by Hugh Thomas
But Wilberforce was supported by Burke, who used the occasion to state, characteristically, that “he was not over fond of abstract propositions.” Whatever he might have thought before, he now at least had no doubt that the slave trade was “an absolute robbery.” He insisted that Africa could never be civilized while the trade continued.II Pitt also spoke magisterially, committing himself to abolition for the first time as an individual, and suggested that a British termination of the traffic might, through negotiation, lead to a similar consummation in other countries. France in particular would agree that it was “highly becoming for Great Britain to take the lead of other nations in such a virtuous and magnificent measure.”2
The anticipation, or fear, that legislation would follow was evident. The same day that Parliament debated the trade, many petitions (fast becoming the main tactic of extraparliamentary pressure) were presented to the House of Commons against abolition, including one from the West Indian traders of Bristol. That document insisted that “it has been found . . . with great exactness that the African and West India trade constitute at least three fifths of the commerce of the port of Bristol and that if, upon such a motion [as proposed by Wilberforce], a Bill should pass into law, the decline of the trade of . . . Bristol must inevitably follow,” with the “ruin of thousands.” The trade, the meeting held at Merchants’ Hall in Bristol had concluded, was also a thing “on which the welfare of the West Indian Islands and the commerce and revenue of the kingdom so essentially depend.”3
This document was written by a committee chaired by the sugar merchant William Miles, an ex-mayor, the self-made chairman of a bank and of the second-biggest sugar refinery in Bristol. Miles, who had made his first fortune in Jamaica in the middle of the century, was not himself a slave merchant, though he did act as a guarantor for slave journeys. He was supported by five aldermen, all of whom were bankers. The petition was presented by Burke’s colleague as a member for the City, that Henry Cruger, of New York, whose family had been prominent in the colony’s politics until the revolution and who had often invested in the trade.
Liverpool, too, presented her opposition. The mayor was Thomas Earle, who had engaged in many slave ventures: he had a share in the Mars, for instance, which sailed for Africa that year, as well as the Othello and the Hawke. His petition stated firmly that “the enterprising spirit of the people,” which enabled them “to carry on the African slave trade with vigour,” had taken the city to “a pitch of mercantile consequence” which could “not but affect and improve the wealth and prosperity of the kingdom as a whole.” The sailmakers of Liverpool also expressed their horror at the idea of an end to the traffic (“Their principal dependance in the port of Liverpool is upon the outset and repairs of the shipping employed in the African trade”). So did the bakers of that city, for they, too, depended, they said, “chiefly for employment on the great number of ships fitted out in that port to supply the West India islands with negro slaves from the coast of Africa and from the great number of people, whites and blacks, to be fed on board during a long voyage.” After all, “almost every man in Liverpool is a merchant and he who cannot send a bale will send a bandbox. . . . The attractive African meteor has from time to time so dazzled their ideas that almost every order of people is interested in a Guinea cargo”; for it was well known that “many of the small vessels that import [only] a hundred slaves are fitted out by attornies, drapers, grocers, tallow chandlers, barbers, tailors, etc., [who] have one eighth, some a fifteenth, and some a thirty-second share. . . .”4
At that time, a quarter of the ships in Liverpool were probably engaged in the African trade. The city had five-eighths of the African trade of Britain and three-sevenths of the European; in 1792, the tonnage engaged in slaving would be nearly five times greater than it had been in 1752. In the years 1783-93, about 360 firms of Liverpool had engaged in the traffic in one way or another. William Gregson, with a part share of six slavers in 1791—a formidable figure in Liverpool politics, an ex-mayor, owner of the brutal Captain Collingwood’s Zong—made the patriots’ point: “Whenever it is abolished, the naval importance of this kingdom is abolish’d with it.”5
Nor was it just Liverpool which was worried: hardly a manufacturing town, much less a trading one, in England did not have some interest in the slave trade. Manchester, for example, annually sent £180,000 in goods to Africa in exchange for slaves. Another rising commercial town, Birmingham, also considered its fortunes tied to the slave trade: “A very considerable part of the various manufactures in which the petitioners are engaged,” ran one appeal from there, “are adapted to, and disposed of for, the African trade, and are not saleable in any other market.”6 The gunmakers presented a similar petition, talking of “the fatal consequences which must inevitably attend such a measure”—although, a real sign of the times, an alternative position was taken up by a group of persons led by the ironmasters’ chief spokesman, Samuel Garbett, and including several future bankers, the Quaker Lloyds.7
An alliance against abolition was now in being at Westminster. This included the articulate members of the royal family, of whom several were willing to speak and vote in Parliament; most of the admirals, active and retired; many landowners who feared any innovation; and, of course, the main commercial interests in London: people interested in cotton as well as sugar, for cotton, from both British and French islands, was needed in the new industrial revolution even more than sugar. At that time, 70 percent of the cotton used in Britain came from tropical America, principally Surinam, and less than 30 percent came from Turkey or elsewhere in the Old World. The West Indian islands were still considered in London the most brilliant of diamonds in the British imperial crown: Pitt estimated the income from West Indian plantations as four million pounds, compared with one from the rest of the world; and even Adam Smith thought that “the profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation . . . known in Europe or America.”8
Some signs of the newly organized opposition to the idea of abolition were visible when there was a further debate on the slave trade in the House of Commons in January 1790. Bamber Gascoyne, of Liverpool, was the main spokesman for the trade; he sought procedural delays to prevent the establishment even of a committee of inquiry into it. A leading role began to be played, too, after the election of 1790, by Colonel Banastre Tarleton, brother of John Tarleton, the Liverpool merchant who had protested against Dolben’s bill, and who was one of the few heroes of Britain’s unsuccessful war in North America. Banastre Tarleton had succeeded Lord Penrhyn as the member for Liverpool, and had a slave ship belonging to the family firm called after him: the Banastre, of ninety-three tons burden. Once, in a debate in 1791, he suggested that people (such as, presumably, Wilberforce) who were looking for philanthropic work should concern themselves with the poor laws rather than devote their time to ruining a trade of great benefit to the country.III
In these early days of his campaign, Wilberforce, however, always had the support of Pitt, Fox, and Burke, who spoke often, brilliantly, and effectively. The combination should have been devastating, yet they failed to convince a House of Commons in which slaving interests were so well represented.
That body now did set up its own special committee of inquiry, at which many of the important questions were again posed. For example, Dr. Jackson, who had been a physician in Jamaica, was asked the pertinent question “whether it was more the object of the overseers to work the slaves moderately and keep up their numbers by breeding; or to work them out, increasing thereby the produce of the estate, and trusting for recruits to the slave trade?” He answered, accurately: “The latter plan was more generally adopted, principally, I conceive, owing to this reason, that imported slaves are fit for immediate labour: slaves that are reared from childhood are liable to many accidents, and cannot make any return of labour for many years.”9 Evidence was also given by the much-traveled Swedish mineralogist Dr. Wadström, who had
been to Gorée and Sénégal, and assured his questioners that, “if the slave trade were abolished, they [the Africans] would extend their cultivation and manufactures . . . particularly if some good European people had enterprising spirit enough to settle among them in another way than is the case at present.”10 The Reverend John Newton came forward to testify that, in his opinion, the Africans “with equal advantages . . . would be equal to ourselves in capacity.”11
What must have vividly struck those members of Parliament who studied this absorbing if terrible document was the account of the endless brutalities, whippings, and tortures executed as a matter of routine, and without any legal limitation, to the slaves at work on plantations in the West Indies. For example, Major General Tottenham gave evidence with regard to Barbados. In reply to the question “Did it appear to you that the slaves in the British islands were treated with mildness or severity?” he said: “I think in the island of Barbados, they were treated with the greatest cruelty. . . . I will mention one instance. . . . About three weeks before the hurricane, I saw a young man walking the streets in a most deplorable situation—he was entirely naked—he had an iron collar about his neck, with five long spikes projecting from it. His body before and behind his breech, belly and thighs were almost cut to pieces with running ulcers in them, and you might put your finger in some of the weals. He could not sit down, owing to his breech being in a state of mortification, and it was impossible for him to lie down, owing to the projection of the collar round his neck. . . . The field negroes are treated more like brutes than human beings. . . .”12
• • •
The second important debate in May 1789 was that in the United States House of Representatives. This was the first meeting of that body, and the members who assembled in City Hall in New York numbered a mere sixty-five. Here the discussion could not concern itself with the abolition of the trade, since the Constitution had left that aside, as a federal matter at least, till 1808. Instead, the debate concentrated on possible taxes to be imposed on slaves imported. Thus Josiah Parker, of Virginia, moved that a tax of ten dollars should be laid on every slave imported; the Irish-born O’Brien Smith, of South Carolina, wished to postpone a matter “so big with the most serious questions for the state which he represented”; and the experienced Roger Sherman of Connecticut could not “reconcile himself to the insertion of human beings as an item of duty.” James Jackson of Georgia thought that all these matters should be left to individual states, and later declared that the blacks were “better off as slaves than as freemen.” In the end, the bill was withdrawn, amid rising bad temper: only James Madison spoke in a way likely to be remembered, when he said, “By expressing a national disapprobation of this trade, we may destroy it, and save ourselves from reproaches, and our posterity the imbecility ever attendant on a country filled with slaves.”13
A further debate on slavery was held in the Congress of the United States in 1790, as it had been in England. This discussion, held in New York like its predecessor, occurred in response to numerous petitions from Quaker societies. Michael Stone, of Port Tobacco, Maryland, mocked the “disposition of religious sects to imagine that they understood the rights of human nature better than all the world besides.” Aedanus Burke, of South Carolina, born in Galway but a traveler to the West Indies before he went to live in Charleston, thought that “the rights of the southern states ought not to be threatened” in any way. When a petition was brought in—from the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, and signed by Benjamin Franklin—that same Burke said that the mere discussion of the plan by a committee of Congress “would blow the trumpet of sedition in the southern states.” A colleague of his, Thomas Tudor Tucker, a surgeon from Bermuda who had been educated in Edinburgh, said ominously that the Southern states would not submit to a general emancipation without “civil war.” William Loughton Smith, also of South Carolina, like so many of his colleagues educated in England, said that he considered the idea of ending slavery as “an attack upon the palladium of the property of our country” (he was a planter). The scheme was then sent to a committee, on which there were no members from any Southern state. This body’s final report concluded that “Congress [did] have authority to restrain the citizens of the United States from carrying on the Africa trade for the purpose of supplying foreigners with slaves” (my emphasis). It also declared that Congress would be within its rights to insist on proper regulations for the humane treatment of slaves on their passage to the United States. The consequence was that Congress did prohibit foreigners (Cubans as well as Englishmen and other Europeans) from fitting out slave ships in the United States, and prohibited the United States slave trade to foreign ports. Everything else was left pending till 1808.
Little enough transpired. The Congress of the United States, in February 1790, might hear a Quaker praying that God would inspire the new Congress against the wickedness of the slave trade. But the enemies of abolition were gathering. James Jackson—English-born, like so many friends of slavery, now a senator for Georgia where he had previously been a congressman and a grower of rice and cotton on his plantations—argued that slavery was permitted by the Bible. The trade itself was expanding too. In the first six months of 1792, regardless of the new law thirty-eight North American captains were recorded as arriving in Havana, Cuba, with slaves—that is, six a month on the average. Warren, Providence, and Bristol, Rhode Island, were still competing successfully in these years with their neighbor Newport as the new nation’s premier slave ports. William Ellery, a prominent Newport merchant who had become a collector of customs in the city, wrote in 1791, “an Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be induced to change so lucrative a trade as that in slaves for the slow profits of any manufactory.” (In 1759, Ellery, as a young man, had himself taken a ship, with “82 barrels, 6 hogsheads, and 6 tierces of New England rum,” to Africa.)
Congress’s passage of the law condemning the foreign slave trade, of course, made many of these Rhode Island merchants technically criminals. The punishments for breaking the law were the surrender of the vessel concerned, and fines of $1,000 for each merchant or captain engaged and of $200 for each slave transported. The Quakers saw these penalties as constituting a triumph, but they had little effect on the Rhode Island shippers. The young United States was less law-abiding than its founding fathers assumed that it would be. The active men who came of age in the 1770s had, after all, been raised in a fiscal atmosphere in which lawbreaking, smuggling especially, was a defensible practice. British attempts to enforce the Sugar Acts had made illegal trading appear patriotic. Anyway, trading to Africa itself was not illegal, so there was no need for a slave captain to conceal his first port of call. The question of the final destination was more complicated, and some captains did what they could to remove from their vessels incriminating “equipment,” such as slave platforms, shackles, swivel guns, as well as letters and other documents relating to the traffic, before returning home. Some slavers sold their ships in Havana, and returned as passengers on other vessels. Other merchants devised two sets of papers.
All these subterfuges were necessary. Customs officers and federal agents in Rhode Island brought several cases against slave traders. There were a few instances of foreign slave ships’ being captured and condemned. This befell “two French ships from the coast of Guinea, with near 800 slaves on board,” at New London, Connecticut, in 1791. Yet the trade continued. Thirty-two ships left Newport, Rhode Island, for Africa in 1795. Among these was the Ascension, commanded by Captain Samuel Chace, who bought goods in Rotterdam and the Ile de France (Mauritius), with which he bought 283 slaves in Mozambique. These were sold at Montevideo, Havana, and Buenos Aires. This vessel was owned by the ex-sea captains Peleg Clarke and Caleb Gardner, in partnership with William Vernon. The biggest merchant in Rhode Island, however, was Cyprian Sterry of Providence. The Society for Abolition sought to persuade the United States attorney to prosecute both Sterry and John Brown, who was
known as a man of “magnificent projects and extraordinary enterprises.” Sterry agreed surprisingly to withdraw from the trade. The case against Brown began, and was heard in 1797. His ship, Hope, was confiscated and sold, but no charges were preferred against him. In a second trial, Brown escaped because the prosecution case collapsed.