The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  35

  They All Eagerly Desire It, Protect It and Almost Sanctify It

  Comment by Captain-General Cañedo on the attitude to the slave trade of Cuban planters c. 1853

  THE BRAZILIAN SLAVE TRADE, one of the longest-lasting businesses in the history of commerce, was now at an end; but an even older one, that to Cuba, was still prospering. Between 1840 and 1860, about 200,000 slaves were probably carried to Cuba (and perhaps 7,200 to Puerto Rico). But beneath such an austere statement of figures, the diplomatic, maritime, economic, and social life of the island of Cuba went through an astounding series of upheavals.

  In one respect, this era represented an unusual triumph for Spanish foreign policy. Through dissimulation, procrastination, and evasion, the weak governments of Queen Isabella in Madrid continually resisted the demands of the British at their most bombastic. Had the matter not been the continuation of the slave trade, the diplomacy of Spain would have received accolades, and avenues might have been named after those responsible.

  But this success for diplomacy in Madrid began in a curious way. Though the census of 1841 indicated that slaves constituted a majority of the population of the island, the slave trade itself seemed to be coming to an end. The reason had nothing to do with England, nor with philanthropy. The fact was that, as in Brazil, there were several slave revolts. The new thirty-four-year-old captain-general, whose responsibility was to suppress these challenges, was Leopoldo O’Donnell, one of the many Spanish officers of distinction with Irish antecedents. Like most captainsgeneral of Cuba, he had spent his youth fighting in the civil wars of Spain. Whereas his predecessor Valdés owed his lucrative place in Cuba to his friendship with General Espartero, a friend of Britain, O’Donnell owed his own appointment to his support for General Narváez in overthrowing Espartero. He would afterwards have a long career in politics surely financed by his five years’ stay in Cuba, where he was an assiduous friend of both slavery and, even more, of the slave trade. He was said to have taken £100,000 back to Spain with him. He was always backed in Madrid by his patron Narváez and by the queen regent. O’Donnell’s own view was that a sudden end of the slave trade would result in a catastrophe, and he advised that the Government in Madrid ought to do all they could to avoid all discussions of the matter in the Cortes.

  The facts of the “Escalera Conspiracy” (so called because suspects were tied to a wooden staircase in a ruined coffee plantation near Matanzas and whipped till they confessed), which faced O’Donnell in Cuba, are unclear. Broadly, though, a group of free blacks and mulattoes seem to have discussed a scheme to proclaim the independence of Cuba, and the manumission of all slaves who supported the idea. An assistant of the late British Consul Turnbull, Francis Ross Cocking, was implicated, but the lead was taken by a group of free blacks headed by a certain José Rodríguez. Cocking apparently encouraged these men to suppose, inaccurately, that he, and they, had the approval of the British government. He himself imagined that he had the backing of certain enlightened criollos. But the scheme was betrayed by the writer Domingo del Monte who, Cocking foolishly supposed to have been in support of him, but who described the matter, in an exaggerated form, in a letter to Alexander Everett, sometime minister of the United States in Madrid, once the president of that country’s special representative in Havana, and a keen supporter of the idea of annexation of Cuba to the North American Union. Everett came then to believe, with his friends among the Cuban planters, that Britain might be planning an armed intervention in Cuba in order to establish an “Ethiopico-Cuban republic” (del Monte’s expression) and “to form round our southern shores a cordon of free negroes.” He sought, unsuccessfully, to awaken his masters in Washington to the iniquity of the matter. Daniel Webster, secretary of state under President Tyler, was skeptical, but concerned enough to inform the Spaniards of the alleged conspiracy.1

  Apparently independent of this plot, there were a number of slave revolts in late 1843 and 1844, similar in character to rebellions which had often occurred before: a rising of twenty-five slaves at the Alcancia sugar mill in Cárdenas; a protest of slaves on the Cárdenas-Júcaro railway; and other minor outbursts, which were all suppressed by O’Donnell with considerable brutality. Perhaps 3,000 slaves and free blacks were tried summarily, and about eighty were shot or died under a panicky interrogation, either on the stocks or in overcrowded cells. No evidence was forthcoming of a large-scale revolutionary conspiracy, but that did not prevent many free blacks who had been born outside Cuba from being deported, along with a number of criollo leaders, such as José de la Luz y Caballero and even the inadvertent informer, Domingo del Monte. Those who were executed included Cuba’s best-known poet, Diego Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, “Plácido,” a free mulatto, who was accused of being an English agent but who seems to have been innocent of all participation in any plot.

  The black is born and thereafter

  For lack of education

  In a chaos of bitterness,

  He seems sad and blind.I

  O’Donnell made no secret of his view that Cocking, Turnbull, and the might of the English Crown had been the inspiration of these rebellions. Indeed, his hostility to England was remorseless. It was as if he was determined to avenge the defeat of Red Hugh O’Donnell, his ancestor, by the English in Ireland in 1600.

  If O’Donnell hated England, the sentiment was cordially returned. After the repression of 1844, even the serene Aberdeen was roused to anger, and he exerted himself to secure his withdrawal. “Unless they remove him, I do not see what we can do but recall you,” Aberdeen wrote to the minister in Madrid, the languid but effective Henry Bulwer, “Unless they make reparation for his monstrous cruelties and acts of gross injustice . . . we shall be obliged to order reprisals.”2 But Bulwer knew that such a thing would be far from easy, because of that general’s friends in Madrid. Palmerston summed up the position, when he returned to the Foreign Office, in another letter to Bulwer: “It appears that the practice of re-selling emancipados which has been going on for some time past, under the sanction of the captain-general of Cuba was the public topic of conversation [in Havana]. . . . It is also stated that upwards of 5,000 of these unfortunate persons have been re-sold at rates varying from 5 to 9 ounces of gold—for example, 50 emancipados were sold to the Gas Company of Havana for a period of five years to serve as lamplighters, by which means a profit of upwards of $600,000 has been made by persons in Government house [sic]. . . . 400 emancipados have been transferred to the Marquis of las Delicias, chief judge of the mixed court, to be held by him for the benefit of the Countess of Guerega, wife of General O’Donnell . . . [so] You will express the confident hope that the Government of Spain will give positive and peremptory orders to General O’Donnell to obtain . . . liberty for these nominally emancipated negroes.”3 . . . But these efforts were unsuccessful.

  O’Donnell busied himself with inquiries, commissions, and recommendations much as Valdés had, but always with the aim of enabling those engaged in the slave trade to continue it. But he was every year encountering further difficulties, less because of a sudden fit of philanthropy among the criollos than from their fear, comparable to what had transpired in Brazil, that, one day, the presence of a large black slave population might bring to them the same kind of revolution which had destroyed Saint-Domingue. For an identical reason, ironically, O’Donnell abandoned Valdés’s scheme for the liberation of emancipados after five years: he was convinced, he said, that “free men of colour were compromised en masse in the vast plot.” Emancipados after 1845 remained, indeed, slaves de facto if not de jure, though now, as a rule, they worked for the government—Roman emperors would instantly have recognized them as “state slaves.” They must then have numbered about 2,000 in Cuba (alongside another 2,000 who had been freed, 1,000 who had gone to British colonies, and about 6,000 who were listed as “dead, lunatic or disappeared”).

  In 1844, meantime, the veteran Spanish liberal Martínez de la Rosa—the playwright-statesman of t
he Cortes of 1820, friend of Canning and Chateaubriand, who had signed on Spain’s behalf the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1835, with its famous equipment clause—returned to power, as foreign minister. In keeping with the wishes of his English friends, he introduced a law into the Cortes in Madrid naming penalties for those convicted of being concerned in the slave trade. Owners and investors in slave voyages, as well as captains and other senior officers, would be imprisoned for six years, or eight if they resisted arrest, as well as being subject to exile and fines; crews would suffer half those fines; and there were other punishments if slaves were maltreated.

  The bill caused trouble in Spain. Even liberal politicians were hostile to it, and the opponents of the measure sought to ruin it by introducing wrecking amendments. The bill became law, only because it seemed not to damage the institution of slavery. Indeed, one of the amendments which the government did accept allowed that, once slaves had reached a plantation in Cuba, they could not be touched.4

  If the bill caused trouble in Madrid, it provoked something close to panic among planters in Cuba. Though the then state prosecutor in Havana, Vicente Vázquez Queipo de Llano, privately thought that an end of the slave trade was the only way to ensure indefinite white supremacy, Captain-General O’Donnell believed that the law, if carried out, would ruin the colony. He prevented any mention of it from appearing in the newspapers in Havana—one more remarkable treatment by a colonial governor of a law proclaimed by the imperial power. The Council of the Indies in Madrid, however, merely commented that Britain, presumably jealous of the success of Cuban sugar, must be seeking to destroy the island’s prosperity by making demands on Spain which it did not dare to make on the United States. That Council now seems to have thought that the slave trade should be slowly run down and the deliberate propagation of slaves (in keeping with what was believed to be practiced in the United States) should be encouraged to offset the shortage of labor.

  The panic took some time in Cuba to be assuaged. There was, though, for several years an almost complete end to the import of slaves into the island: the only people able to continue, thought the British commissary judge in Havana, “were persons like Don Julián Zulueta” who were simply “desirous of obtaining slaves at a low price, not for sale.” It would seem that no more than 1,500 slaves were imported in 1848. Cholera also killed many slaves already in Cuba. Some sugar planters sold up and went to Texas. Most coffee farms were ruined by hurricanes.

  The economics of slavery was in these years discussed ad infinitum in the Cuban periodical press. Thus, in 1845, Vázquez Queipo de Llano estimated, in a public report, that slave labor cost seventy pesos per person a year and free labor 140, and that the rising price of slaves would soon make free labor competitive.

  In 1845, it was hard to see that twenty years of efforts by the British governments, with occasional sporadic support by liberal Spanish governments, had had the slightest effect on the Cuban slave-powered economy. The Spanish governments in these days were not malign. Bruised by civil war, or the fear of it, with the political consequences of having a child queen and a strong-minded but self-indulgent queen regent in a semiabsolutist regime, they still did not have the strength to carry out policies which seemed against the interests of their richest colony. The administration was quick to take offence. Thus in 1848, Bulwer was asked by General Narváez to leave Madrid after (false) accusations that he had been concerned to support a rebellion against the Spanish government. There was outrage in London, and Palmerston even considered asking the navy to blockade Seville.

  But in 1849 and 1850, imports of slaves rose again in Cuba and, after 1851, with prices in Africa very low because of the end of the traffic to Brazil, the trade returned to its old high levels. The profits in the business were too high to ignore. Washington Irving, the inspired author who had become, so curiously, yet so appropriately, the United States minister in Madrid, reported to Washington: “It seems beyond a doubt that, under . . . captain-general O’Donnell, slaves are again admitted in great numbers” to Cuba.5 A slave in the 1840s could be bought for half what he would have cost in 1780, but he could be sold for at least twice as much. As we have seen, the cost of manufacturing goods, the main items used to barter slaves, had also fallen dramatically. Even when all costs were paid, a slaver capable of carrying 500 slaves might make $100,000 a journey: a profit of 200 percent.

  The renaissance of the trade in the late 1840s in Cuba was largely the work of a clever native of Cádiz, Manuel Pastor, a retired colonel who had been a friend of Tacón, who had used him as an adviser on public works, then given him control over the new markets which he had built in Havana. This made Pastor’s fortune. Unlike Tacón, he believed in railways, and he helped to finance several. In the late 1840s, he was the brain behind a new sugar company in which the queen mother, María Cristina, still in effect the regent of Spain, participated, along with such wellknown merchants as Pedro (once Pierre) Forcade of Bordeaux, Antonio Font, and Antonio Parejo, a close friend of the queen regent’s second husband, General Muñoz (the duke of Riañasares), and generally held to be the agent of the queen mother herself. This company’s plantation, Susana, received its regular “sacks of coal” (that is, new Africans) thanks to Parejo—as well as courtesy of new captain-general, Federico Roncali (count of Alcoy). Roncali, like his predecessor, O’Donnell, feigned ignorance of the slave trade. But he was engaged in protecting it, all the same: “The CG [captain-general] pockets 51 pesos a head,” wrote a merchant to his New York partner in 1849.II (The Spanish queen regent was, meantime, as a result thought to be the “richest individual in Europe.” The intelligent British minister in Madrid in the 1830s, George Villiers, had reported, “All her money is secured in foreign funds.”6)

  Parejo, looked on in 1850 as the “person now considered the most extensively engaged in slave trading,” died in Cuba, leaving debts to the queen mother which she apparently never recovered. That financier’s widow, Susana Benítez (it was after her that the big plantation had been named), all the same provided him a funeral which cost 10,000 pesos. In these years, the small Cuban port of Cabañas, in the western province of Pinar del Río, became the most important of the slave harbors, where could be seen “the cream,” the merchants and captains (la flor y nata) of the slave ships,” commented Captain Impiel, in Baroja’s Los Pilotos de Altura.7

  Still, there was one critical change in the late 1840s and 1850s in Cuba: though slaves were cheap in Africa, they were becoming too expensive in Cuba for all but the large proprietors. This confirmed a trend whereby small farmers gave up grinding their own cane, and increasingly took their product to a larger establishment where there were modern facilities, a steam engine, and a Derosne or Rilleux centrifugal mechanism, introduced from France. These modern haciendas were the origin of the modern centrales afterwards found throughout the island and, though the biggest and newest of them (Zulueta’s Alava, Parejo’s Susana, the queen mother’s San Martin, the last two of which joined to found a new company, La Perseverencia) adapted to the new conditions, many, more modest, abandoned slave society.

  Rich and internationally aware criollos had begun in these years to think in terms of annexation to the United States as a way of preserving their slaves and their position. This “annexationism” in Cuba merged with the expansionist movement in the United States known as Manifest Destiny. The United States was, just at that time, in the wake of the Mexican War, acquiring Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as parts of Colorado and Nevada. Why should the rainbow of Union ever end? Southern politicians in the United States also began to see annexation of Cuba as the next step, both as a way of helping to guarantee slavery in their own country, and as marking the beginning of a new Caribbean empire. Further, the Spanish minister in Washington, Ardáiz, received private warnings from Southern members of the United States Congress that they would support the Cuban planters if, after Spanish abolition of the slave trade in Madrid, they were to rebel against the madre patria.

>   Two societies were formed to agitate for annexation to the United States. First of these was a secret society, La Rosa Cubana, headed by Narciso López, a Venezuelan adventurer who had lost his father in the wars of independence and who, after taking part in the Carlist Wars in Spain on the liberal side, had briefly been governor of the elegant city of Trinidad. Second, there was the more restrained Club de la Habana, directed by Miguel de Aldama, a planter of imagination who hoped for annexation to the United States as a means of preserving slavery if not the slave trade. López made several attempts to inspire rebellions in Cuba, with help from volunteers from Hungary as well as Louisiana. He was eventually arrested by the Cuban authorities and garrotted, his last words being a ringing appeal: “Don’t be frightened, Cubans, of the scarecrow of the African race that has served so often the tyranny of our oppressors. Slavery is not a social phenomenon exclusive to Cuba or incompatible with the liberty of citizens. . . . Nearby you have the example of the United States, where three million slaves did not prevent the flourishing of the most liberal institutions in the world. . . .”8 Thus did Cuban nationalism start its melancholy history on a flawed premise.

  It also had a curious enemy, in the mother country. In addition to her requirement to treat Britain as a great economic power with which it was unwise to quarrel, Spain was beginning also to see Britain as an ally to help her thwart the annexation of Cuba to the United States; and it was true that British governments wanted to prevent the United States’ capture of the ever-faithful isle, not only because of her own commercial relations with her, but because such a consummation might cut her off from Mexican and other promising markets. All the same, Britain could not assist Spain until the latter had put into practice the treaties on the slave trade. But the unhappy rebellion of López changed that attitude. In September 1851, after the execution of that patriot, Palmerston gave the unusual order to British naval forces in the West Indies to help Spain in any way necessary to defeat North American filibustering expeditions. Even more remarkable, the French associated themselves with this. It was an indication of solidarity against what was seen by the European powers as a United States threat to their interests.