident magistrates. Rules for issuing permits were spelled out in the colony's Circular No. 4 of 1874, which instructed resident magistrates to issue gun permits only to Africans who were "fit" to possess guns without defining how, exactly, they were to determine fitness. Justices of the peace received no such instructions, and many settlers felt that they were too liberal in issuing permits.33 Permissive policies were defended by prominent liberals. The Cape Colony's secretary for native affairs, Charles Brownlee, observed that Africans wanted to know "why if they are really British subjects we should be so anxious that they should not possess gu

ife and property of its subjects."56 Communities that were coming under British rule needed to be disarmed. That was the civilized way to diminish risk and increase security. Frere wrote that "a wise government cannot permit any portion of the population, whose attachment to the government is in the least doubtfu

LOGY AND CULTURE OCTOBER 2004 VOL 45 remain generally possessed of arms." In the eighteenth century this had been government policy in Scotland. In the nineteenth century it had been policy in Ireland. In India during the Mutiny Lord Canning had disarmed sepoys suspected of disloyalty. It did not matter that the loyal and the disloyal were treated alike, because the government could not determine, at any given point, exactly who was who. General disarmament was the only practical policy. Even if it proved difficult to confiscate all weapons, if people got out of the habit of carrying guns in public disarmament would eventually be achieved. Based on this rendition of history, Frere proclaimed that the Pea

One of the earliest careful explorations of the source of the Jordan, the report of which is described by Dr. Robinson as ' the first good account that we possess"5 was made in 1844 by Rev. W. M. Thomson, then a missionary of the American Board in Syria, and ever since recognized as standing in the front rank among Palestine explorer

AMERICAN EXPLORERS IN PALESTINE. Society that the country east of the Jordan should be reserved as the special field of the American exp

Some of the latest and best authorities fix the foundation of Memphis by Menes at 4000 years B. C., and the building of the pyramids at 500 years later; the obelisk of Heliopolis and the tombs of Beni Hassan at 3000, all of which necessarily implies onie or two thousand years of previous consolidation to create an empire capable of such achievements.

Finally the Turks, under Sultan Selim, conquered Egypt in 1517, and hold it to this day.

wondrou

Its soil was trod by Abraham and Jacob, Joseph and Moses, as well as by Herodotus, Pythagoras and Plato. After the glories of the Pharaohs and the conquests of Cambyses, came those of Alexander. Then followed the Ptolemies, Anthony and Cleopatra, Pompey and Caesar and Augustus.

he Nile,

In the Soudan, negro blood begins to predominate. To these elements must be added 90,000 Circassians, Jews, Syrian s and Armenians, 40,000 Turks and about 100,000 Europeans; and in the deserts, 300,000 Bedouins who are of a type entirely different from all the rest, being nearly all of pure Arab blood

Mohammed Ali was born at Cavalla, in Macedonia, on the Gulf of Salonica, in 176

t Memlooks would soon treat him as they had done all his predecessors, he resolved to suiypress them. Suimmoned to the citadel of Cairo on the 1st of March, 1811, for a state ceremony, they repaired there on horseback, about 800 strong. The ouiter gate, Bab-el-azab, was closed on them, and the first inner gate al

, Mohammed Ali organized his army upon the European model, with the assistance of numerous French officers, and commenced all these reforms in civil as well as military matters which have placed Egypt so far ahead of other Mussulman countries. He died insane in 1849.

Ibrahim-Pasha, his son, exercised a short time the functions of regent, but died before his father. He was a great soldier, and twice-in 1832 and 1839-he would have driven the Sultan out of Constantinople had he not been stopped in the height of victory by the European power

r Mohammed Ali came Abbas-Pasha, a cruel tyrant, who died by violence in 1854; then Said-Pasha, and in 1863 Ismall-Pasha, the son of Ibrahim, who was forced to abdicate a year or two ago.

Ismagl-Pasha, the deposed Khedive, was once the most belauded of men, as he became afterwards the best abused; yet he might say, in the words of the French poet: " Wais je n'ai m6ritO Ni cet excbs d'honneur ni cette indignit6."

" Modern Egypt and its People.

Pompey's pillar, nearly 100 feet total height, the shaft being of a single piece of red Syenite granite, highly polished, 73 feet in length, was erected about the year 300 of our era, in honor of Diocletian, and had no more connection with Pompey the Great than Cleopatra's needles with Cleopat

Egypt should perish of hunger. Ismail's greatest error was in not tendering a compromise of 50 per cent. of his debL, which would have been accepted gladly, and 3 or 4 per cent. interest, instead of 12 and 14 and 20, which he had been paying for years.

His son, the present Khedive, has much less ability than his father, and is a mere figurehead, the consuls and commissioners having virtual control. The ex-Khedive and his sons are well educated for Orientals, and in their habits and mode of living, are quite European except as regards the hareem. They all speak French fluentl

Alexandria, or Iskanderia, as the Arabs call it, is the great seaport of Egypt, founded and named by Alexander 332 B.

The Arab quarters are inhabited by about 200,000 natives, and the European population amount to 60,000 more

Out of a debt of one hundred millions of pounds Egypt never realized over forty-five millions, and the suffering inflicted upon his people by excessive taxation was partly due to his extravagance,

They were originally at Heliopolis, but were brought to Alexandria under Tiberius. They bear the hieroglyphics of Thotmes III. (1500) and Rameses II. (Sesostris the Great), 1400 B.C.

The distance is 130 miles; time, four hours and a half, over a perfectly level country, for Cairo, 12 miles above the apex of the Delta, is only 40 feet above the sea level.

e "'New Hotel

emple, and you would not be astonished if from it issue the Caliph Haroun-al-Rasbid with his faithful Mesrour, or the very same three Calenders whose adventures are recorded in the "Arabian Nights," and I could vow that I have seen the very oil jars in which Ali-Baba's forty thieves were scalded to death. There are the same bazars, with the same little shops, mere recesses in the wall, where the merchant, sitting cross-legged, can reach without rising every shelf in his shop. There he sits all day smoking his chibook and wa

ge English horses and full of lovely, half-veiled, fair Circassian and Georgian women. Two mounted janizaries, with long pistols in their holsters and curved scimetars at their sides, gallop some twenty yards in front. Behind come four syces, in pairs, with cressets full of burDing light-wood, then two more syces with wands. At each side of the carriage rides a mounted eunuch, and a pair of them follow the carriage, and behind them, another couple of mounted janizaries. They pass you at full speed, the flashing of dark eyes mingling with that of diamon

. Just between the New Hotel and Shepherd's Hotel, in the most frequented part of the European quarter, stands a building whose history brings all the darkness of the Middle Ages in juxtaposition with modern civilization. It is a palace of Arab architecture, surrounded by a palm grove and enclosed within a lofty stone wall. In that palace, less than twenty-five years ago, lived the widowed daughter of Mohammed Ali-the widow of the famous Defterda

She was a beautiful and talented woman, but licentious and cruel

This princess whose power at couirt was very great, was one of the chief actors in the assassination of her nephew, Abbas-Pasha, in 185

. It is a small city in itself, three or four times more extensive than the Tower of London. It contains a vast palace, once inhabited by Mohammed Ali, and his tomb in the mosk, which he built of Oriental alabaster and whose minarets are miracles of architectural bol

! The unequalled moon of Egypt has just risen above the Mokattan range, and its silver light mingles with the fiery glow of departing day. As you now stand nothing lies before you but the tombs of the Caliphs and the Arab cemeteries scattered in dreary ravines of yellow sand

ore. I once had an orderly, a Copt Christian named Girgis, or George, about fifty-five years old. TIe said he had beeni more than twenty-five years in service and, having no friends to apply for his release, he did not know that he would ever be discharged.

Their white cotton uniforms (short tunics, baggy zouave trouisers, and gaiters over their substanitial army shoes) are well suited to the climate and make a very good appearance. They are exceedingly weell drilled upon the French system of tactics. The infantry are armed with the best American Remington rifles. The cavalry are extremely well mounted and equipped. The artillery are well organized and have several batteries of the best Krupp guns. The officers are thoroughly acquainted with the routine of service, but the best of them are utterly ignorant of the higher branches of military science. They, as well as their soldiers, understand perfectly all the details of military life.

In one word, they possess all thebest qualities of soldiers except one-the fighting quality. This probably is due in part to the oppression of centuries, the Egyptian people having beenl ruled bv a foreign conqueror for 2,400 y

The subordinate officers are hardly a shade better than the men, and the high Pashas think only of their ease and personal safety. At the battle of Guy Khoor, in Abyssinia, the Pashas and Colonels, with Prince Hassan at their head, led the flight before the fight had fairly begun, and when my gallant frienid General Dye, severely wounded, tried to stern the tide of the retreating troops, the soldiers said to hi

Egyptian army from a defeat as complete as that of Isandula, for the Abyssinians fight as desperately as the Zulus. It is true that two or three Arab officers of high rank fought bravely and were killed on the field, buit they were the exception. Ratib-Pasha, who commanded the army, saw his extreme right flank-one battalion and a battery, which he had imprudently left isolated about twelve hundred yards off-surrounded by a multitude of Abyssinians, who rushed for that ga

There are also large barracks, military schools, all the bureaus of the War Department, arsenals, vast magazines, workshops and a cannon foundry. Also the famous well of Joseph, 270 feet deep, so called, not from the Joseph of Scripture, but from Saladin, whose name was Yusu

The line-officers, nearly all natives, did not show any dislike to the Christian staff-officers, even if they felt it. When the financial difficulties culminated in 1878, the English and French comptrollers, who had virtually assumed the government, ordered a great reduction of the army and the discharge of all the foreign officers, which resulted in the practical abolition of the staff. There were now left in the army only two elements-the native or fellah, and the Turco-Circassian. The Turks have hitherto occupied nearly all the high positions, civil and military, for they still retain their prestige as the conquerors of Egypt.

The ex-Khedive, IsmaYl-Pasha, was a regular purchaser of twenty or thirty of them every year. It is the highest ambition of a Circassian girl to be sold to the Sultan or some of his chief officers. If she succeeds in becoming a favorite, her brothers hasten to sbare her fortunes by obtaining civil or military appointments. This accounts for there being so many Circassians in high places in Turkey and Egypt. Ratib-Pasha, the Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian army under Ismail-Pasha, was a Cireassiani. (See Appendix A.) Until the close of the Abyssinian war, the Egyptian army seemed to be absolutely submissive to its Prince.

" Holy War,"

The most prominent were Generals Mott, Sibley, Loring, Stone, who held the rank of Pashas (Generals); Reynolds, Dye, Field, Long, Prout, Lockett, Ward, Purdy andl Mason, who ranked as Beys or Colonels

te. Several of my esteemed comrades in those expeditions-Campbell, Losche, Lamnson-left their bones in the deserts of the Soudan, and others returnied with impaired constitutions.

l Obeyad, the capital of Kordofan, after unspeakable sufferings. There I was joined by that talented and accomplished officer, Col. H. G. Prout, to whom I turned over the comnmand. The surgeon anw everybody else gave me up to die, and I thought my days had reached their term. But I began to mend slowly, and after six months I started back for Cairo.

El Obeyad from Suakim on the Red Sea, where I took a steamer for Suez and thence by rail to Cairo. All the Americans except Gen. Stone are now out of the Egyptian army, but I can assert with

They stop every two or three hundred yards while the discordant music strikes up and a hired male dancer goes through some absurd contortions

f Dr. Parsons, the American missionary, and they will never be hanged unless the United States send a squadron to require it. Our Secretary of State in his last report states that the demands of his department on this subject have been evaded.

On my second -expedition to Kordofan, one of the soldiers of my escort, rejoicing in the name of Abou-la-nane, came to me on the eve of our departure from Cairo, and stated that he had married a wife from a village far up the Nile. Would I permit him to take his wife on the boat and leave her at her village with her relatives; otherwise she would starve from misery in Cairo. This was probably a subterfuge, but I consented. Arriving at the village after several days, Abou-la-nane came and said that all his wife's relations were dead, and if she was left there she would starve more certainly than in Cairo. " Would his Excellency the Bey (that was myself) permit him to take her along?" I told him that if he did she would certainly surely die in the desert from the hardships we would

One night at Dongola, on the Upper Nile, after retreat, the whole camp was startled by the wails and moanings of Hafizah, the soldier's wife. He had become jealous of the attentions of the sergeant of artiller

The sentence was irrevocable. Fortunately theire were no witnesses, and he stoutly denied having used the triple formula, only the simple one. So they went before the cadi and got married again, and everything was altogether lovely. I may as well state here that my kitid treatment of Abou-la-nane and his wife was "bread cast on the waters." When in the heart of Kordofan, soldiers and servants were dying or prostrated by fevers, and I was at the point of death, this little weak, puny woman was never sick a day, and did all the coQking and washing at headquarters wheni no one else could be found to do it. When I was transported back to Cairo, Abou-la-nane was detailed as one of my escort, and he returned safely to Cairo with his wife. Another anecdote to illustrate inatrimonial customs: The house in which I dwelt the last four mnonths of my residence in Egypt was in Alexandria, just behind the English chuirc

" His Excellency Belhram Aga, Chief of the Eunuchs," rode past on a magnificent charger, the orders of the Osmanie and Medschidje glittering on his breast, followed by Ahmed Bey and a number of the adjutants of the Sultan. When he arrived at the gate of the palace, lambs were slaughtered before him as a token of welcome.

he Sultan sent across to his new official two symbols of office, a written document and a magnificent silver pastoral staff worked in relief, which is never handled by any but the Agas of the imperial hare

Boston News-Letter,

The plants, herbs, human blood, graveyard dirt, and other substances

Kormantin

some Negro Slaves here of ye Nations of Caramantee & Pappa plotted to destroy all the White[s] in order to obtain their freedo

nine rebels with obvious Akan day names, a young male slave by the name of Dick, owned by Harmanus Burger, performed a vital function during the course of the trials. Having been charged in the coroner's inquest with the murder of Henry Brasier on April 9, 1712, Dick along with Peter Vantilborough's Cuffee received immunity in return for services provided to the British Crown. Serving as an interpreter for the slaves who could not speak English-on several dates including April 11th, 12th, 14th, 16th, and 17th; May 7th and 27th; and June 4th-Dick's skills in that regard were drawn on in at least seven of the nine cases involving slaves with Akan day names. Joost Lynsen's Quacko,

e (Aduru Pa), malevolent medicine (adubone), or poison (aduto).

e 21 Africans facing criminal charges in connection with the uprising, 9 had Akan day names. Of the slaves accused of being involved in the revolt, 2 were named Cuffee, 4 were named Quacko, 1 was named Quashi, Quasi, and Amba, respectivel

that constitute the powder all contain an innate amount of supernatural forc

Western hemisphere derivatives-Vodun, Santeria, and Condomble-would play a similar role in other regions of the Americas. During the initial phases of the 1791 Santo Domingo slave uprising, for example, an individual known as Boukman Dutty, a Vodun high priest, was the initial leader who masterminded the revolutionary movement. Boukman had considerable influence among slaves, serving as both a religious figure and the headman of a plantation. The plan he

Bookman

The Aja-speaking Yoruba originated in a region of West Africa in which both variants of the Kwa language group (including Akan and Aja) were spoken and in which there was a great deal of cultural and commercial contact between the Akan and the Yoruba city-states. With this degree of cultural interplay and diffusion, it is conceivable that an Akan speaker would be well versed in the spiritual beliefs and practices of the Yorub

The evidence for slavery in African society, and the complex circumstances that led African elites and merchants to participate in the slave trade on the scale that they did, is largely documented by travelers who visited Africa during that period. European travelers to Africa varied widely in their motivations, background, level of education, and experience.

John K. Thornton, Boston University

The expanding commercial trade prompted the United States to complete its first international agreement with the Orange Free State, the Convention of Friendship and Commerce and Extradition of 1871, and also recognize the young republic.

The first known act of recognition between the United States and the Republic of the Orange Free State occurred in 1871 when plenipotentiaries for the two states signed a Convention of Friendship and Commerce and Extradition on December 22, 1871.

The first U.S. Consul assigned to the Orange Free State was Ernst Richard Landgraf, who was appointed as U.S. Consular Agent to Bloemfontein on December 16, 1891. U.S. consular agents remained posted at Bloemfontein after its incorporation into the British Empire until the post was closed by agency order on November 30, 1928.

Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols, and Agreements Between The United States of American and Other Powers

Full diplomatic relations between the United States and the Orange Free State were never established. In 1899, the Orange Free State declared war upon the British and fought alongside its sister Boer republic, the South African Republic, during the Boer War (1899-1902). The British occupied the capital of Bloemfontein in 1900.

The United States and the Orange Free State never established diplomatic relations.

On December 22, 1871, the United States signed a Convention of Friendship and Commerce and Extradition with the Orange Free State in Bloemfonten, Orange Free State. The convention was negotiated and signed by U.S. Special Agent Willard W. Edgcomb, who served at the time as American Consul at the Cape of Good Hope, and the government secretary of the Orange Free State, Friedrich Kaufman Höhne. This convention was denounced on January 4, 1895 by the Government of Orange Free State.

The Orange Free State ceased to exist as an independent, sovereign state in 1902 as a result of the process of colonization that carved up much of the African continent into areas of European empire. There were several states like the Orange Free State, with which the United States had treaties or sometimes even diplomatic relations, that were incorporated into another state’s overseas empire.

this led to the intensive exploitation of the ivory resources of the interior. Thro

ntil the early nineteenth century, ivory was obtained in suf

Figures of ivory exports from East Africa during the early nineteenth century are not easy to obt

Various figures have been put forth to show the number of elephants killed to supply the above ivory exports. Baker's estimate that 3,000 elephants were killed annually, to supply the ivory transported down the Nile during the i86os, may not be far off the m