CHAPTER II

THE MARITIME SLAVE TRADE


At the request of a slaver's captain the government of Georgia issued in
1772 a certificate to a certain Fenda Lawrence reciting that she, "a free
black woman and heretofore a considerable trader in the river Gambia on the
coast of Africa, hath voluntarily come to be and remain for some time in
this province," and giving her permission to "pass and repass unmolested
within the said province on her lawfull and necessary occations."[1] This
instance is highly exceptional. The millions of African expatriates went
against their own wills, and their transporters looked upon the business
not as passenger traffic but as trade in goods. Earnings came from selling
in America the cargoes bought in Africa; the transportation was but an item
in the trade.

[Footnote 1: U.B. Phillips, _Plantation and Frontier Documents_, printed
also as vols. I and II of the _Documentary History of American Industrial
Society_ (Cleveland, O., 1909), II, 141, 142. This publication will be
cited hereafter as _Plantation and Frontier_.]

The business bulked so large in the world's commerce in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries that every important maritime community on the
Atlantic sought a share, generally with the sanction and often with the
active assistance of its respective sovereign. The preliminaries to the
commercial strife occurred in the Elizabethan age. French traders in gold