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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 5. Race and Ancestry - 2. African Ancestry
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Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry 119
cent a year. The rest of the increase, namely, about 2 per cent . . . repre-
sented the excess of births over deaths.” Dublin’s proportion of smuggled
Negroes is equivalent to an absolute figure of about 563,000,* but even this
must be taken, as he says, to be a maximum figure. All estimates of the num-
ber of slaves smuggled in between 1808 and i860 must be regarded in the
light of the fact that apparently only 330,000 to 400,000 Negroes were
imported during the entire period before 1808, when the slave trade was
federally legal. Although it is possible that there were more slaves smuggled
into the United States between 1808 and i860 than there were legally
imported in the two centuries before 1808, it is probable that the former
figure was, at best, not much larger. A good many of the Negro slaves who
were liberated after the Civil War were African-born. Whatever historical
research ultimately determines these two figures to be, it is extremely
likely that the total number of slaves imported into the United States
before i860, by whatever means, was less than a million.
The Negroid element in the ancestry of the present-day American Negro
people, whether brought here directly or via the West Indies, had its
original home in Africa and in the islands close to that continent.^® The
population of Africa was not homogeneous during the period of the slave
trade.^^ In the region of the Sahara Desert and surrounding districts, there
had been intermixtures between Negroids and Caucasoids for an unknown
number of centuries. In the Southern portion of the Continent were the
Bushmen and the Hottentots. In the section known as the ^West Coast”
—
which is really only the central part of the African coast facing the Atlantic
Ocean—^lived the “true Negro.” ^
The remainder of Central and Southern
Africa was inhabited by various groups of Negroes who are often lumped
together for convenience and called the “Bantu-speaking stocks.”
These problems—from what regions and from what Negroid peoples in
Africa the Negro ancestors of the present-day American Negroes came, and
in what proportions during various periods of the slave trade the direct
and indirect import to America was furnished—are still far from settled
in a conclusive way. Since anthropometric evidence is difiicult or impossible
to bring to bear on these problems—due, among other things, to the later
miscegenation of the various Negro groups in America—^anthropologists
have had to rely on the relatively meager historical evidence that can be
discovered, scanty oral traditions in Africa, and cultural remnants in the
“The census reports an increase of 3,064,022 Negroes between 1810 and i860. The
application of Dublin’s ratio (4 to x) to this gives 6x2,804 Negroes who had to be
accounted for by factors other than natural increase. Some 50,000 of these came into the
country when new territory was annexed. This leaves 562,804 as a maximum figure for
the number smuggled.
*This is a technical anthropological term, according to Herskovits, and should not bo
taken to imply a value judgment that the West Coast Negroes are “truer” Negroes than
any others.
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