The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The minutes of the meeting show several expressions of loyalty, as befitted citizens of that “ever-faithful” (siempre fiel) island, which designation the captain-general had recently secured formally for the colony. But the gathering unanimously requested the governor to refrain from publishing the Anglo-Spanish Treaty as it was and suggested a committee to reflect on the matter. The committee would include Santiago de la Cuesta, who would know what was happening in the field.14

  The committee duly reported. It requested the government to provide time in which the planters could seek the slaves whom “in so many ways we need for the reproduction of the black species,”II basing this ideal on the rules of “convenience, humanity, and philanthropy . . . mentioned in the treaty.” The law was, meantime, published in the official gazette of Havana, the Diario del gobierno de la Habana, on March 17.

  The slave merchants, planters, and officials of Cuba now reached agreement that the formal abolition of the slave trade by Spain would not be allowed to interfere in practice in the traffic. The French, after all, had shown the way.III There had been a number of discussions about the future of the trade the previous year. Now both the governor and the treasurer, Alejandro Ramírez, apparently assured Santiago de la Cuesta (who in turn informed his colleagues in the commerce) that, whatever the government in Madrid might do to please the English, matters would be different in the Caribbean. After all, most Spanish planters had been smuggling slaves—from the English in Jamaica above all—so as to evade taxation: what more easy than to continue the practice, in order to avoid the new treaty with the English, who had so curiously changed their mind on the matter of slaves? Perhaps, too, that Anglo-Saxon change of mind was just temporary; the merchants of Havana knew enough of England to realize that, whatever the government in London desired, there were investors and merchants in that city only too willing still to help Cuba in its efforts to achieve an adequate labor force. It seems also that the Spanish government secretly decided to permit their subordinates in Cuba to break the law on slave trading: a later captain-general of Cuba, General Tacón, wrote in 1844 to the then ministers of foreign affairs and the navy that, in 1818, the king sent a confidential order to his predecessor in Cuba and to the same official in Puerto Rico, instructing them to overlook the illegal importation of slaves since, without slaves, he accepted, the agriculture of the islands could not make progress.15

  The Spanish Crown, through its Cuban representatives, was also doing what it could to increase foreign investment in, and foreign immigration to, Cuba, by concessions on taxes. Many North Americans had been long established on the island, and now more came. Some entered the slave trade; others, such as the ex-king of the Rhode Island traffic, James de Wolf, were content, for the time being, to maintain their sugar plantations—Mariana, Mount Hope, and San Juan—near Matanzas, where they employed slaves whom they had earlier imported or whom they obtained through George de Wolf, who was still active in the commerce in slaves, and whose sugar plantation, the Arca de Nöe, Noah’s Ark, lay to the southwest of Havana, near Batabanó.16

  In those days, hostility towards “la perfidia inglesa” was shared by almost everyone in Cuba, including the captains-general, such as Cienfuegos and his short-serving successor, Juan Manuel Cagigal (both of them had had their first experience of dealing with England during the siege of Gibraltar in 1783). The treasurer, the able Alejandro Ramírez, the real master of the island for many years, was in matters of foreign policy a traditionalist who always looked on England as the eternal enemy, this hostility being exacerbated rather than soothed by England’s help in the Napoleonic Wars.

  The Spanish colonial officials had other things, too, with which to concern themselves: the fear of revolution, either in the style of the Haitians or in that of the rest of Latin America. The loyalty to Spain of the Cuban planter class could be secured only if they were assured of slaves.IV

  Whatever the secret expectations of the planters, the signature of the treaty with Britain, as might have been expected, was a stimulus to importing slaves before the legal deadline: in three years, 70,000 Africans entered Cuba through Havana alone, over 100,000 in the whole island. The ships which brought these slaves mostly flew a Spanish flag, but one also came in flying a Dutch flag, several purported to be Portuguese, one was United States, and one was French. Many of the ships with Spanish flags were, however, United States slavers, including several from George de Wolf’s fleet from Bristol, Rhode Island. Barnabas Bates, at that time postmaster in Bristol, wrote in 1818 that the system was that “cargoes suited to the African market are procured here in Bristol, and taken aboard vessels suited to the purpose, and then cleared for the Havanna by the Collector [that is, Charles Collins]. The master there effects a nominal sale of the vessel and cargo to a Spaniard, takes on board a nominal master and proceeds to Africa. . . . When the vessel has made one voyage, she can proceed on another without returning to the United States. A new cargo is then sent out to her in the Havanna. . . . There is one [ship] lying here ready for sea called the General Peace, lately owned by Thomas Saunders, of Providence. . . . The crew talk familiarly of their destination, and one man against whom I had a claim boldly told me that I must wait ‘till he could go and catch some blackbirds.’ ”17, V

  The legal Spanish trade did not end without one remarkable occurrence: the entry into action in 1819 of a corvette of the Haitian navy, the aptly named Wilberforce, which seized the Spanish slave ship Yuyu (otherwise known as the Dos Unidos) coming from Africa with a cargo of slaves. On March 26, 1820, the captain-general of Cuba demanded of the mulâtre President Jean-Pierre Boyer of that island (he had temporarily reunited Santo Domingo, with the ex-Saint-Domingue) that he give up the slaves which he had liberated. There was no reply. A further request from Cuba also went unanswered. Only in January 1821 did Boyer reply, in a conciliatory fashion, but he refused to give up the slaves. By that time, the slave trade to Cuba was formally illegal, the number of slaves actually in Cuba probably approaching 200,000.

  Spain, secretly satisfied to find that the Cuban planters seemed to prefer riches and dependence to independence with no defense, tried to encourage, for the first time, European immigration into Cuba, including non-Spanish immigration. A tax of six pesos was also imposed on each male slave imported in these last years of the legal trade, and the revenue was to be used for bringing free white labor. Female slaves were exempted from the tax, to encourage imports of them.

  Another faithful Spanish colony, Puerto Rico, always poorer, remained with a strong white (80,000) or free black or mulatto (85,000) population, against a limited number of slaves (17,500), in a population of over 180,000.

  In 1820, the Spanish government, as everyone had anticipated would happen, made numerous demands of the English to delay the enactment of their antislaving treaty. Ships already at sea should surely be allowed to deliver their cargoes. Did not a ship setting out for Africa for slaves for Cuba have to count on a journey of ten months?

  The Cubans—planters, merchants, officials—were assisted in these moves by the tacit support of the king; by the dismissal of that minister, Pizarro, who had been so (unwisely) proud of having introduced an end to the slave trade; and by his replacement by the marquis of Casa Irujo, a firm friend of the slave dealers. The Cubans’ agent in Madrid, General de Zayas, seems to have done his job well.

  On May 20, 1820, when the slave trade to Cuba was formally supposed to end, a new deadline was agreed delaying the measure till October 31, but the Cubans, through their friends in Madrid, again argued that five months was too short a time. Only on December 10 were the newly appointed British commissioners in Havana told by the captain-general of the island that orders had been received to carry out the treaty. That was a direct consequence of a liberal revolution in Madrid, and indeed it is hard to believe that it would have occurred had it not been for that upheaval.

  So tribunals were established at Sierra Leone and at Havana: at the last named, the Spanish judges were to be, ho
wever, Alejandro Ramírez and Francisco de Arango—the first the treasurer who had laid careful plans with the slave traders for the evasion of the treaty; the second, the theoretician of the slave trade in Cuba.

  The Spanish navy would send only two ships or so as their contribution to the naval patrol, and neither they nor the few English ships in the region could do much, even if they had wished to, in Havana. It was impossible to distinguish at sight slave ships from the others leaving Cuba, and it was impossible to have to check each suspicious one.

  A typical incident occurred in March 1821, only a few months after the treaty had come into force. The British Commodore Collier intercepted the Cuban-based schooner Ana María, in the Bight of Benin. She turned out to be carrying 500 slaves. Collier’s boat crew boarded this vessel, whose captain insisted that he was a North American. Papers proclaimed him to be a Spaniard, Mateo Sánchez. This individual locked himself into his cabin and a fight ensued, during the course of which fifty female slaves jumped overboard, to be eaten by sharks. Collier was still able eventually to liberate the other 450 slaves in Sierra Leone.

  A new liberal Cortes in Madrid, after the Revolution of 1820, had, meantime, appointed a commission to propose measures to stop all violations of the treaty of 1817, and to decree that that document should be included in the new criminal code. But this new Cortes naturally included members from the colonies, including three from Cuba, who had instructions to point out that a further delay of at least six years was necessary for any effective prohibition on the trade. It was desirable to stock up the haciendas with slaves, and to provide “African women for the conservation of the species and the plantations. . . . Of all the provinces of the Spanish empire,” the document went on, “the most concerned . . . in this business is the island of Cuba. No other one has undertaken the African slave trade directly with its own ships and capital. Therefore, the damages caused by the sudden cessation . . . would be incalculable.”18

  The Cuban deputies at the Cortes, however, included Fray Félix Varela, professor of philosophy, a real liberal who had passed his childhood in Florida. He ignored his instructions from Havana: the first Cuban to say anything publicly against the slave trade, he boldly stated that, until slavery was abolished, the Antilles would always be in danger of slave revolts, for the Haitian and continental revolutionaries had many plans for the liberation of his island. How could one expect the slaves to be tranquil while the criollos and others rejoiced in their new freedom under the constitution of 1820? “The barbarian is the best soldier when he finds someone to lead him. Santo Domingo showed that there would be no lack of leaders [in Cuba]. The general wish of the people of Cuba is that there should be no slaves. They only want to find some other way to supply their necessities.” Varela proposed the liberty of slaves who had served fifteen years with the same master, and the liberty for all born after the publication of the decree. He also wanted the establishment of a lottery whose winner would be allowed to buy his freedom, and the foundation of philanthropic committees charged with directing abolition and protecting slaves.19

  This speech received no attention in Spain, but much publicity in Cuba. The historian José Antonio Saco, a pupil of Varela’s, himself soon to be a deputy from Cuba, recalled that he heard someone in the Cortes say, “Any deputy from Cuba who asks for the abolition of slavery ought to have his tongue torn out. . . .” Another priest-deputy to the Cortes from Cuba, a canon of the cathedral, Fray Juan Bernardo O’Gabán, was persuaded to write a pamphlet against Várela (Observaciones sobre la condición de esclavos africanos) in which he insisted that the slave trade was a means whereby the Africans could be rendered civilized. So, if humanitarianism were truly understood, “wise legislators would compel the Africans to work, and protect, not oppose, their transition to America.”20

  The question was left unresolved until, in April 1823, the French army of “100,000 sons of Saint Louis,” inspired by Chateaubriand, destroyed the revolutionary government in Spain. Liberals in Madrid were swept away, exiled, and even executed; and Varela and those who thought like him emigrated, as so many enlightened Cubans have had to do since, to the United States. With that counterrevolution, any chance of a swift end to Cuban slavery ended.

  In an effort to maintain her own policy, the British navy extended her network of patrol ships to the coasts of Cuba and Brazil. Yet many slavers entered the ports of Cuba (twenty-six at least in 1820 and 1821, perhaps ten, four, and seven respectively in 1822, 1823, and 1824), and it was not till the last of these years that the British captured a slave cargo off the island and the slaves, the so-called emancipados, were freed.

  After the capture of this first vessel, a new controversy broke out. The commander-in-chief in Spain, General Francisco Tomás Morales (he had commanded the last Spanish army in Venezuela, which he had withdrawn to Cuba), was found to be a major shareholder in the condemned ship: a fact which, as the British Judge Kilbee pointed out, in one of his many reports to London, “speaks volumes as to the state of the slave trade.” Kilbee had already convinced himself that, “with very few exceptions, all the employees under the government [in Havana] are directly or indirectly engaged in the traffic.”

  Then arose the difficult question of the emancipados: these ex-slaves, beneficiaries of English philanthropy, were supposed to be handed over to members of the clergy, to widows, or to other benign proprietors who promised to look after them. But after a few consignments, the disposal of such unwilling emigrants from Africa became yet one more business. The captain-general was unenthusiastic about releasing a large number of free blacks into Cuba, and handed over their distribution to Joaquín Gómez, originally of Cádiz, one of the prominent slave dealers of the island. In this way, the planters naturally came to control the emancipados exactly as if they had been slaves.

  New laws, it is true, provided that these Africans were to be instructed in the Christian religion, taught a craft and so made capable of sustaining themselves and, after four years, made free. But in practice the masters had no incentive not to overwork them. In addition, they were customarily re-employed by those who had had their services at the beginning.

  The seizure, by H.M.S. Lion, of a second Cuban slave ship, El Relámpago, in late 1824, was the beginning of an argument between the British and the Spaniards, which lasted half a century. One hundred fifty bozal slaves—that is, slaves from Africa—were on board, all entitled to certificates as emancipados. Judge Kilbee wrote out some provisions which would have given each freed man, or woman, a trade. But an astute new Spanish judge on the mixed court, Claudio Martínez de Pinillos, who had succeeded Ramírez, talked of the political dangers of releasing the emancipados. If these Africans (filled with English ideas of freedom) were placed at liberty, they would constitute a dangerous example to others on the island. The Cuban authorities explained additionally that they could not return the emancipados to Africa, because of the cost, the difficulty of finding ships, the folly of returning such souls to “the darkness of paganism,” and the certainty of exposing the persons concerned to resale into slavery. Martínez de Pinillos, an able economist who was now treasurer of Havana as well as a judge, had helped, when still in Spain, to draft the decree on free trade in the Americas which, had it been issued only a few years earlier, might have saved the Spanish empire from dissolution. In Cuba, he devised a way to raise the annual income of the colony from two million pesos to thirty-seven million in a space of only twelve years. That was why he was taken so seriously.VI

  The Council of the Indies in Madrid, however, refused Martínez de Pinillos’s ideas on the treatment of emancipados. One of the members, Manuel Guazo, suggested that the Africans should be brought to Spain and asked to build roads. But the archbishop of Toledo was hostile to the idea. Others suggested they should be dispatched to the Balearic Islands or the Mosquito Coast in Central America to work under the guidance of priests. The Havana City Council argued that the captured slave ships and their emancipados should be carried back by the Br
itish to Sierra Leone. But the Spanish foreign minister in the end decided that the Africans should be taken to be employed as domestic servants in Spain. The journey would be paid for by the sale of the captured slave ships concerned and, if necessary, more money would be raised by a tax in Cuba.

  This decision was issued as a royal decree in 1828. But the Cuban planters still thought that the scheme would cost too much. Joaquín Gómez, the slave dealer who had become subprior of the Consulado of Havana, thought that twenty pesos a head was the minimum cost of taking the emancipados back to Spain. Martínez de Pinillos then suggested that these “free men” should merely be distributed as theretofore among institutions or individuals of the island, “to be employed, either as servants or as free laborers.” There was no indication as to how these Africans were to be distinguished from slaves if they were asked, as many were, to work on a sugar or coffee plantation, and the evidence is that they were not so distinguished. But for a few years this was the interim solution preferred.

  The Spanish navy, of course, was supposed to be fulfilling the same task as was the British but, between 1820 and 1842, their vessels stopped precisely two ships, both Portuguese and, therefore, the slaves within them were not subject to the jurisdiction of Judge Kilbee and his court. Yet, though the British tally of ships seized was far higher, it made little impact on the number of slavers arriving: at least thirty-seven in 1825, perhaps bringing over 11,000 slaves, and some fourteen in 1826, bringing over 3,700. Kilbee reported to Canning in 1825, “It is not from being in possession of better sources of information than formerly that I am enabled to state the number of slaves landed . . . but merely [because] transactions of this nature are now public and notorious, no mystery being found necessary.”21