The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The Chinese were satisfactory as workers, if well looked after. But as a rule they were not. Suicides were frequent. Many ran away. These “mongols,” as they were often absurdly known, gained a reputation for being thieves, homosexuals, and rebels, as well as being denounced as both lazy and impulsive: every imaginable accusation was thrown against them. But those who treated Chinese workers intelligently (for example, Antonio Fernández Criado) met with excellent service. Some of these workers, after their years of labor were over, eventually set up small businesses in Havana.

  Another innovation was the import of 2,000 Yucatec laborers from Mexico, contracted by none other than Charles Tolmé, the British consul before Turnbull. The first Yucatecs came from prisons to which they had been condemned after the Mexican Caste War, which ended in 1848. These were bought at 25 pesos each and sold at 100. They had left home on the understanding that their removal would improve their condition, while the Mexican government would be relieved of dangerous enemies. But they did not work well, were badly treated, and most died very soon.

  Other schemes included one for importing African free labor with contracts lasting eight years like the Chinese. But the British opposed “free African labour” as they had done in Brazil, and that factor weighed a good deal. The Cuban proprietors, meantime, were still reluctant to increase the population of slaves by encouraging the import of women: a female slave, above all a pregnant slave, continued to seem a waste of money.

  • • •

  The end of the Brazilian trade also led several Portuguese merchants who had done well in Rio or Bahia to move up to New York with the intention of using their expertise, often gained in Africa as well as in Brazil, to develop the Cuban commerce. The most interesting of these men was Manoel Basilio da Cunha Reis, an agent in Africa of a Brazilian slaving firm, before founding on his own, in 1852, the “Portuguese Company,” in New York, in partnership with the Portuguese consul, César de la Figanière. They specialized in obtaining large cargoes of slaves from Mozambique for Cuba.IV Though everything to do with this body is confused (including whether the enterprise was as important as it seemed), it was apparently soon absorbed by a Spanish company, also established in New York, and directed by Inocencio Abrantes of Havana. Both these clandestine companies had many tentacles, in all parts of the Caribbean, and several of the ships were often involved in legitimate trade. Then, suddenly, these vessels would change to slaving, after refitting in, say, Mexico. There was believed to be some collaboration with a similar, and even more shadowy, company concerned to sell slaves in the United States.

  The Portuguese Company apparently chose New York as its headquarters because, unlike Havana, that city had a genuine legal African trade. The Company’s ships were mostly American-built, inquisitive British officials were few and far between, and so many vessels changed hands in New York that the Portuguese Company’s activities attracted little attention. The company had at least twelve ships and may have had more. Their first, the Advance, left New York for Africa on September 18, 1852.

  This trading from New York was, of course, intended to serve the Cuban market. There was little trading to the United States itself. Even the Texan gate of entry had declined after the entry of that state into the Union in 1845. Captain Denman testified in a British inquiry in 1843, “I have no reason to believe that any slave trade whatever exists there, except the slave trade from one part of the coast to another. I believe that no new slaves are introduced.”18

  Yet, in the late 1850s, some transatlantic trade to North America seems to have revived. As has been noticed, Philip Drake, in his untrustworthy memoir, talked of a slave depot being established in one of the Bay Islands off Honduras for the purpose of receiving slaves from Africa for gradual infiltration into the United States through Texas, Louisiana, or Florida. The Savannah letter book of Charles Lamar suggests how some trade may have been managed in the mid-1850s. Lamar, from a well-known Georgian Huguenot family of Savannah, a nephew of Mirabeau Lamar, second president of Texas, was said, by The North American Review, to have been “a Southern gentleman of the most approved type”; but, the anonymous author added ironically, he “possessed just enough of the Yankee spirit of enterprise and thrift to render him human.” Lamar apparently entered the slave trade in 1857, buying slaves first from Cuba, then direct from Africa.V One of his ships was the E. A. Rawlins, said to have landed slaves in 1857 in numerous places. Lamar, like so many before him, was attracted by the idea of making a profit of well over 100 percent on the voyage. He estimated that the figures might be:

  Cost of the expedition

  $300,000

  Say we bring 1200 negroes @ $650

  $780,000

  Deduct 1st cost

  $300,000

  Leaves nett profit and steamer on hand

  $480,00019

  Yet though Lamar plainly liked profits, he also seems to have had an ideological obsession with the need to revive the trading of slaves.

  The United States naval patrol was easily circumvented. The British diplomat John Crampton reported from Washington in 1853: “The United States naval officers are zealous enough in capturing slavers, but the force is so small, particularly now that they have sent the greater part to Japan [with Matthew Perry], that little is done.” He sensibly added: “The difficulty of getting slavers condemned by Admiralty courts when captured and brought into American ports is another encouragement to the slave traders.” Crampton also pointed to another weakness: that difficulty of ensuring conviction was, it seemed, “much greater in the northern states, which profess abolitionism, than in the south, where slavery exists.” Shipbuilders of the North were interested in the prosperity of the trade, for which, the diplomat reported, they still furnished “by far the greatest part of the vessels under whatever flag they afterwards sail.”20

  There were other reasons for inaction in the United States, apart from the anxiety about damages and the continuing disinclination of the United States to accept the naval leadership of Britain. Consider the case of the Martha. The U.S. naval patrol ship Perry (a ship called after the hero of Lake Erie, Matthew Perry’s brother), reached Ambriz, Angola, on June 5, 1850, in search of her commodore’s ship, the John Adams. She found that this ship had gone to Luanda. En route to that port, the Perry saw a large ship, the Martha of New York, standing off the coast, and brought her to. Up till then, the Perry had not shown her flag, but she then did so. The master of the Martha then observed that the Perry was a U.S. cruiser, at which he hoisted a Brazilian flag and threw overboard his writing desk, with his instructions in it. Lieutenant Rush of the Perry boarded the Martha, but a Portuguese captain insisted that he was the master. The real master’s writing desk was, however, retrieved and a North American, dressed as a sailor, was identified as the captain. This man later admitted that, had it not been for the interruption, he would have taken on board 1,800 slaves that night. The Martha was escorted to New York. A farce followed. The captain was released on $3,000 bail, which he immediately abandoned.

  Still, during the 1850s, the United States Navy began to have some success in relation to the trade to Cuba. In 1853-54, Commander Isaac Mayo, on the Constitution, captured the schooner Gambrill when about to load slaves, but Mayo released all the crew except for two, because he did not wish to be sued. Then, in 1854, again off Ambriz, Lieutenant Richard Page, on the Perry, seized the slaver Glamorgan, whose captain, Charles Kehrman, sought to escape by hoisting a British flag. Page sent Kehrman home to be tried in Boston, but allowed the Portuguese supercargo to go free—for which act of generosity he was himself arraigned. In November of that year, New York District Attorney John McKeon brought to trial James Smith, sometime master of the Julia Moulton, a New York ship owned by a certain Lamos, a Cuban, which had carried 645 slaves from Ambriz to Trinidad, Cuba. Smith claimed that he was in reality a German, Julius Schmidt of Bederkesa, Hanover, and that he had never been naturalized as a citizen of the United States. He was, however, found guilty of trading sl
aves, the first man to be so convicted under the law. But a mistrial was proclaimed, on a question of technicalities and, after many legal complications, Smith-Schmidt served only thirty-two months.

  “Joint-cruising” off Africa between the United States Navy and the British was decided upon in the 1850s. But the policy was “from the first and in spirit dead. . . . The flagships of the American and British squadrons on the coast in the years 1855, 1856, and part of 1857 met only once and that at sea. They were two miles apart; they recognized each other by signal and, by the same means, held the following exchange: ‘Anything to communicate?’ to receive the inaccurate answer, ‘Nothing to communicate.’ ”21

  The year 1857 was a good one generally for the interception of slave ships: H.M.S. Prometheus overtook the U.S. brig Adams Gray, a fully equipped slaver, with $20,000 in cash aboard. Between then and January 1858, the British seized twenty-one slavers, while the United States, Spanish, and even Portuguese naval patrols captured six more. From that time, the British had the services of an effective spy, a Cuban shipbroker, Manuel Fortunat, a Cuban equivalent of the agents whom Palmerston had inspired in Rio. He passed much information to the British consulate in New York. It was this which probably led the British commander on the coast of Africa, Commodore Wise, to believe that, despite everything, the trade to Cuba was still growing: “Slaves are procurable in thousands; the natives are selling their children, and the traffic in slaves is rapidly destroying legal trade. These ill effects,” he added, “are produced by the shameful prostitution of the American flag for, under that ensign alone, is the slave trade now conducted. . . . Out of 23 vessels said to have escaped, eleven were repeatedly visited by Her Majesty’s cruisers but, though known to be slavers, they were necessarily left unmolested, through being bona fide American vessels. Had we a treaty with the United States, every one of these vessels would have been captured. . . . Last year, slavers were (in the majority of cases) captured through their captains forgoing the protection of the American flag; but now American slavers are arriving and sailing with almost as much impunity as if they were engaged in legal trade.”22

  At much the same time, Commander Moresby of the British West Africa Squadron seized the Panchita off Africa and sent her to New York. The United States minister in London protested and stated firmly that the “question whether the Panchita’s journey [was] with the slave trade could have no bearing on the violation of sovereign right.”23 The British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, admitted that Moresby had made a mistake, but pointed out the difficulties under which that captain had been laboring.

  Palmerston had other difficulties. The Crimean War was now over, and British public opinion was turning its attention again to the matter which had defeated two generations of politicians. The Times, on May 25, 1857, argued in favor of a blockade of Cuban ports. Two months later, the House of Commons urged the government to do all in its power to end the slave traffic, Spain being pressed by many members of Parliament to declare the trade to be piracy. Charles Buxton repeated all the old arguments, with an urgency which would have suggested the subject was a new one for that legislature; the prospects for peaceful trade with Africa were as never before; cotton could be grown there on a large scale; and why not ask the navy to do in Cuban waters, as the Times suggested, what she had done so successfully in Brazilian? Palmerston replied with a defense of his policy of inactivity which might have surprised his own personality of twenty years before: Spain, he rather feebly said, had a different kind of treaty with Britain from that which Brazil had had.24

  In these circumstances, when nothing serious seemed to be happening to affect the traffic in slaves to Cuba, in April 1858, a British gunboat seized the United States vessel Cortez just after she had sailed out of Havana Bay, and begun to harass other ships in Cuban waters. British officers boarded 116 ships by the end of May, of which sixty-one were owned in the United States. One naval captain boarded no fewer than eleven merchant ships in the tiny Cuban port of Sagua la Grande alone. These actions seemed more of an insult to the United States than the sporadic seizures off Africa. On this matter, the states of the North and South of the United States were for once at one, and not only Lewis Cass (in his seventies, that veteran Anglophobe had agreed to serve President Buchanan as secretary of state) but the Senate itself demanded a firm stand. Senator John Hays Hammond of South Carolina said, “We had just and ample cause for war, for we had received a flagrant insult.”25 Even Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois suggested that a British ship should be seized and her crew held responsible. The mood was so violent in the United States that the British minister in Washington, Lord Napier, prudently (if unheroically) advised the commander-in-chief of Britain’s North America Station, Sir Houston Stewart, to suspend further action.

  In the continuing fortunate absence of the international telegraph, it was some time before this capitulation was communicated to British captains in Cuban waters, and several more incidents occurred. Sir Houston Stewart had begun his naval career under the command of the brilliant Lord Cochrane and knew, therefore, very well the importance in naval matters of audacity, courage, and imagination. Even when the naval captains knew that they could not board and search United States vessels, they still believed that they could board ships which showed American colors to which they had no right. The question when a vessel might or might not be visited remained, therefore, as the historian of the right of visit says, “more nor less a matter of guesswork.”26

  The activity of United States vessels in carrying slaves to Cuba in these years suggested to many in the increasingly vociferous South that the slave trade to the Union should itself be officially revived. The idea was not new, for it had been proposed as long ago as 1839, by the Courier of New Orleans; but it was not till 1853 that Leonidas Spratt, the editor of the Standard of Charleston, began a systematic advocacy of this revival, a cry taken up by Robert Barnwell Rhett, in the Mercury of the same city. The action of Charles Lamar has been noticed. In 1856, the governor of South Carolina, James Hopkins Adams, also demanded a legal revival of the African slave trade. In March 1858, the Louisiana House of Representatives called for the import of 2,500 free Africans as apprentices; but the Senate of that state absented themselves from the discussion. The same year, William Lowndes Yancey, the secessionist leader of the League of United Southerners, in Montgomery, Alabama, and once a United States senator, asked, with a certain logic, “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil and Africa?” Jefferson Davis, on this occasion, stated that he was against reopening the African slave trade because he thought that the consequences would be to swamp Mississippi: “The interests of Mississippi, not Africa, dictate my conclusion.” He strongly denied that he himself had any connection with those who “prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the trade.” In 1859, similar things were said at the Southern Commercial Convention in Vicksburg, Mississippi: “A brilliant speech on the resumption of the importation of slaves,” wrote Henry Stuart Foote, a liberal ex-governor of the state,VI “was listened to with breathless attention and applauded vociferously. Those of us who rose in opposition were looked upon as traitors to the best interests of the south.” There was now much support in the Southern press for the idea. Thus the New Orleans Delta thought that those who voted for the slave trade in Congress were men whose names “will be honored hereafter for the unflinching manner in which they stood up for principle, for truth, and for consistency, as well as for the vital interests of the South.”27

  Had the South won the Civil War, the African trade would indeed have been reopened. The demands of cotton plantations might have been endless: the crop of five million bales in 1860 was nearly double what it had been ten years before, and five times what it had been in 1830.

  The most famous slaving case in these years just before the Civil War was that of the Wanderer, a fast ship which sailed to Africa in November 1858. It was said of this vessel, “You’
d think she could fly instead of sailing.” Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of this kind of clipper in lyrical terms: “These . . . ships were built of wood in shipyards from Rockland in Maine to Baltimore. Their architects, like poets who transmute nature’s message into song, obeyed what wind and wave had taught them, to create the noblest of all sailing vessels and the most beautiful creations of man in America. . . . They were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon.”28 Yet many of these jewels were used in the Cuban slave trade; and one at least in that of the United States.

  There were many rumors in the South of the United States, during the 1850s, that slaves had been brought in. There was the instance of Charles Lamar’s vessel the E. A. Rawlins of which mention has been made. Many people knew people whose friends claimed that, in Georgia or South Carolina, they had seen a coffle of slaves direct from Africa. But the only attested case of the late 1850s was that of the schooner Wanderer. Ninety feet long on her keel, 108 overall, with a beam of twenty-six feet, this fine vessel had been built in Brookhaven, New York, during the winter of 1856-57 for Colonel John Johnson, who had made money in sugar on a plantation near New Orleans. He sold the boat to a number of Southern gentlemen, prominent among whom were Captain William Corrie, a member of the New York Yacht Club, and Charles Lamar, who, as has been mentioned earlier, was a member of a well-known family of Savannah, with investments in cotton, shipping, and banking.

  The Wanderer was fitted out at Port Jefferson on Long Island, where a number of alterations were set in train: including the provision of those extra-large water tanks, which would suggest to all informed yachtsmen that the purpose of the vessel was to bring slaves from Africa. But the boat retained the luxurious fittings which enabled her to be called “a yacht”: there were mirrors, damask, satinwood cupboards, a library, prints, and “Brussels carpets.”