The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  This view was also expressed, privately, in 1736, from his lovely estate of Westgrove, near Jamestown, Virginia, by Colonel William Byrd, son of the London-born merchant of the same name who had “imported, used and sold many slaves [from Barbados],” in a letter to Lord Egmont, the president of the trustees of the newly founded colony of Georgia.VIII He envied Georgia’s prohibition on the import of slaves—a ban which would be only briefly maintained—and commented: “I wish, my Lord, we could be blest with the same prohibition. They import so many negroes hither that I fear this colony will some time be confirmed by the name of New Guinea. I am sensible of many bad consequences of multiplying these Ethiopians amongst us. They blow up the pride and ruin the industry of our white people who, seeing a rank of poor creatures beneath them, detest work, for fear it should make them look like slaves. Another unhappy effect of many negroes is the necessity of being severe. Numbers make them insolent and then foul means must do what fair will not. We have, however, nothing here like the inhumanity which is practised in the islands [the West Indies] and God forbid that we ever should. But these base tempers require to be rid with a taut rein, or they will be apt to throw the rider. . . . Private mischiefs are nothing if compared to the public danger. We have already 10,000 men of the descendants of Ham fit to bear arms.”35

  Similar views were also expressed in Georgia itself; thus certain Scottish colonists of Darien declared that it was shocking “to human nature that any race of mankind . . . should be sentenced to perpetual slavery; nor in justice can we think otherwise of it, than they are thrown amongst us to be our scourge one day or another for our sins; and as freedom to them must be as dear as to us, what a scene of horror must it bring about. . . .” George Whitfield, who spent some time in the colony as secretary to Governor Oglethorpe, wrote an open letter to the other Southern colonies in which he complained not so much about the slave trade (of which matter, he curiously said, he was not capable of deciding the legality) as about the fact that the settlers treated their slaves worse than they did their horses.36

  Slave revolts were understandably on everyone’s mind. More than a dozen major ones took place during the eighteenth century in Jamaica, where escaped slaves carried on guerrilla war in several colonies in the forested mountains. There had been a slave revolt on Long Island in 1708, and others in the city of New York in 1712 and 1733; in 1739, a group of slaves in South Carolina seized arms and began to march south to Florida—to, that is, as they ignorantly supposed, freedom.

  The official position in South Carolina was interesting for a different reason. Advising the king to reject the petitions of merchants of London and Bristol in 1733 against a duty on the import of slaves, the council chamber of that colony insisted: “The importation of negroes, we crave to inform Your Majesty, is a species of trade that has exceedingly increased of late in this province where so many negroes are now trained up to be handicraft tradesmen, to the great discouragement of Your Majesty’s white subjects, who come here to settle with a view to employment in their several occupations, but must often give way to a people in slavery.”37 Lewis Timothy, printer of the Laws of South Carolina, and for a time a partner of Benjamin Franklin, wrote in the South Carolina Gazette (which he owned) in 1738 that the slave merchants were ruining the colony by persuading so many planters to buy Negroes: “Negroes may be said to be the bait proper for catching a Carolina planter, as certain as beef to catch a shark. How many under the notion of eighteen months’ credit have been tempted to buy more negroes than they could possibly expect to pay for in three years?”38

  Several colonial assemblies in North America would soon vote to impose prohibitive duties on the import of slaves, precisely out of anxiety lest the import might grow out of control and public order be threatened. In 1750, for example, Pennsylvania imposed a duty on the import of slaves which was supposed to be prohibitive. In Virginia, in 1757, Peter Fontaine, the Huguenot rector of Westover, wrote to his brother Moses about their “intestine enemies, our slaves,” though he added: “To live in Virginia without slaves is morally [sic] impossible. . . . A common labourer white or black if you should be so much favored as to hire one, is a shilling sterling or fifteen pence currency a day . . . that is, for a lazy fellow to get wood and water £19-16s-3d per annum; add to this [only] seven or eight pounds more and you have a slave for life. . . .”39

  In 1769, New Jersey also imposed a prohibitive duty of fifteen pounds a head on imports of slaves. In 1771, a duty of eight to nine pounds brought the trade to an end in Maryland for a time. North Carolina, unlike its southern neighbor never a big employer of slaves, experienced some protests. Thus the freeholders of Rowan County resolved “that the African trade is injurious to this colony, obstructs the population of it by freemen, prevents manufacturers and other useful immigrants from Europe from settling amongst us, and occasions an annual increase of the balance of trade against the colonies.” Three weeks later, the Provincial Congress resolved: “We will not import any slave . . . nor purchase any slave . . . imported or brought into this province by others from any part of the world after the first day of November next.”40 Slaves who arrived after the date concerned were to be reshipped to the West Indies. About the same time, the Rhode Island Assembly prohibited the import of slaves and determined that any slave brought in would be freed. But the Assembly was then too weak to ban slave traders operating out of Newport. None of these prohibitions, it is worth emphasizing, was decided upon for reasons of humanity. Fear and economy were the motives.

  What became the main argument against slavery and the traffic in Africans, outrage at the very idea of slave traffic, was slow to gather civilized support, even in England, France, and North America. Elsewhere, the process was still more lethargic, being confined to isolated statements by writers whose works, however well intentioned and high-minded, gained little currency. Among these, for example, were two Portuguese polemicists: first, André João Antonil who, in Cultura e Opulencia do Brasil por Suas Drogas e Minas, published in Lisbon in 1711, demanded amelioration, not abolition; and, second, Frei Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha who, in Ethiope Resgatado, Empenhado, Sustenado, Corregido, Instruido e Libertado, published in Lisbon in 1758, went so far as to demand an end to the slave trade and the substitution of free for slave labor. He remarkably argued that all slaves should be prepared for eventual freedom, for he thought the slave trade was illegal “and ought to be condemned as a deadly crime against Christian charity and common justice.”41 However contemptuous the Anglo-Saxons might later be about such Portuguese attitudes to the slave trade, this was a denunciation before anyone in Britain or North America had gone nearly so far.

  Just one indication is available to show that, in these years, the moral side of the slave trade was at least being considered by some practitioners. In August 1736, Antonio de Salas, the Spanish governor in Cartagena de Indias, wrote to his king, Philip V, to complain that the South Sea Company was importing “black Christians” into the Spanish empire, specifically from the region of the river Congo. The king understood the point: it was not lawful, he replied, “to enslave anyone born free, nor is it lawful that any Christian should enslave another.”42 But now that the slaves had arrived, he declared, they were better off in the hands of the Spaniards than in those of English Protestants. It seems that those slaves remained in Cartagena, and the outbreak of war with England in 1739 prevented Philip from having to reconsider his policies. Anyway, the collection of laws relating to the Indies which had so painstakingly been put together in Madrid in the 1680s contained only brief references to black slaves.

  The great wave of ideas, and emotions, known in France, and those who followed her, as the Enlightenment, was (in contrast to the Renaissance) hostile to slavery, though not even the most powerful intellects knew what to do about the matter in practice. For example, the playwright Marivaux, the great Voltaire, the brilliant Montesquieu, the assiduous Diderot, and the contributors to the Encyclopédie, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all condemned
, or mocked, or denounced, slavery; but they assumed that all they had to do was to launch ideas into the cafés and governments would follow their advice, even if it was merely implicit. As early as 1725, Marivaux wrote his one-act play L’Ile des esclaves, in which two haughty Athenians, shipwrecked on an island inhabited by escaped slaves, exchange places with their own servant-slaves. Marivaux’s affection for the slaves derived from his contempt for antiquity. The theme of this work was: “The difference in human conditions is only a test to which the gods make us submit.” His Athenians are cured of inhumanity when they return to Athens. Though now the play seems mild, it was a success, being played twenty times in Paris and once in Versailles.43, IX

  The grand figure of the Enlightenment was, of course, Voltaire, who laughed at “those who call themselves whites . . . [but] proceed to purchase blacks cheaply in order to sell them expensively in the Americas.”X He also mocked the Church of Rome for having accepted slavery. In his Scarmentado, in 1756, he depicted a variation on the theme of Marivaux: A shocked European slave captain finds his ship and crew seized by Africans. The crew are enslaved. What right have you, the captain asks, to violate the law of nations and enslave innocent men? The African leader replies: “You have long noses, we have flat ones; your hair is straight, while ours is curly; your skins are white, ours are black; in consequence, by the sacred laws of nature, we must, therefore, remain enemies. You buy us in the fairs on the coast of Guinea as if we were cattle in order to make us labor at no end of impoverishing and ridiculous work . . . [so] when we are stronger than you, we shall make you slaves, too, we shall make you work in our fields, and cut off your noses and ears.”44 Voltaire too caused Candide to observe a young slave who had an arm and a leg cut off as the price demanded for the sugar which had to be sent to Europe. He also criticized slavery in his Dictionnaire philosophique in 1764, in rather an indirect manner, and argued that “people who traffic in their own children are more condemnable than the buyer; this traffic shows our superiority.”45, XI Not surprisingly, in view of that remark, he seems to have gambled in the slave trade himself. He accepted delightedly when the leading négrier of Nantes, Jean-Gabriel Montaudoin, offered to name one of his ships after him.46

  Montesquieu, more profoundly, believing as usual in the determining influence of climate on manners, thought that slavery, if inappropriate for Europe (at least then!), might have a natural basis in tropical countries, where “heat enervates the body” and no one could be expected to work unless he was made afraid of punishment. Unlike Voltaire, Montesquieu was much interested in the question, as was natural in one who had been president of the parlement of Bordeaux, a slave port. The core of his argument in L’Esprit des lois was that slavery was bad both for the master and for the captive: for the first, because the institution led him into all kinds of bad habits, causing him to become proud, impatient, hard, angry, louche (voluptueux), and cruel; and for the second, because the condition prevented him from doing anything virtuously. Montesquieu added an ironical passage: “If I were to try and justify our right to make slaves of the blacks, this is what I would say: The Europeans, having exterminated the peoples of the Americas, have had to enslave those of Africa, in order to ensure the clearance of a great deal of land. Sugar would be too expensive if one could not get slaves to produce it. The slaves I am talking about are black from head to toe, and they have such ruined noses that one can’t begin to complain of them. . . . One cannot put oneself into the frame of mind in which God, who is a very wise being, took it upon himself to put a soul, and a very good soul at that, into such an entirely black body.” He continued: “The blacks prefer . . . a glass necklace to one of gold, to which properly civilized [policées] nations give such consequence. [So] it is impossible for us to suppose these creatures are men because, if one were to allow them to be so, a suspicion would follow that we are not ourselves Christian.”47

  The author of L’Esprit des lois, like Marivaux, may not seem to be radical in the twentieth century. But his mocking insistence that slavery had to be discussed seriously was very important at the time. His remarks influenced everyone who thought of the matter thenceforth, even the modest reflections of the great Gibbon, in chapter II of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They were also the subject of an impassioned essay, Les Chaînes de l’esclavage, for the Académie Française in 1774, by the young Jean-Paul Marat, a tutor in Bordeaux in the early 1760s to the children of Pierre-Paul Nairac, the greatest slave merchant of that city.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, more extreme than anyone else, with regard to the issue of slavery as to everything, insisted that the essence of the institution was its dependence on force; and so, in his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (1755), he condemned slavery absolutely, describing it as the final manifestation of the degrading and idiotic principle of authority. In his Du contrat social (1762), he added: “However we look at the question, the right to enslave is null and void, not only because it is illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory.”48 Then Diderot’s great Encyclopédie (in the volume published in 1765), in its article on the slave trade (by Louis de Jaucourt, a hardworking and self-effacing scholar who seems to have taken many of his ideas from the Scottish philosopher George Wallace), stated, without equivocation: “This purchase [that is, of slaves] is a business which violates religion, morality, natural law, and all human rights. There is not one of those unfortunate souls . . . slaves . . . who does not have the right to be declared free, since in truth he has never lost his freedom; and he could not lose it, since it was impossible for him to lose it; and neither his prince, nor his father, nor anyone else had the right to dispose of it.” The Encyclopédie also stated firmly that if any slave entered France and was baptized he automatically became free. That was a procedure which was explained by “long usage” which had “acquired the force of law.”49

  These firm statements made antislavery part of new French radical thought; and, for once, radical thought coincided with Catholic thinking: in 1741, Pope Benedict XIV (Lambertini) repeated the prohibitions on slavery discussed a century before by Pope Urban VIII, in the decree Immensa. Benedict was, like so many of his predecessors, concerned primarily with prohibitions on Indian slavery in the New World, but the declaration clearly covered black slavery, too; and the papal nuncio in Lisbon later reported, among the causes for his distaste for the Jesuits in the Portuguese dominions, that the Society of Jesus “engaged in a slave trade.”50 But Benedict had even less importance than Urban in the commercial mind. Presumably some slave merchants thought that they had satisfied their consciences when they christened their ships Liberté, Ça-Ira, and Jean-Jacques, instead of Saint-Hilaire or Saint-François, and other saints’ names favored in the past.

  * * *

  IThe first naval vessel to be copper-sheathed was the frigate Alarm in 1761, and the second the discovery ship Dolphin.

  IISee page 162.

  IIIThe publication of these laws in 1672 left out the words “and such strangers.”

  IVThe romantic “Afric” figures often in poems such as these, reaching, via Milton, Swift, and Gay, its consummation in the preposterous line of Bishop Heber’s hymn, which speaks of “Afric’s sunny fountains.”

  VSee page 421.

  VIThese Germans had opposed the slave trade from early on: some Germans held slaves, but most of them thought the institution evil. The German press in North America differentiated itself from the English one in this respect, and generally did not carry advertisements for the sale of slaves, nor notices about escaped ones.

  VIIDid he mean Spartacus?

  VIIIThis was the eccentric John Perceval, who also had plans to make himself king of the Jews.

  IXJ. M. Barrie plagiarized the idea for his The Admirable Crichton.

  X “Ceux qui se disent blancs vont les acheter des nègres à bon marché, pour les revendre cher en Amérique.”

  XI“U
n peuple qui trafique en ses enfants est encore plus condamnable que l’acheteur; ce négoce démontre notre supériorité.”

  24

  The Loudest Yelps for Liberty

  “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

  Dr. Samuel Johnson

  “Il est surprenant de voir des hommes vendre leur liberté, leur vie, leurs concitoyens aussi tout étourdiment que font ces malheureux noirs. Passion! Ignorance que de morts vous faites au genre humain.”

  Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, ch. 197

  IN 1752, a prince known as William Ansah Sessaracoa, from Anamabo, on the Gold Coast, returned home to Africa after a stay in England. Visits of that kind had been made before, but no previous African had been so successful in English society. The expedition had arisen because the prince’s father, John Corrantee, had entrusted his son and a friend to a Liverpool slave captain to go to England to learn manners. The captain treacherously sold these African noblemen as slaves. The captain died and the officers on the slave ship informed the authorities in Jamaica what had happened. The prince and his companion were then taken to England and were looked after by the earl of Halifax, then president of the Board of Trade and Plantations.I They were educated, were introduced to the king and, according to the peerless letter-writer Horace Walpole, became the “fashion at all the assemblies.”1 They even went to the presentation of one of the many theatrical versions of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, at Covent Garden: “The dialogue between Oroonoko and Imoinda so affected the Prince that he had to retire weeping . . .” Walpole reported. The visit underpinned the existing disposition of humanitarians to romanticize the “noble negro,” the prince unjustly enslaved—forgetting the humbly born slaves whose sufferings were as many and as great.