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Updated: April 30, 2025
To-day the number of persons called Negroes is probably about ten and a quarter million. These persons are almost entirely descendants of African slaves, brought to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The importation of Negroes to the mainland of North America was small until the British got the coveted privilege of the Asiento in 1713.
In a momentary pause in the crowing, there issued from a throat riven and deep-seamed from frequent floodings with fiery torrents of mescal, and out of lungs perpetually surcharged with cigarette smoke, a hoarse croaking, but friendly toned, "Buenos dias, señor. Sirvase tomar un asiento.
So little did the agriculture of the islands, overstocked with engagés, justify as yet the slave-traders in the losses and expenses which they incurred. The Guinea Company was bound to import only one thousand yearly into all the French Antilles; but it did not flourish until it became an Asiento Company, when, during the War of Succession, a Bourbon mounted the throne of Spain.
The convention arranged that a certain sum of money was to be paid by Spain to England within a given time, but that this discharge of claims should not extend to any dispute between the King of Spain and the South Sea Company as holders of the Asiento Contract; and that two plenipotentiaries from each side should meet at Madrid to settle the claims of England and Spain with regard to the rights of trade in the New World and the boundaries of Carolina and Florida.
But a kind of hysterica passio seems to have mastered the cool common sense of the nation a fury of repentance for the war about the Asiento contract, for building Bristol and Liverpool with the flesh and blood of the slave, and for the 2,130,000 negroes supplied to Jamaica between 1680 and 1786. Like a veteran devotee Great Britain began atoning for the coquetries of her hot youth.
After the Asiento of 1713 this number rose to 30,000 annually, and before the Revolutionary War it had reached at least 40,000 and perhaps 100,000 slaves a year. The total number of slaves imported is not known.
The concessions of the Asiento, or slave-trade, and of the annual ship to South America have been mentioned; but these privileges were but a part of the English commerce in those regions.
The Asiento, however, allowed Great Britain exclusive right to supply Spanish America with negro slaves, at the rate of 4800 a year, for thirty years. They were still forbidden to sell other commodities in the domains of the Spanish king, except that once a year one British ship of five hundred tons burden might visit Porto Bello on the Isthmus of Panama for purposes of general trade.
To the dangerous rivalry between British and French colonists and traders in America and in India, during the thirty years which followed the treaty of Utrecht, was added the continuous bickering which grew out of the Asiento concluded in 1713 between Great Britain and Spain.
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