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1202 An American Dilemma
social aspects of the slavery system. Nevertheless, if there is any value In physical selec-
tion and survival, there is perhaps no more sensitive example of this in history than the
cold and almost organic selection for which the slave trade was responsible. For every
slave introduced into the routine of the American slave system, from two to five died
or were killed on the way. Thomas F. Buxton estimates that for every slave landed safely
on a plantation five were lost, and he is supported in this estimate by Normal Leys.
“The African slave trade was aided by the intertribal warfare which kept numerous
slaves in the possession of tribes. As the trade became widespread and highly profitable,
there were deliberate slave raids which entailed great loss of life. The march to the coast,
hunger, the harsh measures of the slave drivers, the exposure to contagion in the close
quarters of the slave barracoons, and the horrors of the notorious middle passage, the long
ocean voyage on which the victims were packed close in the foul and unsanitary holds
of the slave ships, resulted in an excessively high toll. It has been estimated that the mor-
tality on the journey from the interior to the coast amounted to five-twelfths of the entire
number captured. Since no careful records were kept, this may be an extreme figure,
but it is known that this mortality was extremely high.
“There are better estimates for the mortality of the middle passage. A journey
required about fifty days. Slaves were cheap in Africa but high in America, and this fact
encouraged overcrowding. The records of the English African Company, for the period
1680 to 1688, show 60,783 Negro slaves shipped, of which number 14,387 were lost in
the middle passage. This is 23.7 per cent of the number. Altogether, this was an experi-
ence calculated to eliminate weaklings. Says Le Fevre: ‘From the standpoint of the
American slaves, the most significant aspect of the slave-trade was its frightful efficiency
in weeding out feeble bodies and easily depressed minds. Every Negro who survived
proved by the mere fact of being alive, his physical and mental capacity for endurance,*
”
Herskovits (The Myth of the Negro Pasty p. 43) cites evidence of low mortality. He
relies on P^re Dieudonne Rinchon. (Le Trafic NSgriefy d^afres les livres de commerce
du cafitaine Gantois Pierre^Ignace Lievin Van Alstein [1938], pp. 304 ff.):
“For he [Rinchon] shows that, between 1748 and 1782, 541 slavers bought 146,799
slaves, and disposed of 127,133. The difference, 19,666, or 13 per cent, would indicate
that the losses from all causes during shipment—and it by no means follows that these
were deaths—^were much smaller than has been thought.”
Frederick Olmsted quotes a slaveholder to this effect: “In the States of Maryland,
Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, as much attention is paid
to the breeding and growth of Negroes as to that of horses and mules.’* (The Cotton
Kingdom, Vol. i [1862], p. 57.)
Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1910) and
various other papers. A critical and appreciative evaluation of Boas* work has been
expressed by F. H. Hankins, The Racial Basis of Civilization (1926), pp. 355-356:
“The famous study by Boas already referred to purported to show that the Europe.m
immigrant ‘changes his type even in the first generation almost entirely*; children bom
a few years after the arrival of their parents in this country ‘differ essentially from their
foreign-born parents.* Elsewhere Boas contends that ‘These observations seem to indicate
a decided plasticity of human types.* In view of the fact that the differences between
parents and offspring as shown in his original data for such a trait as head-form were
not always either positive or negative but frequently conflicting, and in view of the fact
that the general average differences were not always significant when compared with
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