by Hugh Thomas
All the same, the idea of ending the slave trade was bound to cause difficulties for a conscientious captain-general. Valdés wrestled with such questions as whether planters should surrender newly purchased slaves if they were found; whether plantations could be officially searched for imported Africans; whether he should seize ships denounced as slavers by the British; and whether all concerned in a slaving voyage should be arrested, or whether it should be just the captain and the ship’s owner. The captain-general sent a memorandum putting these and some similar questions to Madrid in March 1843. But he never received an answer.
General Valdés had by then become the target for attacks by the slave merchants. In him for the first time they encountered a governor who was unhappy to collaborate with them and receive their bribes. A ferocious campaign was in consequence mounted against him in Madrid. In 1842, just to select one of the innumerable documents which supported the slave merchants, the provincial deputation of Santander, on the north coast of Spain, announced that, “when from all sides of the kingdom a deeply felt clamor is raised against the demands of the English government which, under the pretext of humanity, seeks the ruin of the Spanish Antilles, the provincial diputacion of Santander cannot do less than unite its voice to the many who feel the blood of Castile run in their veins. . . .” The fact was, as Aston, the British minister in Madrid, wrote to Palmerston in February 1841, the Spanish government still depended “entirely upon the revenues of that island [Cuba] for the means of meeting the pressing exigencies of the state.” It was also supposed that behind Britain’s advocacy of abolition lay a real intention to capture the island: Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, an enlightened planter, wrote to his friend, the writer Domingo del Monte, that Britain had the force, the knowledge, and the will to ensure the end of the slave trade: if they did not act, it meant that there “are sinister designs which will be realized by sinister means.”23
Meanwhile the abolitionist David Turnbull had become British consul in Havana: an astonishing appointment. Turnbull had been a journalist for The Times in Madrid, where his interest in the slave trade had been awoken by the clever British minister, George Villiers, who had negotiated, with great patience, the treaty of 1835. His real character is difficult to gauge. His United States colleague, Campbell, described him as “just a Glasgow bankrupt, with some talent, more pretension, a great fanatic and regardless of the truth.” To the Spaniards, he was an archfiend. Valdés hated him but, then, he had accused Valdés of being as anxious to profit personally from the slave trade as his predecessors had been. In the view of the British apostle of free trade, Richard Cobden, Turnbull interfered in Cuban affairs so as to “embitter the feelings of Cuba and Spain more than anything else.” Yet to abolitionists he was a hero and even a martyr.24
These were, of course, nervous times in Cuba. There was restlessness among the slaves and several revolts on plantations. Partly because of Brazilian competition,VIII the slave trade declined in the early 1840s. Consul Turnbull was accused by the Spaniards, as Dr. Richard Madden had been, of exaggerating the facts in his reports, of trying to provoke a slave revolt, of encouraging the emancipados to present their claims through the British consulate, even of inciting his criollo friends to declare an abolitionist republic under British protection. Some of these charges were true. He probably did secure the release of two thousand emancipados while in Cuba.
Palmerston replied by insisting that, instead of Spain’s having the right to demand Turnbull’s dismissal, Britain wanted the power to dismiss all Cuban officials, from the captain-general downwards. Turnbull’s opinions, Palmerston declared, were, after all, those of the whole British nation. This high-handed approach astonished the Spaniards. Yet, despite being seen everywhere as a man bent on fomenting a slave revolt, Turnbull stayed a year or so more.IX Meanwhile, Valdés had antagonized the planters by merely asking what they thought of Turnbull’s plan. The overwhelming answer had been to oppose any further concessions. Who wanted some “fanatical Methodist” in Havana who would be, at the same time, the “judge, the accuser, and the instigator of revolts by slaves”?
Before he left Havana, Turnbull, by then a refugee on the British hulk, Romney, in Havana Bay, declared that the degrading spectacle of slavery in the Antilles and Brazil would soon be swept away by public indignation. Captain-General Valdés calmly suggested that such a humanitarian spirit might turn his attention first to Ireland and India before he concerned himself with foreign countries. Valdés thought that to accept Turnbull’s plan would be equivalent to abandoning the island; and he, for one, a veteran of fighting against Peruvian independence, would resign rather than have anything to do with such a surrender.
In fact, as the captain-general knew, there were, at that time, a few stirrings within Cuba in criticism of the slave trade. The director of the Economic Society, for example, a popular philosopher, José de la Luz y Caballero, had become an opponent; far away in Paris, the exiled historian José Antonio Saco maintained a constant stream of publications on the same theme. Then Domingo del Monte, a Venezuelan by birth, a friend of both Dr. Richard Madden and of Consul Turnbull, argued that Spain was only permitting the continued import of slaves from Africa in order to prevent a rebellion of criollos. He saw the slave trade, therefore, as an instrument of Spanish oppression.
There was also the beginning of a new mood in Madrid. Two members of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society called on the economist Ramón de la Sagra. They convinced him of their arguments against the slave trade, and la Sagra wrote a letter published in El Corresponsal in December 1840, which demanded the suppression of the commerce as a step towards the abolition of slavery itself. The Cubans, he said, echoing Adam Smith, were making a great mistake to suppose that the labor of slaves was superior to that of freemen.
In 1842, Turnbull, who had left Havana only to go to the Bahamas, and who was now the British government-appointed “superintendent of liberated Africans,” returned in a sloop to Cuba with some free British blacks, intending to try and liberate some Bahamians who he thought had been kidnapped as slaves. He landed near Gibara, on the north coast of the island, but was this time explicitly accused of seeking to organize rebellion, imprisoned, deported, and warned never to return. He was perhaps fortunate not to be executed, as many Spaniards demanded. Lord AberdeenX abolished his office (though appointing him for seven years to be a judge of the Anglo-Portuguese mixed court in Jamaica).
Following what seemed to the world to be a modest victory over British pressure, Spain tried to soothe her critics by introducing yet one more slave code (in 1842). On the one hand, it was stricter than previous arrangements: slaves on one plantation now could not visit neighboring ones without permission, and working days were defined as being of ten hours except during harvest, when they would be sixteen. But, at the same time, there were tolerant concessions: slaves who reported a conspiracy would be declared free; and slaves of advanced age without means of support would have to be maintained by the masters for whom they had once worked. In an effort to force household slaves onto plantations, the government imposed a tax of one peso per domestic slave.
In the face of continued Brazilian and Spanish or Cuban obstructionism, and the complex attitudes of France and the United States, the British government had now altered their approach to the problem of the slave trade in Africa itself. They had earlier signed treaties with three potentates in East Africa: the king of Eastern Madagascar, the sultan of Zanzibar, and the imam of Muscat. These each included provisions against the slave trade. Why not, thought John Backhouse of the Foreign Office, extend this scheme to West Africa? So naval officers were instructed to begin that process there.
The first opportunity for applying the new policies occurred in surprising circumstances on the river Gallinas. There, in 1840, Captain Joseph Denman, the determined officer who was son of the then lord chief justice in London, at the request of the governor of Sierra Leone landed sailors from three warships, the sixteen-gun brigs Wanderer, R
olla, and Saracen, at the Spanish slave station on the Gallinas estuary, browbeat the local king into accepting his intervention, destroyed the most important nearby slave barracoons (at Dumbocorro, Kamasura, Chicore, and Etaro), and freed 841 slaves waiting to be shipped. Palmerston was delighted: “Taking a wasp’s nest . . . is more effective than catching the wasps one by one,” he triumphantly proclaimed. While Denman burned the barracoons, local Africans helped themselves to the stores (including those belonging to the notorious Mrs. Lightburne:XI cottons and woolens, of course, but also gunpowder, spirits, and other goods). The Spanish merchants escaped upriver. The intervention led to the signature by the son of the king of the region of the first of the new treaties.
This sensational action caused a shock all along the African coast—particularly when other British naval officers followed, with other attacks: Captain Blount landed higher up the river Gallinas; Captain Nurse did so on a slave factory on the river Pongas, to the north of Sierra Leone; Captain Hill landed at “Mr. François’s barracoon” at Sherbro; Commander Tucker did the same at the island of Corisco, off Gabon (he seized much merchandise, as well as a Spanish factor, Miguel Pons); and, Captain Matson destroyed eight barracoons, owned by Brazilian and Spanish merchants, at Ambriz and Cabinda in Loango-Angola. (Asked later by a House of Commons committee how he knew that one merchant concerned was engaged in the slave trade, Captain Matson tartly answered: “The only proof was finding slaves chained in the factories.”)25 When Matson was charged in London for trespass by one of the slaveowners, Juan Tomás Burón, he explained that the slaves numbered 4,000, worth £100,000.
Under Denman’s influence, various treaties were afterwards secured with several other kings on the coast to achieve the abolition of the traffic in slaves, in return for a modest payment. The treaties with native kings would be balanced by a “vigilant and unremitting blockade,” followed up by destruction of the barracoons. Captain Matson later recalled that he received orders that, “wherever we found slave barracoons erected, we should endeavour to obtain the sanction of the native chiefs to destroy them; failing to obtain that consent, we were in certain cases to do it without. However, it was never difficult to obtain that consent, for it was really obtained for a trifling subsidy, and [so] most of the barracoons on the coast were destroyed.”26
These actions caused another shock in Havana. The dealers in slaves there seemed to the new British consul “to be paralysed for a time. . . . [They] came to me expressing great regret and remorse that they ever engaged in such an enterprise; and [hoped] that by following legal modes of traffic, great good might be done.”
Matters, meantime, at last also improved with respect to the relations between the United States and Britain when New Englanders regained control of United States foreign policy. Daniel Webster, a great orator, took office in Washington as secretary of state, and Andrew Stevenson, the Virginian at the London legation, gave way to Edward Everett, of Harvard. It is true that Webster had the bland view that, since slavery was bound to end one day, there was no point in discussing the question. But that did not affect his efficacy as a diplomat.
At the same time, Palmerston was succeeded as foreign secretary by the austere, cultivated, and subtle Lord Aberdeen—Byron’s “travell’d thane, Athenian Aberdeen.” His remarkable features expressed a “charted tranquillity,” in Gladstone’s words, “the absence from his nature of all tendency to suspicion,” which made him in some ways a more effective diplomat on the issue of the slave trade than Palmerston. He sought to understand the Spaniards and Portuguese, whereas Palmerston despised them; he saw the point of view of Brazilians, and never threatened them. Yet he gave up nothing to them. He was the one man whom Gladstone loved. His one published work, An Inquiry into the Principles of Beauty and Grecian Architecture, distinguishes him from all other statesmen of his era.
The new British minister in Washington was the experienced Lord Ashburton. As the enlightened banker, and head of Barings’, we have met before this Alexander Baring, when speaking on the slave trade in the House of Commons as long ago as 1814. He had served in Peel’s administration in 1834, and he had the great benefit of having known the United States in Jefferson’s day. Neither Aberdeen nor Ashburton surrendered Palmerston’s aims, but they altered his language. Thus Aberdeen suggested that British naval officers should renounce the right to visit United States merchant vessels if they merely thought slaves were aboard; and should offer reparation if a trespass were to occur. All the same, he did assert the right to visit such vessels flying the United States flag, not as Americans but as suspected Spaniards. The actual difference was nonexistent, the difference of style considerable.
The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 (primarily concerned with boundary disputes) marked this new mood of reconciliation between Britain and the United States. By it, both countries bound themselves to “maintain in service on the coast of Africa a sufficient and adequate squadron or naval force of vessels, of suitable numbers and description, to carry in all not less than eighty guns, to enforce separately and respectively the laws, rights, and obligations of each of the two countries for the suppression of the slave trade.” The treaty was to remain in being five years, and afterwards till one of the two countries declared that she wished to end it. An early draft of the treaty provided that British and United States ships should, in the spirit of the Sierra Leone agreement between Lieutenant Paine and Commander Tucker, cruise off Africa in couples. But Britain’s unfortunate continuing refusal to abandon the right of impressment of seamen found on neutral ships in time of war ruined the chance of this innovation, and the treaty merely left a pious understanding that cooperation should occur on the spot “should exigencies arise.” Even so, the treaty had its enemies in Washington, such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton (“Old Bullion”). The treaty was also criticized as feeble by Palmerston, in opposition, in the columns of the Morning Chronicle. In a wild speech in the House of Commons, he also deplored Ashburton as “a half Yankee,” a man with American loyalties.
At the same time, Aberdeen was prepared to criticize Palmerston’s behavior towards the United States: “I think the United States had cause to complain,” he rather curiously said. Discussion and argument, however, continued for many years yet, in the privacy of legations and government offices, in Congress and Parliament, as in the press, about the exact nature of the right of visit.27
Finally, Aberdeen’s advocate-general wrote in 1842 an opinion that the activities of Denman and other naval officers in destroying barracoons could not be justified “with perfect legality.”28 Basically, here was a restatement of the judgment of Sir William Scott twenty-five years before. Aberdeen had now to instruct the navy “to abstain from destroying slave factories, and carrying off persons held in slavery.”
The captains were displeased. In the opinion of Captain Matson, the change played into the hands of the slave merchants. It told the Africans, he explained bitterly to a committee of the House of Commons in 1848, that “there had been a revolution in England; that the people had risen and obliged the Queen to turn out Lord Palmerston, because he wished to suppress the slave trade; that there was now a revolution going on in England to oblige the Queen to carry on the slave trade.”29 In Africa itself, some of the treaties which the officers of the navy had laboriously secured in order to abolish the trade were placed in jeopardy.
Slavers, though, both men and ships, were faced, in the beginning of the 1840s, with some further impediments: in addition to the British naval squadron, the French maintained a force in West Africa, which was sometimes as large as the British even if it confined itself to deterrence (between October 1842 and March 1843, three French warships “visited” twenty-five ships, of which twenty-three were English, one Swedish, one from Hamburg). Incidents abounded; the United States had its ships, so did the Spanish and Portuguese, and even the last named sometimes, at least for the show of the thing, felt it necessary to intervene. The same was true of the tiny Brazilian navy.
I After 1828, the Dutch appointed no new judges to the Anglo-Dutch mixed court, and Britain was left to act as she thought best.
II The equipment defined was of ten kinds: (1) hatches with open gratings, not closed hatches; (2) divisions or bulkheads in the hold or on deck in greater number than were necessary for vessels engaged in lawful trade; (3) spare planks fitted for being laid down as a second or slave deck; (4) shackles, boats, handcuffs; (5) a larger quantity of water in casks or in tanks other than was necessary for the crew; (6) an extraordinary number of casks or of other receptacles for holding liquid; (7) a greater number of mess tubs than was required for the crew; (8) a boiler of unusual size; (9) an extraordinary quantity of rice or other articles of food; and (10) a larger quantity of mats than necessary for merchant ships.