and again drummers hired as trading auxiliaries would send word along the
coast and into the country that white men's vessels lying at Lagos, Bonny,
Loango or Benguela as the case might be were paying the best rates in
calico, rum or Yankee notions for all slaves that might be brought.

In music the monotony of the tom tom's tone spurred the drummers to
elaborate variations in rhythm. The stroke of the skilled performer could
make it mourn a funeral dirge, voice the nuptial joy, throb the pageant's
march, and roar the ambush alarm. Vocal music might be punctuated by tom
toms and primitive wind or stringed instruments, or might swell in solo
or chorus without accompaniment. Singing, however, appears not so
characteristic of Africans at home as of the negroes in America. On the
other hand garrulous conversation, interspersed with boisterous laughter,
lasted well-nigh the livelong day. Daily life, indeed, was far from dull,
for small things were esteemed great, and every episode was entertaining.
It can hardly be maintained that savage life is idyllic. Yet the question
remains, and may long remain, whether the manner in which the negroes were
brought into touch with civilization resulted in the greater blessing or
the greater curse. That manner was determined in part at least by the
nature of the typical negroes themselves. Impulsive and inconstant,
sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust,
amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves.
Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan
England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household
service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free
negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a
body-servant whom John Quincy Adams, the American minister, had brought
from Massachusetts to St. Petersburg.[4]

[Footnote 4: _Writings of John Quincy Adams_, Ford ed., III, 471, 472 (New