The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  On January 11, 1811, the United States secretary of the navy, Paul Hamilton (himself a slaveowner and planter who had earlier urged the legislature of South Carolina to abolish the slave trade), wrote to Captain Campbell, the naval commander at Charleston: “I hear, not without great concern, that the law prohibiting the import of slaves has been violated in frequent instances at [the port of] St Mary’s [Georgia], since the gunboats have been withdrawn. . . . Despatch them [the gunboats] to St Mary’s with orders to use all practical diligence”; and President James Madison, whose opposition to the slave trade had been continual, if occasionally tactical, told Congress, in his message of December 10 of that year: “It appears that American citizens are [still] instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity and those of their own country.” He added: “The same just and benevolent motives which produced the interdiction by force against the criminal conduct will doubtless be felt by congress in devising further means of suppressing the evil.”17 “Doubtless” turned out to be rather a strong word in the circumstances. Sometimes, it is true, a slaver would be caught by an enterprising customs officer (such as the Eugene, captured off New Orleans), but its disposal was another matter.

  Louisiana, newly acquired from France, was a specially difficult problem: Governor William Claiborne was quite unable to enforce the abolition of the trade in slaves, and dealing with the smuggling of them “proved to be one of the most troublesome problems in the administration of the prohibitory legislation.”18

  As for South Carolina, as early as 1804, Representative William Lowndes of that state said: “With navigable rivers running into the heart of it [the state], it was impossible, with our means, to prevent our eastern brethren [that is, New Englanders] who, in some parts of the Union in defiance of the general government, have been engaged in this trade, from introducing them [slaves] into this country.”19 Several other states of the Union, such as North Carolina, had always been dependent on slaves brought in by land (mostly from South Carolina), not by water, so there are no entries recorded in the books of the Customs.

  The United States Slave Trade Act of 1807 only prohibited the international slave trade. It condemned neither the internal nor the coastal traffic. There was no limit to the number of slaves who could be so traded, nor any regulation as to the way they should be carried. The size of this commerce was large: slaves were carried either by sea or, more often, by land, to New Orleans or Charleston, and there sold to shippers who might take them elsewhere in the United States or even (illegally) to Cuba. Thus the Virginia Times would boast in 1836 that 40,000 slaves had been sold for export the previous fiscal year. The journey from Virginia to the market in New Orleans might take as many days as the “middle passage” from Africa.

  The mention of Virginia raises an interesting subject. From the beginning of agriculture there in the seventeenth century, proprietors on tobacco plantations had, as has been pointed out, increased their stock of labor from home-bred slaves without excessive recourse to the international market. By 1800, slaves on some plantations were being deliberately bred there for sale. The idea had often been canvassed in the West Indies (for example, in Jamaica and on the estates of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) as an alternative to the slave trade. The Gadsdens of Charleston, the Campbells of New Orleans, and Nathan Bedford Forrest of Memphis were the outstanding names in this new business, but there were others, in Alexandria, Savannah, and Richmond, though most of them saw the breeding of slaves as an incidental, rather than a dominating, business.

  The United States was more successful in producing slaves by natural increase than any other slave-employing society in the Americas. Was this because special attention was coldly paid to “breeding women,” to those who were “uncommonly good breeders”? Did some Virginian slaveowners realize that slave children were, as it were, a return on capital which could increase their wealth? The testimony is slight and a little tainted: Richard Drake described seeing such a breeding farm near Alexandria, Virginia, but no one has been able to decide on the reliability of his vivid account of thirty pregnant women and the huts swarming “with piccaninnies of different shades.”20 The argument that female slaves would have more children if well treated had been often used during the debates on abolition; for example, Captain Thomas Wilson, of the British navy, who had had experience of both the West Indies and mainland America, did so in evidence to the House of Commons in London in 1790: “I always thought them [the slaves of North America] better treated and clothed—they appeared more domestic and happy—marriages are more frequent among them—there are fewer imported in proportion.”21

  The concern whether a slave population could be maintained by breeding was also a consideration of the abolitionists in the 1790s; though, usually, the answer which they received to their questions about the West Indies was of the order of “I understood from one planter to whom I spoke on the subject that the slaves in general were too hard-worked to breed.”22 Dr. Harrison, a doctor who, like Captain Wilson, had experience in both Jamaica and the North American colonies (before 1778), explained, “In South Carolina, the slaves were well fed, well clothed, less worked and never severely whipped; in Jamaica, they were badly fed, indifferently clothed, hard worked, and severely whipped.” In Brazil, “the Portuguese do not hesitate to tell you that it does not pay them to breed slaves, and bring them up, as the woman is kept away from her usual duties for so many years that it would not remunerate them for loss of time, and the cost of feeding them. Besides that, the mortality among children is said to be great.”23 Later, with the coffee boom in Brazil after the 1830s, that attitude would change, since “children of a very tender age can go and pick coffee.” But even then, J. B. Moore, the chairman of the Brazilian Association of Liverpool, said that he was not “aware of any distinct establishment [in Brazil] for the breeding and sale of home-grown slaves.”24

  In 1790, slavery in North America, as opposed to North American participation in the slave trade to Cuba and elsewhere, seemed to be in decline. But Eli Whitney’s fateful invention of the cotton gin, on Mrs. Nathanael Greene’s plantation at Savannah, Georgia, during the spring of 1793, and the realization that, with this removal of the great hindrance hitherto to the large-scale cultivation of cotton (the taking of the lint from the seeds), “one negro could produce fifty pounds of cleaned cotton a day,” was already transforming the position. The figures are remarkable if well known; in 1792, the year before Whitney’s invention, the United States exported a mere 138,328 pounds of cotton, which placed her on the same level as a producer as Demerara (Guiana); in 1794, already, the figure had leapt to 1,601,000; in 1800, she exported 17,790,000; and in 1820, cotton exports reached thirty-five million pounds.

  This triumph, depending on the cultivation on a large scale of green seed-cotton in Georgia and the Carolinas, marked the conversion of this crop into the most important item in North American exports, and caused an unprecedented demand for slaves; especially women, since it was supposed that the sensitive harvesting of cotton demanded female labor.

  This latter perception had demographic consequences. In 1790, there were only half a million, well-acclimatized slaves in the United States, most of them of the second or third generation. Between 1800 and 1810, slaves within the United States increased by a third, and there was an increase of nearly another third in the next ten years, to 1820. By 1825, the slaves in the United States numbered over a third of all slaves in the Americas. This trend would continue. But the slave trade into the United States was tiny. Why should the smallest slave importer have the largest slave population? The reason for the increase in slaves in North America must have been linked to the use of female slaves on the cotton plantations.

  • • •

  United States shippers continued to provide slaves to Cuba and other parts of the Spanish empire and also, though in smaller numbers, to Brazil. In 1807, for example, in the nine months for which the record survives
, thirty-five United States ships entered Havana, out of a total of thirty-seven (the other two were technically “Danish”). The fact that the license to foreigners to import slaves into Cuba ended in 1810 mattered little: the appropriate officials in Spain considered what should be done, and some of them (the Consulado of Cádiz, for example) expressed humane hopes but, with the country at war, the best course seemed to be to do nothing; and, in the meantime, the trade to Cuba continued without impediment. The official returns for Havana list only five United States ships between 1808 and 1819.II But there were certainly others, under a variety of flags, and landing slaves in a variety of ports. In May 1808, Captain Madden’s Pitter carried sixty-two to Matanzas, where Captain Wilbey delivered eighty-six in the Venus in February 1809. Numerous ships which sound by their name to have been Anglo-Saxon—for example, the Rebecca, under Captain Colquhoun, in March 1810; or Captain Beale’s Tripe in June 1810—were probably from the United States.

  • • •

  Continuing English involvement in the trade is more difficult to analyze. A few dealers established in West Africa or islands off the shores continued to play a part. A few English captains sailed under United States flags, and later under Swedish, Danish, and even French ones. More important, probably, several prominent firms participated in the trade after 1807 by investing in or even owning theoretically Spanish- or Portuguese-owned ships.III British sailors helped to teach Cuban-based Spaniards the tricks of the trade. Many English firms still supplied the “trade goods” for slave voyages of Portuguese and Spanish ships. But most important English firms did drop out. They even abandoned the slave trade between the Caribbean islands.

  • • •

  The first move in the British policy of seeking to restrict the international traffic in slaves came as early as April 1807, when Lord Strangford, the British minister in Lisbon,IV sought to persuade Portugal to abolish the traffic; or, at least, to ensure that the Portuguese trade remained within its existing limits. The Portuguese foreign minister, Azevedo, however, thought that it was impracticable for his country to adopt any measures on the subject. Lord Strangford, the father of George Sydney Smythe, the model for Disraeli’s Coningsby, should have known all about the slave trade, since his American-born mother was a Philipse of New York, a great-granddaughter of a famous merchant in slaves, Frederick Philipse, of a hundred years before; but perhaps the significance of that genealogy was hidden from him, for the family had recently been through many vicissitudes. Strangford had gone on, however, in August, 1807, to persuade Dom João, the regent of Portugal (his mother, Queen Maria, was mad), to reject Napoleon’s ultimatum demanding that he close Portuguese ports to the English or be invaded. This defiant act led him and the Portuguese Court, and a great number of businessmen, to sail in English ships to Brazil. Strangford had let it be known that England would “occupy Brazil” if the royal family were to allow themselves to fall into the hands of Napoleon.

  The change of residence was a great success for Brazil. The mere presence of the regent and the court transformed Rio. No matter that the regent himself was an easy-going amiable and flabby bourgeois prince. Rio began to think of herself as a capital. From then on, all the trade which used to go to Lisbon went to Rio. A bank was founded in that city, not to speak of a mint, a public library, as well as a botanical garden and a new theater. There were newspapers, and a Portuguese edition of The Wealth of Nations, with its skepticism about the value of slavery, was published. To cap the arrangements, the regent agreed to sign, under the kind of courtly duress which diplomats from London could then inspire, a commercial treaty with Britain (giving that country a “most-favored-nation” status, with a preferential tariff for her goods), as well as a treaty of alliance, by whose Article 10 the regent agreed to cooperate to ensure the “gradual abolition of the slave trade.” Dom João also undertook that Brazil would thenceforth take slaves only from those parts of Africa which were already part of the Portuguese zone of influence. That meant that they could trade legally in Loango, Angola, and Mozambique, at São Tomé and Principe, and at Whydah but not at Lagos, where there was no Portuguese fixed presence. The treaty was in some respects vague: for example, there was no guarantee that Portugal, once re-established at home and at peace (if that were to happen), would legislate against the slave trade. For the time being, too, the increased quantity of British manufactured goods now brought into Brazil, legally, could continue to be used in the trade to Angola, and in exchange for slaves: a weakness in the schemes devised in London which the Foreign Office had overlooked. Whether the regent envisaged that anything serious would come from his signature on the document is a matter for the imaginative novelist rather than for the historian: though he would not have known the figures, Dom João must have realized that, after his arrival, the import of slaves had increased in Brazil (from, say, ten to twenty thousand a year), a good business in which he himself is said to have invested.

  With this treaty, meantime, the British demonstrated that, almost overnight, they had changed their international posture: from having been the great practitioners of the trade in slaves, they had become philanthropic opponents of it on moral grounds. The transformation puzzled all those with whom they came into contact. Opportunistic motives were naturally suspected. The French, the North Americans, and the Spaniards thought that the British crusade against the slave trade was a way of consolidating their navy’s command of the sea. For, immediately after the passage of the bill prohibiting the slave trade, a British West Africa Squadron was established to ensure the implementation of the law: to ensure first and foremost that no British captain, from any British port, traded slaves along 3,000 miles of African coast. The Act of 1807 also permitted the seizure of pirates, and any vessels which carried false papers would automatically be judged pirates, at least according to English law.V A bounty of £60 per male, £30 per female, £10 per child would be paid by the Admiralty to naval officers and some other beneficiaries, including Greenwich Hospital, for every slave liberated (these rules meant that captains of slavers would never be indicted as pirates, because, had they been so, the bounties would not have been paid).

  After the report of some transgressions by English merchants (for example, the discovery of the Commercio del Rio, a fully equipped Spanish slave ship, in the Thames), the penalties for breaking the law were made more severe. In 1811, a new bill, the consequence of more agitation by the abolitionists, steered through Parliament by the mercurial Henry Brougham, made slaving a felony, and punishable by transportation (to Australia) for fourteen years. Brougham instanced the ship Neptune which, as well as carrying wood and ivory from Africa, had taken thirteen slaves to the isle of Principe. Then the George was also observed setting off to carry slaves. The navy stopped a ship with 109 slaves, called the Marqués Romano, which turned out to be the Liverpool vessel Prince William. Other Spanish disguises were the Galicia and Palafox, in reality the Queen Charlotte and the Mohawk. The judges at Sierra Leone had found that over a thousand slaves had been produced for emancipation at their court.25

  This further legislation seems to have had a decisive effect on would-be British slavers. Transportation, after all, was tantamount to a life sentence. Few accusations of British slave trading were subsequently made, although surreptitious investment in the Spanish and Portuguese ships continued, and though British goods remained popular among slaving captains.VI

  The first British West Africa Squadron at first consisted of only two ships, the frigate Solebay (thirty-two guns, Commodore E. H. Columbine) and the sloop Derwent (eighteen guns, Lieutenant E. Parker). They made a trial journey to the West African coast in 1808. The two ships were small, slow, and incapable of restraining a multimillion-dollar commerce. Then, in 1811, after the Anglo-Portuguese treaty, which seemed to permit the use of naval power against Portuguese or Brazilian slavers plying between Brazil and Africa, a larger flotilla was dispatched, under Captain Frederick Irby, a veteran of Camperdown and the Glorious First of June. He had at
his disposal the Amelia (thirty-eight guns), the Ganymede (twenty-four), the Kangaroo (eighteen), and the Trinculo (eighteen). His task continued difficult because both of the length of the coast which he had orders to supervise, and of the ambiguity of the laws under which he was operating. Since the country was at war, Britain claimed the right to board and search the ships of all neutral and enemy nations: that included those of the United States as well as France. But the two largest slave shippers were then Spain and Portugal.