The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  A story from one of Irby’s voyages explains much. Having been told that forty-five Portuguese ships were loading slaves between Cape Palmas and Calabar, Irby set off from his headquarters at Sierra Leone just after Christmas 1811. On December 31, he met the Portuguese brig São João, full of slaves. Irby intercepted and sent her, with an escort on board, to Sierra Leone. A few days later, he met another Portuguese vessel, the Bom Caminho. She had no slaves on board, so she was released, even if Irby observed that she had recently bought two canoes, which (he believed) must have been intended for carrying slaves from Cape Coast to the ship. Irby reported this to the (British) governor of Cape Coast, and warned him never to sell canoes again if they could be used for slaving. He continued to Whydah, where he saw that three Portuguese brigs were openly trading for slaves. But since the Portuguese had a trading post there, Irby could do nothing. A little farther on, near Lagos, at Porto-Novo, the British found three more Portuguese ships, in the process of buying slaves. There was there no permanent Portuguese post, so he thought that he was entitled to seize them and sent them off, again with an escort of British officers on board, to Sierra Leone. Irby did the same at Lagos itself, again sending three ships to Sierra Leone, though leaving three others. After a brief stop at São Tomé, Irby returned to Sierra Leone.

  These and similar actions caused fury among the Portuguese, though the captains of their merchant ships were quite unprepared to fight the navy of their ancient ally. But many ships of countries other than Portugal had left the ocean because of the continuing war; and their slavers for a time habitually used the Portuguese flag.

  The colony of Sierra Leone, so long a center of the trade, and the recently bankrupt philanthropic colony of a private company, now became the headquarters of Britain’s antislaving activities. A prize court under the Admiralty had been set up at the new city of Freetown, on the estuary of the river Sierra Leone, with a judge and officials fully imbued with Wilberforcian ideals. It seemed for a time possible that, in this new role, Sierra Leone might, after all, become “the cradle of African civilization.” When a slave ship was captured, the naval officer concerned would send her there with a prize crew. If the vessel were condemned, as it almost always was, it would be confiscated and sold, and the slaves would be maintained at government cost for a year. After that, they had to shift for themselves, unless they volunteered to go to the British West Indies as apprenticed laborers. Almost all, however, remained in Sierra Leone, which thus became a microcosm of African tribal differences. The governor of that colony, usually a retired naval officer, was at the same time made generally responsible for all British interests in West Africa.

  It seemed to be an ideal solution. But difficulties began when Commander Irby, acting as “the new champion of the cause of humanity and justice,” in Ambassador Strangford’s words or, in the new style of English “global moralism,” to use the historian Pierre Verger’s phrase, interpreted (or misinterpreted) parts of the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty as showing that Portugal considered the slave trade to be generally illegal. Irby and his captains captured twenty-four nominally Portuguese or Brazilian slave ships in four years, 1810-13, of which twelve came from Bahia. There were continuous outcries from Lisbon. The new foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, had to write to the Admiralty in May 1813 “to desire that your lordships will be pleased to instruct His Majesty’s cruisers not to molest Portuguese ships carrying slaves bona fide on the account and risk of Portuguese subjects from the ports of Africa belonging to the Crown of Portugal and the Brazils.” Irby and the prize-court judges in Sierra Leone protested in turn. What was the former to do? The question was not soon to be answered. James Prior, of the navy, wrote, also in 1813, that all other considerations in Bahia faded “into insignificance in comparison with the slave trade; Portugal and Spain, England and France, Wellington, Bonaparte, the Prince Regent can all vanish into the land of shades; what does it matter provided that their dear traffic, the subject of their dreams, day and night, can be maintained? This attachment, no power of reason can shake, only the argument of force can have any effect.”26

  British naval captains had also to stand by if they saw ships from the United States at work on the African slave coast. The United States might have abolished the international slave trade, but they had no intention of allowing British naval officers to inspect their ships, criminal or no. Nor, for the time being, were they thinking of a naval patrol of their own off Africa.

  There was a hectic anxiety about the slave trade in these years which contrasted with its stability before 1788. No one knew how long it would continue. Planters who had always used slaves now bought them at inflated prices, since they feared that they might not find any more. The problems worsened (for the slave users, that is) as several Latin American countries, anxious for British commerce, recognition, and protection, and themselves no longer dependent on the institution of slavery, hastened to abolish their slave trades. Britain, with a virtual monopoly over all tropical produce, then had the only navy which could intervene in every continent. Thus Brazil, Argentina, even Mexico and several other ex-Spanish colonies were her virtual dependencies: Canning would candidly say, in 1824, “Spanish America is free and, if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English.”27

  Bolívar thought that abolition of slavery was the key to Spanish American independence, and liberated his own slaves. The Supreme Junta of Caracas, the first government of an independent Venezuela, abolished the trade in slaves in 1811; and, in New Granada (Colombia) in 1812, the liberator Miranda promised freedom to any slave who would fight the Spaniards for ten years (scarcely a generous concession). In Buenos Aires, the first revolutionary triumvirate, in a rare lucid moment, in 1812, prohibited the slave trade in the grandiose terms to which their compatriots had become used, though a clandestine commerce continued for a few more years. (The liberator, San Martin, thought that, in his army, “the best infantry soldier we have is the black and the mulatto.”28) His equivalent in Uruguay made a special appeal to blacks to rally round him, even calling on the slaves in Brazil to do the same. In Chile, the Revolutionary Congress in 1811 agreed to a proposal by a humanitarian liberal, Manuel de Salas, to abolish the domestic slave trade—a proposal which aroused the old guard who, as elsewhere, thought that the measure would shake the social order; even though that was anyway shaky. Then Morelos, in his rebellion in New Spain (Mexico), ordered all masters to free slaves within three days, and promised that such emancipated captives should have equality with Spaniards. But at that time there were few black slaves in the country; in any case, Morelos was soon defeated. Only in Cuba, as in Brazil, did a continuing demand for slaves seem to characterize the new era—and, partly for that reason, independence was delayed for nearly another century. Francisco de Arango, bewailing the decline in the introduction of slaves into Cuba in 1809 to a mere 1,162, insisted that no foreigner could provide Cuba on the scale which she required: “All our hopes,” he declared, “center on ourselves alone, and our entire attention must be directed to that end.”29

  Ourselves alone, nosotros solos! The new leading merchants of Havana who dealt in slaves, mostly peninsularesVII in origin, now led by Santiago de la Cuesta y Manzanal, Francisco Hernández, and Juan Magín Tarafa, with the support of the governor, soon set about carrying out the suggestions of Arango. In 1809, they jointly dispatched a brigantine, the San Francisco, to London, with instructions to buy goods there which could be exchanged for slaves in Africa. Other ships followed: the Zaragoza went direct to Loango, the Junta Central to Calabar. The intendantVIII of Havana, Juan de Aguilar, wrote to the Council of the Indies explaining how he was trying to encourage more direct journeys from Africa to Cuba, in Spanish ships, captained by Spaniards. Further, for all Arango’s declaration of insular self-reliance, the Cuban slave dealers were in close touch with North American shipbuilders and merchants, in Baltimore and Philadelphia.30

  But this new traffic brought Spain immediately into difficulty with the British
, theoretically allies of Spain, just as the Portuguese-Brazilian commerce had done. The British foreign secretary had, in both 1808 and 1809, asked his representative in Spain to urge the desirability of a gradual abolition of the Spanish slave trade throughout the Spanish empire. Wilberforce also wrote to the minister in Spain, the marquis Wellesley, and they talked about the matter in 1810. But if, in the capitals, the British were diplomatic, at sea they were less so.

  Thus, in the two years 1809 and 1810, Irby and his naval patrol intercepted nine ships out of about twenty-four which left Cuba for Africa to seek slaves, and sent most of them to Sierra Leone, where they were declared prizes and sold off, their slaves being liberated there. Most British officers believed that the Spanish slave trade was carried on by non-Spaniards and that, therefore, these vessels were fair game. True, there were some North Americans among the captains of these ships. But had not the United States abolished the trade as well as the English? So it was assumed that those accused would have to prove by their own laws that they were innocent. The Spanish ambassador in London—Pedro Alcántara de Toledo, the duke of Infantado, a friend of King Ferdinand VII—complained: the slave trade had not been abolished by Spanish law. A British tribunal could not cause British laws to apply to Spanish ships. The British government, triumphant in the long war, paid no attention. Her insensitivity to the national pride of a great nation fallen on hard times in the long run damaged the great abolition cause.

  The seizure of these ships was usually attended by a complex drama. Take, for example, the case of the brigantine Hermosa Hija, which belonged to Francisco Antonio Comas, of Havana. This vessel left Havana for Africa in 1810 and had almost returned again, with its cargo of several hundred slaves, when the British vessel Dark, under Captain James Wilkins, captured her. Wilkins put on board a prize crew and gave orders that the boat be taken to Sierra Leone. Within twenty-four hours, the Spanish crew had mutinied and overthrown the British sailors and, for four days, the ship was sailed back to Cuba. Then the British managed to recover control and, chaining both slaves and Spaniards, set off again for Freetown. There the Spaniards were accused and condemned, not of slave trading but of the more serious crime of insurrection.

  Cuban slave merchants had other difficulties than those presented to them by moralistic British naval officers. Once, one of their vessels was seized by Haitians, and the slaves were set free in that liberated but unfortunate country. The War of 1812 between Britain and the United States also made it legitimate for the British to seize ships with North American flags. But it also legalized privateering, and United States ships, including some owned by the de Wolfs of Bristol, captured British merchantmen. The traders in slaves often found themselves caught in the crossfire between the navies of the two Anglo-Saxon powers. The Caribbean was full of pirates in the early nineteenth century, no less brutal, if less picturesque, than those of the past. For example, a French corsair, Dominique You, on the bark Superbe, captured the United States ship Juan, with 134 slaves on board, belonging to Cuesta y Manzanal of Havana; another French pirate, Captain Froment, on the Minerve, seized the sloop Hiram, with sixty-one slaves intended for David Nagle also in Havana. Another coup of a different nature was that of the French Captains Brohuac and Morisac, who before 1808 seized a British merchantman on her way to Jamaica and sold the 220 slaves whom they had found on board.

  All the same, for abolitionists, the first promising news after 1808 did seem to come from Spain. In full war, with Napoleon’s armies in control of most of the country, the new liberal constitution made possible a legislative assembly representing the empire as well as the peninsula. José Miguel Guridi y Alcócer, an eloquent deputy for Tlaxcala, New Spain (he was a priest also), on March 26, 1811, presented to the Cortes of Cádiz the first formal Spanish project for the abolition, not of the slave trade, but of slavery as such, which, he said, adapting his Wilberforcian ideas to Latin phraseology, was contrary to natural law. He demanded the immediate abolition of the trade, freedom for all children of slave mothers, wages for surviving slaves, and the automatic right of slaves to buy their freedom if, through one way or another, they could lay their hands on any money. He hoped, too, to guarantee better treatment for all who remained in slavery. But in reply, a deputy from Bogotá, José Mejía Lequerica, said that, although he agreed that the abolition of the trade was an “urgent necessity,” that of slavery itself required much more thought. The Cortes decided to refer the matter to its commission on the new constitution. It remained there. Then, on April 2, the radical deputy Agustín de Argüelles (who had had, he said, “the sweet satisfaction” of having been in the House of Lords in London in 1808, on the night when it passed the bill of abolition) proposed the condemnation of the trade. He insisted that “Spain ought to be in line with Britain.”31 The British should be assured of that, so that the two most enlightened opponents of Napoleon could work together. Argüelles, it seems, had heard that the British ambassador, Henry Wellesley—brother of the marquis of Wellesley, then British foreign secretary, as of the duke of Wellington—was about to make a request to this effect and had persuaded him to hold his hand, so that the idea of abolition could be made to seem a Spanish one.

  This discussion caused panic in the Spanish empire, above all in Cuba, whose planters were horrorstruck, and whose captain-general, the marquis of Someruelos, Salvador de Muro, a subtle administrator whose motto was “know everything, pretend much, punish little,” sent back a message to the Cortes on July 7, 1811, which requested the government to treat the idea of abolition of the trade with reserve, “in order not to lose this important island.” The municipality of Havana on July 20 sent a ninety-two page memorandum to the Cortes, blaming Bishop de Las Casas for the slaves in Cuba in the first place: but “the slaves have come and are here, to our misfortune; not by our fault, but of those who first initiated and encouraged this commerce in the name of law and religion.” Now the economy of Cuba depended on both slavery and the slave trade, and that fact had to be faced. There was not a property on the island which had the slaves which they needed. The document was well-written, showed a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the debate on abolition in London and indicated that the criollos in Cuba would be formidable enemies of the British abolitionists. The precise knowledge which the author also had of the growth of “slave philanthropy” (filantropia negrera) was a warning to the government of Spain not to take the loyalty of Cuba forever for granted.32

  Then, also in the Cortes, as deputy for Cuba, there was the economist Francisco de Arango, who made a skillful rearguard defense of the existing position—much in the style of Henry Dundas in 1792. Though accepting the injustice of the trade, Arango opposed, as equally unjust, an overhasty resolution of the problem, arguing that the Cortes should wait till a constitution for Spain had been worked out, and suggesting that, since Britain and the United States had in effect given their planters twenty years’ notice of their plan to abolish the trade, Spain should be allowed to do the same. The planters of Cuba, and other places which had come to depend on slaves, should, in the meantime, encourage the import of female slaves for the purposes of reproduction.

  The following year, on November 23, in another debate in the Cortes (on a bill to remove the purchase tax known as the alacabala on the sale of slaves), Isidoro Antillón—the gifted geographer who had first among the Spaniards suggested the abolition of the trade, ten years before—proposed the full abolition of slavery. Arango again skillfully secured that the proposal was lost, by confining discussion of it to the oblivion of a secret session. The friends of slavery, of whom there were many, came to realize that they could influence opinion when they hinted that the abolitionists were covert allies, or even agents, of the English. That accusation made everything much more difficult, even if the English were allies of Spain. All the same, the municipality of San Juan in Puerto Rico did instruct their deputy, Ramón Power y Giralt, to support all measures in Madrid which favored the immigration of Europeans and the gradual extinct
ion of slavery, which they termed “the worst of ills from which this island suffers.”33

  These debates were signs that abolition might be proposed in the Spanish Cortes, but the violent reaction in Cuba suggested that the planters were unlikely to conduct themselves in the law-abiding way which had characterized their companions in Jamaica. There was an indication that that lawlessness might spread to the mother country too when Antillón, some days after his speech, was beset in the streets of Cádiz by three thugs, who inflicted wounds so severe that he died a year later. It would, however, be difficult to say that this was the first murder of an abolitionist, for the identities of Antillón’s assailants were never made clear.

  The British government were determined to prevent the use of the Spanish flag by their subjects to carry slaves to Cuba. So Henry Wellesley was in May 1811 ordered to ask Spain “to take all necessary action” to prevent the use of Spanish colors and documents by British as well as American slave captains. The British navy would be available to assist the Spanish government in putting its new regulations into effect. Suspicious ships—for example, off Tenerife—could be captured and judged, unless “the whole concern” were positively shown to be the bona-fide property of Spanish subjects.

  The Spanish government, needing British help against Napoleon, gave a conciliatory reply. They said that they would instruct the authorities in Tenerife to act as appropriate, in the light of Brougham’s accusations. But, not surprisingly, they gave no sign whatever of enthusiasm for the offer of British naval assistance.

  • • •

  In November 1813, the Portuguese, under the influence of their British friends, who insisted on the benefits of Sir William Dolben’s Act of 1788 (itself an adaptation of an old Portuguese law), agreed to a new limitation on the number of slaves carried: five per two tons’ weight of ship in any ship up to 201 tons; in larger ships, there could be only one slave per ton.