THE
CHEMAWA
AM ERICAN
(barracks), where they were held until purchased and shipped off to
foreign lands.
Neighbors who had domestic quarrels had only to prefer charges of
witchcraft in order to get each other into the chaingang—ordeals by
poison, or fire, determining their guilt, subject to the caprice of the net-
officials administering them; and these in turn were easily suscepti
ble to bribes. As a rule, white slave-traders, or contractors, as thev
were termed, had native chiefs in their service who went on raids for
the purpose of collecting slaves for export, so that, between the upper
ami nether milestones, common people had a poor chance for a perman-
ent residence on the Dark Continent.
hroni an old number of Goldwaiter’s Geographical Magazine, we may
learn that most of the negroes who were brought to the United States
were obtained from tribes living near the coast, and from a district lo-
catei 100 to 3oo miles inland, between the Senegal river, the Gulf of
Guiña, and the Gaboon; while a part of the blacks, who were imported
by thousands to the plantations of South America, came from a latitude
farther south.
The result is that an important difference in ancestry exists between
most of the negroes of the United States and those who inhabit the east
ern part ot South America. The larger part of our States negroes
though by no means all of them, are of pure African lineage, and their
ancestors spoke languages which were entirely distinct from those spok
en by the Bantu tribes exported from the more southern portions of the
. rican west coast, and which, as a whole, are a superior race of people.
I evertheless, through much suffering and trouble, our negroes have de
veloped wonderfully, for they have had advantages denied to the Africans
who live farther south m the western hemisphere, and are now above
the latter in the scale of intelligence and civilization.
The most serious handicap which our present generation of Auglo-
. ricans has to carry, and one seldom thought of by those who are work
ing for Ins salvation, is lack of family antecents. He belongs to the
innominate; to the grand army of ciphers. In these davs of egoism
when every white man who is proud of himself is studying to trace his
ineage, the black man is absolutely without recourse.
This disability was felt even in slave times, before the war, and at
that time high class servitors, with ambition and ideas of their own per
sonal consequence, were fain to call themselves by the names, of their
masters, especially when to the manor born; and they ranked in im
portance among their fellows as well as among the white people them
selves according to the social status of their households. I„ these
crucial days when credentials are indispensable and references are re
quired, where or how can the unfortunate black man come in? This is