Page:Rebels and reformers (1919).djvu/262

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was less well done; an intelligent person who takes some interest in his work will do it very much better than one hardly removed from the animals.

One Sunday in Baltimore, Garrison was visited by a slave who had just been whipped with a cowhide, and whose back was bleeding from twenty-seven gashes, while his head was terribly bruised. He had not loaded a wagon to his master's liking, and this was his punishment. Garrison could hear as he passed down the street the sound of whips and cries of agony. There seemed no mercy or justice anywhere, and his country's barbarity made Garrison's cheeks burn with shame.

How did such a state of things arise, one may ask; how did these black men and women come to be living in such numbers on American soil? It happened in this way: the English in the past, having conquered lands in different parts of the world, needed men to work and develop these lands. They were mostly wild and uncultivated. The British, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese were chiefly responsible for the slave trade. Prince Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese, had been the first to bring negroes into Europe in the fifteenth century, capturing them on his exploring expeditions round the coast of Africa. Sir John Hawkins was the first Englishman to engage in the traffic, and in the seventeenth century the slave trade was mostly in English hands. England made a very good business of supplying slaves to the Spanish set-