The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Nor can New York be neglected as a slave port. At least 130 slave voyages seem to have been mounted from that city to Africa between 1747 and 1774, William and Garret van Horne and John and Stephen van Courtlandt being prominent alongside Nathaniel Marston and Philip Livingston, the latter’s sons also being investors (Marston and Livingston seem the only merchants to have had investments in as many as four ships). Thus it was not surprising that, in the region of the Sherbro River, in what is now Sierra Leone, John Newton of Liverpool, then the captain of a slave ship, should have exchanged slaves with Captain William Williams of New York in the Rebekah, a sloop. Trading in slaves, of course, constituted only a tiny proportion—2 percent perhaps of the total commerce of the city—and many more ships, nearly six hundred between 1715 and 1764, went to the West Indies than to Africa. Even so, between a third and a quarter of New York’s four hundred merchants were concerned in one way or another in the slave trade in the mid-eighteenth century.

  Merchants from Massachusetts were also implicated: families from Boston who invested in the slave trade in the eighteenth century included the Belchers, the Waldos, the Faneuils, and the Cabots; there were also the Crowninshields and the Grafton brothers of Salem; and, farther north still, the Pepperells of Kittery, a little port just in Maine. Still, all these enterprises were on a small scale. Boston shipping destined for Africa rarely totaled ten a year before 1774, in comparison with nearly sixty destined for Britain and sometimes nearly two hundred for the Caribbean.

  Pious Pennsylvania was also sending ships in the 1760s to Africa for slaves. The supply of indentured servants there had been exhausted. This led to new initiatives being taken by merchants already interested, such as Thomas Riche, or the powerful firm of Thomas Willing and Robert Morris. The latter company is of special interest, since Morris, the future “financier of the revolution,” even if he did help to send the patriotic-sounding Granby across the Atlantic to Africa, was the son of an agent of the well-connected slave merchant Foster Cunliffe, of Liverpool, at Oxford, on the Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps a dozen ships left the City of Brotherly Love for Africa in the ten years before the War of Independence, and perhaps a thousand slaves a year were imported.

  Few slaves were in these days sold in New England, except for Rhode Island, and fewer still of those came direct from Africa. For there was no work on which slaves could be easily employed there, and the few slaves in New England were mostly domestics.

  One important change came in 1750. For the first fifteen years of its existence, between 1733 and 1748, the Trustees of Georgia had forbidden the import of slaves. The Scottish settlers of Darien, on the southern coast, and the Salzburgers of nearby Ebenezer supported this prohibition, but the Anglo-Saxon settlers in Savannah bitterly opposed it: they had been raising their tall glasses to “the one thing needful” for twenty years. The trustees were harassed, and there had been much illegal import. In 1750, the Anglo-Saxons won the debate and Georgia declared slavery legal. Thereafter, the colony was soon transformed: there were 1,065 slaves in 1753 and 7,800 in 1766.

  • • •

  The Seven Years’ War, of 1756-63, was Britain’s most successful engagement in a world conflict. Her defeat of France in both Canada and India was accompanied by her conquest of the French sugar islands of Guadeloupe and later Martinique, as well (as we have seen) as their slave suppliers in Africa.IV Havana also fell to the English in 1762.

  Cuba had previously had a small number of African slaves, say thirty-two thousand, working on about a hundred small sugar plantations. John Kennion, the Liverpool-born Unitarian commissary, or general supplier, to the commanders who conquered the island, was given an exclusive right to import to the place two thousand slaves a year, of whom fifteen hundred were to be men, five hundred women. Kennion already had plantations in Jamaica, as did many go-ahead English slave merchants of the day. But though this unitarian Liverpudlian sold many slaves during the nine months of British occupation—probably seventeen hundred—his competitors sold as many: “The acquisition of Havana will give great spirits to the planters in Georgia and Carolina to purchase negroes,” wrote Henry Laurens to John Knight in Liverpool; “a cargo from Angola lately sold at higher prices than we ever knew, considering the quality.”7,V Many of the most respected names in the Anglo-Saxon world of commerce turned their ships towards Havana in 1762 and 1763 (including Samuel Touchett, the cotton pioneer and MP, of Manchester; and Sir Alexander Grant, MP, of Glasgow and London).

  All these merchants found that Kennion’s privileged arrangements excluded them. The glut in slaves in Cuba meant that prices plummeted. The old state monopoly company had before the war sold piezas de indias at three hundred dollars each. The new merchants could only sell at ninety dollars. The British army also sold off in Havana the thousand or so slaves which they had brought to serve as porters and general assistants in the campaign.

  The criollo planters of West Cuba were delighted by the British occupation: this was before the age of patriotism. As well as slaves, they bought from the conquerors a vast quantity of cloths, clothes, and sugar equipment. This brief extension of the British Empire marked, as the inspired Cuban economist Francisco de Arango would later recognize, a turning point in Cuban history, the import of so many Africans being the motor of an economic change which made Cuba, by the end of the century, a formidable sugar producer: “The tragic event of its surrender gave Havana life in two ways,” Arango wrote; “the first was considerable riches, with the great import of blacks, utensils, and cloths which were brought in during only a year. . . . Second, it showed our Court the importance of this.”8 The occasion also demonstrated the charm of Cuban sugar to a wide audience: “The Havana sugar which I have for sale is exceeding good and very clear,” Henry Laurens wrote from Charleston in April 1763.9

  Thus it was that Cuba was launched on her astonishing career as the world’s grandest sugar bowl; and soon few, apart from historians, would remember the old days before 1763, when the poorer island had a more balanced economy, in which a trade in hides and tobacco competed for labor and investment with shipbuilding.

  The attitudes of the Spanish criollo planters of Havana were shared by their French counterparts in Guadeloupe. Into the latter island, the English conquerors introduced even more slaves than they did in Havana (probably over twelve thousand), and over a longer period, for the occupation lasted seven years. The economy of the island was transformed.

  The possibility that the peace might return some of these conquests to their original owners distressed businessmen in London. Thus, in November 1762, 145 merchants of Liverpool petitioned Lord Egremont (the secretary of state) to keep at least Guadeloupe after the peace, because of their great success in selling slaves there: “The possession of that island has increased their trade beyond all comparison with its former state, in the demand of British manufactures for slaves. . . . The West-Indian and African trade is by far the largest branch of the great and extensive commerce of this kingdom . . . the most beneficial commerce, not only to themselves but to the whole kingdom, as the export is chiefly of the manufacturers of this kingdom, British ships and seamen solely employed. . . .”10

  The protests were to no avail. The policy of “Take and Hold,” advocated by William Pitt and those who had won the war, did not move those more tranquil souls concerned to make the peace. Lord Egremont succumbed to what the polemicist Junius described as “a fatal lethargy.” Thus, though Britain gained Canada and India at the peace, she abandoned the one opportunity afforded since 1600 to any great power of uniting the Caribbean under a single flag.

  At the Treaty of Paris, there was a most notable transfer of “people and provinces” in what Woodrow Wilson, at another peace made later in the same city, would call “the great game of the balance of power.” For, though Britain returned to France Gorée, off Africa, and Guadeloupe, Martinique, Belle Isle, Desirade, Saint Lucia, and Marie-Galante, in the Antilles, as well as Havana to Spain, she retained Fort Saint Louis, at the mout
h of the river Sénégal, and other trading points on that great river; and in the West Indies, she kept several islands: Saint Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago, with a total population of perhaps twenty thousand, together with Grenada (a new sugar island, with a slave population of twelve thousand in 1750). The huge French territory of Louisiana, Crozat’s old concession, passed to Spain, with its six thousand slaves, and the almost empty Spanish colony of Florida also fell to Britain.

  Both the French and Spaniards reacted to this peace by a determination to compensate for their losses. The French Prime Minister Choiseul sought immediately to develop new French interests in Africa so as to free their colonies in the West Indies from reliance on Britain, formally or informally, for the supply of slaves. That the provision of slaves was an essential part of French commercial policy he was left in no doubt. Thus, in 1762, the Chamber of Commerce of Nantes declared: “The African trade is precious not only because of gold and ivory, it is infinitely more so because of the blacks that it makes possible for only they are capable of carrying through the hard work which the agriculture and manufacturing [of sugar] demand. . . .”11 Choiseul agreed: “I look upon this trade as the motor of all the others. . . .” Equally, the same body in La Rochelle declared, in 1765: “The African trade has always been looked on rightly as very advantageous to the nation. More than 100 ships [that is, from La Rochelle] are annually employed in this navigation. . . . They each introduce 300 blacks. The Ministry has been shown that this commerce brings into the kingdom 11,470,330 livres solely from the expeditions. . . . If foreigners [for example, Perfide Albion] were to introduce blacks into our colonies, our manufactures, our sailors, and our farmers would be deprived of innumerable outlets. . . .”12

  • • •

  The fifteen years of peace between 1763 and 1778 (the year when France entered the American Revolutionary War against Britain) were good for the slave trade in all the main commercial nations, including British North America. The continuing popularity of coffee, tea, jam, and chocolate partly explains the matter. Two-thirds of the slaves shipped to the Americas in the 1770s worked on sugar plantations, and 84 percent (160,000 out of 190,000) of the slaves in Jamaica were employed to produce sugar on the large plantations established there. Slaves in these years also seemed essential to all important European military operations in the Americas: five hundred from Jamaica went with Admiral Vernon’s disastrous expedition to Cartagena de Indias and twice that in 1762 to Havana with General Lord Albemarle. So it is unsurprising that Britain should have carried something approaching a quarter-million slaves across the Atlantic between 1761 and 1770—of whom about seventy thousand went to the Southern mainland colonies, where they would be sold by Henry Laurens or his successors to the owners of rice or indigo plantations. These British-shipped slaves were carried by merchants and captains primarily from Liverpool, which city sent over a hundred ships to Africa in 1771 for the first time, carrying more than twenty-eight thousand slaves. The largest ship of these, the Prince of Wales, was alone responsible for six hundred. London transported eight thousand slaves in fifty-eight ships; and Bristol a few more, nearly nine thousand in twenty-three ships; even Lancaster carried nine hundred and fifty in four. In the single year 1774, the British slave trade seems to have accounted for forty thousand captives, these captives coming mostly from the Bight of Benin, the Niger Delta, and the Loango coast.

  These were golden days for British West Indian society in particular: the governing class was small, but the large slave populations seemed resigned to their productive if ignominious lot. Visitors noted the pretty landscapes—a tropical version of Gloucestershire, with hedges of cape jasmine and pomegranate, logwood and lime, to point the contrast. How agreeable it was to hear, from travelers’ vivid accounts, of the feasts, with turtle on the table, accompanied by thirty-two different fruits. Meantime, the slaves, in their Sunday suits, would be making the best of their hard lives with amazing forbearance, even with high spirits, having often survived dangers at sea which would have made Dante blench.

  In these same years, however, France was beginning to overtake Britain as a sugar producer. In 1767, for the first time, her colonies exported more of the ever-desirable commodity than did her rival: seventy-seven thousand tons against seventy-two thousand. She also shipped for the first time over a hundred thousand slaves in a period of ten years. She did not seem to have much missed her old slaving harbors on the river Sénégal. The average number of slaver ships leaving French ports every year was fifty-six, a modest increase only, it is true, over previous figures, but the new ships were bigger, averaging 364 slaves per boat. The merchants were also much assisted by the government’s policies directed towards using the slave trade as a means of economic revival. Thus, after the peace of Paris, France refortified Gorée, refurbished the French trading points on the river Gambia and at Whydah, established forts at Lahous, Quitta, and Apollonia (on the Windward Coast), and even opened an inquiry into the reasons why their trade in blacks had been bringing less profit than that of Britain. Finally, in 1767, Law’s old Compagnie des Indes lost its monopoly. Henceforth, the government used the ten livres paid by traders for a license much as their English rivals did, to maintain their forts in Africa.

  Nantes remained the great French slaving port, followed by Bordeaux. The latter sent five ships a year to Africa in the early 1760s, eight a year in the 1770s. Other ports were struggling to enter, or re-enter, the profitable business. For example, merchants from Le Havre, such as the Foäche family and their relations by marriage the Bégouens, were heavily engaged. The Foäches established a younger son (Stanislas) in Saint-Domingue, as firms in Nantes had long done, to receive the slaves dispatched by the head of the family (Martin-Pierre and his wife, Catherine). Le Havre was able to make herself France’s third-most-important slaving port in these years, ahead of La Rochelle. The new promising circumstances also encouraged René-Auguste de Chateaubriand, of Saint-Malo, to re-enter the trade: he sent the Saint-René to Africa in 1768, just at the moment when his wife was giving birth to the future author of the novel René.13 Saint-Malo dispatched seventy-five ships, all told, to Africa in the first fifteen years after the peace of 1763. Outstanding among those who now entered the French trade was Jean-Baptiste Prémord, of Honfleur who, in 1762, contracted with the London owners (Richard Oswald, Alexander Grant, and their friends) of Bence Island, in the Sierra Leone estuary, to buy fifteen hundred slaves a year for five years—a figure which was not reached. But Honfleur went ahead in the trade in Africans, thanks largely to Prémord’s determination, and sent forty-four ships to Africa between 1763 and 1777, another seventy-two between the latter date and 1792. Rouen also played a part.

  The Crown was delighted. In 1768, King Louis XV expressed himself pleased in particular at the way “les négociants du Port de Bordeaux se livrent avec beaucoup de zèle au commerce de la traite des nègres.”14

  The great success in these years of Loango Bay, with Cabinda and Malemba nearby, as a slave harbor was due to its remaining a zone of free trade. The rulers of Loango retained their independence and traded with all comers. Here, in the 1760s, the French did the best, if only since they seemed the most numerous. They also now supplied what Loango judged to be the best goods, and they paid the highest prices for the captives. By the 1780s, two-thirds of the French slave trade was from Loango, whose total product was then between ten and fifteen thousand slaves a year.

  The chief buyers of these French-carried captives were the planters in Saint-Domingue (three-quarters), who also bought many slaves illegally from the British. There were over two hundred thousand slaves in Saint-Domingue in 1765, and it was generally assumed that fifteen thousand slaves had to be introduced every year just to maintain the labor force at the right level. The French government, meantime, did what it could further to support the commerce by raising the bounty per slave when it was delivered to one hundred livres, a figure which would be increased further in 1787 to 160.

  The government
in Paris, never completely able to escape the tradition of Colbert, who so hated the thought of free trade, could not bring itself to abandon the idea of monopolies, and so part of the French trade, that from the newly fortified Gorée, was allocated to a new Company of the Coast of Africa (it became in 1776 the Guyana Company, on the mistaken assumption that it would sell slaves exclusively to the new colony of Cayenne-Guyane). This company was given the exclusive right to trade slaves from Gorée for fifteen years.

  • • •

  That African slavery was regarded as the solution to all problems of labor in Brazil was confirmed by the formation of two new chartered companies in Lisbon: the Maranhão Company, established in 1755, and the Pernambuco Company, founded in 1759. The first was most interested in Bissau and Cacheu, and specialized in large ships, such as the Nuestra Senhora da Esperança or the San Sebastião—able to carry between five and eight hundred slaves each voyage. The second—its ships had similar devotional names—dealt largely with Luanda, the main Portuguese settlement in Angola, where, for its first twenty-two years of trading, 1761–83, it rapidly became the major buyer. Both companies were concerned primarily with slaves, though they had other interests, and both were exempt from the export duties levied on their competitors. There had been a Maranhão Company in the seventeenth century, but it had not been successful: the price of slaves had been too high for the settlers on the Amazon, who had then been able to kidnap Indians with great ease and without much cost. Now, however, the Indian tribes had either been destroyed or had escaped farther into the green interior. Furthermore, Pombal, the prime minister, a man whose own monarch thought that he had “hairs growing on his heart,” was determined to introduce a new era for the Indian in Brazil. His law of 1755 on the matter did break new ground so far as the surviving Indians were concerned. But it meant a greater emphasis than ever on black slaves.