Endowed
with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appre-
ciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world
animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of
strange influences,--of Good to be implored, of Evil to be
propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him the dark triumph of
Evil over him. All the hateful powers of the Under-world
were striving against him, and a spirit of revolt and revenge
filled his heart. He called up all the resources of heathenism
to aid,--exorcism and witch-craft, the mysterious Obi wor-
ship with its barbarious rites, spells, and blood-sacrifice even,
now and then, of human victims. Weird midnight orgies and
mystic conjurations were invoked, the witch-woman and the
voodoo-priest became the centre of Negro group life, and that
vein of vague superstition which characterizes the unlettered
Negro even to-day was deepened and strengthened.
In spite, however, of such success as that of the fierce
Maroons, the Danish blacks, and others, the spirit of revolt
gradually died away under the untiring energy and superior
strength of the slave masters. By the middle of the eighteenth
century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to
his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was
unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life.
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