by Hugh Thomas
So, in the ten years between 1780 and 1790, at least three-quarters of a million slaves were carried across the Atlantic: perhaps 325,000 by Britain, Liverpool being as ever the dominant city. If Newport, Rhode Island, ruined by the long British occupation in the years of the revolution, was no longer in the forefront of the United States’ trade, the nearby ports of Bristol and Providence, as well as Boston and Salem in Massachusetts, not to speak of Philadelphia and Charleston, made up for it. Perhaps forty ships a year sailed from the new United States for Africa in the 1780s: again, nothing in comparison with old Europe, but what seemed a good beginning to independent commerce.
We could do worse than linger on this new slaving port of Bristol, Rhode Island. Pre-eminent among the merchants there was Simeon Potter, who had begun life as a cooper on board ships sailing to the Caribbean for molasses and mahogany. By 1744, he was a captain, and sailed as a privateer in the wars of the forties and fifties. By 1756, he had made enough money to retire from the sea, and he invested his savings in slaving voyages which were undertaken by his brother-in-law, Mark Antony de Wolf (or D’Wolf), and that adventurer’s sons. This de Wolf had signed on in Guadeloupe as a sailor during one of Potter’s journeys, though he is said to have been of United States stock—perhaps descended from a bastard line of the Dutch de Wolffs of New York in the 1670s.VIII
Simeon Potter’s first slave journey was that undertaken by Mark Antony’s son Charles in the Phoebe in 1757. Potter’s instructions to his captain, William Earle, on his slaver King George, seven years later, indicate his character as well as his literacy: “Worter [sic] yr. rum as much as possible and sell as much by the short mesure [sic] as you can.” Five of Mark Antony’s sons, Potter’s nephews, afterwards engaged in the slave trade, beginning in the 1780s. Of these, the youngest, Levi de Wolf, abandoned the business after one journey, apparently in disgust. His brother Charles had no qualms: he once told the local parson of the Congregational church, “Parson, I’ve always wanted to roll in gold.”29 He proceeded to lie down on a pile of canvas sacks full of that metal. William and John de Wolf, after making money in the slave trade, became respectively an insurer and a farmer. The great success, though, of the family was James de Wolf, later a United States senator and cotton manufacturer, who made a fortune between 1780 and 1808 in carrying and selling slaves, as will be seen in a subsequent chapter.IX
In the 1780s, French captains, meantime, carried 270,000 slaves. Nantes, still dominant, was responsible for 35 percent of this trade in 1785. But that port was pursued closely by ever more ardent rivals, such as Bordeaux, La Rochelle (seeking to compensate for the loss of the Canadian fur trade after 1763), Saint-Malo, and Honfleur.
The French profited greatly from the American Revolution, and recovered their old headquarters on the Sénégal at the peace in 1783. They re-established their interests, thereafter, in the trade south of that river. Ships leaving French ports for the Antilles averaged fifty-three a year during this war, in contrast with a mere eleven during the Seven Years’ War. Pierre-Paul Nairac, the leading slave merchant of Bordeaux, in 1777 paid the largest taxes in his city; as did Pierre Meslé at Saint-Malo, the leading slaver there. Businessmen in France were confident. One of the leading shippers of Nantes would write, in the early 1780s, to his brother: “The slave trade is the single branch of commerce which presents a perspective of benefits.”30 Marseilles also entered the slave trade seriously after 1774, though one slave ship had gone to Guinea from that city every four years or so since 1700. The single colony of Saint-Domingue, the “Eden of the West,” was now importing nearly forty thousand slaves a year; and, if the “grands seigneurs” of that rich colony slept “au pied du Vésuve,” as Mirabeau would shortly put the matter, their feasting hours in their lovely houses were full of gaiety.31
Spain, too, was expanding her slave traffic. In 1777, she gained from Portugal the neglected islands of Annobón and Fernando Po, in the Gulf of Guinea, in order to have bases from which to supply her colonies with the much-needed slaves in the now permitted direct trade to Africa. Portugal also agreed that Spain should be able to engage freely in the slave trade from Cape Formoso, at the mouth of the Niger, and Cape Lopo Gonçalves, south of the estuary of the Gabon (she did not occupy them, though).
So it was that, in 1780, the African trade in slaves seemed an essential part of the economies of all advanced countries, both a traditional thing, and one which was being adjusted to meet all modern opportunities: the cotton cloth of Lancashire—above all Touchett’s cotton checks, the very symbols of the new industrial process—were exported to secure African slaves. In France, too, cotton, unknown before 1700, was, as we have seen, being developed, and also in imitation of Eastern fabrics, in order to please the Africans: hence the pretty “indiennes” of Lille and Saint-Denis, as well as of Nantes, not to mention the cotton velvet of Evreux, Amiens, and Dieppe. Bordeaux seemed to be within reach of overtaking Nantes as the major slaving port of the country, making special efforts on the east coast of Africa, where her merchants were busy carrying slaves to Ile de France and Bourbon, as well as round the Cape of Good Hope to the Americas. French slave merchants even brought themselves sometimes to carry the popular and cheaper English cottons. The French also were expanding their African interests; for example, in 1778, Jean-François Landolphe created a trading post at Ughoton, on the Benin River, where the Portuguese had first begun to deal in slaves and pepper in the 1480s, nearer the sea than the capital, in succession to the Dutch there.32 Merchants in Nantes were adapting effectively to the times by christening, as the Montaudoins did, their ships the Jean-Jacques and even the Voltaire. (Liverpool merchants were less imaginative and remained with ships named the Charming Nancy or the Betty until the end of the traffic; but James de Wolf, of Bristol, Rhode Island, did own a slave ship which he called the Monticello.) All forward-looking planters of sugar realized that the new Otaheite cane, brought from the South Seas, would further increase the yield of well-organized sugar plantations and, for that reason, the planters in French colonies were already producing more than their Jamaican neighbors.
North American colonists continued to hold Indian slaves throughout the eighteenth century. But for reasons unrelated to morality, some colonies prohibited their import: for example, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island (between 1712 and 1714). The same prohibition later occurred in Jamaica (in 1741). The fear was that indigenous captives could, through their restlessness, inspire wars with the tribes from which they came. Other Europeans restricted the use of Indian slaves to certain tribes: the French in Canada seem to have used only the Pawnees.X These restrictions seem to suggest the need for an even greater emphasis on African labor.
Until this time, few in Europe or the Americas doubted that, however vile the condition of a slave might be in a sugar plantation or a gold mine, in Jamaica or in Brazil such a life was superior to anything which the person concerned might encounter in Africa. But these years of the greatest level of the Atlantic slave trade also saw the beginning of a discussion whether it was, after all, the right way for civilized men to make a fortune.
* * *
ISee page 297.
IISee page 486.
IIISee chapter 15.
IVMinorca had earlier been captured by France, and Pitt’s friend the sugar king, William Beckford, lord mayor of London 1762–63 and an MP, apparently advised that France would certainly exchange Martinique for Minorca at the peace.
VTwo hundred and seventy slaves were sold in Havana by Laurens’s rivals, the Charleston firm of Smith, Brewton and Smith.
VISee page 486.
VIIFor the pleasures of Bence Island, see chapter 17.
VIIISee page 187.
IXSee page 534.
XThe 1750s also saw the final formal prohibition of the enslavement of Amerindians in Brazil.
* * *
Book Four
THE CROSSING
15
A Filthy Voyage
“Your captains and
mates . . . must neither have dainty fingers nor dainty noses, few men are fit for these voyages but them that are bred up to it. It’s a filthy voyage as well as a laborious [one].”
Sir Dalby Thomas, commander of the Royal Africa Company at Cape Coast, the Gold Coast, c. 1700
“Look at that shipbuilder who, bent over his desk, determines, his pen in hand, how many crimes he can make occur on the coast of Guinea; who examines at leisure the number of guns he will have need of to obtain a black, how many chains he will need to have him garrotted on his ship, how many strokes of the whip to make him work. . . .”
Abbé Raynal, L’Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, 1782 edition
THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE was, for much of its long life, a governmental enterprise in the countries concerned. The Portuguese Crown set the tone, in establishing the principle that expeditions to the coast of Africa had to be approved by its Casa da Guiné, and were subject to taxation. Certain merchants were given licenses to trade in slaves and other “merchandise” in Africa, the assumption being that they would sell sublicenses to other traders. An early beneficiary, as we have seen, was the formidable Lisbon Florentine Bartolommeo Marchionni, who had the privilege of trading on the Slave River, Benin, between 1486 and 1493, and in the “rivers of Guinea”—that is, Sénégal, Gambia, and so on—between 1490 and 1495. In the sense that he operated on the grand scale, but with governmental backing he was the characteristic European slave merchant.
By the sixteenth century, it had been laid down that a Portuguese trader to West Africa, for gold as well as slaves, should discharge charitable obligations in Lisbon and also help to maintain the clergy in the Cape Verde Islands; should send at least twelve ships to Africa within three years; should undertake not to sell or barter European weapons to the Africans; and should accept that the settlers in the Cape Verde Islands would trade freely on the mainland opposite, with their own produce, and bring back as many slaves as they personally needed. For many years, traders in slaves who went to West Africa were also supposed to stop at Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands, and pay duties; though they often did not, and so an official was appointed to collect those taxes on the African river Cacheu. Later, the Portuguese Crown generally agreed to farm out the collection of all these taxes to various businessmen, who made money in consequence, in Angola as well as in the Cape Verde Islands and elsewhere, till a change of policy was introduced in 1769 by the great reformer Pombal. All the same and despite the participation of many entrepreneurs, the prime mover in the slaving business was the state.
There were similar obligations in Spain with respect to merchants who bought slaves from the Portuguese before taking them to the New World; a license was required from the very beginning, and there was, on top of that, a tax of two ducats for every slave delivered. Later, as has been amply shown, the asiento, or contract, to deliver slaves to the Spanish empire was another much-valued source of income for the Spanish Crown.
In different ways, the French, the English, and the Dutch crowns developed similar financial interests in the slave trade and monarchs from King Louis XIV of France to King George I of England, the kings of Sweden and Denmark, not to speak of the stadtholder in Holland and the duke of Courland, divided though they might be on every other matter, had a mutual interest in the prosperity of the slave traffic.
The main trading nations also created privileged companies concerned to carry slaves from Africa to the New World; the Portuguese, for example, founded the Cacheu Company, in the seventeenth century, and the Maranhão and Pernambuco companies in the late eighteenth century; Holland had their very grand West India Company, and Britain established the Royal Adventurers, the Royal Africa Company, and in the end, the South Sea Company. Spain, too, had numerous companies with a privileged status in the eighteenth century; and the reader will sensibly have forgotten how many Guinea companies were founded by France after Colbert established the first one in the 1670s. There was also John Law’s extraordinary New Company of the Indies. Even the Scandinavian countries had their special, if more modest, enterprises. All these firms sought to establish numbers of slaves to be carried, as well as the prices at which they were to be sold, and interfered in other ways with the free working of the market. Only the Portuguese tried to interfere in order to lay down rules how the slaves were to be treated and transported.
The only nation free from this curious mixture of capitalism and state management was the United States, one of the smallest of slave carriers.
These state companies were directed by a diversity of individuals, half bureaucrats, half entrepreneurs but, in the end, it was recognized almost everywhere that private enterprise, with as few restrictions as possible, brought the best results.
The individual slave trader who played such a part in the eighteenth century, in particular, is a person of consuming interest. The typical “slaver”—we can, oddly enough, use the noun for the individual and for his ship—is easy enough to picture, in his substantial countinghouse, with meeting rooms on the ground floor of that building, bedrooms for the family on the first floor and, above, rooms for his clerks. The fine hôtels of the Montaudoins in Nantes, and the Nairacs in Bordeaux, with the head of Neptune over the big door, are admired today; and, though one can only imagine their equivalents in London (where the redevelopment of the late twentieth century finished what the Luftwaffe began), there are streets in both Liverpool and Bristol where houses of old slave traders still stand. Stanislas Foäche can be traced in Le Havre (just), and Jean-Baptiste Prémord in Honfleur, as can Coopstad, Rochussen, and Michiele Baalde in Rotterdam. The noble houses of slave merchants of Spain’s golden age, such as the Caballeros and and the Jorges, and the families of the Genoese Corzo and Pero López Martínez, survive in old Seville. Across the Atlantic, the splendid mansions of Nicholas and John Brown in Providence, George de Wolf (Linden Place) in Bristol, or the Vernon family in Clarke Street, Newport, are still visited—even if Philip Livingston’s house in Duke Street, New York City, has vanished, along with his splendid country mansion in Brooklyn Heights.I
A typical slaving expedition in the eighteenth century would require a substantial sum to fit out: perhaps 250,000 livres in France, the same kind of sum, the admirable historian of the trade from La Rochelle, Jean-Michel Deveaux has pointed out, as would be needed to buy a large house (hôtel particulier) in a fashionable street in Paris, such as the Rue Saint-Honoré.
The typical slave trader was interested in all kinds of commerce as well as slaves: he might be a banker, such as Pierre Cornut, who financed the second slave voyage from Bordeaux in 1684; or always also concerned in whaling, in order to make spermaceti candles, as was the case with the Browns of Providence or Aaron Lopez in Newport, Rhode Island; or he might have been a man such as the giant John Brown, who drew his brothers into the slave business and then became interested in the China and Baltic trades, insurance and banking, in gin as well as in slaving; while Richard Oswald of London was first interested in tobacco, from Maryland, and did well as a commissary feeding the British troops in Germany in the Seven Years’ War. All the Basque merchants, such as Ariosteguí or Uriarte, who led the Spanish slave commerce in the second half of the eighteenth century, were general traders, for whom slaving was an important but not a dominating part of their commercial activities. Jacques-François Begouën-Demeaux reached Le Havre in the 1720s, made a fortune, and then embarked on the slave trade about 1748. He always limited his interest to a third share. Richard Lake, who both bought and sold slaves in Jamaica, was known also as “a great coffee planter,” very generous in his manners, and hospitable, too. Etienne Dhariette, the first large slave merchant of Bordeaux, had, in the 1670s, an interest in 133 ships which left his city for the West Indies as well as Africa, many carrying engagés, French indentured laborers—masons, surgeons, and coopers—to the “islands,” even if he soon saw that he could make more money carrying blacks than whites. The same was true of the Liverpool slave merchant Foster Cunliffe, who ope
rated so successfully in Chesapeake Bay as well as Liverpool. Samuel Sedgely of Bristol was a slave trader who interested himself in carrying convicts to Maryland, as did Lyonel Lyde, one of the partners of Isaac Hobhouse, who had interests in copper. Sugar and tobacco, rice and indigo were traded by many of these merchants in the New World, as well as East Indian cloth, silk, iron bars from Sweden, copper goods, and linen in the Old.
The purchase of plantations in the West Indies was a preoccupation for some slave traders: Abraham Redwood, Aaron Lopez, James de Wolf, and George de Wolf all had them, as did Simeon Potter, the father of slaving at Bristol, Rhode Island. The London Scotsman Sir Alexander Grant, one of the dealers in slaves whose ships turned to Havana in 1762, had been a country doctor in Jamaica, to begin with, but had seven plantations on that island, totaling eleven thousand acres, at his death in 1772; his ships carried his own sugar back to En-gland, and their captains bought slaves at the mouth of the river Sierra Leone (from a property of which he was also part owner, Bence Island). John Tarleton of Liverpool most unusually had an estate and a store in Curaçao. The wife of Richard Oswald, Mary Ramsay, inherited land in Jamaica, to which her husband carried slaves; he himself not only owned part of the island off the river Sierra Leone on which to assemble his cargoes bought in Africa but, like Samuel Touchett of Manchester, also had property in the then undeveloped Florida, where he bred slaves.