and often unwholesome wants; it destroyed old industries and it corrupted
tribal institutions. The rum, the guns, the utensils and the gewgaws were
irresistible temptations. Every chief and every tribesman acquired
a potential interest in slave getting and slave selling. Charges of
witchcraft, adultery, theft and other crimes were trumped up that the
number of convicts for sale might be swelled; debtors were pressed that
they might be adjudged insolvent and their persons delivered to the
creditors; the sufferings of famine were left unrelieved that parents might
be forced to sell their children or themselves; kidnapping increased until
no man or woman and especially no child was safe outside a village; and
wars and raids were multiplied until towns by hundreds were swept from the
earth and great zones lay void of their former teeming population.[58]

[Footnote 57: Gomer Williams, chap. 6.]

[Footnote 58: C.B. Wadstrom, _Observations on the Slave Trade_ (London,
1789); Lord Muncaster, _Historical Sketches of the Slave Trade and of its
Effects in Africa_ (London, 1792); Jerome Dowd, _The Negro Races_, vol. 3,
chap. 2 (MS).]

The slave trade has well been called the systematic plunder of a continent.
But in the irony of fate those Africans who lent their hands to the looting
got nothing but deceptive rewards, while the victims of the rapine were
quite possibly better off on the American plantations than the captors
who remained in the African jungle. The only participants who got
unquestionable profit were the English, European and Yankee traders and
manufacturers.