The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Then, in 1802, France revived the trade: Napoleon greeted the Peace of Amiens by reintroducing slavery itself into the French empire. This law, of 30 Floréal in the year X, did not inspire the slightest opposition in the passive “tribunate” in Paris. Article III of the new document stated simply that the slave trade, which had never been abolished, would continue according to the rules obtaining before 1789. Napoleon had previously seen the deputies for Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseilles, and they had talked to him of the urgent national need to revive the slave trade. Pierre Labarthe, in his Voyage à la côte de Guinée of 1802, praised Napoleon for this return to “the principles of a wise policy.”17

  No doubt the deputies’ influence was considerable. Perhaps also Josephine, the brilliant daughter of Martinique, gave her counsel. But the first consul was not sentimental: his colonies required labor as much as his merchants required profits. The Council of Commerce in La Rochelle had earlier rejoiced that “les temps déplorables de la démagogie”—in which entire colonies had been allowed to perish in order to preserve a principle—“sont à la fin passés.” The Council of Commerce of Bordeaux, too, composed of nine men of whom five were négriers (Dominique Cabarrus, Mareilhac, Chicu-Bourbon, Gramont, and Brunaud), also stated firmly that “the supreme object of African commerce has always been to sustain our western colonies. . . . Cultivation cannot be usefully carried on except with the strong arms of Africans. De là, la nécessité de la traite”: always provided, in their opinion, that it was not a traite managed by one of those terrible privileged companies which in the past had so damaged honest traders.18

  Bordeaux, for a short time, was the biggest slave port of France, sending, between February 1802 and January 1804, fifteen ships to Africa, among them such prettily named vessels as the Grand d’Alembert, the Incroyable, and the Harmonie. The dominant trader in this new phase of the history of the Gironde was Jacques Conte, the Protestant son of a sea captain from the peninsula of Arvert (Charente-Maritime), who had first made a fortune from seizing merchant ships as a privateer: 152 in all. The slave trade was popular. Men advertised themselves to work on board the new generation of vessels: “Un citoyen des bonnes moeurs, âgé de 32 ans, appartenant à une famille connue . . . s’emploierait sur les côtes d’Amérique ou d’Afrique [comme] subrécargue.”19 Local papers published numerous advertisements announcing that the merchant concerned had the ideal cargo necessary for the journey.VIII

  The French restoration of the institution of the trade removed in England the stigma of Jacobinism from the abolitionist cause; and, by the same token, it soon came to seem pro-British or antipatriotic to oppose slavery in France.

  Napoleon, having in 1800 forced Spain to return Louisiana to him, sent an army to Saint-Domingue to reconquer it, and it seems as if, for a time, he anticipated a new French empire in the Americas, without rights for slaves. Another French army reconquered Guadeloupe from the rebel Victor Hugues. But the failure of General Leclerc to re-establish French power in Saint-Domingue weakened Napoleon’s imperial desires, as well as placing power in the new republic of Haiti in the hands of the despot Dessalines, who cut himself off from the world (even if he did, on proclaiming himself emperor, receive a crown from the United States, brought on the Connecticut). The incompetence of Dessalines did not make the new country seem a good example for the future of other once successful sugar colonies.

  The resumption of the war in Europe in 1803 persuaded Napoleon to withdraw from his Caribbean ambitions. He even sold Louisiana to the United States, thereby doubling the size of the Union (for the territory stretched far to the north) and, in the long run, making possible the United States’ growth to its modern place as a world power.

  The slave history of Louisiana after its sale is instructive. It was soon accepted that slaves should move into Louisiana as easily as into Mississippi (where, in 1798, the bill introduced to establish it as a state contained a specific declaration that the antislaving clause of the Constitution should not apply, since slavery was a legal institution in the surrounding country). At that time, Louisiana was a small producer of sugar—a mere five thousand tons—and thus scarcely a big slave consumer. But a substantial proportion of the large numbers of slaves imported during these years into South Carolina found themselves eventually in Louisiana.

  A federal law soon condemned the Louisiana slave trade. But, despite protests to President Jefferson (notably by Representative James Hillhouse and by the pamphleteer Tom Paine, now back in the United States), slavery itself was permitted. The marquis of Casa Calvo, the last Spanish governor of the colony, wrote, after his return to Havana: “Truly, it is impossible for lower Louisiana to get along without slaves. And it will be very damaging to their interests if they cannot obtain the hands necessary for their work which will infallibly decline. It is not easy to adduce a reason for this conduct [of the government of the United States] in the colony which was making great strides towards prosperity and wealth. The inhabitants are so angered that it is with difficulty that they will be able to be amalgamated with the rude citizens of the United States.”20

  The same opinions were expressed by an official, John Watkins, sent to travel in Louisiana by the territory’s first United States governor, William Claiborne: “No subject seems to be so interesting to the minds of the inhabitants of all that part of the country which I have visited as that of the importation of brute negroes from Africa. This permission would go further with them, and better reconcile them to the government of the United States, than any other privilege that could be extended to this country. They appear only to claim it for a few years. . . . White labourers, they say, cannot be had in this unhealthy climate.”21 Few, in fact, thought that the planters of Louisiana, with their growing cotton production, would obey federal laws on slavery. That distrust was correct.IX

  • • •

  By chance, Napoleon’s revival of slavery coincided with a fresh impetus for the cause of abolition.

  First, in 1803, the Danes carried out their agreement of 1792 to abolish the slave trade. True, as might have been expected, the number of slaves carried in their last years exceeded all past levels, so that, by 1802, the few small islands of the Danish West Indies counted over 35,000 slaves (in comparison with about 28,000 in 1792).

  Then in 1802, a brilliant young Spanish geographer, Isidoro Antillón, read before an academy of Spanish law in Madrid a dissertation against the commerce and enslavement of Africans. Though his essay was largely an adaptation of the ideas of Montesquieu, it was certainly the first faint indication of abolitionism in a country whose colonial merchants were every year expanding the traffic.22 There had been just a whiff of the same even in Cuba a few years before, when a Jesuit, Fray José Jesús Parreno, was expelled from the island for mentioning the matter in a sermon (his manuscripts were seized). Even in Portugal and Brazil, some enlightened spirits were questioning the basis of the traffic in slaves on which the latter dominion seemed still absolutely to depend. In 1794, for example, a Capuchin brother, José de Bolonha, was expelled from Bahia, since he, too, had publicly maintained that the African trade was illegal, on the ground this time that so many slaves were kidnapped. Two years later, Bernardino de Andrade, who had been an official of the Grão and Maranhão Company, wrote rather optimistically from Guinea-Bissau to his secretary of state in Lisbon that, if the slave trade could only be replaced by other enterprises, the people of Upper Guinea might end “their interminable dissensions and return to agriculture.”23

  Probably without knowing of these Latin initiatives, the patient Wilberforce revived his efforts in 1804; this time the bill, his fourth, actually passed the House of Commons, by 49 votes to 24—a victory achieved because many of the (new) Irish members voted for him.X In the debate, Wilberforce had some entertainment in mocking the remarks of the historian of Jamaica, Edward Long, which had included the outrageous reflection, “An orang-outang husband would by no means disgrace a negro woman.”24 (Long was still the proprietor of a five
-hundred acre sugar estate in Jamaica, Lucky Hill, in the parish of Clarendon, which made him £4,000 a year.) As usual, in those debates, Wilberforce found new enemies, such as John Fuller, member for Sussex, a planter in Jamaica (he had inherited the Rose Hill plantation) who insisted that “he had never heard the Africans deny their mental inferiority.” Another new enemy of reform was William Devyanes, a banker and member for Barnstaple, sometime chairman of the East India Company, who had spent years in Africa and told the House of Commons that an African king had assured him that “if the slave merchants did not purchase from him and others their prisoners taken in war, they would be killed.” (Devyanes, however, was known as an “active philanthropist.”) But the House of Lords, whither the crafty Dundas had now been translated as Lord Melville, as usual proposed a delay, such as was equivalent to the defeat of the bill. Once again, the ineffable duke of Clarence spoke for procrastination. Wilberforce wrote to a friend, Lord Muncaster, a Westmorland peer, that “it was truly humiliating to see, in the House of Lords, four of the Royal Family come down to vote against the poor, helpless, friendless slaves.”25

  Wilberforce was, however, encouraged by his success in the House of Commons. The signs were suddenly propitious to his cause. As so often in politics, patience had its rewards. Dundas, without whose skillful obstructions the trade would have been abolished in 1796, if not 1792, was impeached in April 1805.XI Pitt’s prejudiced lord chancellor, Thurlow, was dying. Whatever the attitude of the royal family and the House of Lords, the mood of the new generation in the House of Commons was evidently inclined to abolitionism, thanks to the propaganda of Clarkson, Sharp, and Stephen. Though Pitt was in the last year of his life, he was still concerned, and indeed was anxious to avoid the risks of a new Saint-Domingue in newly captured Caribbean territories such as Trinidad, Tobago, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent.XII An order-in-council also forebade the import of slaves to the three new rich Guianan colonies of Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice (which Britain had temporarily acquired) after December 1, 1805, but only beyond 3 percent per year of the existing populations. A full ban on the import of slaves from Africa would take place after January 1, 1807. In order to prevent illegal import, there would also be a register of all slaves.

  This modest restriction, following what had transpired in respect to Saint Vincent and Trinidad, was a turning point in the history of abolition; the new rule inspired fury among the cotton planters of Demerara, and led to the import for the first time there of Chinese labor, and to the hiring of some free blacks.

  All the same, the next year, Wilberforce was to his surprise again obstructed, this time by a delaying amendment to a new version of his bill by Isaac, the brother of his old enemy Bamber Gascoyne of Liverpool (the voting on the second reading was 70 to 77). For the first time in this long series of debates, Pitt, preoccupied by personal as well as national problems (he was deeply distressed by the impeachment of Dundas), declined to speak on the matter.

  • • •

  Britain and the United States now moved as if together, though, of course, there was no possibility of deliberate cooperation. For, after several interesting debates as to whether it was right to deal with the slave trade exclusively by taxing imports of slaves, President Thomas Jefferson, in his annual message in December 1806, condemned those “violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa,” and urged Congress to take advantage of the end of the constitutional limitation of twenty years, which would come in 1807, to abolish the slave traffic absolutely.26 This was a remarkably firm statement for a president who was so often ambiguous, especially on the question of slavery. At one stage of his life, when most influenced by the French philosophes, he did once more talk of the relation of master and slave as “a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most remitting despotisms on the one hand, and degrading submissions on the other.”27 But he himself always employed, and sometime sold, slaves, and never endorsed outright the cause of abolition. He had also approved the fatal appointment of Collector of Customs Collins in Newport, a designation leading to the worst evasions of the law.

  The day after Jefferson’s statement, Senator Stephen Bradley of Vermont (also known as the inventor of the stars and stripes on the flag of the United States) introduced a bill which would eventually prohibit the African slave trade. The ensuing debate concerned itself with important details. What, for example, was to be done with illegally imported slaves if they were identified as such? Surely they could not be sold because, if that were done, “we punish the criminal, and then step into his place and complete the crime.” But could they become free Africans inside the United States? Or should they be returned to Africa? If so, could their old homes be found, and how could they be prevented from being sold again as slaves? Punishment of those found guilty of illegal importing and the limitation of the interstate traffic naturally concerned the Congress, too. It was also admitted that violations of the law would be certain to occur, at least at first. Speakers from the Southern states suggested that no federal law against the slave trade could be put into effect in the Carolinas and in Georgia, where the trading of slaves would be seen at the most as a misdemeanor, not a crime: Peter Early of Georgia asked, “What honour will you derive from a law which will be broken every day of your lives?”

  As to punishments of illegal traders, the argument came up against the difficulty of correlating them with existing severe penalties for theft; and Representative Joseph Stanton of Rhode Island, no doubt thinking of old friends at home, declared: “I cannot believe that a man ought to be hung [sic] for only stealing a negro.”

  But, in the end, a bill in favor of abolition of the slave trade passed the Senate on January 27, 1807, and in the House of Representatives on February 11. President Jefferson signed it on March 2. It stated unequivocally that, from January 1, 1808, it would be illegal to introduce into the United States any “negro, mulatto, or person of colour, as a slave.” The law also prohibited any United States citizen from equipping or financing any slave ship, to operate from any port in the United States. Sales of slaves to Cuba as to Brazil would henceforth be as much a crime as a sale to South Carolina. The question of the treatment of freed slaves was resolved by leaving the matter to the legislatures of the states concerned. Punishments would be a fine of $20,000 for equipping a ship, as well as the loss of the ship; for transporting slaves, a fine of $5,000 and the loss of the ship; and for carrying illegal slaves, a fine of $1,000 to $10,000, as well as imprisonment for five to ten years, accompanied by the forfeiture of both ship and slaves. Anyone who bought illegally imported slaves would be fined $800 a slave, and would forfeit the ship.28

  The shortcoming of the act passed in Congress was that no special machinery was devised for their enforcement. Most of the Southern states, admittedly, did pass acts which were concerned with the disposal of illegally imported slaves. Thus Georgia and the new Alabama-Mississippi Territory (in 1815), and North Carolina (in 1816) caused the slaves to be sold by auction for the benefit of the state. For the rest, the secretary of the Treasury, responsible for the collection of customs, was theoretically in charge, but he had no special police at his disposal. In 1820, Secretary William Crawford, a Georgian, would tell Congress, “It appears, from an examination of the records of this office, that no particular instructions have ever been given by the Secretary of the Treasury, under the original or supplementary acts prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the United States.”29

  The discussion in the Congress of the United States on the final abolition was quite different from its equivalent in the House of Commons in London, since the legislature of the United States was concerned with something on which everyone present was to some extent informed from personal experience: every senator or congressman (even Bradley of Vermont, the one state in the Union which had never known slavery) had known a slave. On the other hand, in London, only a small minority of lords or members of Parliament had had experie
nce in the West Indies, and practically none in North America.

  In the early part of 1806, the abolitionists held a series of discussions in London with the new “government of all the talents”—that is, with the prime minister, Lord Grenville (Pitt had died); with Lord Henry Petty, the young chancellor of the Exchequer; and with Charles James Fox, who was at last secretary of state. Grenville, son of Pitt’s “Gentle Shepherd,” who, through his Stamp Act, had done so much to lose the American colonies for Britain, had been an enemy of slavery since the first debate in the House of Commons on the trade in 1789. He, like Fox, had spoken against the trade in nearly all the debates of the 1790s. Petty—the chancellor of the Exchequer, son of Shelburne—was only twenty-five, but had the reputation of having been “a friend of democrats” at Cambridge (he would later be the politically long-lasting mid-Victorian Lord Lansdowne). The attorney-general, Sir Arthur Pigott (son of John Pigott of Barbados, having been also attorney-general in Grenada, he knew the Caribbean background) then introduced a bill forbidding British captains to sell slaves to foreign countries. This was a stepping stone to full abolition, but it was introduced quietly, so that Sir Robert Peel, the cotton manufacturer and slaveowning member for Tamworth, had to admit, in a speech on the third reading, that he had not been present during the earlier discussions because he had not realized the bill’s importance. The Commons voted 35 to 13 in favor. In May 1806, this bill passed even the Lords (by 43 to 18). By then, a new economic argument had been added to the purely humanitarian one: the West Indies were in debt, there was a large sugar surplus, and the “saturated” old colonies did not want new slaves. The abolitionists were now cock-a-hoop: Clarkson, recovered from his mental maladies, could comment, “There was never perhaps a season when so much virtuous feeling pervaded all ranks.”30