Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1859-04-12 00:00:00

YOUNG AMERICA ON
SLAVERY.

(After reading Thos. Colley Grattan's "Civilised4merica.l

NUMBER NINETEEN,

Is a negro a man The Daily News of the 28th
ult. devoted
.a leader to the obituary of a distinguished
negro,—a representative man ! I cannot do better than
to copy a part of it.
" We have this morning to announce the death of a Sove-
reign. A black, woolly-headed potentate was he, it is true,
but nevertheless a notable Monarch—a trained and expe-
rienced warrior—a King whose deeds resounded far and
wide. He had a court, a nobility, a treasury, an army,
and a policy ; he had shed more blood than greater Kings,
and had ambitions of his own ; he raised his state to exter-
nal importance, made treaties, concluded alliances, and
brought himself within the vortex of European diplomacy.
In his time, too, he had thwarted, by his conduct' and
measures, the policy of England, and incurred the dis-
pleasure of Lord Palmerston, who opposed his proceedings,
threatened him with chastisement, resisted the extension of
his dominions, and supplied the smaller communities,
whose independence was assailed, with arms and munitions
of war. Latterly he became an object of attraction to
France. Louis Napoleon sought his friendship and com-
mercial intercourse, sent a mission to his capital, and pre-
sented him with brass field pieces wherewith to astonish his
subjects. English travellers functionaries, and naval
officers, too, visited him, were hospitably entertained, despite
international differences, and, returning after fruitless dis-
cussions from his Court, published narratives of his dreadful
deeds, that have given him a world-wide name, and
enrolled him amongst the monsters of humanity. It is the
demise of Gezo, the Slave King of Dahomey, that
we record. The exact date when the event occurred is not
given in the letters before us, but the news is brought with
such particulars, by the last mail from the West Coast of
Africa, that no doubt can be entertained that Gezo is
gathered to his fathers, and that his son reins in his stead."
Some think facts are appearances—that appear-
ances are delusions - that a man of fact is a man of
fiction;—no matter--is a negro a man ? asks my
informant. Yes—Dahomey was a negro— or rather
Gezo is his name. He was a negro, and to show how
much of a man he was, I again take the scissors :
" Gem deserved the odium and detestation which he so
abundantly obtained; all the more, that he was both able
and sagacioas. For upwards of five and twenty years he
supplied all the demands of the Spanish and Portuguese
slave dealers who infested the Bight of Benin, ravaging
and devastating the interior far and wide by his slave hunts
to obtain victims for his European customers. He organised
and led these internal forays and cruelties on the largest
scale Africa has known, and annually sold without remorse
or scruple his own countrymen in tens of thousands for
exportation. His horrible cruelties arrested the progress
of Africa, fed the wretchedness and mortality of the Middle
Passage, and by depopulating Negroland, promoted the im-
mense material prosperity of Cuba and Brazil. His policy,
and the wealth he derived from it, excited the cupidity of
his neighbours, and from Whydah to Lagos, the Slave
Trade became the business of the whole population. When
Gezo succeeded to his patrimonial throne, the adjacent
country was inhabited by independent communities of the
Bgbas, and it was on them he perpetrated his earlier
atrocities. He Attacked them, burnt their towns, carried
off their choicest people, and when his own violence was
unsuccessful, his intrigue introduced civil war, which com-
pleted their ruin."

" Civilised America" is a paradise in comparison.
There a negro is a man—a better man than Gezo.
As boys cruelly fagged at Eton become the
cruelest of faggers, so does a liberated slave make
the most merciless of masters. Temperance in pros-
perity, and fortitude in adversity, are not the negroes'
virtues. Nakedness is as uncouthly in mind as in body.
America is the only colony ever colonised by freedom,
or without the sword —yet Miles Standish, the
lover of the Puritan maiden, Priscilla, was a man of
war ; and the Pilgrim Fathers proved themselves as
great tyrants as Laud and his abettors, when they
kicked Roger Williams out of their Hacienda.
I was surprised to see on the tomb-stones of
Lombardy, that the early Italian governors were
called " Tormentors." The abolitionists should be
similarly styled.
See what the American missionary, Bower, has to
say, and his authority is recent, about negroes at
home :

" I have counted the sites of eighteen desolated towns
within a distance of sixty miles between Badagry and
Abeokuto—the legitimate result of the' slave trade. The
whole Yoruba country is full of depopulated towns, some of
which were'even larger than Abeokuta is at present. Of
all the places visited by the Landers, only Ishukki, Izbobo,
Ikishi, and a few villages remain. Ijenna was destroyed a
few weeks after my arrival in the country. Other and still
larger towns have lately fallen. At one of these, called
Oke-Oddan, the Dahomey army killed or captured 20,000
people, on which occasion the King presented Domingo,
the slaver, with 600 slaves. The whole number of people
destroyed in this section of country within the last fiftv
years cannot be less than 500,000 !"
Look at that African butchery.
American slavery.
Sterne's negro girl did not learn mercy till she had
suffered oppression. Precious odours may be most
fragrant when most crushed ; but American negroes
do not bear a similar anomaly. The Negrophobists
delight in exaggerating the sins of the Americans ;
but how seldom they moralise on African cruelty !
So goes the world. Job's afflictions and trials are
much more vividly painted than Solomon's felicities
Prosperity in the Old Testament was a blessing—.
was adversity in the New.

Then look at

Gezo was V a negro. Is a negro a man ? Take
another extract from the Daily News.
_

"While, however, the interior without the limits of Daho-
mey suffered by these slave wars disorganisation and
anarchy, the towns on the coast for a season flourished.
Nyhydah,yorto Novo, Badagry, and Lagos rose in popula-

. . .
tion, carried on a great commerce in human flesh, were the
seats of large establishments, and grew rapidly in wealth.
But their ill-gotten riches and fictitious prosperity brought
about their own ruin ; they were nests and dens of rob-
bers, thieves, and pirates ; scenes of tumult, disorder, and
violence were of constant occurrence. Badagry, which
boasted of 10,000 inhabitants, was burnt down in a cut-
throat affair amongst its own lawless population ; the
whole Bight was closely blockaded by English cruisers ; and
Lagos was destroyed by a British bombardment. The
liberated Africans of Sierra Leone founded the town of
Abeokuta, established in the interior an Anti-Slave Trade

interest, were encouraged by English missionari,

supported by English as!
kuta the wrath of Gezo;

brought on 'A

in and again he attacked t

new communit

repulsed ; until ft. t 1

1851, the Slave Kin

pletely routed under its mud wails, and from that time 11
powers declined. British policy prevailed on the coast
Lagos, under the influence of our consuls, Beecroft az

bell (I

nd-Trofitable lawful

up into the interior; peace being established, industry- toc
0 honest courses ; and from Whydah to Lagos the con
merce in palm superseded the Slave Trade, and increase
at a rate nothing less than marvellous, and even Gcl
sought. however grimly, to regain his diminished revenu,

"-Gezo

iverted or reconciled t
all our diplomatic adi

lounced our cru.

and was eve:
>sod, he at

emig-nition; and
E

,hive Trade

) large of

tered at the fanera,
eight hundred were
suffered death for c