The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Despite his help to Spain against the United States, Palmerston had not abandoned his passionate mission to end the slave trade internationally. In 1851, the year of his success in Brazil, he wrote to Lord Howden (who, having been in Rio, had become minister to Madrid) to say that Britain was “desirous of coming to a plain understanding with the government in Madrid, and to make that Government comprehend that Great Britain will no longer consent to be baffled in regard to the Spanish slave trade . . . by unsatisfactory excuses and by unperformed assurances . . . while the Spanish authorities in Cuba have continued systematically and notoriously to set at nought the stipulations of the treaty. . . . It is high time that this system of evasion should cease.” Palmerston suspected that the government in Madrid had two purposes: “first, to afford income to a number of ill-paid public officers or to appointed favourites, by means of the bribes given by slave traders upon the importation of negroes; and, secondly, [to retain] a hold on the island, because it is thought at Madrid that, as long as there is in Cuba a large number of negroes, the white population will cling to the Mother country for protection. . . .”9

  The next Spanish captain-general in Cuba, in the long series of corrupt and patriotic officials in that place, was General José (Gutiérrez) de la Concha, son of a hero of the wars against Argentina, and yet one more veteran of civil conflicts in Spain. He came to Havana as captain-general in 1850 with a name as a strong governor who would be capable, on the one hand, of dealing with filibustering from the United States and, on the other, of ensuring that Cuba comply with the slave treaties. His instructions told him that he was, of course, to remember that Cuba was an island of two races, either one of which might, if unwisely treated, threaten continuing Spanish possession. He was told, too, to seek a solution to the long-standing problem of the emancipados which would both satisfy Britain yet not lose the services of people concerned. After all, the mere sale of these virtual state slaves brought into the government $40,000 a year.

  Concha started well. Thus he dismissed the governor of the province of Matanzas, Brigadier Pavia, on the accusation of conniving at the landing of 840 slaves at Camarioca, on the northern coast of Cuba, in the Emperatriz, belonging to a Catalan company; but the government in Madrid found that promising officer innocent and reinstated him. Concha had also a scheme for the emancipados: to allow them to remain a supplementary labor force for sugar plantations, to be employed on public works and to be available to serve retired officers or their widows. Some of the income available from their sale (“reassignment” was the euphemism) would go to assist a fund for the children of Spaniards who had served in the empire before independence.

  The British were now almost as interested in the problems of the emancipados as in the slave trade itself. Lord Stanley, a youthful undersecretary of foreign affairs in the nine-month government of his father, Lord Derby, had been to Cuba, and so had direct knowledge of the condition of these Africans. Both he and the new foreign secretary, Lord Malmesbury, tried to be, if anything, more rigorous than Palmerston had been, and to insist that the captain-general in Cuba give an account every six months of the fate of the emancipados. At that time, reports from Havana showed that, of over 7,000 Africans liberated under the treaty of 1817, only half had really been freed.

  Malmesbury’s successor, Lord Clarendon (who as George Villiers had been the successful minister in Madrid in the 1830s), then promoted a plan for a tripartite guarantee of Spanish interests in Cuba by France, Britain, and the United States. But both Daniel Webster, briefly back as secretary of state under Millard Fillmore, and his successor and disciple, the splendid orator Edward Everett, rejected any such idea of European involvement in Cuba. Everett explained, “There was no hope of a complete remedy [for the slave trade] while Cuba remained a Spanish colony.”10 The phrase was, not surprisingly, greeted as an explicit approval of the idea of annexation.

  The election of Franklin Pierce as president of the United States in 1852 seemed to make that point only too clear: Pierce, the famous “dark horse” in the electoral race, was, like Buchanan, a “northern man with southern principles,” and considered the idea of acquisition of Cuba by the United States as nothing less than a “fundamental principle.” The British minister in Washington, John Crampton, thought that the administration had decided that the United States “will and must take” Cuba.

  Ministers in Britain racked their brains as to what to do. Some of them wanted a more forward policy—acting against Cuba, say, as Palmerston had against Brazil—for example, sending the fleet to blockade Havana in order to bring the slave trade to a violent conclusion. Lord Malmesbury tried to leave the impression with Spain that, if that country were to refuse to act much more strongly against “the ST,” Britain would not help against United States annexationism. But that threat was not carried through. Lord John Russell would tell Howden in Madrid: “Your lordship may rest assured that, however friendly the Councils of her Majesty may be to Spain; whatever may be the interest of this country not to see Cuba in the hands of any other power . . . ; yet . . . the destruction of a trade which conveys the natives of Africa to become slaves in Cuba will furnish a large compensation for such [a] transfer.”11 But such protestations could always be made to seem insincere when Britain was each year taking more and more Cuban sugar: from under 200,000 hundredweight in 1845, the figure had risen to over 800,000 by 1851 and would be nearly 1.6 million in 1854.

  Concha, meantime, had been abruptly succeeded in Havana in 1852 by General Valentín Cañedo. A man of neither wealth nor significance, he was if anything on even worse terms with the British Consul-General Crawford, and so with Britain, than O’Donnell had been. Yet that enmity derived from a misapprehension: Cañedo authorized governors of provinces to send officials to enter plantations to seek slaves newly introduced from Africa (bozales) and, if necessary, seize them. It was Cañedo who took the brave step of having Julián Zulueta arrested in 1853, and held in La Cabaña, overlooking Havana Bay, for receiving a large consignment of slaves on the Lady Suffolk, though the charges against that millionaire were dropped for “lack of evidence.” This new captain-general accurately reported to his government that the planters, great and small, all defended the slave trade: “Without exception,” he wrote, “they all eagerly desire it, protect it and almost sanctify it.”12 Despite these indications of seriousness, Spain demanded Consul Crawford’s recall, and Britain asked for that of Cañedo. The latter adopted the curious ruse of sending a friend, the mercurial Aragonese writer Mariano Torrente, author of a history of the Latin American wars of independence and editor of various journals in Havana, to London to defend him, but to no avail: Cañedo was sacrificed and withdrawn after only a year in Cuba, and General Juan de la Pezuela, a well-known and hitherto effective liberal, was transferred from Puerto Rico, where he had been governor, to Cuba.III

  Pezuela was a new kind of captain-general for Cuba. He was experienced, being the son of the ill-starred penultimate viceroy of Spain in Lima, where he was born. He was also a poet and playwright, though his lifeless translation of the Divine Comedy had given him the nickname of “El Danticida.” In Havana, he began his time in office by refusing to be bribed into complicity with the traffic—the first captain-general to do so since Valdés. He ordered all slaves illegally introduced to be seized, and sought to detain owners of slave ships and organizers of slave expeditions. He made common cause with Monsignor Antonio Claret, the enlightened archbishop of Santiago, who had long been asking that slaves be better treated. Pezuela encouraged marriage between white and black, and planned a militia in which he hoped to welcome free blacks. He issued a decree freeing the emancipados, and then introduced a plan whereby those of them who had already been given masters would be reassigned to them for annual periods. He personally inspired articles in Havana’s main daily newspaper, the Diario de la Marina, calling for Cuba to fulfill Spain’s treaty obligations with Britain, and discussing the merits of free labor. He dismissed the governors of Trinidad an
d Sancti Spíritus for allowing slaves from Africa to land in their zone of authority, and his ruling was upheld in Madrid. Like Concha, he decreed that officials could enter plantations if they knew of any rumor of clandestine slaves there. That decree, of May 1854, also provided for the compilation of a register of slaves to be made after the next harvest, which in theory would free all illegally imported slaves thereby discovered. Officials would lose their jobs if they failed to act on hearing tales of improper landings. Pezuela told his government that these measures were essential in order to ensure British support against the United States. In February 1854, Pezuela even confiscated, in the harbor of Havana, the United States ship Black Warrior and placed her captain, James Bulloch, under arrest on the ground that the ship’s manifest misrepresented what was on board.

  These high-minded policies of Pezuela were denounced as “Africanization” by the planters. All the old hatreds of criollos for peninsulares which had characterized Spanish imperial rule in all her dominions were revived. The planters thought it certain that Pezuela was going to abolish slavery itself. One Cuban planter, Cristóbal Madán, wrote to President Pierce to ask him to intervene and save the island from the British-inspired emancipation which, it was thought, the captain-general was planning to introduce. (Madán had been educated in the United States and was a friend of Pierce’s clever but autocratic attorney general, Caleb Cushing.) The mood of anxiety seemed to inspire the United States consul, W. H. Robertson, to seek to precipitate a crisis which would enable immediate United States annexation. He assured the planters that Spain had accepted the British policies, and that Britain would soon use her influence to have Cuba filled with Africans, so that the island would become an “African colony given over to barbarism,” as Secretary of State William Marcy put the matter in a letter to James Buchanan, then United States Minister in London: “an act which, in its consequences, must be injurious to the United States.” A special agent of the United States in Cuba, Charles Davis, told Marcy that, if all slaves imported since 1820 were freed, there would be “a disastrous bloody war of the races. . . . Should the United States remain passive spectators of the consummation of the plans of the British ministry, the time is not distant when they will be obliged to rise and destroy such dangerous and pernicious neighbours.”13 A certain George Francis Train declared that Cuba should be seen as a deposit of aluminum from the Mississippi: “What God has joined together let no man put asunder,” he curiously proclaimed.14

  These obsessed declarations explain why Marcy, on April 3, 1854, instructed his minister in Madrid, the tempestuous Louisianian Pierre Soulé, to try to buy Cuba from Spain for $120 million. If that was impossible, Marcy went on, “you will then direct your efforts to . . . detach that island from the Spanish dominion and from all dependence on any European power.” He was the right man to whom to send such a dispatch for, the night before he left New York for Madrid, he had heard with emotion exiled Cubans beg him to bring back a “new star” to “shine in the sky of Young America.”

  Meantime, General John Quitman, twice governor of Mississippi, a hero of the Mexican War, a man with friends in the Cabinet of the United States who tacitly backed him, began to organize, at New Orleans, an expedition of Southern gentlemen to liberate Cuba from Spain and the fearful threat of “Africanization”; while friends of his such as Senators Stephen Mallory of Florida and John Slidell of Louisiana sought to repeal the Neutrality Laws to enable the legal departure of the amateur force.

  “El Danticida,” busy in Havana with a new translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, hesitated on hearing of all these plans and, as has happened to many other good-natured intellectuals in politics, was forced into retreat before being dismissed (after the Spanish revolution in July 1854), since in Madrid it was supposed that the planters in Cuba would welcome filibusters from the United States with open arms if the captain-general’s policies continued.

  That there was then a genuine United States threat was demonstrated by the Ostend Manifesto, of October 1854, in which the United States ministers to Britain (James Buchanan), France (John Mason), and Spain (Pierre Soulé) jointly declared that, if Spain were to persist in refusing to sell Cuba, the United States ought to take it by force. For, if Spain were to refuse the offer of $120 million, then “by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we possess the power.”15

  This declaration, and the enthusiastic terms in which the proposal was couched, caused much emotion: in Spain and Cuba, for obvious reasons; in the slave states of the United States, too, but also in the free ones, whose political leaders saw Cuba as a likely, and dangerous, addition to the slave community.

  After Pezuela, his predecessor but one, Concha, returned to Havana with an instruction to do everything necessary to prevent the annexation of Cuba to the United States. He also came with orders to suppress the traffic in slaves, though that was a lesser consideration; but, if annexationism could only be fought by making concessions to the planters, that would have to be accepted. Concha would remain in Havana for five years, almost a record for these captains-general.

  Concha had learned from Pezuela’s disquieting experience, and decided that his approach to the slave trade would be to demand that personal identification cards, “cédulas personales,” be put on the neck of every slave, and obtainable for a fee—that is, essentially, a tax. Slaves without such identification would be assumed to have been illegally imported, and so be liable to be freed. That scheme was started, eventually, in July 1855, but it failed, because neither planters nor officials would cooperate, except in case of Yucatecs and “coolies” from Mexico and China. Identification cards could, of course, be forged, and they were. Concha was made a fool of.

  On the other hand, Concha opposed the inspection of estates by officials looking for illegally imported slaves, and he repealed Pezuela’s decrees on the matter. He also abandoned Pezuela’s scheme to declare the trade piracy. Instead, he placed faith in the idea of offering bribes to informers, and prize money to officials who denounced slave ships. None of these arrangements was effective. So the slave trade continued “to be carried on . . . almost with impunity.”16 Between nine and twelve thousand slaves were landed in 1853, between eight and eleven thousand in 1854; Zulueta, Pastor, and Parejo were the biggest traders. The traffic in emancipados also continued; even if these were now to receive wages after their five years’ apprenticeship. They were never able to choose their masters, being assigned to them by the officials.

  The pattern of the recent past was thus repeated: Captain Baillie Hamilton testified in London that, in 1853, he stopped the slave ship Arrogante Emilio outside Havana and found, as he expected, “an immense quantity of stone ballast, [and] the beams and planks for a complete slave deck; that, on examining the captain’s trunk [he found that it] was ingeniously contrived with false sides. . . . They found concealed . . . 419 Mexican ounces [of gold], and a track chart with tracks in pencil to the Bight of Benin.”17

  Spanish warships were now asked to control the slave trade off Havana—two heavy sailing frigates, three steam frigates, four steam sloops, and nine sailing brigs. But the arrangement was somewhat schizophrenic since officials seemed to continue to receive payments by the leading slave traders for every slave landed. Minor bureaucrats had come to find bribes as necessary to their survival as slaves were to the planters.

  A new prime minister in Madrid, the count of San Luis (the businessman José Luis Sartorius) told Queen Isabella in 1854 that he wanted to stop the slave trade, but maintain the institution of slavery, and provide for adequate labor on sugar estates by forcing domestic slaves onto plantations with a further tax on slaves used merely as house servants. He would encourage slave marriages, and immigration (from Mexico and China). His ideas included immediate liberty for all emancipados and a slave register. These arrangements would both please Britain and prevent the loss of Cuba to America. But the pious hopes of San Luis in Madrid continued to be the bad jokes in
Havana.

  Havana was now not only the main destination of the slave ships but the best starting point and, by 1858, most outfitting was done there, even if the ships were, as was still often the case, North American-built.

  Despite the continuing despotism of the captains-general, some ideas for the future were now being aired publicly. There had been a plan to import Spanish and also some non-Spanish European workers to make tropical labor more attractive to white men, who were to be employed in tobacco and coffee cultivation. But nothing came of this scheme, nor of others like it. White workers could not be persuaded of the charms of working in cane fields in the tropics. On the other hand, 200,000 Chinese were imported into Cuba, between 1847 and 1867, in conditions similar to, though legally different from, slavery. Well-known slaving firms (including that of Zulueta) organized these arrangements. Contracts were made with companies which brought the “volunteers” from Hong Kong and Macao. Each “coolie” would be paid 125 pesos, sometimes up to 200, for which he would have to work for four years. During that period, the Chinese could be bought, sold, and transferred just as slaves were (slaves cost 600 pesos at this time). But they would be fed and kept, after a fashion. In the mid-1850s, a few planters even preferred “coolies” to slaves. One enlightened sugar king, Juan Poëy, had, on his three plantations, Las Cañas, San Martin, and Pontifex, 44, 358, and 379 Chinese respectively, alongside 480, 436, and 89 slaves).