The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Diamonds had been mined in Brazil since the 1720s, and those jewels, like the produce of the gold mines of Minas Gerais earlier on, were generally worked by African slaves. Just as slaves hid much gold from their masters, large diamonds were often secreted by slaves in ingenious ways: and it was widely said that the Church of Santa Efigenia in Rio was built from the proceeds of gold dust washed out of their hair by slave girls who knelt at the font.

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  The early eighteenth century marked the end of North America’s novitiate in the traffic in slaves. In the seventeenth century, too poor or too concerned with primitive agriculture, colonists there had been slow to participate in any substantial way. A few slaves acting as servants had always been seen in all the colonies; but it was not till the owners of plantations in the Carolinas, learning in some cases from their own experience in Barbados, realized that they could make considerable profits from rice and indigo that anything like a regular trade in slaves began. Those in Virginia made a similar discovery with regard to tobacco. So from then on Africans were sought on a regular basis. Then the small independent farmer began to fail, as had happened in Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies when those colonies had embarked on growing sugar. It was the conventional wisdom of the age that these new tobacco plantations could not be served by a few indentured servants; and that white men did not work well in the rice fields, at least not so well as blacks. Slavery seemed the only solution to the problem, as it had appeared in the West Indies and, before that, in Brazil.

  Independent traders from Britain, including several from minor ports, such as Exeter or Dartmouth, began to serve these “plantation colonies” with slaves in the first ten years of the new century. All the same, there were some hesitations among the settlers of the thirteen colonies—less on moral grounds, to be sure, than on those of prudence. Would not a colony with many slaves incur rebellions, as everyone knew occurred from time to time “in the islands”? So a bill was introduced into the Assembly of South Carolina which demanded the payment of two pounds’ duty per slave. Yet the same document stated firmly that “the plantations and estates of this province cannot be well and sufficiently managed, and brought into use, without the labour and service of negroes and other slaves,” even though such people might have “barbarous, wild, savage natures, such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the laws, customs and practices of this Province.”29 So Carolina had a divided mind on the matter. The same might have been said in Virginia. In poor North Carolina, the Reverend John Urmstone wrote, in 1716, to the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel asking him to arrange for three or four Guinea slaves, three men “of middle stature about 20 years old and a girl of about 16 years. Here is no living without servants, there are none to be hired of any colour, and none of the black kind to be sold good for anything under £50 or £60.”30 (He wrote often, without success.) In his Natural History of North Carolina, published in 1737, John Brickell declared that slaves were reckoned “the greatest riches in these parts,” and that the planters “were at great pains to lay in store of gold and silver with which to purchase negroes in the West Indies and other places.” All the evidence, he insisted—rightly, as it happened—was that slaves in North America were treated far better than those in the Caribbean, where the life of a slave was rendered inhuman by conditions on sugar plantations.31

  Over three and a half thousand slaves were carried to South Carolina between May 1721 and September 1726. In 1732, there were in that colony probably fourteen thousand white people, while the blacks there numbered about thirty-two thousand: the first time a black majority was registered in an English colony on the mainland. The cultivation of rice in South Carolina, which inspired these changes, had its ironies. For seed rice had been introduced from Madagascar, and slaves from both there and Senegambia were perfectly informed of how to produce it before they came to the Americas. The clearing of the cypress swamps in South Carolina and the subsequent harvesting of the new crops were thus tasks performed by experienced workers.

  At a hearing before the Board of Trade, Mr. Samuel Wragg (a merchant of Carolina, who traded slaves himself, and who would be ennobled for encouraging emigrants to the colony) testified that Carolina was importing a thousand slaves a year, largely since the rice trade had increased from fifteen hundred to twenty-five thousand barrels a year, and so a “negro can make £10 clear profit for his master.”32

  By 1730, we also find six thousand slaves in North Carolina—though most of them were probably not shipped, but carried in as a result of purchase in Virginia. The colonists mostly paid by barter: food, livestock, and even pitch. The colony complained that, since it had no direct deliveries—from Africa—which “the People are able to pay for,” it received “the refuse refractory and distemper’d negroes, brought from other governments.”33

  Pennsylvania started to import slaves within three years of its foundation, in 1684, when 150 Africans were brought in and used to clear trees and build houses. Most of the first settlers exhausted their supply of cash in buying these captives. In the early eighteenth century, there were few further supplies but, by the 1730s, thanks to the reduction or disappearance of import duties, the commerce increased considerably. The lead was taken by a Quaker, Isaac Morris, though he mostly bought his captives in the West Indies.

  What troubled the merchants involved in this trade in the eighteenth century were the duties imposed by colonial governments, taxes which were designed to reduce the number of imports for fear of rebellion. Thus 1733 saw petitions of English merchants against the “exorbitant duty” imposed on slaves imported into South Carolina. The merchants who protested included some of the most powerful men in the trade: Isaac Hobhouse, from Bristol; Ben Whitaker and Richard Acland, of London; and Charles Pole, of Liverpool.

  But, though slow in the uptake, and with some hesitations, British merchants, in the eighteenth century, encouraged the trade in African captives to begin in earnest to North America. Advertisements for “prime young slaves” or “strong hearty stout negroes” were soon everywhere to be seen; there were sales of “parcels of very likely negroes,” sometimes with the enticement “of the very blackest sort”; and, often, there were combined sales of “negroes, cocoa and sugars.” In 1721, the Boston Gazette describes the sale of “several lusty negro men, arrived lately from the island of St Jago [Cape Verde Islands]”34; in 1724, an Irish-born merchant, Thomas Amory, with Portuguese and French connections, wrote, from his wharf in Boston, Massachusetts, then the largest city of the thirteen colonies and much the most important port, to a customer in North Carolina: “In the fall, we expect negroes directly from Guinea, a vessel having sailed from here and one from [Newport] Rhode Island.”35 Boston from then on experienced, every year, several sales of slaves direct from Africa. We hear of the schooner William, the brigantine Charming Betty, as well as the Charming Molly, bringing “parcels” of such cargoes to the city, though without specifying exactly whence the slaves came. On June 19, 1732, Godfrey Mallbone of Rhode Island is found selling “choice young negro Gold Coast slaves” in Boston. Ships from more northerly ports, for example, such as Salem, also in Massachusetts, were soon setting off direct for Africa, in imitation of their English rivals.

  Amory’s letter, incidentally, suggests that, even at the beginning of the North American slave trade, though the shippers of slaves in British North America were as a rule from New England, the biggest customers were in the South or the Caribbean; and, within New England, the colony of Rhode Island was from the beginning pre-eminent.XIV

  The success of Rhode Island in this traffic derived from the fact that it possessed excellent harbors but had little soil. The place lacked the grasslands of Connecticut or Massachusetts, and did not have easy access, as those colonies did, to the fisheries of Newfoundland. There was little to do there except to trade, build ships, and distill rum. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the tiny, barren colony had a Venetian economy, or one comparab
le to that of Hong Kong in the late twentieth century; the port of Newport was the center of activity; and slaving, though far from the only commerce, figured importantly.

  Regular sailing for Africa seems to have begun from the harbor of Newport in 1725, when three ships set off, though sporadic sailings had occurred before, 1700 being the earliest year recorded for that port, when we also hear of three ships sailing for Africa. They were largely owned by two Barbados merchants. Newport had excellent rum distilleries and, from at least 1723, its ships carried that liquor to Africa as their special contribution to the cargoes exchanged for slaves. Another mark of this activity was that the ships concerned were smaller than the usual European ones, carrying seventy-five to a hundred slaves, which their crews loaded as quickly as they could in African ports, in order to reduce the risk of sickness or death to both themselves and their captives.

  Rum was an immediate success in Africa; and North American captains were, therefore, especially sought after. The pioneers in these activities were John and William Wanton, Abraham Redwood, the benefactor of the Redwood Library, and Henry Collins, the “Lorenzo de’ Medici of Newport.” By the mid-century, Samuel and William Vernon, sons of a famous silversmith (Samuel Vernon I, with his distinctive mark of a fleur-de-lis within a heart), were pre-eminent.

  So Newport became a major commercial port, and her captains were selling slaves all over the British empire, particularly to planters in the Caribbean. This trade was in many ways an extension of Rhode Island’s earlier dealings in the same places for wood and food. The commerce naturally led to Jamaica and Barbados becoming the principal suppliers of Rhode Island’s imports of molasses, which was needed in order to make rum.

  Providence, Rhode Island, was also concerned in the trade, from 1736, when James Brown, a near-illiterate merchant at that time (judging from his letters), anxious for money with which to expand his spermaceti candle-making business, fitted out the first Guineaman, the Mary, to set out from that harbor, his son Obadiah serving as supercargo. But that was an isolated instance: the next slaver from Providence was the Wheel of Fortune, sent by Obadiah in his own right as a merchant, but not till 1759.36

  New York was far behind the ports of New England. Only fourteen voyages to Africa for the purpose of buying slaves seem to have been made from there between 1715 and 1747, the ships traveling across the Atlantic and directly back. The merchants concerned included descendants of old Dutch families, such as the Schuylers and van Hornes, but also Anglo-Saxon or Scottish ones, such as the Livingstons and Walters: alliances of the two social groups occurred, as when Arnot Schuyler and John Walter of New York jointly invested in the Catherine, which brought back 260 slaves from Africa in the 1730s.37

  Meantime, it should not be assumed that the Americas in those years constituted the only market for West African slaves. The Moroccan Sultan Mulai Ismail carefully established a large black slave army about 1700, with 180,000 soldiers, and 20,000 of them were still under arms when he died in 1727. Such figures would suggest that at least four thousand black slaves were exported from West Africa to Morocco in the first quarter of the eighteenth century; and Egypt was probably taking as many.

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  IThe RAC in 1721 devised a plan for selling slaves to the Portuguese. The slaves were to come from Gambia, and those not disposed of for Africa were to be delivered to a certain Playden Onely, Lisbon. Apparently 150 were so delivered; there, the duke of Chandos hazarded, “we are given to understand they’ll come to a good market.”

  IICrozat’s fortune enabled his bachelor brother, Pierre, to become the most formidable art collector of the age.

  IIIThe Act of Union between England and Scotland of 1707 had enabled Glasgow to participate in the “extensive and increasing trade with the West Indies and American colonies [which] has, if I am rightly informed”—the speaker was the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s brilliant creation, Rob Roy—“laid the foundation of wealth and prosperity, which, if carefully strengthened and built upon, may one day support an immense fabric.

  IVHe was attacked as “Timon” by Pope, in his “Epistle to Lord Burlington,” but the poet apologized, and began talking sycophantically of “Gracious Chandos . . . beloved at sight.” The duke raised a statue to King George I in his grounds, which, according to a biographer, “helped to make Leicester Square hideous.”

  VThese last were ports on the Slave Coast, for which see page 353 ff.

  VISee page 272.

  VIIFor blacks in England, see chapter 23.

  VIIIRaw cotton came to Manchester at first from, above all, the West Indies and the Levant, then from India, later still from Brazil—and finally, of course, after the invention of the gin, from the United States.

  IXSee chapter 22 for implications.

  XThe Montaudoins hailed from Paris, their first known ancestor to settle in Nantes being Jean, an artisan who came in 1616.

  XISee page 358.

  XIILa Rochelle sent 400 (the main mercantile family being the Rasteaus, who sent about thirty négriers to Africa) and Le Havre nearly 350.

  XIIIThese are now the United States Virgin Islands, bought by President Wilson, for $25 million dollars in 1917, just before he drafted the Fourteen Points.

  XIVThe Rhode Island slave trade and the American slave trade were “virtually synonymous,” wrote its historian, Jay Coughtry, thereby underestimating the trade from New York, Maryland, and South Carolina.

  14

  By the Grace of God

  Louis, by the grace of God . . . we have been informed that le sieur Jacques-Alexandre Laffon de Ladébat, trader in our city of Bordeaux, has carried on his commerce in Africa and in America and is distinguished by his zeal, by the extent of his operations and by the commerce of the slave trade . . . that, since 1764, he has arranged to send to our islands of America over 4,000 slaves, through fifteen vessels which he has sent to the coasts of Africa . . . that at present without cease he has seven ships employed in the slave trade or in the provisioning of our islands. . . .

  Letter by King Louis XV with respect to the ennoblement of a Bordeaux merchant

  THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY saw the beginning of the industrial revolution, which still has not spent itself in the late twentieth century. It marked the subsequent beginning of a transition from a life predominantly rural to one decidedly urban; and a new language in which social and political history could be discussed was devised in France. The last half of the century also saw several wars in which the national identity of the leading nations was created or reaffirmed, with a new generation of heroes: the framers of the Constitution of the United States; Nelson’s captains; the French revolutionary generals; the enlightened despots and their advisers in Prussia, Spain, and Portugal. It was the age of medical advances symbolized by vaccination against smallpox; and it was also the age of sugar.

  We observe in England the consequences, in the fat faces in the portraits of the beauties and the kings, of the ostlers and of the actresses. In 1750, already, “the poorest English farm labourer’s wife took sugar in her tea.” She baked sweet cakes, and spread treacle on her bread, as well as her porridge. Mrs. Hannah Glasse’s famous first cookery book in England, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy and subtitled which far exceeds anything of the kind ever yet published, whose first edition was in 1747, shows that sugar was no longer to be considered primarily a medicine, at least in a supposedly advanced country such as England. “Take . . . three quarters of a pound of the best moist sugar . . .” was part of her recipe for “a cake in the Spanish way.” Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility records a moment of anxiety when impending poverty threatens the heroine’s family’s purchases of sugar. The pudding, hitherto made of fish or light meat, now embarked on its unhealthy history as a separate sweet course. Sugar began too to be used as a preservative, as an alternative to salt. Fifty years later, the typical poor family in England would give as much as 6 percent of its income to sugar. In 1848, a planter with property in both Demerara (Guiana) an
d Grenada declared to a committee of the House of Commons that the consumption of sugar had “almost become a necessary of life.” The saccharine soul of Britain’s golden age seems thus clear. How could the sugar be found? As yet, the idea of obtaining it from beet was still a secret in the brain of an obscure Silesian; so the plantations of the West Indies seemed, therefore, the source of all comfort.

  France was in a condition similar to Britain. By now two-thirds of French exports carried by sea went to the West Indies and, as in the case of England, sugar was the most valuable single import. Sugar stimulated the talkers in the great coffeehouses of Paris and of Bordeaux. It gave energy to the philosophes in the drawing rooms of great ladies and humor to petits marquis in the cold drawing rooms of Versailles. It would afford courage to the soldiers as well as the generals of the Grande Armée. Prince Talleyrand’s nostalgia for an epoch when the “douceur de vivre” survived employed an appropriate metaphor; and, of course, sugar in France, as elsewhere, depended on the imports of African slaves into the Caribbean.

  Britain was, in these years, dominant in the Atlantic commerce in slaves. Between 1740 and 1750, her ships probably took to the Americas over two hundred thousand slaves: far more than any country had carried in any ten years before. Of these British shipments, nearly sixty thousand were probably taken to Virginia and the Carolinas. Over fifty thousand slaves went to Jamaica, and thirty thousand to Barbados, with well over sixty thousand to other colonies. In the single year 1749, British merchants sent out about 150 ships in the trade, with a capacity for at least fifty thousand slaves: seventy ships from Liverpool, nearly fifty from Bristol, eight from London, as well as twenty or so ships from minor harbors, such as Whitehaven, Lancaster, and Glasgow. Those secondary ports should not be ignored, for Lancaster was investing heavily in these years in the trade, and that tiny port became Britain’s fourth-largest slave trader, with twelve ships so occupied in 1756, her example encouraging some of her poorer neighbors on Britain’s northwestern coast, such as Preston, Poulton, and even bleak Ulverston, to follow her lead. South Carolina was a specially appreciative market, as can be seen from the papers of the Charleston merchant Henry Laurens. Well might Malachy Postlethwayt—a hack economics writer, author of The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce—say, approvingly, in a book published in 1745 to support the Royal Africa Company, that the British empire was then “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation [author’s italics].”1