teenth
century. A military aristocracy with cruel blood sacrifices was formed. By
1816 the king had at his disposal two hundred thousand soldiers. The
Ashanti power was crushed by the English in the war of 1873-74.

In these states and in later years in Benin the whole character of
west-coast culture seems to change. In place of the Yoruban culture, with
its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized
industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey. What was it that
changed the character of the west coast from this to the orgies of war and
blood sacrifice which we read of later in these lands?

There can be but one answer: the slave trade. Not simply the sale of men,
but an organized traffic of such proportions and widely organized
ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all
other industries, encourage war and all the cruelest passions of war, and
concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from
the ancient Mediterranean lines of trade.

We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute.
Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was not
dominant or tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of skill,
culture, and industry along with inexplicable cruelty and
bloodthirstiness. But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and
set these lands backward. Dahomey was the last word in a series of human
disasters which began with the defeat of the Askias at Tenkadibou.[26]

From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth
centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the
coast morally, socially, and physically. European rum and fire arms were
traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787 that any measures were
taken to counteract this terrible scourge. In that year the idea arose of
repatriating stolen Negroes on that coast and establishing civilized
centers to supplant the slave trade. About four hundred Negroes from
England were sent to Sierra Leone, to whom the promoters considerately
added sixty white prostitutes as wives. The climate on the low coast,
however, was so deadly that new recruits were soon needed. An American
Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton
in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of
land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered
free pa