Horror Taken For Granted (June 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 4)

Horror Taken For Granted

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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June 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 4

The resources open to men who want to believe that a course of action that is profitable is also morally justifiable, firmly based on the eternal verities, seem to be illimitable. Self-interest is both eloquent and ingenious. The darkest villainy imaginable can be made to look virtuous if it yields good cash dividends; some of the worst deeds in history were committed by men who had managed to persuade themselves that they were doing no more than what was right.

A case in point is the notorious African slave trade.

Except perhaps for the satanic Nazi experiment in genocide, history can show nothing worse than this. The trade went on for four centuries, mixing greed with cruelty to create a total of human suffering that is beyond rational computation; as a by-product, it created racial memories so deeply stained with fear, suspicion, and hatred that today they constitute one of the world’s most terrible problems. Yet many generations of good Christian people accepted this business as ethically and morally right—a step toward civilization that was easily taken because it meant money in the pocket, but that was a positive good in any case.

The rationalization had several threads, frail as the filaments of a spider web but devoutly held. Africans were descended from Noah’s son Ham and so were under a curse from of old. Uprooted and put to work on mine and plantation, they were brought out of darkness and often enough their immortal souls were saved; meanwhile the benefits of civilization seeped down to them and redeemed them from the abject barbarism that was their earthly lot. Besides, they were used to slavery. The evil already existed; African kings made wars to get slaves, necessitous parents sold their own children into bondage, and since all of this was part of the Dark Continent’s routine anyway, European society might just as well reap some of the benefits—which, happily, were immense.

This miserable story is familiar enough, in a vague sort of way, and yet in view of the bewildering crisis that confronts Western civilization nowadays—that is, the white man’s civilization, which finds itself somewhat beset—we really need to know more about it. A wealth of material is currently available in four bulky volumes bearing the matter-of-fact title, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America , compiled and edited by Elizabeth Donnan.

Let it be said at once that this is not easy reading. It is a scholarly compilation, meant for the library rather than for the living-room bookshelf. As the title says, it is made up almost entirely of the original documents, with a minimum of connective comment by the editor. It is the record of the slave trade as written by the men who were part of it—kings, governors, parliaments, legislatures, ship captains, factors, directors of joint-stock companies, and ordinary individual businessmen—and although it is a record of