The American Negro Slave Trading in the Old South. By
Frederick Bancroft. (Baltimore : J. H. Furst Co. $4.) WHEN the humane Spaniard Las Cams, to save American Indians, suggested the importation of slaves from Africa to the swamps of Central America, .he lit a fire which it will be very difficult for the human conscience to put out. No race problem has ever been solved except by sheer lapse of time, bringing with it the amalgamation of the contending stocks ; and it is probable that several thousand years hence American race problems will have been solved in this way. But since some of the subsidiary problems cannot wait until then, there is bound to be in the meanwhile a series of partial solutions, mixed with strife, ill-feeling, injustice, as well as successful achievements and instances of sane toleration.
Unfortunately human beings, faced with situations which are beyond their control, tend to simplify them by fitting them to a myth or legend in which contending forces can be conveniently labelled black and white. Thus with the problem of negro slavery : we are "led to believe that Millions of slaves living in pain and gloom were liberated after a heroic crusade by the humanitarian North ; that the new liberty has been of immediate benefit, nay, salvation to the freed men, especially in the North where opportunity has come in full measure. A counter-myth produced by the over-simplified - atmosphere of Uncle Tom's Cabin has tried to show that life in the Old South might be a kind of animal hehven, with all the darker elements carefully hidden. Another myth current in England, and especially evoked by American criticism of our ,actions_in India, is built chiefly oitt of accounts of lynchings and race riots and ignores the extraordinary difficulties which face the " other side." None of.these myths is true ; political and economic raisons d'elat were needed for the fruition of the abolitionist cause and in 1860 the question of slavery was as much an issue between opposed economic groups as Free Trade and Tariff Reform in the England of 1906.
The two books under review are important because they bring the problem down from the realm-of myth and feeling to that of knowledge and fact. Mr. Frederick Bancroft shows us slave trading as it really was. He relies upon documents and piles up evidence from newspaper advertise- ments
and such original sources, leaving it perfectly clear what happened and who took part in it. .Just as a certain type of American to-day will assure' you that only inferior people violate the prohibition amendment, so many southerners affirm that the slave-trader was Socially an outcast. Mr. Bancroft shows us aristocrats partaking in and benefiting from the dirty work. He shows that restrictions against separating families and other such brutal phases of the trade meant little or nothing, and, indeed, we see the business-exactly as it was, neither darker nor lighter ; we feel, perhaps, as one contemporary observer put it, that there was nothing particularly repulsive except the -Whole thing. We realize by the way, that -the descendants-of a social group which hardly more than a half-century ago had no legally accepted marriages or family ties are likely to show certain unorthodox tendencies in their ethical outlook which ought to be tolerated or at least understood.
Mr. Charles S. Johnson's book is of very great importance. It represents the best sociological survey of the problems which are the damnosa laereddas from the earlier picture. A Conference of all the societies and organizations interested in inter-racial relations and containing among its. members some first-class names attempted a synthesis of what is known about relevant problems and Mr. • Johnson's book. IS an epitome of their labours. Its value is in its use of authorities ; research into all manner of questions is gathered together in an admirably scientific mood. We are shown how the post-War economic --probletn-s resulting largely from restricted foreign immigratiorilarbdueed a change in negro life comparable with emancipation itself; it brought the race, hitherto predominantly agricultural, into direct com- petition with the urban industrial worker. Often the first chance to enter a new industry has one to the negro as strike-breaker or as a means of reducing the wages scale. Always his efforts are handicapped- by one sort of race dis- crimination or another. He must inhabit the less healthy
districts, his children have of schools and playgrounds, he knows that,his chances of promotion are flimsy, his civil rights are too often insecure, criminal statistics seem to prove not the higher criminality of the negro, but his greater likelihood of being arrested and condemned; he is above all in many parts of America a disfranchised man.
All these points and much research into the negroes' physical and mental capacities are set forth with the relevant statistics. The accumulated effect on the reader is one almost of despair ; one feels that the injustices are so excusable, human nature being what it is ; that the problems are so inexorable. One recognizes how easy it would be to criticize the American conscience, but at the same time one wonders whether any other community in the world would produce such noble and energetic effort in face of the difficulties. The record of white philanthropists and fighters for justice and the record of negro achievement itself do much to wipe out the national scandal. It is not as a weapon in the armoury of critic- ism of America that this book is to be recommended, but rather as a clinical picture of what is bound to happen in any country where two or more races begin to live the same economic life, to be competitors for the same material benefits and to have a share in the same culture. One truth of profound importance emerges and that is that beneath the protean ramifications of race prejudice there is always to be observed a more real cause of friction and that is economic competition. Race problems must be considered primarily as economic problems. That fact is going to be of funda- mental importance in the future of the British Empire.
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