The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  In 1750, the slave trade was made even easier for British merchants: an act made the commerce entirely open, so that it was henceforth “lawful for all His Majesty’s subjects to trade and traffick to and from any port in Africa. . . .”2 A new holding company representing all merchants trading to Africa was established to look after British forts and trading posts. This was to be directed by a board composed of traders from Bristol, London, and Liverpool, which set about devising a new form of regulation to maintain those places. The eventual arrangements were a good example of the English approach to the mixed economy: the Crown gave the new company an annual grant of ten thousand pounds to maintain the forts, but the company—that is, the merchants—ran them, and were also responsible for the appointment of governors. Every trader to Africa was thereafter supposed to pay two pounds, to either the town clerk of Liverpool, the clerk of the Merchants’ Hall in Bristol, or the chamberlain of London, as a fee for using the African ports. Like many of the best English institutions, the company had the character, therefore, of a club.

  The 1750s saw few changes in slave deliveries, at least until the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Britain again delivered over 200,000 slaves in these ten years: about 65 ships a year left from Liverpool, 25 from Bristol, 10 from London; ships from Liverpool were now carrying over half the slaves exported from Africa by Europeans. The Brazilian trade was not far behind, and accounted for 170,000, over half from Angola, about 50,000 from Mina, and the remainder from Mozambique round the Cape of Good Hope. The French, much affected by the war, in which they lost so much, shipped about 90,000. The war virtually brought their commerce to a temporary end. From 1757 to 1761, only two slave ships left French ports (both from Bayonne). The English seized over 100 ships from Nantes, causing the ruin of several famous shippers there (Michel et Grou, Trochonde Lorière, Rollet du Challet, Struickman, Desridelières-Leroux, and others). But there were some successful French attacks on English ships: Captain William Creevey, father of the courtly diarist Thomas Creevey, recalled how his slaver, Betty, was sunk off Spain while en route to Gambia.

  The war affected slaving in other ways. Thus, in 1758, a British expedition sent on the urgent recommendation of Thomas Cumming, of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, captured both Sénégal (May 2) and Gorée (December 27), and soon all the most important French anchorages in Africa, with their six factories, were in Britain’s hands.

  The victors began immediately to export slaves from those ports. Yet, war or no war, some merchants of France were prosperous: between 1748 and 1765, a single merchant, Guillaume Grou, sent from Nantes forty-three négriers, to carry over 16,000 captives. The government in Paris showed itself so determined to revive the trade that it introduced bounties for slave ships leaving France for Africa, and increased the existing bounties for every slave landed in the West Indies. French planters were, however, still dissatisfied, for the shortages were continuous and harvests had to be brought in, whatever the cause of the conflict. They bought slaves illicitly from English or Dutch merchants—sometimes from ships “obliged” to take refuge in a French harbor, sometimes from English ships which secretly landed slaves on the indented south coast of Saint-Domingue.

  There was, meantime, one unexpected benefit to France of the failure of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s (and Antoine Walsh’s) efforts to recover the British throne for the Roman Church: a Jacobite manufacturer from Manchester, John Holker, fled to France, and convinced both merchants and officials there of the desirability of using, and stealing, English techniques for dyeing and printing textiles: hence his factory in the Rouen suburb of Saint-Sever in the Seine Valley. Many of his imaginative products found their way onto slave vessels. So did those of Julien-Joseph Pinczon du Sel des Monts who, at Salleverte, near Rennes, planned his new manufactury of textiles for the benefit of the shippers of Nantes’s African trade. His Considérations sur le commerce de Bretagne endeared him to the états of the region, and they gave him a large subsidy. Another new manufacturer was André Langevin, who had himself been a minor slave dealer, but who, in 1759, became an indienneur to serve his old colleagues and rivals in that trade.

  In these years, Spain was too backward and too poor to look on sugar as the recipe for prosperity. The aristocrats could buy it from France, the poor (“les nègres de l’Europe,” in Chamfort’s phrase) could be overlooked. Yet sugar was being produced in the Spanish empire, and slaves were still held to be needed in a hundred anchorages there. When, after 1739, the War of the Austrian Succession between Spain and Britain caused the South Sea Company’s contract again temporarily to lapse, the Spanish Crown made a contract for slaves with a Havana merchant of Basque origin, Martín de Ulibarrí, the first Spanish asentista for two generations; and, when nothing seemed to transpire, began a series of separate agreements with different companies which, the government hoped, would meet the demand in different markets. Thus, after 1746, the new Royal Havana Company was given a twenty-year license to introduce merchandise to that port, including the right to sell five hundred slaves, at 144 pesos each. The company sounded new; but its directors were all members of well-known Cuban oligarchic families, who themselves had sugar mills near at hand. Other companies were given similar licenses: the much more successful Guipúzcoa (Caracas) Company, for example, which made much money carrying cacao to serve the new chocolate craze in Madrid, carried nearly twelve thousand slaves to the port of Caracas between 1754 and 1765; and a special concession enabled Ramón Palacio to import two thousand or more blacks into Chile and Peru.

  The changes which these arrangements made were modest: none of the new companies went to Africa to look for slaves, they merely continued to buy in Jamaica, or elsewhere in the Caribbean. The Spanish government must have known that was likely, if only because the Havana Company’s agent, José Ruiz de Noriega, traveled to that island specifically to make the necessary plans with George Frier, who had been the South Sea Company’s representative at Cartagena.

  Peace after 1748 brought the revival of the South Sea Company’s contract but, two years later, its directors, such as Sir Peter Burrell, MP, being by then passive or lazy, by mutual agreement between Spain and Britain brought the venture to an end. Neither the British government nor those directors felt that the once-promising arrangements concluded in 1713 now had prospects. Spain even paid £100,000 for the British renunciation of the opportunity.

  Spain had then to consider its needs anew. Another Basque merchant, Martín de Ariosteguí, was in 1754 asked to try and satisfy the demands of the empire. But despite his initial enthusiasm, he failed to produce any slaves at all. France was then again temporarily if informally allocated the asiento, and Antoine Walsh, Prince Charles Edward’s friend and financier, prepared to supply blacks from his “floating factory,” off the coast of Angola. His plan was that there would be a fortified assembly point in Saint-Domingue, from which slaves would be distributed to the French and Spanish markets. But again little transpired. As a result, in 1753, the Spanish Crown gave permission to Spanish companies to bring slaves directly from Africa to Cuba. The papal rule of 1493, limiting trade with Africa to Portugal, was at last, unceremoniously, put aside, at a time when the Spanish and Portuguese governments were also reconsidering Pope Alexander VI’s division established at Tordesillas in that same far-off year.

  All the same, nothing was done immediately, in the light of this liberal decision. Spanish merchants had gone down the West African coast occasionally in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but the Crown had no African factories, no navy on the coast, and little commercial experience in the territory. Still, when similar rights were offered to a Catalan company, the Barcelona Company, to provide slaves to Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Margarita, some long-term voyages were planned and, in 1758, the first boat for many years, the Perla Catalana of Barcelona, did arrive in San Juan direct from Africa.

  The opportunities offered by the trade in slaves, and especially the dominance of Britain in the busines
s, were reflected in North America, where, in these last years before the revolution of the 1770s, slave merchants were beginning to be men of wealth. They were never as rich as those found in Liverpool or Nantes, or even in Middelburg in the Netherlands but, relatively speaking, they were important. In South Carolina, for example, there was Henry Laurens of Charleston, who has already been briefly mentioned. Laurens was a trader of Huguenot stock (his grandfather, André, came from La Rochelle, in the late seventeenth century a major slave port, and so perhaps the commerce was in his blood). South Carolina was already known, at the time of Laurens’s birth, for its production of rice and indigo for the home market; a biographer of his explained, “The very trying summer climate, supplemented by the unhealthy nature of the tasks, made African slavery inevitable.”3 Laurens began to trade slaves, in company with George Austen, also of South Carolina, in 1748, when he told Foster Cunliffe, a Liverpool correspondent, that “there is a good prospect of good sales for negroes in that province, as rice [this year] promises fair to be a good commodity.” He told other English slave merchants of his plans to enter the traffic in slaves (for example, Isaac Hobhouse of Bristol). He, Laurens, wanted to buy slaves from English or other traders and then resell them—mostly, but not entirely, to Carolina planters. In return for a commission of 10 percent, Laurens would also arrange to give security in England, and collect all slave-trading debts, but he did not propose any limit on the length of time that he would be offered credit. Laurens’s principal partner in England was Devonshire, Reed and Lloyd of Bristol, but he also used the imposing Augustus Boyd of London who, with his son, John, would form one of the best collections of paintings in England.I After a few years, though, Laurens’s English partners, especially those in Liverpool, began to turn their business over to other traders who would offer “immediate remittance”; and so Laurens was run close, as the main dealer, by rivals such as Samuel Brailsford and Miles Brewton. Laurens sent a few ships direct to Africa, but most of his profits derived from buying captives from captains who had been sent by his friends in England, and then reselling them.

  There was plenty of money to be made by all these men, for the 1750s marked a breakthrough in slaving in South Carolina. In 1754, the governor, James Glen, reported that “negroes are sold at higher prices here than in any part of the King’s dominions . . . a proof that this province is in a flourishing condition, for these importations are not to supply the place of Negroes worn out with hard work, or lost by mortality. . . . But our number increases even without such yearly supply. I presume ‘tis indigo that puts all in such high spirits. . . .”4 The proportion of slaves which came from natural increase in South Carolina was certainly high: one plantation’s stock of slaves there grew in Laurens’s day from eighty-six to 270 in thirty-eight years, only twelve or fourteen of them being replaced by purchases. Yet Laurens reported in 1755, “Never was there such pulling and hawling for negroes before. Had there been a thousand, they would not have supplied the demand.”5 The firm of Austen and Laurens was concerned with wines and spirits, beer, deerskins, rice, indigo, and indentured servants, as well as slaves, but it carried, in 1755, about a quarter of Charleston’s slaving business: seven hundred slaves that year. Laurens made a profit of 10 percent on every slave imported, 5 percent on other produce.

  That same year, Laurens wrote to Captain Charles Gwynn of the Emperor, then at Jamaica: “If you had arriv’d about the middle of April, or anytime since, we should have made a glorious Sale of your cargo, our planters are in full spirits for purchasing Slaves, and have made almost all the money loaded up for that purpose. Indigo has kept up at almost an exorbitant price in England, so has rice. . . . Capt. [William] Jeffries [on the Pearl, owned by Thomas Easton & Co, of Bristol] arrived here the 10th instant with 251 pretty slaves. . . .” Most sold at between £270 and £280 each, “a very great price for Angola slaves.” Laurens was able to tell Easton that he had made £52,294 on this voyage.6

  In another sale at Charleston, Laurens sold slaves from the Orrel, owned by John Knight of Liverpool, to a most diverse group: to, for example, Peter Furnell of Jamaica; to Gedney Clarke, collector of customs at Barbados; to William Wells, Jr., of Saint Kitts; to Devonshire, Reed and Lloyd of Bristol, presumably for resale in North America; to the art collector and slave dealer Augustus Boyd of London; and to Robert and John Thompson, two brothers who were the leaders of the trade in slaves from Lancaster. The sale shows the extent to which these traders in captives, even in then parochial North America, were far from being provincial men; like Bartolommeo Marchionni of Lisbon in the fifteenth century, or Coymans of Amsterdam in the seventeenth, they thought in intercontinental terms.

  Laurens is one of the most interesting men in the long history of the Atlantic slave trade since, a great gentleman who loved his own slaves, in later life he repented of his involvement in the traffic. But he never did much against it, and bought one or two more slaves from an English friend, Richard Oswald of London, even after he had become convinced of the need for change. Having made his fortune, and established himself at Mepkin, a fine property on the Cooper River, inland from his city, Laurens withdrew from active slaving about 1764; he later entered politics, became the president of the Continental Congress and, after a year in prison in England, became a peace commissioner, in 1782, with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay in Paris, where Richard Oswald was a senior British negotiator.II

  Despite the significance of Charleston as a market, Rhode Island, and particularly Newport, was, in the 1750s and the 1760s, still the North American colonies’ most important slaving zone. Newport, which always welcomed enterprising people without asking whence they came, also used more slaves in small businesses, farms, or homes than any other Northern colony did. If, as seems likely, Rhode Island carried just over 150,000 slaves from Africa either to the Caribbean or to North America, probably 100,000 were financed by merchants of Newport. About 110 slavers cleared Newport for Africa in the 1750s, 165 in the 1760s. These figures were, of course, small beer in comparison with those of the major slaving ports of Europe.

  One successful merchant of Newport interested in slaving was the “active, alert, shrewd, bold, and masterful” John Bannister, whose ancestors had been merchants in Boston and who, like many others, came to Newport after 1733 as a protest against the prejudices he encountered in that austere city. Like Laurens in Charleston, Bannister was as much at home in old as in New England. He even built ships for merchants in England, such as Joseph Manesty of Liverpool (owner of the Duke of Argyll, presumably called after the duke who had been a South Sea director, on which the Reverend John Newton was once captain).III Another important slave merchant was Abraham Redwood, who was among the first North Americans to carry commercial logic to its geographical conclusion by not only trading in Newport and Africa but owning a plantation in Jamaica, to which his own ships took slaves from Africa. Quaker merchants were involved, too, in Rhode Island slaving; for example, Joseph Wanton, who became his family’s fourth governor of Rhode Island, saw no difficulty whatever in buying and selling slaves in the 1770s.

  The most interesting of these merchants of Rhode Island with slaving interests in the second half of the eighteenth century was, however, Aaron Lopez of Newport, who, unusually in the United States at that time, was Jewish Portuguese in origin. He had concealed his Judaism in his youth in Portugal, and came to North America in 1752 (and to always welcoming Newport a little later). He was, to begin with, a general trader, operating from a shop in Thames Street, selling everything from Bibles to violins, being especially concerned in the trade in candles made from whale spermaceti. He always kept his spermaceti works, but he entered the slave trade in 1762, in collaboration with his father- and brother-in-law, Jacobo and Abraham Ribera; and spermaceti candles often figured among their cargoes to Africa. By 1775, Lopez was the largest taxpayer in Newport and owned over thirty ships. It is not quite clear how many slaving ships he financed; his accounts seem to list only fourteen direct voyages to Africa,
but over fifty to the West Indies, from which his captains sometimes presumably returned with slaves, and delivered them in North America—for example, in South Carolina. Lopez, like Abraham Redwood, was as philanthropic as he was successful. The Dictionary of American Biography exhausts its approbatory adjectives in describing Lopez as “beneficient to his family connections, to his nation, and to all the world,” as “almost without a parallel.” Again like Redwood, he was also the proprietor of an estate in the British West Indies, in his case in Antigua.

  Trading in slaves was carried on elsewhere than in Rhode Island: for example, in Maryland, where the Galloway, Tilghman, and Ringgold families were prominent. They or their colleagues sold a hundred thousand slaves in one way or another by the end of the eighteenth century, perhaps many from natural increase, but also many bought from captains hailing originally from Liverpool or London. Thomas Ringgold and Samuel Galloway, with houses on opposite sides of Chesapeake Bay, sent at least one ship direct to Africa, all the same, as well as several to the West Indies.