The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Of one hundred journeys by Dutch ships in the second half of the century, forty-one seem to have registered losses. A careful analysis of Dutch slaving expeditions undertaken both by the Dutch West India Company and by interlopers suggested profits of little more than 3 percent, with an annual gain of 2 percent at most on investments. A study of the Middelburg company suggested that, between 1761 and 1800, it must have had an annual profit of only 1.43 percent, though it had cleared over 8 percent in 1751-60.

  A similar study of the Maranhão Company of Brazil in the mid-eighteenth century suggested a profit of 30 percent, but that figure did not take into account many costs.

  From the early eighteenth century onwards, there were always voices within the Danish West India Company arguing that the slave trade bought losses: Frederik Holmsted, the company’s bookkeeper from 1708, was a critic of the trade for that reason.IX

  To sum up: considerable profits were made in the slave trade in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At the end of the latter era, however, prices of slaves rose considerably in Africa so that profits averaged 8 to 10 percent, the same kind of percentage obtained in much more ordinary commercial undertakings. But some skillful, or lucky, merchants continued to prosper greatly. At all times, the costs of the privileged companies in salaries, upkeep of forts, and other bureaucratic activities limited their profits. The decline in profitablity of the traffic at the end of the eighteenth century was undoubtedly in the minds of some traders in slaves by 1780; but that does not seem to have had much effect of the extraordinary course of events then about to transpire.

  * * *

  IClaver was canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1888.

  IIThe intendant and the commissaire were important officials in France, and the offices had been extended to the empire.

  IIIFor another joke which went horribly wrong, see page 718.

  IVA piece-of-eight was a peso, or Spanish dollar, equal to eight reals.

  VSee Appendix 4.

  VIAlexander von Humboldt, traveler, naturalist and polymath, author of Voyage aux régions équinoxiaux du nouveau continent.

  VIIFor which see page 523.

  VIIIEarl Hamilton carried out thousands of calculations when working on his admirable history of the effects of the import of gold and silver on prices in Spain.

  IXBut the company never listened. Its directors always believed that the colonies in the West Indies—Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix—had to be served.

  * * *

  Book Five

  ABOLITION

  23

  Above All a Good Soul

  “One cannot put oneself into the frame of mind in which God, a very wise being, put a soul, above all a good soul, into an entirely black body.”

  Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois

  “THE ATTRACTIVE AFRICAN METEOR,” as a pamphleteer employed by the bakers of Liverpool later described the Atlantic slave trade, was at its height in the 1780s.1 Well-equipped ships carried about seventy thousand or more Africans every year to enthusiastic ports all along the coastlines of North and South America and the Caribbean. Perhaps half that number were carried by captains from that most modern and freedom-loving of nations, Great Britain. About two-thirds of the captives sent from Africa were taken to colonies making sugar, the most sought-after of tropical products. There may have been three million slaves altogether in the New World. William Pitt, the British prime minister from 1783, thought that the West India trade, which depended so heavily on slaves, was responsible for four-fifths of the income reaching Britain from across the seas.2

  Many subsidiary trades depended on the traffic in slaves—cotton in Manchester and Rouen, wool from Exeter, rum from Rhode Island, brandy from Rio de Janeiro, wine from Bordeaux and La Rochelle, guns from Birmingham and Rotterdam. All those concerned knew the “African trade” to be an important outlet.

  Every few years, new developments, maritime or technological, appeared, to make things easier for the many practitioners. Thus, in the 1770s, slave vessels began to sail with copper-sheathed bottoms, which resisted shipworm and sailed faster.I Even in Luanda, that white man’s grave in Angola, a prudent Portuguese governor was introducing new standards of hygiene on vessels bound for Brazil, and insisting that his own officials should inspect the ships, rather than leave the task to local men.

  Imperial authorities in Europe were becoming less concerned with national exclusiveness. After 1783, France opened up her slave ports in the Caribbean to foreign traders, provided that they paid a tax. The liberal viceroy of New Granada, Archbishop Caballero y Góngora, inspired an active commerce in slaves between Cartagena and the English Antilles in the mid-1780s.

  The biggest French slaving port, Nantes, which sent more than fourteen hundred slaving expeditions to Africa in the eighteenth century, and was in the 1780s challenging Liverpool as the largest carrier of slaves, had “that sign of prosperity which never deceives, namely new buildings. The quartier near the Comédie [the new theater] is magnificent, all the streets at right angles and of white stone,” wrote Arthur Young. “I doubt whether there is in all Europe a better inn than the Hôtel Henri IV.”3 We catch a glimpse of these remarkable aristocrats of commerce, the slave traders of Nantes, in a memoir of Francis Lefeuvre: “They form a class apart, never mixing, save when business requires it, with the other merchants who approach them only with signs of a profound respect. . . . They are important personages, leaning on high, gilt-topped canes . . . dressed in full city regalia, their hair carefully arranged and powdered, with suits made of dark- or light-colored silks according to the season; wearing long waistcoats, and breeches, also of silk, and white stockings and shoes with large gold or silver buckles. They carry a sword. . . . What should be most admired is their fine linen and the resplendence of their shirts, which they send to be washed in the mountain streams of Saint-Domingue, where water whitens clothes much better than in French rivers.”4

  In England, Temple Luttrell, MP for Milborne Port in England, reflected the accepted wisdom when he declared, in the House of Commons in 1777: “Some gentlemen may . . . object to the slave trade as inhuman and impious; let us consider that, if our colonies are to be maintained and cultivated, which can only be done by African negroes, it is surely better to supply ourselves . . . in British bottoms.”5 Not for nothing, it might be added, was he the grandson of a governor of Jamaica.

  Ambitious European powers were expanding their Caribbean interests. Sweden, in 1784, received an island, the barren Saint-Barthélemy, in the Lesser Antilles, with about 408 slaves and 542 French settlers, from King Louis XVI, in return for permitting French trading privileges at home in Gothenburg. The governor of this new colony sought to build a Swedish slave trade, though that idea foundered.

  But as already hinted, a phenomenal change was on its way. In Britain, in the Anglo-Saxon colonies, in France, and then in the many places where French and English ideas were influential, hostility was growing towards both the slave trade and the very existence of slavery.

  • • •

  The seventeenth century, otherwise so productive of political ideas, had little critical to say of the slave trade. Milton, it is true, wrote some fine lines in Paradise Lost which insisted that:

  Man over men

  He [God] made not lord, such title to himself

  Reserving, human left from human free.6

  But it is obscure whether he thought of Africans as included within that generous comment. Both Grotius and Hobbes considered slavery to be as reasonable as Sir Thomas More had. Locke saw slavery as a “state of war continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive.”7 He probably inspired a paragraph accepting slavery in his draft of the “Fundamental Constitutions” or “Grand Model of the new colony of Carolina”; and, as has been seen, he was also a shareholder in the Royal African Company. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, preached brotherhood by letter to the slaveowners of the West Indies, and denounced slavery in Barbados; but in Pennsylvania
he, like his disciple William Penn, the founder of the colony, owned slaves.

  There had been for some time considerable unease over the matter of slavery in the Catholic Church. But the proclamations by Crown or pontiff continued to denounce the enslavement of the mild Indians rather than the competent Africans. Firm statements of King Philip III of Spain (II of Portugal) spoke in 1609 of “the great excesses that might occur if slavery were to be permitted in any instance.”8 But that monarch was evidently speaking of Indian slaves. Pope Urban VIII (Barberini), in a letter in 1639 to his representative in Portugal, condemned slavery absolutely, and threatened with excommunication those who practiced it. This denunciation derived explicitly, however, from the journey of Spanish Jesuits to Rome to protest against the enslavement of thousands of Brazilian Indians by the bandeirantees of São Paulo.9

  Still, the proclamation of Pope Urban’s statement caused an uproar in Brazil. The Jesuits, who were known to have urged it, were expelled from their college in Rio. But, again, the controversy affected only the Indian slaves. It is true that missionaries, in letters to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, often described the evil effects of slavery on their own work, and there was a further meaningless papal condemnation of the institution in 1686. But in the Atlantic-facing ports, Catholics were as deaf to such statements as were Protestants. There is no record in the seventeenth century of any preacher who, in any sermon, whether in the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux, or in a Presbyterian meeting house in Liverpool, condemned the trade in black slaves. La Rochelle and Nantes were far apart in matters of religion, but they were as one on the benefits of the trade in slaves. The greatest preacher of the age, António Vieira, was the friend of Amazonian Indians—but not of African slaves, whose plight he seems never to have mentioned, in any of his astounding sermons. Indeed, like Las Casas 150 years earlier, he urged solving the problem of shortage of labor in Brazil by importing more African slaves, in order to enable the Indians to live better.

  As will be recalled, the Dutch West India Company at first pronounced against the idea of trading slaves. Early-seventeenth-century Amsterdam, indeed, took a humane attitude to such things. The work of Bredero has been discussed.II But by the mid-1620s, these hesitations were forgotten—a reminder that humanity can diminish as well as grow, in the seventeenth as well as in the twentieth century.

  Meantime, there had been just a few irritants to the slave traders in France. When it was proposed that Africans should be introduced into the French empire, Louis XIII is supposed to have paled and said no, since slavery was forbidden on French territory. He was, however, convinced that, in removing these unhappy beings from paganism, the négriers would convert them to the religion of Christ. On his deathbed, he apparently said that “since the savages would be converted to the Christian faith, they would become French citizens, capable of all the responsibilities, honours, and donations” of a Frenchman;10 and France in the seventeenth century became used to seeing blacks, mostly from the Antilles, but some from Africa direct: for example, the slave Aniaba, christened by Bossuet, the black servant of Queen Anne of Austria. In 1642, the Protestant synod at Rouen had to reproach “over-scrupulous persons who thought it unlawful for Protestant merchants to deal in slaves”:11 a helpful remark for the commerce, since Rouen was about to embark on a long, if minor, life as a slave port. In 1698, a theologian, Germain Fromageu, presiding over a tribunal in Paris for cases of conscience, denounced the many slave traders, and owners, who did not ensure that their slaves were fairly procured—that is, by war, not kidnapping. Still, these were pinpricks, and the French trade in slaves, as has been seen, enjoyed profits throughout the eighteenth century.

  In spite of the denunciations of Indian slavery by the pope and others, there was little difference in the Europeans’ treatment of Indian and African slaves. Indians captured by the Anglo-Saxon colonists of North America were sometimes punished by being shipped to the West Indies. Such hesitations as the colonists felt about enslaving Indians derived from raison d’état as much as piety: it was thought dangerous to antagonize certain peoples. For that reason—not, it would seem, from delicacy of sentiment—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island all banned the import of Indian slaves, in the early eighteenth century; Jamaica (where the indigenous population had long since died out) did the same, though not till 1741.

  Some criticism could be heard in England during the second half of the seventeenth century of the profitable trade in English indentured servants: but, in 1670, a bill prohibiting the export of convicts was rejected, and another, against the theft of children, was never properly discussed. Judge Jeffreys, showing a humanity for which he is not generally renowned, wanted to imprison a mayor of Bristol who permitted the kidnapping of servants, but the merchants who benefited were not restrained.

  All the same, at the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon adventure in North America, there were a few doubts about the morality of the slave trade, even of slavery as such. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties in 1641, for example, made a Delphic statement: “There shall never be any Bond-Slavery, Villeinage, or Captivity amongst us, unless it be lawful captives taken in just wars and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us . . . provided this exempts none from servitude who shall be judged thereto by authority.”12, III But, of course, the concept of a “just war” was less clear than it should have been.

  In 1644, a New England ship returned from Africa with two slaves; a legal dispute showed that the slaves had been kidnapped, not bought, in Africa. The magistrates in Massachusetts ordered the slaves returned to Africa and the responsible seamen arrested. An early act of the General Court of Rhode Island also included the tart reflection that, though there was “a common course practised amongst Englishmen to buy negers, to that end that they might have them for service for ever,” Rhode Islanders were adjured to prevent “black mankind or white being forced by covenant bond or otherwise . . . to serve any men . . . longer than ten years.”13 This was an instruction which Rhode Islanders in particular would find it hard to fulfil.

  These documents are ambiguous, giving to some modern writers evidence that slavery was abhorrent to the early settlers, and to others proof that Massachusetts was as conscious of the need for slaves as any other colony. In truth, the availability of indentured servants from Europe blunted the need for slaves until, in the early eighteenth century, people in England began to worry about underpopulation more than overpopulation; the indentured servant, however, with his commitment to work for only ten years, was always more expensive than the black slave.

  These attitudes in North America were given some support by a petition of the Reverend Richard Saltonstall who, in 1645, denounced not only the murder of certain black slaves who were said to have been brought to New England from Africa, but also “the act of stealing negers, or of taking them by force . . . on the Sabbath Day,” as being “contrary to the law of God and of this country.”14 But Cotton Mather, one of the founders of Yale, and a constant advocate of fair treatment of slaves, seemed, in several of his 450 published works, uncomfortable about the “fondness for freedom” in so many captives’ minds: as slaves in America, he said, voicing an opinion shared by thousands of Europeans, “they lived better than they would have done as free men in Africa.”15 All these contradictions derived from the fact that there were no laws in English North America stating positively that slavery was legal, but it was assumed to be so from immemorial usage.

  These dignified ambiguities in North America did not last. Joseph Dudley, a cold, ambitious, and effective governor of Massachusetts, was found reporting that the province had 550 slaves in 1708, mostly in Boston and mostly bought in the West Indies. In Rhode Island, hostility to slaves (if it was indeed ever profound) came to be limited by the desire of its assembly to realize duties on their import. Slaves came there, though “the whole and only supply to this colony is from . . . Barbados.”16

  Some English Protestant voices were heard
attacking slavery in the late seventeenth century—just when English participation in the trade was beginning. The Puritan Richard Baxter, for example, compared English slaveholders to Spanish conquistadors: an accusation intended to be highly insulting. It was better, he thought, to call those who owned slaves demons than Christians. Then the remarkable Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to make a living as a writer, praised, in 1688, in her Oroonoko, or the History of a Royal Slave, about a Cormantine from the Gold Coast, with a face of “perfect ebony,” killed after leading a doomed slave revolt in Surinam—the Dutch colony which Mrs. Behn had known as a child, where her alleged father had been lieutenant-governor during its shortlived time as an English colony. A dramatic version of the novel in 1696 (by Thomas Southerne) presented these noble slaves’ predicament to fascinated audiences in both England and France for nearly a hundred years. Oroonoko, it is true, offered “gold or a vast quantity of slaves” in return for his own liberty—thereby indicating an egotism which would not please later antislave agitators. Yet Aphra Behn’s contribution to the preparation for the abolitionist movement can scarcely be exaggerated. She helped to prepare literary people’s minds for a change on humanitarian grounds. She was more influential than popes and missionaries.17