With what
result? The protraction of the conflict on the part of the South would
[240] have been impossible but for the admirable management and
realization of their resources by those benighted slaves. On the other
hand, not one of the thousands of Northern prisoners escaping from the
durance of a Southern captivity ever appealed in vain for the
assistance and protection of a Negro. Clearly the head and heart of
those bondsmen were each in its proper place. The moral effect of
these experiences of the Negroes' sterling qualities was not lost on
either North or South. In the North it effaced from thousands of
repugnant hearts the adverse feelings which had devised and
accomplished so much to the Negro's detriment. In the South--but for
the blunders of the Reconstructionists--it would have considerably
facilitated the final readjustment of affairs between the erewhile
master and slave in their new-born relations of employer and employed.

Reverting to the Africans who were conveyed to places other than the
States, it will be seen that circumstances amongst them and in their
favour came into play, modifying and lightening their unhappy
condition. First, attention must be paid to the patriotic solidarity
existing [241] amongst the bondsmen, a solidarity which, in the case of
those who had been deported in the same ship, had all the sanctity of
blood-relationship. Those who had thus travelled to the "white man's
country" addressed and considered each other as brothers and sisters.
Hence their descendants for many generations upheld, as if
consanguineous, the modes of address and treatment which became
hereditary in families whose originals had travelled in the same ship.
These adopted uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, were so united by common
sympathies, that good or ill befalling any one of them intensely
affected the whole connection. Mutual support commensurate with the
area of their location thus became the order among these people. At
the time of the first deportation of Africans to the West Indies to
replace the aborigines who had been decimated in the mines at Santo
Domingo and in the pearl fisheries of the South Caribbean, the
circumstances of the Spanish settlers in the Antilles were of singular,
even romantic, interest.

The enthusiasm which overflowed from the crusades and the Moorish wars,
upon the discovery and conquest of America, had occasioned [242] the
peopling of the Western Archipelago by a rac