The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  So it was scarcely surprising that it should have been the loyalist earl of Dunmore, governor of Virginia, who was the only commander to free slaves in an attempt to win black support for his side. But though some of these ex-slave warriors were inspired to wear emblems saying “Liberty for Slaves,” they were not much help militarily. The British government rejected Dunmore’s audacious scheme for reconquering the Southern colonies with a black army, even though many more slaves fought on the British side in the conflict than on that of the rebels (as many as fifty thousand may have been evacuated by the British to Canada or Nova Scotia; some of them later returned). The American revolutionary army also did use blacks (free blacks, at Lexington and Bunker Hill), then banned them, and afterwards allowed their reenlistment. John Laurens, son of the repentant Henry, tried to found an army of three thousand slaves in South Carolina, but failed to receive congressional support.

  Meantime, the rich British Caribbean colonies, led by Barbados and Jamaica, refused any idea of standing alongside the mainland colonies. They feared for their slaves. Britain was relieved: in 1773, British imports from Jamaica alone were five times the combined import from the thirteen colonies.

  One further contemporary comment should be noted. Edmund Burke, the philosopher-statesman, supported, as is well known, a policy of conciliation with the American colonies. But he was at that time a member of Parliament for Bristol, still one of the foremost slaving ports of Britain; and his fellow member Henry Cruger, a North American by birth, had often invested in slaving voyages. In his speech in the House of Commons in March 1775, advocating negotiations with the colonists, Burke opposed the idea of punishing the colonists by liberating their slaves. An offer of freedom, he said, “would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia and Carolina with a cargo of 300 negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the same instance to publish his proclamation of liberty and to advertise his sale of slaves.”30 But while the fighting for one kind of liberty was going on, there was not much thought given to the idea of liberty for slaves.

  Once the war was over, the subject of slavery began immediately to be discussed. Several states accepted not just an abolition of the slave trade, but actual emancipation. The motor of these remarkable changes was once more the Quakers, who recovered their standing at the peace; and the Society of Friends, at that time, was a transatlantic movement, in which members on both sides of the ocean were in constant touch. New polemicists took up the cudgels: David Cooper, for example, pointed out that Washington and his friends had asked God to deliver the Americans from oppression, when “sighs and groans” were to be heard in consequence of worse oppressions.31

  Thus Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780. The law admittedly applied only to future generations, and delayed freedom for any slaves till after they had reached the age of twenty-eight; participation in the slave trade by Pennsylvanians was not prohibited until 1789. Between 1780 and 1804, similar acts of gradual or qualified emancipation were carried through, not without opposition, in New York, New Jersey, and even in Rhode Island. Upper and Lower Canada, still British, with their small store of slaves, followed suit. By 1786, slaves could only legally be introduced into Georgia. How ironic, considering that that was the state which had legalized slavery as lately as 1750!

  There were numerous qualifications to these seeming acts of philanthropy. Rhode Island might have abolished slavery, but that did not mean that it outlawed slave merchants: indeed, in its Act of 1774 prohibiting the importation of slaves, Rhode Island had preserved the interests of her merchants by providing that, if they were unable to dispose of their slaves in the West Indies, they could bring them to the home state for a limited period of a year, and then re-export them at will. In New York, all existing slaves were to remain so, and slave merchants were still legally able to operate from that state’s ample shores.

  Enlightened opinion in England, with a somewhat larger number of slaves to consider than in the United States (there were probably close to 800,000 in the West Indies alone and, in the new United States, about 650,000), was, meantime, beginning to think not that slavery or the slave trade should be abolished, but that it was desirable to make slavery less cruel and better regulated. In 1780, for example, Burke conceived a scheme to make the slave trade and slavery humane, as well as to civilize the coast of Africa. He retreated, however, when he thought of the strength of the West Indian interest in the House of Commons.XII But the opposition of Scottish thinkers to slavery as such continued. Thus the historian William Robertson, who was a member of a debating society in Edinburgh to which both Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith belonged, explained, in his History of America, published in 1777, that the slave trade was “an odious commerce no less repugnant to the feelings of humanity than to the principles of religion.”

  More energetic opposition to slavery was now being expressed in France, which, in these years, seemed further from social upheaval than did England. In 1769, the poet Charles-François Saint-Lambert created, in his novel Zimeo, the curious personage of Wilmouth, the philanthropic Quaker; while in 1770, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, in L’An 2440: Rêve s’il en fut jamais, describes how the hero, awakened from a sleep of 772 years, finds a Paris where all injustices have vanished; where Greek and Latin are spoken in the street; and where he sees a “singular monument,” made of marble, depicting, “on a magnificent pedestal, a black, bare-headed, his arm outstretched, with a proud look, his attitude noble, imposing. Around him was the debris of twenty scepters. At his feet, one could read the legend ‘to the Avenger of the New World.’ ” The book was, of course, proscribed.32

  Then, in his Histoire philosophique et politique . . . des deux Indes, the Abbé Raynal (and his collaborators, who included Diderot) again argued that slavery was contrary to nature, and so universally wrong. The book now reads confusedly, though the language is eloquent and, at the time of its first publication—in Amsterdam, in 1770—its effect was electric. Raynal had been a Jesuit, a journalist on the Mercure de France, and had frequented the salons of Paris, including that of the famous Madame Geoffrin. One of his biographers has suggested that he himself had invested in trading slaves. All the same, he first described polemically the vile conditions in which most Africans lived in the New World, and said that the women were given such hard work that they could not think of having children. He thought that, whereas the Spaniards made their slaves the companions of their indolence, the Portuguese the instruments of their debauches, the Dutch the victims of their avarice, the English treated them as purely physical beings, and would never become familiar with them, never smile at them, or even talk to them. The French, Raynal thought, were less proud and so less disdainful, according their slaves a kind of a morality which enabled them to forget their intolerable condition. The Protestants, the abbé went on, allowed their captives to stew in their “mahommedanism” or their idolatry, provided they worked, whereas the Catholics thought themselves obliged to afford some sort of baptism, if only rudimentary.

  Raynal did think it necessary to try to make the conditions of existing slaves more supportable. Give them more music, he argued, let them dance, let the women be encouraged to have families so that there would be some laborers accustomed from childhood to the light of the Americas. “I shall . . . prove,” Raynal said proudly, “that there is no reason of state which can authorize slavery. I shall not be afraid to denounce to the tribunal of reason and justice those governments which tolerate this cruelty, or which are not even ashamed to make it the basis of their power.” He then systematically destroyed the arguments of all who, “executioners of their brothers,” sought to justify slavery, reserving a final thrust at those who argued that the enslavement of Africans was “the only way to conduct them to the eternal beatitude through the great benefit of holy baptism. Oh pious Jesus,” Raynal wrote, “would you have predicted that your sweet doctrines could be made the justification of such horror?�
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  The gradual disappearance of slavery in Europe, Raynal argued, had been the result not of religion but of the decisions of various monarchs who had thought that they would thereby ruin their feudal tenants. The Americas had offered an unlimited new field for the exploitation of human beings; and European expansion into America had been from the beginning marked by oppression. The slave trade, since the Renaissance, was to be attributed to a generation of pirates from both France and Britain. “Whoever justifies such an odious system deserves mocking silence from the philosopher,” said the abbé, “and a stab with a dagger from the black.”

  Raynal thought that the abolition of slavery would come as a result of a revolution of slaves led by a hero who would render “the Americans drunk with long-awaited blood” (such as had indeed nearly happened in a terrible slave rebellion on the Danish island of Saint John in 1731). The Code Noir, which was supposed to govern the treatment of slaves by their masters in French territories, would disappear and, in its place, there would be a Code Blanc, which would, he thought, be terrible enough if it were only to reflect the right of vengeance.33

  Though the clergy of Bordeaux demanded that Raynal’s work be prohibited because of its outrage to religion, and the parlement of Paris even ordered it burned by the public executioner, his influence quickly percolated throughout society. Thus it was because of having read him that a Huguenot merchant, A. Triquier, spoke out firmly in a meeting of the Academy at Marseilles in 1777: “But how can we pass over in silence the means which we have invented to ruin America after having devastated it? . . . Barbarians that we are!” Raynal, too, had addressed his fellow Europeans as “barbarians,” adding, “Will you persuade me that a man can be the property of a sovereign, a son of a father?” God, after all, was the Father, not the master. The speaker gained a prize for this lecture.34

  Still, for the moment, administrative action in response to the issues raised by the Quakers, by the philosophes, by Granville Sharp, by a few enlightened Portuguese friars, and by Raynal was confined to trying to draw a line between what pertained in the empires concerned, and what happened, or was allowed, at home. In 1773, in what was presented as an enlightened measure, “people of color” from Brazil were forbidden to enter Portugal. (Portugal had abolished slavery at home in 1750.)

  The last public sale of a black slave in England appears to have been in Liverpool in 1779. In 1777, a royal declaration forbade the entry of any black into France, because “they marry Europeans, they infect brothels, and colors are mixed.” Whether this law had any effect is doubtful: six years later, in 1783, a ministerial circulaire complained that black servants were still being disembarked: “They are daily confiscated; and their masters insist that they have not heard of the law of 1777.”35

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  IHe had a great fortune, which he had inherited from his wife’s grandfather, Sir Thomas Dunk, a clothier of Kent, whose woolens could scarcely have been absent from the ships of London slave dealers at the turn of the eighteenth century.

  IIIn his account of a journey to West Africa, to which several references have been made.

  IIISee page 272.

  IVIn these ideas Hutcheson was influenced by the enlightened third earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, a man supposed by Voltaire to have been “the greatest English philosopher” and whose work Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (published in 1701) gave a generous picture of the idea of benevolence. This was recognized by the slave captain John Newton, who found the book by chance when in the great Dutch slave port of Middelburg. But the modern reader cannot find much of interest in Shaftesbury except a few important phrases such as “moral sense,” which occurs in his Inquiry Concerning Virtue, of 1712.

  VFerguson had been chaplain to the Black Watch, in which capacity he had, to the astonishment of his colonel, charged the enemy at Fontenoy at the head of his men.

  VIIt should not, however, escape the present generation that this classic statement of the nature of English law was profoundly influenced by a great Frenchman.

  VIIBenezet’s favorite quotation from Montesquieu was that philosopher’s comment that slavery “is neither useful to the master nor slave; to the slave since he can do nothing through principle (or virtue); to the master because he contracts with his slave all sorts of bad habits and insensibly accustoms himself to want all moral virtues.”

  VIIIAdmiral John Byng’s squadron was defeated off the island of Minorca. He was court-martialed and executed on his own quarterdeck, the distant view of which tragedy caused Voltaire’s Candide to turn his ship round and return to France.

  IXBritish colonies usually had representatives in London to act on their behalf.

  XIt was he who nominated John Newton to the curacy of Olney. Richardson, when asked by Newton who was the original of his Sir Charles Grandison, replied, “Dartmouth, were he not a methodist.” He is described in the Dictionary of National Biography as “entirely without any administrative capacity.” But he was all the same one of the promoters of Dartmouth College.

  XIMorris was also an associate of Anthony Bacon, one of Liverpool’s most astute merchants who had provided slaves to the British colonies in the 1760s on the government’s behalf—though he had moved on to iron before the American Revolution and, the founder of the South Wales iron trade, was making money out of providing guns for the British army in North America.

  XIISome years earlier (despite his admiration for Montesquieu), he had shown that he was in no way concerned about the slave trade, when he wrote to a friend, Harry Garnet: “I shall only trouble you with one point more which is to recommend to your very serious consideration the consequences which will probably attend any project for altering the present constitution of the Royal African Company. The act upon which it stands was made by the most experienced men upon the most mature deliberation.”

  25

  The Gauntlet Had Been Thrown Down

  “The matter had now become serious. The gauntlet had been thrown down and accepted. The combatants had taken their station, and the contest was to be renewed, which was on the great theatre of the nation.”

  Thomas Clarkson, History, vol. II

  THE PEACE CONFERENCE between the new United States and Britain was held in Paris. Benjamin Franklin was the first United States negotiator. Though he was much involved in business throughout his life, and though he once advertised the sale of slaves in his newspaper, he had become a firm opponent of the slave trade, if not yet of slavery itself.I His British counterpart was David Hartley, the dull member of Parliament who had first raised the matter of the abolition of the slave trade in the House of Commons. But the deputies of these negotiators included two old partners in the slave trade, Henry Laurens of Charleston, and Richard Oswald of London (and Bence Island). Since his withdrawal from the slave trade, Laurens had been president of the Continental Congress. Oswald, chosen for his riches and knowledge of America, was a merchant with whom Laurens had often traded slaves, and had become the intimate adviser of the prime minister, Lord Shelburne (to whom, curiously enough, he had been presented by his fellow Glaswegian, Adam Smith). Oswald had looked after Laurens’s children when they boarded in London, had worked for Laurens’s release when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1781, and had even speculated in land in east Florida with Franklin (to whom he seemed a “truly good man”).1

  The association between Laurens and Oswald at opposite sides of the table at the famous peace conference of 1783 in Paris is a symbolic association in the history of the eighteenth century. Both men were Atlantic dealers, men whose activity was not limited to one country, and both had much to lose from a separation of North America from Britain, and even more from a bad peace marking that separation.

  With this sponsorship of the peace, it is scarcely surprising that the slave trade should afterwards revive as if nothing had happened. A member of a large firm in Nantes, Chaurand Frères (it fitted out eleven slavers between 1778 and 1790), understandably wrote, in
1782: “The slave trade is the only branch of commerce which presents perspectives of profit. The need of the colonies for slaves is so great that they will always be received with pleasure.”2

  The new Otaheite cane from the South Seas seemed a prescription for revived success even in old sugar plantations, and there was already talk of how James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s new Birmingham-made steam engines could simplify the business of boiling the sugar. This trade in slaves led to the production not just of sugar, but also of coffee. Saint-Domingue exported about twelve million tons of those benign beans a year in the late 1760s, and was selling over seventy-two million by 1789. In the 1780s, the consumption of coffee by the French increased in proportion to their interest in political freedom.

  British business and British politicians, too, seem to have had no doubt about the importance of the slave traffic. In 1787, the Board of Trade would be told that the British probably carried thirty-eight thousand slaves from Africa that year.

  In North America, despite disapproving legislation, merchants were dealing in slaves with more energy than ever. This was the era in particular of the rise of Bristol, Rhode Island, which began to replace the old dominating harbor, Newport, which took some time to recover from occupation by the British for two years. Several slave ships also left Boston in these years for Africa with “positive orders to take slaves only.” The tall figure of Colonel Thomas Handasyd Perkins of that city had recently established a good business selling slaves in Saint-Domingue. Baltimore merchants (Samuel and John Smith, William van Wyck, John Hollins, Stewart and Plunkett) were also all busy buying (and selling) slaves in the West Indies, as well as landing cargoes in Charleston.