American Folk Lore_), p. 25.

[86] Brown: _History of San Domingo_, II, 158-159.

[87] See Leger: _Hayti_, Chap. XI.

[88] Cf. Chapter V, p. 69.

[89] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_.

XI THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES

There were half a million slaves in the confines of the United States when
the Declaration of Independence declared "that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The
land that thus magniloquently heralded its advent into the family of
nations had supported the institution of human slavery for one hundred and
fifty-seven years and was destined to cling to it eighty-seven years
longer.

The greatest experiment in Negro slavery as a modern industrial system was
made on the mainland of North America and in the confines of the present
United States. And this experiment was on such a scale and so
long-continued that it is profitable for study and reflection. There were
in the United States in its dependencies, in 1910, 9,828,294 persons of
acknowledged Negro descent, not including the considerable infiltration of
Negro blood which is not acknowledged and often not known. 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. Before
that Northern States like New York had received some slaves from the
Dutch, and New England had early developed a trade by which she imported a
number of house servants. Ships went out to the African coast with rum,
sold the rum, and brought the slaves to the West Indies; there they
exchanged the slaves for sugar and molasses and brought the molasses back
to New England, to be made into rum for further exploits. After the
Asiento treaty the Negro population increased in the eighteenth century
from about 50,000 in 1710 to 220,000 in 1750 and to 462,000 in 1770. When
the colonies became independent, the foreign slave trade was soon made
illegal; but illicit trade, annexation of territory and natural increase
enlarged the Negro population from a little over a million at the
beginning of the nineteenth century to four and a