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-1CHY4U1 The West & The World Unit 2 Lesson #06 Ships, Sugar & Slavery Primary Document

ent Analysis (DBQ 2b) Each paragraph should have at least 2 different annotations. Please read the following article and using the space on the right hand side of the page please annotate the text by adding the following elements: Identification of Main Ideas Questions about supporting details Words to Define or look up Key Points & understandings Inferences (reading between the lines) Prior Knowledge (is there something you have read that you already know something about). Key Passages for answering quiz or discussion questions.
Annotations

The French had no comprehensive set of laws governing the status and treatment of slaves until 1685. In that year, Louis XIV issued the "Black Code," which remained in force until the French Revolution. In the following excerpt, the preamble comes from the original decree and the articles from the 1723 revision. The Code Noir 1. All the slaves on our islands will be baptized and instructed in the Roman, Catholic and Apostolic religion... 4. We enjoin our subjects ... to observe Sundays and religious holidays by not working nor making their slaves work on said days ...on pain of ... punishment of the masters and confiscation of any slaves caught by officials at work... 5. We prohibit our white subjects of either sex from marrying blacks, on pain of. . . punishment and fine... 7. We very expressly prohibit priests from performing marriage ceremonies between slaves unless they have the consent of their masters. We also prohibit masters from coercing slaves to marry against their will. 8. All children born from marriages between slaves will be slaves... 23... In no circumstance may a slave be made to testify for or against his/her master... 26. The slave who strikes his master, his mistress, the husband of his mistress or their children so as to leave a bruise or draw blood, or on the face, will be sentenced to death. 27. Verbal excesses committed by slaves against; free people will also he punished with death. Text Citation: Haberman & Shubert. The West and the World. Toronto, Gage Learning Corporation, 2002. pg. 108. Part of the commercial prosperity enjoyed by several Western nations was built on the slave trade, which flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Slaves were generally shipped in British vessels, but the French and others engaged in this trade as well. Most slaves were taken across the Atlantic to Europe's colonial holdings, which in turn shipped goods such as sugar, metals, and wood products to the home country. Although there was little widespread opposition to slavery in Europe during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by the middle of the eighteenth century antislavery sentiments were growing. The following is

-2an account of what was involved in the slave trade, written in 1771 by an anonymous Frenchman who argued for its abolition. As soon as the ships have lowered their anchors off the coast of Guinea, the price at which the captains have decided to buy the captives is announced to the Negroes who buy prisoners from various princes and sell them to the Europeans. Presents are sent to the sovereign who rules over that particular part of the coast, and permission to trade is given. Immediately the slaves are brought by inhuman brokers like so many victims dragged to a sacrifice. White men who covet that portion of the human race receive them in a little house they have erected on the shore, where they have entrenched themselves with two pieces of cannon and twenty guards. As soon as the bargain is concluded, the Negro is put in chains and led aboard the vessel, where he meets his fellow sufferers. Here sinister reflections come to his mind; everything shocks and frightens him and his uncertain destiny gives rise to the greatest anxiety. At first he is convinced that he is to serve as a repast to the white men, and the wine which the sailors drink confirms him in this cruel thought, for he imagines that this liquid is the blood of his fellows. The vessel sets sail for the Antilles, and the Negroes are chained in a hold of the ship, a kind of lugubrious prison where the light of day does not penetrate, but into which air is introduced by means of a pump. Twice a day some disgusting food is distributed to them. Their consuming sorrow and the sad state to which they are reduced would make them commit suicide if they were not deprived of all the means for an attempt upon their lives. Without any kind of clothing it would be difficult to conceal from the watchful eyes of the sailors in charge of any instrument apt to alleviate their despair. The fear of a revolt, such as sometimes happens on the voyage from Guinea, is the basis of a common concern and produces as many guards as there are men in the crew. The slightest noise or a secret conversation among two Negroes is punished with utmost severity. All in all, the voyage is made in a continuous state of alarm on the part of the white men, who fear a revolt, and in a cruel state of uncertainty on the part of the Negroes, who do not know the fate awaiting them. When the vessel arrives at a port in the Antilles, they are taken to a warehouse where they are displayed, like any merchandise, to the eyes of buyers. The plantation owner pays according to the age, strength and health of the Negro he is buying. He has him taken to his plantation, and there he is delivered to an overseer who then and there becomes his tormentor. In order to domesticate him, the Negro is granted a few days of rest in his new place, but soon he is given a hoe and a sickle and made to join a work gang. Then he ceases to wonder about his fate; he understands that only labor is demanded of him. But he does not know yet how excessive this labor will be. As a matter of fact, his work begins at dawn and does not end before nightfall; it is interrupted for only two hours at dinnertime. The food a full-grown Negro is given each week consists of two pounds of salt beef or cod and two pots of tapioca meal, amounting to about two pints of Paris. A Negro of twelve or thirteen years or under is given only one pot of meal and one pound of beef or cod. In place of food some planters give their Negroes the liberty of working for themselves every Saturday; others are even less generous and grant them this liberty only on Sundays and holidays. Therefore, since the nourishment of the Negroes is insufficient, their tendency to cheat must be attributed to the necessity of finding the food they lack.

-3Text Citation: Leon Apt and Robert E. Herzstein, eds., The Evolution of Western Society, vol. II (Hinsdale, Ill.: The Dryden Press, 1978), pp. 279-280. Adapted from, Sherman, Dennis; editor. Western Civilization: Images & Interpretations (Toronto, McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1991), pp. 46-47. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and several other philosophes condemned slavery and the slave trade. In Book 15 of The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu scornfully refuted all justifications for slavery. Ultimately, he said, slavery, which violates the fundamental principle of justice underlying the universe, derived from base human desires to dominate and exploit other human beings. Voltaire, Essay on Morals and Customs, 1756 One hundred thousand slaves, Black or mulatto, work in sugar mills, indigo and cocoa plantations, sacrificing their lives to gratify our newly acquired appetites for sugar, cocoa, coffee, and tobacco---things unknown to our ancestors. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The New Heloise, 1761 I have seen those vast unfortunate lands that seem only destined to be inhabited by slaves. I have averted my eyes from that sordid sight with loathing, horror and pity; and seeing one fourth of my fellow humans changed into beasts for the service of others, I have grieved to be a human. Denis Diderot, in The Encyclopedia, denounced slavery as a violation of the individual's natural rights. Denis Diderot - ENCYCLOPEDIA "MEN AND THEIR LIBERTY ARE NOT OBJECTS OF COMMERCE...." [This trade] is the buying of unfortunate Negroes by Europeans on the coast of Africa to use as slaves in their colonies. This buying of Negroes, to reduce them to slavery, is one business that violates religion, morality, natural laws, and all the rights of human nature. Negroes, says a modern Englishman full of enlightenment and humanity, have not become slaves by the right of war; neither do they deliver themselves voluntarily into bondage, and consequently their children are not born slaves. Nobody is unaware that they are bought from their own princes, who claim to have the right to dispose of their liberty, and that traders have them transported in the same way as their other goods, either in their colonies or in America, where they are displayed for sale. If commerce of this kind can be justified by a moral principle, there is no crime, however atrocious it may be, that cannot be made legitimate. Kings, princes, and magistrates are not the proprietors of their subjects: they do not, therefore, have the right to dispose of their liberty and to sell them as slaves. On the other hand, no man has the right to buy them or to make himself their

-4master. Men and their liberty are not objects of commerce; they can be neither sold nor bought nor paid for at any price. We must conclude from this that a man whose slave has run away should only blame himself, since he had acquired for money illicit goods whose acquisition is prohibited by all the laws of humanity and equity. There is not, therefore, a single one of these unfortunate people regarded only as slaves who does not have the right to be declared free, since he has never lost his freedom, which he could not lose and which his prince, his father, and any person whatsoever in the world had not the power to dispose of. Consequently the sale that has been completed is invalid in itself. This Negro does not divest himself and can never divest himself of his natural right; he carries it everywhere with him, and he can demand everywhere that he be allowed to enjoy it. It is, therefore, patent inhumanity on the part of judges in free countries where he is transported, not to emancipate him immediately by declaring him free, since he is their fellow man, having a soul like them. Text Citation: Perry, Peden & Von Laue. Sources of the Western Tradition. Volume II: From the Renaissance to the Present. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. pp 88 to 89. Marquis de Condorcet THE EVILS OF SLAVERY Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (17431794), was a French mathematician and historian of science. He contributed to the Encyclopedia and campaigned actively for religious toleration and the abolition of slavery. In 1788, Condorcet helped found The Society of the Friends of Blacks, which attacked slavery. Seven years earlier he had published a pamphlet denouncing slavery as a violation of human rights. Following are excerpts from this pamphlet. "Dedicatory Epistle to the Negro Slaves" My Friends, Although I am not the same color as you, I have always regarded you as my brothers. Nature formed you with the same spirit, the same reason, the same virtues as whites. . . . Your tyrants will reproach me with uttering only commonplaces and having nothing but chimerical [unrealistic] ideas: indeed, nothing is more common than the maxims of humanity and justice; nothing is more chimerical than to propose to men that they base their conduct on them. Reducing a man to slavery, buying him, selling him, keeping him in servitude: these are truly crimes, and crimes worse than theft. In effect, they take from the slave, not only all forms of property but also the ability to acquire it, the control over his time, his strength, of everything that nature has given him to maintain his life and his needs. To this wrong they add that of taking from the slave the right to dispose of his own person... It follows from our principles that the inflexible justice to which kings and nations are subject like their citizens require the destruction of slavery. We have

-5shown that this destruction will harm neither commerce nor the wealth of a nation because it would not result in any decrease in cultivation. We have shown that the master had no right over his slave; that the act of keeping him in servitude is not the enjoyment of a property right but a crime; that in freeing the slave the law does not attack property but rather ceases to tolerate an action which it should have punished with the death penalty. The sovereign therefore owes no compensation to the master of slaves just as he owes none to a thief whom a court judgment has deprived of the possession of a stolen good. The public tolerance of a crime may make punishment impossible but it cannot grant a real right to the profit from the crime. If writers protest against the slavery of Negroes, it is the philosophes, their opponents say, thinking they have won their case.... If some people have been saved by inoculation from the dangers of smallpox, it's by the advice of the philosophes. ... If the custom of breaking the bones of the accused between boards to make them tell the truth has been recently suppressed, it's because the philosophes inveighed against the practice; and it is in spite of the philosophes that France has been lucky enough to save a remnant of the old laws and conserve the precious practice of applying torture to condemned criminals.... Who is it who dares to complain in France about the barbarism of the criminal laws, about the cruelty with which the French Protestants have been deprived of the rights of man and citizen, about the harshness and injustice of the laws against smuggling and on hunting? Who had the culpable boldness to pretend that it would be useful to the people and in accord with justice to insure liberty of commerce and industry? ... We can see clearly that it was surely the philosophes. Text Citation: Perry, Peden & Von Laue. Sources of the Western Tradition. Volume II: From the Renaissance to the Present. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. pp 89 to 90.

John Wesley THOUGHTS UPON SLAVERY John Wesley (1703-1791) was, with his brother Charles, the founder of the evangelical Methodist movement in England. Inspired by the Great Awakening in the American colonies, he launched a successful revival of Christianity in England in 1739. The rest of his long life was devoted to leadership of the Methodist movement. Wesley's eyes were opened to the evils of slavery by reading an indictment of the slave trade by the French Quaker, Anthony Benezet. In 1774 he published the tract Thoughts upon Slavery, from which the extracts below are taken. Wesley drew heavily on Benezet's writings for his facts, but in warning participants in the slave trade against divine retribution he spoke in the cadences of the inspired evangelical preacher. Wesley became one of the leaders in the movement against slavery and his pioneering work, in which he was supported by the Methodist movement, helped bring about the abolition of slavery in England in 1807. I would inquire whether [the abuses of slavery] can be defended on the principles of even heathen honesty, whether they can be reconciled (setting the Bible out of question) with any degree of either justice or mercy. The grand plea is, "They are authorized by law." But can law, human law,

-6change the nature of things? Can it turn darkness into light or evil into good? By no means. Notwithstanding ten thousand laws, right is right, and wrong is wrong still. There must still remain an essential [difference) between justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. So that I still ask, who can reconcile this treatment of the Negroes first and last, with either mercy or justice? . . . Yea, where is the justice of taking away the lives of innocent, inoffensive men, murdering thousands of them in their own land, by the hands of their own countrymen, many thousands year after year on shipboard, and then casting them like dung into the sea and tens of thousands in that cruel slavery to which they are so unjustly reduced? .. But if this manner of procuring and treating Negroes is not consistent either with mercy or justice, yet there is a plea for it which every man of business will acknowledge to be quite sufficient......Dn justice, it is necessity. . . . It is necessary that we should procure slaves, and when we have procured them, it is necessary to use them with severity, considering their stupidity, stubbornness and wickedness." I answer you stumble at the threshold. I deny that villainy is ever necessary. It is impossible that it should ever be necessary for any reasonable creature to violate all the laws of justice, mercy, and truth. No circumstances can make it necessary for a man to burst in sunder all the ties of humanity. It can never be necessary for a rational being to sink himself below a brute. A man can be under no necessity of degrading himself into a wolf. The absurdity of the supposition is so glaring that one would wonder anyone can help seeing it... . "But the furnishing us with slaves is necessary for the trade, and wealth, and glory of our nation." Here are several mistakes. For first wealth is not necessary to the glory of any nation, but wisdom, virtue, justice, mercy, generosity, public spirit, love of our country. These are necessary to the real glory of a nation, but abundance of wealth is not. ... But, secondly, it is not clear that we should have either less money or trade (only less of that detestable trade of manstealing), if there was not a Negro in all our islands or in all English America. It is demonstrable, white men inured to it by degrees can work as well as they, and they would do it, were Negroes out of the way, and proper encouragement given them. However, thirdly, I come back to the same point: Better no trade than trade procured by villainy. It is far better to have no wealth than to gain wealth at the expense of virtue. Better is honest poverty than all the riches bought by the tears, and sweat, and blood of our fellow creatures. "However this be, it is necessary, when we have slaves, to use them with severity." What, to whip them for every petty offence, till they are all in gore blood? To take that opportunity of rubbing pepper and salt into their raw flesh? To drop burning wax upon their skin? To castrate them? To cut off half their foot with an axe? Text Citation: Perry, Peden & Von Laue. Sources of the Western Tradition. Volume II: From the Renaissance to the Present. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. pp 90 to 91. Guillaume Raynal, Essay on the Administration of Saint Domingue,

-71781 White people are incapable of working in the field under the hot sun in Saint Dominque; thus to make the best of this precious soil, it has been necessary to find a particular species of laborers. Saint Domingue is a milder climate for the slaves than the hot climate from which they have been transplanted. Olympe de Gouges, Reflections on Black People, 1788 Why are Black people enslaved? The color of people's skin only suggests a slight difference. There is no discord between day and night, the sun and the moon and between the stars and dark sky. All is varied; it is the beauty of nature. Why destroy nature's work? Jacques Necker, speech, opening meeting of the Estates General, May 1789 A day may come, gentlemen, when you will cast a glance of compassion on these unfortunate people who have been made a barbaric object of trade; these people who are similar to us, in thought and, above all, in their capacity to suffer. A delegate from Bordeaux, speech, National Assembly, March 2, 1790 The abolition of slavery and the slave trade would mean the loss of our colonies; the loss of the colonies would strike a mortal blow to commerce, and the ruin of commerce would result in stagnation for the merchant marine, agriculture, and the arts. Five million French citizens exist only by the trade they bring. The colonies bring in an annual income of more than 200 million livres. A delegate of the Owners of Property in the French Colonies of America Residing in Bordeaux, speech, National Assembly, date unknown End our fears by declaring that your proclamation on the Rights of Man does not extend to the Black people and their descendants. We have not enslaved them, but we discovered them in the hardest and cruelest slavery, and transplanted them to French colonies, under a kind of humane government, where, indeed, they work, but they live without fear for tomorrow. Antoine Barnave, report, National Assembly's Committee on the Colonies, 1790 We have reached this level of prosperity thanks to our colonies. If someday they must gain independence, we must make sure to postpone that day so that we will be able to lose them without an economic shock and without a disturbance to our political existence.

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