Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Slaves Would Have Diminished, Since 1820, With Great
Rapidity, But For The Fraudulent Continuation Of The Slave-Trade.
If,
by the progress of human civilization, and the firm resolution of the
new states of free America, this
Infamous traffic should cease
altogether, the diminution of the slave population would become more
considerable for some time, on account of the disproportion existing
between the two sexes, and the continuance of emancipation. It would
cease only when the relation between the deaths and births of slaves
should be such that even the effects of enfranchisement would be
counterbalanced. The whites and free men now form two-thirds of the
whole population of the island, and this increase marks in some degree
the diminution of the slaves. Among the latter, the women are to the
men (exclusive of the mulatto slaves), scarcely in the proportion of
1 : 4, in the sugar-cane plantations; in the whole island, as 1 : 1.7;
and in the towns and farina where the negro slaves serve as domestics,
or work by the day on their own account as well as that of their
masters, the proportion is as 1 : 1.4; even (for instance at the
Havannah),* as 1 : 1.2. (* It appears probable that at the end of
1825, of the total population of men of colour (mulattos and negroes,
free and slaves), there were nearly 160,000 in the towns, and 230,000
in the fields. In 1811 the Consulado, in a statement presented to the
Cortes of Spain, computed at 141,000, the number of men of colour in
the towns, and 185,000 in the fields.
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