Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan
England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household
service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free
negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a
body-servant whom John Quincy Adams, the American minister, had brought
from Massachusetts to St. Petersburg.[4]
[Footnote 4: _Writings of John Quincy Adams_, Ford ed., III, 471, 472 (New
York, 1914).]
The impulse for the enslavement of negroes by other peoples came from the
Arabs who spread over northern Africa in the eighth century, conquering and
converting as they went, and stimulating the trade across the Sahara until
it attained large dimensions. The northbound caravans carried the peculiar
variety of pepper called "grains of paradise" from the region later known
as Liberia, gold from the Dahomey district, palm oil from the lower Niger,
and ivory and slaves from far and wide. A small quantity of these various
goods was distributed in southern Europe and the Levant. And in the same
general period Arab dhows began to take slave cargoes from the east coast
of Africa as far south as Mozambique, for distribution in Arabia, Persia
and western India.
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