The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Farther along the coast, in the delta of the Niger, most of the population seem to have been of slave descent. “There are not ten free people in Bonny,” a British businessman, J. A. Clegg, would tell a House of Lords select committee in 1843; and he continued: “At one time, there was not a chief in Bonny who was not a slave trader.” These slaves had attained their status by climbing within the curious system of “houses,” or associations of families, which remained the most important social authority in the delta. Inland, the Aros, the economic dictators of the region, were continuing to exploit their influence effectively and were reluctant to abandon the commerce which had brought them such riches. Slaves were for them, as for innumerable Africans, the main capital asset. Abolition by Britain brought for many in the Gulf of Guinea a fall in income, particularly for those who had depended on the tolls paid by African slavers and merchants, as well as the original enslavers, all the way up the rivers which had been the old routes of the traffic. Aristocracies often lost, with abolition, their only source of income.

  A British trader, Francis Swanzy, recalled in 1843, “As soon as a man had made a little money he bought a slave; the people expended much money on the acquirement of slaves, which gave them power”; while a French traveler, René Caillé, thought about 1820 that a peasant’s first aspiration was to own ten to fifteen slaves.5

  The abolition of the British slave trade and the subsequent efforts of the British to ensure that other Europeans followed their example, made available for the domestic African economies concerned many slaves who would otherwise have been exported to the Americas. In the region of upper Guinea, the masters employed more and more slaves to farm the goods approved of by the English as the “legitimate trade,” such as palm and kola nuts. The number of footloose slaves in West Africa even became a threat to established rulers and, just as slaves were held originally to have helped the development of states, they now assisted their disintegration; for example, in the Oyo empire, slave soldiers of northern origin came together under the flag of an Islamic jihad and hastened the demise of that power.

  The slave trade from black Africa across the Sahara to the southern Mediterranean and Egypt continued after 1808, as it had throughout the era of the Atlantic trade. This accounted about 1800 for something in the region of two to three thousand captives a year, which probably expanded, after 1820, to at least 8,000. The Oyo, in 1810, before their fall, invaded the Mahi country, to their east, and brought back 20,000 slaves for sale at Lagos, and some of these went north across the Sahara, not west to the Americas. The slaves exported across the Sahara continued to include a substantial minority of much-sought-after and expensive eunuchs, favored as civil servants throughout the Muslim world in the nineteenth century. In the internal areas most affected by the Sahara trade, merchants might refuse in the 1820s to accept payment for goods in anything but slaves who, therefore, became something like the chief currency of the region around Bornu, near Lake Chad. Al-Nasiri, a Moroccan historian of distinction, complained of “the unlimited enslavement of blacks, and the importation of many droves of them every year, for sale in the town and county markets of the Mahgreb, where men traffic them like beasts.”6

  To the south, in the Portuguese (and, before 1792, French) zones of Loango, Congo, and Angola, the slave trade continued after 1808 with, if anything, greater intensity: for the traders there began to fear that the British might use their superior naval power in order to insist on the end of the trade, so it seemed necessary to stock up with slaves while that was still possible.

  The British House of Commons rebuked the committee of the still-surviving Company of Merchants Trading to Africa for failing to convince Africans that abolition was for the good of the local population. The committee replied, not unfairly: “Can the wildest theorist expect that a mere act of the British legislature should, in a moment, inspire . . . [the] unenlightened [sic] natives of the vast continent of Africa, and persuade them, nay more, make them practically believe and feel that it is for their interest to contribute to, or even to acquiesce in, the destruction of a trade not inconsistent with their prejudices, their laws, or their notions of morality and religion, and by which alone they have been hitherto accustomed to acquire wealth and purchase all the foreign luxuries and convenience of life?”7

  Western European philanthropists talked much of persuading Africans to exchange the slave trade for other commerce. The charter of the newly founded Africa Institution, whose first president was the abolitionist duke of Gloucester,I made evident that it aimed at “diffusing useful knowledge and exciting industry among the inhabitants.” But when people tried to put the ideas of the institution into effect in Africa itself, they seemed a challenge to the existing order. Captain James Tuckey, an Irish-born geographer, during a journey “to solve the problem of the Congo” on the river of that name in 1816, wrote baldly: “The native merchants do not wish Europeans to penetrate into the country lest they should interfere with their business.”8

  How could the peoples of West Africa who had been used to selling slaves to Anglo-Saxons build a new life? Dealing in salt was one possibility, a trade surviving indeed from the pre-Portuguese era: Captain John Adams, writing in the late eighteenth century, described how, at Warri, inland on the river Forcados, “neptunes, or large brass pans, are used during the dry season for purposes of evaporating sea-water to obtain its salt . . . and a great trade is carried on in this article with the interior of the country.”9 But it could not be a real rival to the trade in slaves.

  More promising was palm oil, especially from the territory just behind the delta of the Niger, in which trade the towns along the rivers Bonny and Calabar would eventually play as big a part as they previously had with respect to slaves. Palm oil also was produced in the eastern part of the Gold Coast by the Akuapem people, who had been known as farmers in the days of the slave trade. It had been in use in Benin when the Europeans reached there in the fifteenth century and, in the 1520s, Portuguese sailors had been allowed to bring back a duty-free allowance of it of two jars apiece on their slaving voyages.

  The most important use of palm oil in 1800 was soap; and, after that, candles. In Africa it was also made into a kind of gin (in the Gold Coast, when the question was asked whence came the capital used in the cocoa business, “palm oil and gin” was the usual answer). Palm oil was, too, an essential ingredient for lubricants. The coming of railways, and other new machinery in the nineteenth century, in Europe and North America caused an increase in demand for product on a large scale. The industrial revolution relied on this African export more than it did on slaves.

  Some of the Liverpool merchants who had been busy with slaves until 1807 made a remarkable transition to this business: among them, the Aspinall brothers; George Case, Gregson’s partner in the ownership of the Zong; Jonas Bold, whose brother Edward was a pioneer in trading palm oil in the Benin River; and, above all, John Tobin, whose family were pioneers of Old Calabar. Tobin and Horsfall imported 450 tons of palm oil to England in 1807; in 1830, 4,000. Since the average price was £14 per ton in Calabar, and £28 in England, the profits began to be as high as they had been in the slave trade. The method of trading, too, was similar, to begin with, to what had happened in connection with slaves: textiles, iron bars, muskets, alcohol (especially rum), manilla bracelets, and cowries were all exchanged for the raw material. The irony was that many palm-oil groves were tended by slaves. European philanthropists thought that that labor force would eventually be substituted for by wage earners. But that liberal, or capitalist, alternative took several generations to develop.

  Another possibility for “legal trade” was gum, especially from acacia trees along the sandy north of the river Sénégal. That product, sought after in all Europe, had already brought in for the region of that waterway half what the slave trade had done in the 1790s; by 1810, before French abolition, it was already equal in value to the trade in slaves.

  Hides and beeswax were an equivalent to gum on the rive
r Gambia and, by the 1820s, those products too exceeded in value the income from slaves. Ivory, gold, rice, timber (especially camwood), pepper, peanuts (later to play a great part in the valley of the Sénégal), and rice were other old African items of commerce which were renewed.

  Yet, though the king of Bonny might sell palm oil to his newly moralistic old British friends, he was quite ready to continue to sell slaves to the Portuguese; indeed, to anyone who would buy them. Hugh Crow, one of the last Liverpool captains to go legally to West Africa—in 1807, with Thomas Aspinall’s Kitty’s Amelia, to carry 400 slaves to the West Indies—was told by the king of Bonny (in Crow’s customarily condescending rendering of the statement): “We tink trade no stop, for all we Ju-ju man tell we so.” The king of Dahomey sent an ambassador to the viceroyalty of Brazil in 1810 to reassure his customers that the traffic would be maintained.10

  He need not have worried. For the governor of Bahia had had a clear instruction from Lisbon that “it is far from being the royal intention to restrict this commerce in any way. On the contrary, the royal authorities wish to promote and facilitate it in the best way possible.” The bishop of Pernambuco, José Joaquim da Cunha, for his part, had in 1808 denounced the “insidious principles of a sect of philosophers” concerned to preach abolition; he went on to insist that “the commerce of slavery is a law dictated by circumstances to barbarous nations.”11 Thereafter, several African kings found it convenient to have informal embassies in Brazil, directed, to be sure, by persons of Portuguese blood, to ensure the smooth working of the trade in the new circumstances. The long-standing exchange of slaves for third-rate tobacco between Bahia and the “coast of Mina” continued: 8,000 slaves were carried from the latter coast to Bahia in exchange for tobacco in 1807 alone; in 1810, Rio recorded its largest annual import of slaves, 18,677, in forty-two ships.

  So, despite the high-minded efforts of the British, and despite the numerous acts of emancipation, soon to be introduced in some of the newly independent Latin American countries, the number of African slaves in the Americas in 1822 was probably twice what it had been in, say, 1780. Adam Smith’s contention in The Wealth of Nations that slavery was an uneconomic system had been widely read, but it was also almost everywhere rejected. In Brazil, as in Africa, wage labor was not available, and slave-powered agriculture seemed to prosper.

  It therefore became appreciated soon after 1808 in London, if less so in Washington, that the abolition of the trade in slaves would be incomplete unless the British and American Acts of 1807 were followed by similar denunciations in the other slave-trading countries. Since they had abolished the slave trade themselves, it was scarcely in British interests to allow their commercial rivals to stock their colonies with slaves. That country’s diplomats, therefore, set about trying to convince other governments that they, too, should abolish their slave trades, in the hope that, eventually, that would lead to an end to slavery itself in the respective empires. A long crusade, usually misunderstood by other peoples, thus began.

  • • •

  The abolitionists, whether they were in power (and many in Britain were now inside the administration, as civil servants, if not ministers) or whether they were still acting as a pressure group outside the government, faced three major challenges: first, one from Portugal, and her empire in Brazil; second, one from Spain, and her American empire, which in 1807 still seemed, from Mexico to Chile, unchanged and loyal; and, third, one from the United States. The war with France had for the moment put paid to the slave trade of the latter country, while the other European countries constituted lesser problems. Britain herself was the most law-abiding of nations in the early nineteenth century so that, when the act condemning the trade was passed, the business generally closed. But there was still some small-scale trading, and some indirect connections which would give rise to concern.

  • • •

  Brazil was still the main market for slaves from Africa, as had generally been the case since the late sixteenth century, except for the second half of the eighteenth, when she had been overtaken by the clients of Britain. Half the population of the huge colony were slaves (nearly two million out of about 4 million in 1817). Slaves performed much of the productive work, working in mines, on sugar and coffee plantations, carrying sacks full of the produce of those enterprises to ships, and also acting as servants in the grand houses of the rich, as water carriers, or carrying their masters and mistresses, or merely escorting them along the ill-lit streets. The import of slaves was the most important part of Rio de Janeiro’s international trade, and accounted for a third of all commerce. Masters still believed that their supply of slaves needed constant replenishment, for the low birthrate continued as a result of the traditional, and deliberately contrived, shortage of women (two women to eight men at best were imported). In 1817, a British traveler, H. M. Brackenridge, reported once again that the natural increase of blacks was discouraged “from the calculation that it was cheaper to import full-grown slaves than to bring up young ones.”12

  • • •

  Slavery still existed everywhere throughout the Spanish empire. But by now the old nerve centers of that colossal enterprise, the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru, as well as the lesser territories of Chile and Argentina, employed more indigenous Indian labor than black slaves (10 percent only of the Mexican population were black or mulatto in 1810, and most of them were free; if a quarter of the population of Buenos Aires were black in 1810, Chile had only 5,000 black slaves all told). The only large employers of slaves in 1810 in the Spanish empire were the Cubans, followed by the Venezuelans (as they were soon to be).

  Cuba had many things in common with Brazil. A lenient attitude to manumission, in both places, had made possible the rise of large free black populations. The colonists of both territories considered a substantial slave population essential for the economy. Both colonies depended economically on European countries whose national identities were protected during the Napoleonic Wars by Britain. But Cuba’s slave population was still small: a mere 200,000 in 1817, compared with Brazil’s 2 million. Cuba was an island, if a large one. That fact of geography dominated its history, as the historian Michelet would unsubtly emphasize with respect to Britain. (“L’Angleterre, c’est un île,” he would tell successive generations of French students in Paris.)

  Thirdly, though Cuba was every year more prosperous, this “pearl of the Antilles” was nouveau riche, in comparison with Brazil, which had been receiving immense numbers of slaves from across the Atlantic for several centuries and had specialized in sugar even in the days of Philip II. By contrast, Cuba had, until the eighteenth century, primarily constituted a depot for Spanish treasure fleets.

  Yet the most important product in Cuba was now sugar. Before the 1770s, planters in Cuba had neglected their opportunities for its production, though the soil was as suitable for its cultivation as that of Jamaica or Saint-Domingue; and there was much more of it. Still, by 1788, Cuba was already producing about 14,000 tons a year. By 1825, that figure had trebled to over 40,000 tons, grown on about 2,000 plantations. Soon Cuba would be exporting more sugar than all the other islands of the Caribbean put together—an increase made possible by the ceaseless growth in demand for the product in the United States and Europe; and this sugar was grown on slave-powered plantations.

  As for Venezuela, the great landowners, the Uztarizes, the Toros, and the Tovares, the families who made money in the place, still needed slaves for their plantations of cacao in the beautiful valleys of Caracas and Aragua. In 1800, the slave population had admittedly been under 10 percent of the total population but, then, the criollos, or whites born in the New World, could only have been about 20 percent; the rest were mulattos, or free blacks. All the same, the landowners remained the masters of the colony, and Humboldt commented that these men were conservative in politics simply because “they believed that, in any revolution, they would run the risk of losing their slaves.”13 They had, after all, vivid memories of recent sl
ave revolts, such as one in their own country which in 1795 had proclaimed “the law of the French Republic,” had caused much destruction, and had even led to the temporary occupation by rebel slaves of the town of Coro, on the coast opposite Curaçao.

  • • •

  Another problem facing abolitionists after the Act of 1807 was the United States. The trade was prohibited. Several later acts of Congress refined the definition of the crime and toughened the penalties. But it was not till 1862, in the time of President Lincoln, that anyone was executed for the offense; in the meantime, the United States enjoyed a modest illegal international trade in slaves for fifty years.

  This mostly flowed through Texas (part of the Spanish empire till 1821, then of Mexico till 1835, and finally independent till 1846), Florida (Spanish till 1818), and South Carolina. In Florida, in particular, slaves could easily, and legally, be landed at Pensacola and then shipped up the Escambia River into Alabama, or escorted by land into Georgia. Baltimore shipbuilding firms such as Samuel and John Smith, William van Wyck, John Hollins, and Stewart and Plunkett were still involved after 1808, as they had been before, in building ships for the trade and buying slaves in the West Indies. Underwriters in Boston still insured slave ships: thus N. P. Russell wrote to Messrs. J. Perkins in 1810: “At your particular request, I have offered to the underwriters in my office the two African risks, viz: the San Francisco de Asis and the schooner Carlota. . . .”14 Some Rhode Island slave merchants, including members of the de Wolf family, continued as such: (General) George de Wolf, not his uncle, James, was the biggest shipper in these illegal days though he was concerned principally to import slaves into Cuba, not the United States. He celebrated his new wealth by building a magnificent house, with Corinthian columns and Palladian windows, Linden Place, in Bristol, Rhode Island. In Providence in the same state in 1816, an unidentified correspondent wrote to Obadiah Brown, philanthropist and pioneer of cotton manufacture, saying: “The impunity with which prohibited trade is carried on from this place has for some time past rendered it the resort of many violators of commercial law. . . . The African slave trade is one of this description now most successfully and extensively pursued.”15 The truth is still concealed by deliberately contrived confusion. For example, in late 1809, the Africa Institution of London reported the coast of West Africa to be “swarming” with ships flying Spanish flags which derived from the United States. The Smiths of Newport, not to speak of Francis Depan and Broadfoot of Charleston, as well as John Kerr of New York, were all implicated. So, judging from a letter written by James de Wolf of Bristol to his brother John, was the well-known merchant Samuel Parkman of Boston: “I learn that Parkman of Boston sends you a schooner to Bristol [Rhode Island] to be outfitted for an expedition to the eastward, and that you have refused to have anything to do with her, which, in my opinion, is a very proper determination of yours.”16