The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  There was criticism outside the narrow political world which had reached this compromise. Samuel Bryan of Philadelphia, “Sentinel,” wrote in the Quaker Independent Gazetteer that, in the Constitution, “the words, dark and ambiguous . . . are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe that, in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in high stations.”18 In The Federalist, James Madison of Virginia replied, in more cautious terms than theretofore: “It ought to be considered a great point gained in favour of humanity that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these states, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy.” He added, quite fairly: “Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppression of their European brethren!”19

  There was a good deal of sporadic opposition to this clause of the Constitution. For example, General Thompson of Massachusetts asked: “Shall it be said that, after we have established our own independence and freedom, we make slaves of others?” George Mason, a planter of Virginia, and himself a slaveowner, engaged in an argument with Madison in which he declared himself against allowing the Southern states to enter the Union unless they agreed to discontinue the slave trade. But there was also opposition of a different kind: “Negroes were our wealth, our only natural resource; yet behold how our kind friends in the north were determined soon to tie up our hands and drain us of what we had”! Rawlins Lowndes of South Carolina, who had been born in Saint Kitts, had opposed independence from Britain and now openly opposed a federal constitution.20

  The two other clauses of the Constitution which mentioned slavery were also compromises: first the peculiar “three-fifths clause” (article I, section 2, paragraph 3), whereby members of the House of Representatives were to be elected in proportion to the populations of their states, taking into account three-fifths of the slaves who were there; and then the fugitive slave clause. But it was the article on the trade in slaves which excited most attention.

  The Constitution did not mean that individual states could not abolish the slave trade or slavery itself before 1808; and several more soon did so, in their own fashion. Thus New Jersey abolished slavery, and even imposed a duty on slaves who had been brought into the state since 1776. Moses Brown, Samuel Hopkins, and the Quakers of Rhode Island petitioned the legislators of that state to end the slave traffic and, to their surprise, a bill prohibiting the residents of the state from participating in it was passed. In 1788, as a result of more Quaker pressure, the legislature of Massachusetts also passed an act “to prevent the slave trade.” Its preamble denounced the “lust for gain” of those engaged in the “unrighteous commerce.” Connecticut abolished the trade in 1788, the prime mover being the theologian Jonathan Edwards Junior, at that time pastor of the White Haven Church at New Haven, an ally of the abolitionists of Rhode Island nearby: that was necessary if the prohibition in Rhode Island was to have a chance since, if there had been no prohibition in the next-door state, the Bristol and Providence slavers could easily have moved their business there. New York also abolished the trade in 1788. Even Virginia declared that illegally imported slaves were free. Delaware prohibited African slavery and imposed a fine of £500 per slave imported. Pennsylvania did the same, raising the fine to £1,000.

  Nobody thought that these prohibitions would be easily put into practice. The intermeshing of state and federal law was poor. The issue was bedeviled by problems of jurisdiction. A debate in Charleston on the import of slaves into South Carolina in 1785 had also suggested the kind of resistance to the very idea of abolition which would be met in North America at the local level: John Rutledge, the most gifted leader in South Carolina, and later chief justice of the state, proclaimed, unequivocally, that he “had been of opinion, for many years, that Negroes were the reason for an increase of our wealth; what number of slaves had been imported since the peace?”21 General Charles Pinckney, an aide to George Washington, a future minister to France, and an unsuccessful federalist presidential candidate in 1804 and 1808, thought that “this country is not capable of being cultivated by white men. . . . Negroes are to this country what raw materials are to another country. . . . No planter can cultivate his land without slaves.”22 (Pinckney was himself a substantial planter, at Belmont, Virginia, and in Charleston.)

  Had it not been for the destruction caused by the war, and the urgent demand for slaves in the South, the traffic in slaves might have been outlawed in 1787; and the history of the United States would have been different. But three states (North and South Carolina, and Georgia) continued to look on the trade as legal; and merchants in the Northern states continued to serve them. Thus began what W. E. B. Dubois, still the foremost historian of the abolition of the trade in the United States, described as “that system of bargaining, truckling and compromising with a moral, political and economic monstrosity, which makes the history of our dealing with the slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century so discreditable to a great people.”23

  The leaders of the states which had abolished the slave trade expected that state prosecutors, customs officials, and even private citizens would bring to book those who broke these laws. No such action followed till, in May 1789, a private citizen, William Rotch, a whaler and a member of the Providence Society for Abolition in Rhode Island, charged the owners of the brig Hope (John Stanton, Caleb Gardner—the “revolutionary hero” who had piloted the French fleet into Newport in 1780—and Nathaniel Briggs) with sailing from Boston to carry 116 slaves from Africa to Martinique. A case was heard, in the course of which the defense claimed that the defendants could not be tried because they were not citizens of Massachusetts. In the end, the prosecution won. But the case had taken so long, and the punishment was so derisory, that the victory seemed to all concerned a Pyrrhic one.

  The society to promote abolition in Philadelphia, which had been formed before the War of Independence, was meantime enlarged, with Benjamin Franklin as its president, and a mixture of Quakers and others, including Benjamin Rush, the founder of medical science in the United States and surgeon-general to the Continental Army during the war, were placed on its committee.X Moses Brown also founded a Providence Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. All these societies were attacked by slave interests in journals such as the Providence Gazette, in which the most powerful influence was John Brown, Moses Brown’s elder brother and now head of the firm of Nicholas Brown.XI

  There was as yet no sign whatsoever that these ideas had any echo in Portugal or in Spain, nor in their empires. Indeed, the Spanish government, as always in search of ready cash, was still toying with the idea of monopoly companies; and a new Company of the Philippines (largely composed of entrepreneurs previously involved in the old Caracas Company) was given an exclusive contract to exploit the new Spanish islands of Fernando Po and Annobón. These had been bought from Portugal in 1778, in order to trade slaves there; and, in 1786, that company was also given the right to import slaves into the region of the river Plate (the modern Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay), Chile, and Peru. But the Spaniards did not settle the new islands, all the same; and the company procured most of its slaves from large English houses. Their London agent made an arrangement with the big Liverpool shipbuilders turned slave merchants, Baker and Dawson, to import five to six thousand slaves a year at $155 each. (Peter Baker, the biggest shipbuilder for the navy, had embarked upon the slave trade about 1773. His daughter Margaret married James Dawson, who captained some of his father-in-law’s ships—among them the True Briton, which carried over five hundred slaves from Africa to Jamaica in 1776, despite an insurrection and the outbreak of war.)

  In 1788, when Baker and Dawson’s contract came up for renegotiation, the firm made a bid to introduce 3,000 slaves into Cuba every year. But their terms were unsatisfactory. The Spanish government, in no way showing that it was disconcerted by the new mood in London—or in North America, come to that—and at last
despairing of monopoly companies, on February 28, 1789, allowed as many slaves to be brought into Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela as the planters liked for the next two years. Slaves had, it is true, to be landed at specific ports (to assist collection of taxes), a third of the slaves had to be women and, as well as a government subsidy of four pesos per slave landed, a tax of two pesos was levied for slaves intended for domestic labor. Foreigners were limited to twenty-four hours in Spanish ports, their ships had to be of less than 300 tons, and they were not allowed to land in certain places, such as Santiago de Cuba, where the Crown feared that it was too easy for captains to escape the attention of officials. The policy was extended to the vice-royalty of New Granada (that is, Cartagena de Indias) in 1791, and to the remaining Spanish imperial territories, including Peru and the river Plate, in 1795.

  For some of the old slave centers, such as Cartagena de Indias, this liberalization of the laws came too late. From 1791 to 1794, only 262 slaves were legally imported; even if the real figure, taking into account contraband, was higher, the old slave trade to the South American mainland was in full decline, for reasons which had nothing to do with Anglo-Saxon abolitionism. For by this time, in both New Spain and New Granada (Mexico and Colombia), the indigenous, or mestizo, population was growing fast, and the need for African slave labor seemed less. But merchants in Cuba seized the opportunity: in consequence, 4,000 slaves were introduced in a single year, half of them by Baker and Dawson, as a result of the skillful salesmanship of their agent in Havana, Philip Allwood. In addition, the great landowners of the territory which would become, after independence, Venezuela, “los amos del valle” (to recall the title of Herrera Duque’s fine novel), with their large plantations of cacao in the valley of Caracas, were equally pleased, for they had always hated the silly restrictions on their imports of slaves which the old regulations had necessitated. They too were prominent customers of Barker and Dawson.

  More comfort still was given to the British traders in slaves by the arrival in England in 1787 of five planters and businessmen from the Spanish empire. These included the count of Jaruco, from Cuba, who came to buy modern sugar-processing equipment, and to discover how the British managed their sugar refineries and also their trade in slaves. No doubt Jaruco and his comrades discovered that most English sugar planters lived away from their properties. The Cubans certainly took back from England a steam engine which was for the first time put to use on one of Jaruco’s sugar plantations.

  William Walton, the Spanish honorary consul in Liverpool, told Lord Hawkesbury, the experienced president of the Board of Trade and Plantations (himself a West Indian proprietor), how these visitors had “been down to Manchester to look at the kinds of goods and their prices usually sold to the English African merchants, [and] since that they have been at Liverpool to view the town and the ships employ’d in the slave trade . . . how many hands each vesell carried . . . the list of cargoes necessary to purchase slaves on different parts of the Coast . . . which goods might be procured in Spain, which must be purchas’d in England, and which were East India goods; [and] whether the slave trade had been profitable to the Town of Liverpool at large. . . .

  “They likewise particularly enquir’d whether captains and doctors experienced in the Slave Trade might not be prevailed upon, by proper encouragement and great advantages given them, to go out to Cádiz and undertake the purchasing of the cargo, navigation of their vessells, and management of their Slaves. . . . They told me that the Court of Spain propos’d to have a slave trade of her own. . . .”24

  The Spaniards were naturally disturbed by hearing of the campaign to bring to an end the British slave trade, on which their empire so greatly depended. They began to realize that, sooner or later, they might have to do without the supplies of Africans from Liverpool merchants. So they returned to found enlightened societies in Cuba, such as the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, a club concerned to promote liberal ideas without any risk of a political or social upheaval; they also promoted the first Cuban newspaper, El Papel Periódico; and they inspired a development board known as the Junta de Fomento. They instigated schools, and interested themselves in all technological innovations. Jaruco and his friends saw no reason to consider the abandonment of either slavery or the slave trade just because the British were having what seemed to be a temporary fit of conscience. They were looking forward to achieving in Cuba the wealth of Jamaica or Saint-Domingue, preferably on a larger scale, a possibility to be entertained because their territory was much bigger. They would go to any lengths to secure the slaves they believed were necessary to make that possible.

  The enlightened government of King Charles III in Madrid was anxious to do all that it could to assist these schemes and first reacted by promulgating a new slave code: the Código Negro Español, based largely on precedents extracted from previous laws of the Indies (especially the Código Carolino of 1785 and the French Code Noir of 1685). It contained several humane provisions. Masters were now absolutely obliged to instruct their slaves in the Catholic religion, not just baptize them and leave everything else to chance, and to feed them according to standards fixed by a specially designated “protector of slaves.” Masters who abused slaves were subject to fines, and even risked their confiscation. There were to be only 270 working days a year, the rest being holidays and feasts. Nevertheless, on working days, slaves could still be legally obliged to work from sunrise to sundown, unless they were older than sixty or younger than seventeen. The recalcitrant slave could still be punished with twenty-five lashes or by being placed in stocks and irons. Nor was this revised document generally implemented. Spanish laws, even under the rule of King Charles III, were still more an indication of what intelligent civil servants and lawyers in Madrid hoped might occur than a reflection of what did happen in the colonies.

  While Cuban liberals were in England studying how their traffic in slaves, and slavery itself, could be expanded, William Pitt, the prime minister of the country which they were visiting, was converting the question of the abolition of the British slave trade—not, for the moment, that of slavery itself—into a major political matter. For, in May 1788, with Wilberforce ill, Pitt himself raised the matter in the House of Commons, and announced that he was planning to place it on the agenda of the next session of Parliament. The great Burke used the opportunity to speak out against the very idea of slavery, which he called “a state so improper, so degrading, and so ruinous to the feelings and capacities of human nature that it ought not to be suffered to exist”; the fact that the declaration was the opposite of what he had said on the subject twenty years before was a sign that even great men were having to change their views. Charles James Fox spoke in similar vein. But the member for Liverpool, Bamber Gascoyne, through his mother a man with substantial economic interests in that city,XII now made the first of many speeches against changing the existing order, saying that those of his constituents “who were more immediately concerned in the trade, were men of such impeccable characters that they were above the reach of calumny.” Gascoyne was a close friend of the premier slave merchant, Peter Baker, to whose house he had, indeed, been carried in a chair in 1780 on his election. Abolition of the trade, he said, was “unnecessary, visionary and impracticable.”25

  Then as later, Pitt was unable to secure a majority of his Cabinet and party for abolition, and so the motion was introduced as a private member’s action, with a free vote. Pitt had a great ascendancy, but he did not have a large personal following.XIII Radicals such as the eloquent Lord Brougham, the persistent Sir James Stephen, and the tortuous Sir Philip Francis thought that Pitt could have pressed the matter of slavery more strongly than he did. Was he not the most powerful statesman of his age? Had he not then been in power for over ten years? Could he not have overridden his Cabinet? John Somers Cocks, member for Reigate, said in 1804: “It had frequently occurred to him that, if the right hon gentleman had employed the fair, honourable influence of office, the great
object which he professed to have had so cordially in view would long ere this time have been obtained.” But Pitt could not have done that without difficulty. His friend and manager, on whom he relied for so much, Henry Dundas, was as determinedly against change, as was the long-serving Lord Thurlow, the lord chancellor (“No man was ever so wise as Thurlow looked,” Fox once said). Lord Hawkesbury, a third influential senior minister, was also hostile to change. Later on, issues of peace, the French Revolution, and war would overshadow the issue of slavery. King George III may have made some intervention too which prevented Pitt from taking the kind of initiative that Somers Cocks thought desirable. That may explain the mysterious paragraph in Clarkson’s History: “A difficulty, still more insuperable, presented itself, in an occurrence which took place in the year 1791 but which is much too delicate to be mentioned. The explanation of it, however, would convince the reader that all the efforts of Mr Pitt from that day were rendered useless, I mean as to bringing the question, as a minister of state to a favourable issue” (emphasis added). To support this interpretation, the agent for Jamaica, Stephen Fuller, who was also a member of Parliament, wrote that he was convinced that more was owed to the king than was generally realized in securing “the defeat of the absurd attempt of abolishing the slave trade” (he was writing in 1795).26, XIV

  The French historian Gaston Martin thought that Pitt’s attitude derived from a wish to ruin French commerce. Eric Williams added, “It can be taken as axiomatic that no man occupying so important a position as Prime Minister of England would have taken so important a step as abolishing the slave trade purely for humanitarian reasons.”27 That seems as inaccurate as it is harsh. Pitt assured Granville Sharp that his “heart was with us.” Clarkson, always quick to denounce treachery, recalled that, year after year, Pitt “took an active, strenuous and consistent part” against the slave trade. Clarkson always had access to him, and gained a great deal of help from him. Whatever papers Clarkson wanted, Pitt supplied. Pitt was genuinely interested in the “civilisation of Africa”: and hoped, by imperial expansion, to assist it. His speeches confirm his concern: he concluded his first declaration in the House of Commons on abolition with the ringing words: “When it was evident that this execrable traffic was as opposite to expediency as it was to the dictates of mercy, of religion, of equity, and of every principle that should actuate the breast . . . how can we hesitate a moment to abolish this campaign in human flesh which has for too long disgraced our country and which our example would no doubt contribute to abolish in every corner of the globe?”28