YOUNG FOLKS HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR. CHAPTER I. THE REASON WHY, I was slavery that made all the trouble. Now that it exists no longer, we remember it only as a bad dream from which we are thankful to awaken. The day is long past in which men and women, and even ttle children, were bought and sold for money in our own free country; for it is indeed true that the laws of our land once permitted negroes to be treated as dumb animals might have been before there was a humane society to protect them. They had no rights, and their wrongs were many. Faithful labor for a lifetime brought them no wages. No choice of masters was possible. The question whether they should suffer hardships, or enjoy comforts, depended wholly upon the sort of men who owned them. Some masters were kind, and looked after their people; but by far the greater number left the care of their slaves to overseers whose tender mercies were cruel. But the colored race is easy-going and cheerful by nature, taking life patiently, and waiting hopefully for the "good time coming" by and by. So these poor people dried their tears, and sang and prayed and danced; and their masters called them happy children, content with their lot. A true story of those times, picturing to your minds the wealth and luxury and sin on the one hand, and the sorrow and misery on the other, would be as hard to believe as any of the "Tales of the Arabian Nights." The Pilgrim Fathers settled at Plymouth more than two hundred years ago. At that time a shipload of negroes had already been sent by an English slave-trading company to Virginia, landing at Old Point Comfort. Vessels from England, Spain, or Portugal, sailed over to the coast of Africa to steal the poor blacks who lived there; SAILING FROM ENGLAND. or, buying them with a few beads or a little money, they were brought to this country, and sold as slaves. Of course, weeks were consumed in this terrible voyage; and often one-fifth of the cargo died on the way, from heat and hunger, and lack of pure air to breathe. You will be surprised to hear that the English nation was not ashamed of this business. In the year 1713 Queen Anne of England took one-quarter of the stock in a company of this kind; that is, she gave one-fourth of the money to fit out the expedition and to buy the slaves, expecting to get one-quarter of the profit. Shiploads of these poor creatures were brought to this country every year. As early as the Revolutionary War, three hundred thousand negroes had arrived, and there was not one of the thirteen States that did not hold slaves. Even the children of the Pilgrims owned Indians, and afterwards negroes. |