s called the "middle passage,"
that is, the voyage across the Atlantic. As Sir William Dolben said, "The
Negroes were chained to each other hand and foot, and stowed so close that
they were not allowed above a foot and a half for each in breadth. Thus
crammed together like herrings in a barrel, they contracted putrid and
fatal disorders; so that they who came to inspect them in a morning had
occasionally to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their
carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers to whom they
had been fastened[75]."

It was estimated that out of every one hundred lot shipped from Africa
only about fifty lived to be effective laborers across the sea, and among
the whites more seamen died in that trade in one year than in the whole
remaining trade of England in two. The full realization of the horrors of
the slave trade was slow in reaching the ears and conscience of the modern
world, just as to-day the treatment of dark natives in European colonies
is brought to publicity with the greatest difficulty. The first move
against the slave trade in England came in Parliament in 1776, but it was
not until thirty-one years later, in 1807, that the trade was banned
through the arduous labors of Clarkson, Wilberforce, Sharpe, and others.

Denmark had already abolished the trade, and the United States attempted
to do so the following year. Portugal and Spain were induced to abolish
the trade between 1815 and 1830. Notwithstanding these laws, the
contraband trade went on until the beginning of the Civil War in America.
The reasons for this were the enormous profit of the trade and the
continued demand of the American slave barons, who had no sympathy with
the efforts to stop their source of cheap labor supply.

However, philanthropy was not working alone to overthrow Negro slavery and
the slave trade. It was seen, first in England and later in other
countries, that slavery as an industrial system could not be made to work
satisfactorily in modern times. Its cost was too great, and one of the
causes of this cost was the slave insurrections from the very beginning,
when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil
War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrection in the West
Indies, in North and South America, kept the slave owners in apprehension
and turmoil, or called for a police system difficult to maintain. In North
America revolt finally took the form of