The amount of human misery which that frightful traffic entailed during those 240 years almost baffles the imagination.

The bloody Civil War which had, perhaps, its earliest cause in the landing of those twenty blacks at Jamestown, was scarcely more than a fitting penalty, and there was justice in the fact that it fell on North and South alike, for if the South clung longest to slavery, it was the North--even abolition New England--which had most to do with establishing it on this continent.
However, it is not with slavery, but with the slave trade we have to do.
Circumstances largely forced upon the New England colonies their unsavory preeminence in this sort of commerce.

To begin with, their people were as we have already seen, distinctively the seafaring folk of North America.
Again, one of their earliest methods of earning a livelihood was in the fisheries, and that curiously enough, led directly to the trade in slaves.
To sell the great quantities of fish they dragged up from the Banks or nearer home, foreign markets must needs be found.

England and the European countries took but little of this sort of provender, and moreover England, France, Holland, and Portugal had their own fishing fleets on the Banks.
The main markets for the New Englanders then were the West India Islands, the Canaries, and Madeira.

There the people were accustomed to a fish diet and, indeed, were encouraged in it by the frequent fastdays of the Roman Catholic church, of which most were devout members.