The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society seemed willing, at a conference in Lord Brougham’s house in London in June 1861, to abandon its long-held pacifism in support of Palmerston’s position. But surely war could not be the answer.

  • • •

  Part of the solution lay in securing effective legal action in North America; and now, for the first time, that seemed to be forthcoming. In August 1860, Commander Sylvester Gordon of the United States Navy, on the San Jacinto, detained the slave ship Erie, captained by his namesake Nathaniel Gordon, to the west of Cabinda, with 900 slaves on board. Nathaniel Gordon, who was said to have carried out at least three slave journeys before (when the Erie had been called the Juliet), had fitted out his ship in Havana and sailed forty-five miles up the Congo to fetch this consignment of Africans. He was already at sea, preparing to sail back to Cuba, when he was detained. His slaves were taken to Liberia, and he was himself sent to New York. The ship was sold, and Gordon was tried with his mates, William Warren and David Hale, before Judge William Shipman, who was hearing his first slavery case.

  Gordon’s defense was that he had sold the Erie to a Spaniard before the slaves were loaded, and that he was just a passenger at the time of arrest. But several seamen testified that they had been offered a dollar a head by Gordon for every slave landed peacefully in Cuba. After one mistrial, Gordon was, to the general surprise, condemned to be hanged. Judge Shipman said: “Do not imagine that because others shared in the guilt of this enterprise, yours is thereby diminished. But remember the awful admonition of your Bible: ‘Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not go unpunished.’ ”

  This sentence must have astonished Gordon. Many slave captains had been captured, but none had been severely punished, much less hanged, even though the offense of slave trading had been a capital one since 1820. Between 1837 and 1860 seventy-four cases had been brought in the United States on charges related to slaving, but few captains had been convicted, and those had received trifling sentences, which they had usually been able to avoid.

  Gordon took strychnine, but the prison doctor saved him for the gallows. He was hanged in public on February 21, 1862: the first, and only, North American to be executed for slave trading.12

  This was a landmark in the history of the slave trade, though it was not quite a turning point, for old ways survived, even in the North of the United States. In 1861, for example, Commander John Taylor, on the sloop-of-war Saratoga, arrested the Nightingale (Captain Francis Bowen), off Cabinda, just after loading 961 slaves, bound for Cuba. But all concerned were treated lenienly, including Samuel Haynes, the first mate, who suffered two retrials. On October 30, 1862, Erastus Booth, captain of the Buckeye, was also tried—before Judge Shipman, indeed—for trading slaves. After he was released on bail, the evidence was dismissed, and Booth acquitted. In the same month, Albert Horn, owner of the slaver the City of Norfolk, was convicted at New York City but was, inexplicably, pardoned by President Lincoln on grounds of ill-health. In the spring of 1863, Appleton Oaksmith, owner of the supposed whaler Margaret Scott, was convicted in Boston of slaving, but he escaped from jail while awaiting sentence, with the connivance of a guard. In 1862, the Dutch instigated their first case against a slave trader when an English naval captain reported that the mate of the slaver Jane had lived in Rotterdam. But this man claimed that he had not realized that the ship on which he was serving was a slaver, and the case was dismissed.

  The administration of President Lincoln desired to end the slave trade, but it required its ships for war duties, and called home both the Africa and the new Cuba squadrons. This action appeared likely to stimulate the slave trade again. The hanging of Captain Nathaniel Gordon of the Erie did not seem to be a determining deterrence. Diplomacy was still necessary.

  So Charles Francis Adams—United States minister in London, and son of John Quincy Adams—was asked by Secretary of State Seward (Cass’s benign successor) to request Lord John Russell to send a force into Cuban waters to intercept slavers. An amazed Russell replied that sending cruisers was pointless unless British warships were allowed to search and, if necessary, seize United States ships. Lincoln and Seward “capitulated,” as Howard, of the British legation in Washington, put it—partly because the administration hoped to gain British support for the federal side. On October 5, 1861, the Admiralty in London received an astonishing memorandum from the Foreign Office: “The American Secretary of State, in speaking of the jealousy of the United States respecting the Right of Search, has expressed to Lord Lyons [the tactful British minister in Washington] the willingness of the Washington cabinet that British cruisers should overhaul any vessels which gave reasonable grounds of suspicion. . . . Mr Adams, the United States Minister . . . has apprised Lord John Russell that the fitting out of vessels designed for the Slave Trade will no longer be permitted at New York.”13 Lord Lyons, who had as a boy served as a midshipman on his father’s H.M.S. Blonde in the Mediterranean in the 1820s, drafted a ten-year treaty to allow such inspection. By then, the federal navy had blockaded the Confederate coastline and put paid to any chance of a revival of the slave trade to the North American mainland.

  The subsequent treaty allowed warships of both nations the right to search each other’s merchant vessels in the Atlantic. A later protocol also permitted search off the East African coast. If any slaving equipment, or any slaves, were found, the ships could be taken to a mixed court at New York, Cape Town, or Sierra Leone. Decisions in those cities had to be made by both a British and an American judge and, if they could not agree, a U.S. or a British arbitrator would be called in. There would be no damage for false arrest: a great relief to United States naval officers.

  Thus, in a single document, Lincoln abandoned the principles of United States foreign policy which John Quincy Adams had enunciated, and which every United States president and secretary of state, not to speak of every minister to London, had referred to as if they had been Holy Writ. The establishment of a mixed court was also a great concession, since it had always been maintained that no foreign judge could ever play any part in deciding United States law. Secretary of State Seward remarkably wrote to his protégé, Charles Francis Adams, in London: “Had such a treaty been made in 1808, there would have been no sedition here.”14

  The Senate considered, and approved, this extraordinary treaty behind closed doors, in executive session, and there was no report in the newspapers.

  The treaty with the United States should have been a great satisfaction to the aging Lord Palmerston who, for all his intolerable pride, bombast, and condescension towards those peoples whom he considered inferior, had done almost as much as Wilberforce and Clarkson to secure the end of the international slave trade. But his own and his Cabinet’s attitude to Lincoln and the North in the Civil War had been lukewarm (if not actually hostile) until this moment and he and Russell had already recognized the Confederates in the United States as belligerents. Palmerston believed for a time that the North was planning to invade Canada, and his hostility to slavery as such, as opposed to the trade, had never been strong. He was also exercised by the thought of the slaves of the cotton-producing and aristocratic South being freed by democratic generals from the North. Adams, whose work in London was made much easier by the fact that he had gone to school in England, reached the conclusion that, though the matter of slavery had previously been the main question dividing the United States and Britain, “the sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared.”15

  The detention of the two Southern envoys in the British ship Trent, en route from Havana to England, by Admiral Charles Wilkes (a greatnephew of John Wilkes) returning from his time on the United States antislave naval patrol on the coast of Africa, on that same U.S.S. San Jacinto which had captured Nathaniel Gordon, brought Britain and the federalists near to conflict. (Had the Atlantic cable been in operation in December 1861, wrote Charles Francis Adams’s son, Henry, “the two countries would certainly have gone to war.”)

  Lincoln’
s government, meantime, after its well-known hesitation on the matter, in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the Union, introduced the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and so abolished slavery in the United States. The death of Charles Lamar, the protagonist of the affair of the Wanderer, acting as an aide to General Howell Cobb (Buchanan’s secretary of the Treasury, who had married a Lamar) in the Battle of Columbus, Georgia, in April 1865, marked the end of an era.

  Two other developments, a hardening of the British position and internal changes in Cuba, need to be taken into account. As to the first, Captain Wilmot of the Africa squadron had suggested, at the end of July 1861, a two-pronged attack on the chief African sellers: first, a special visit to the king of Dahomey to persuade him to abandon trading slaves, and, second, a close naval blockade of about 300 miles of the African coast to prevent the shipment of slaves. Palmerston, however, agreed with Charles Buxton (Fowell Buxton’s son) who, in the House of Commons, had suggested an attack on Whydah (“he could not see why they should not use violent means”), and thought that, with the United States preoccupied by the civil war, “we ought to . . . begin by taking possession of Whydah and either tell him [the king of Dahomey] why, or wait until he asks us why. . . . It is only the strong arm which can prevail with these barbarians.” But the Admiralty opposed this and, in the end, Palmerston merely sent Wilmot, and subsequently the explorer Richard Burton (at that time Her Majesty’s consul in Fernando Po), on a peaceful mission to the king. Wilmot, explained to King Gelele: “England has been doing her utmost to stop the slave trade in this country. Much money has been spent, and many lives sacrificed to obtain this desirable end, but hitherto without success. I have come to ask you to put an end to this traffic and to enter into some treaty with me.”

  Gelele refused: if white men came to buy, why should he not sell? Wilmot asked how much money he needed. “No money will not induce me . . . I am not like the kings of Lagos and Benin. There are only two kings in Africa, Ashanti and Dahomey: I am the King of all the Blacks. Nothing will compensate me for the [loss of the] slave trade.” Gelele also told Burton, “If I cannot sell my captives taken in war, I must kill them, and surely the English would not like that?”16

  It was an argument for which abolitionists were unprepared. The slavers were not; and many new ships were fitted out, for the Cuban trade, in the early 1860s: some in France (Fécamp, Marseilles), and Spain (Cádiz).

  The only way in which the British really intervened in Africa at this time was, with some reluctance, to accede to a suggestion of Consul Beechcroft in Lagos and agree to the occupation of that city in order to complete the abolition of the slave trade in the Bight of Benin. That at least was the explanation offered by Lord John Russell, then foreign secretary, in June 1861: the government “are convinced that the permanent occupation of this important point in the Bight of Benin is indispensable to the complete suppression of the slave trade in the Bight.” King Docemo was dismissed by Acting Consul William McCoskry, a legitimate trader of long experience on the coast, and subsequently allowed an annual income of one thousand pounds, to be paid in cowries.17

  The British had scarcely patrolled the coasts of Cuba between 1858 and 1861. The risk of a serious naval clash with Spain seemed too great. But with the new situation in the United States, they changed their policies. Russell, still foreign secretary, sought, like the United States before 1860, to organize a blockade by four steam cruisers in Cuban waters. Spain refused to allow those ships to anchor off any Cuban port. The idea seemed a renunciation of their sovereignty. All the same, in 1863, the British navy did have six ships cruising off Cuba. Despite the Civil War, the United States also maintained a sporadic patrol, and Admiral Charles Wilkes, the controversial officer who had captured the Trent, seized the Noc Daqui, one of Julián Zulueta’s large steamers, in 1863.

  In these critical moments, Cuba had the benefit at last of a succession of genuinely liberal captains-general. Thus, in 1859, in the face of accusations that the international trade in slaves was doing better than ever—perhaps 23,000 were carried into Cuba that year—and with the British continuing to send to Madrid all the evidence they had gained from their consul in Havana,I Captain-General de la Concha proposed to exile from Cuba anyone even suspected of being involved in a slave expedition. The Spanish government thought that idea far too arbitrary. Concha, to begin with suspected of being too tolerant to the planters, then resigned, apparently in disgust at the planters’ disloyalty.

  The eclipse of Concha was providential, for the next captain-general was the enlightened General Francisco Serrano, a competent and tolerant ex-minister of war and ex-lover of Queen Isabella, the “handsome general” whom the queen had desired always to retain at the palace. He, like his predecessor, had a solution to the problems of Cuba: an organic law, in which numerous political freedoms would be granted. Slavery would be preserved, he told the British Consul Joseph Crawford but, on the other hand, the slave trade would be declared piracy, and any offenders would be punished by martial law.

  It is true that the government in Madrid dismissed the plan as being against “the principles of morality and justice.” But by now, there was a real abolitionist group in Spain, not just a few isolated writers such as the botanist Ramón de la Sagra. A radical group in the new Cortes of 1855 (including Emilio Castelar and Laurent Figuerola) talked of the matter. These were still minority voices, but they were eloquent: the first-named was among the finest orators in Europe, the second an intelligent economist who would one day introduce Spain’s first free-trade budget. General Serrano, in June 1862, suggested that the Civil War in North America should cause Spain to talk genuinely of abolition—before events precipitated the matter. He thought that, unless the slave trade were abolished, slavery itself would be destroyed. Serrano had already tried to infuse the Spanish navy with a serious capacity for preventing the slave traffic, by using a few shallow-draft steamers. But though the government agreed with him in principle, in practice they were resolved to be ineffective.

  Next as captain-general was General Domingo Dulce. He had first come to the public notice when he defended Queen Isabella and her sister against an insurrection faction of officers, on the staircase of the royal palace in Madrid in 1841. He sought to govern with generosity but strength, although he had no sympathy for Africans.II When he took office in Havana in December 1862, he announced that he had been sent to fulfill the treaties which the queen had made with other countries for the suppression of the trade in slaves. He said that he possessed the names of those concerned in such activities and he would not hesitate to use his powers to destroy them. For the first time, a British judge of the Mixed Court (Robert Bunch) reported favorably of a captain-general: “It is impossible that anyone should express himself more strongly against this infamous traffic than general Dulce did.” Bunch said he believed that he was often deceived by false reports. Dulce admitted that was often the case, and said: “Send in all the information you can get, be it true or false, and we will do our best to sift it.” He began by sending home two minor slave traders, Antonio Tuero and Francisco Duraboña, and followed that by sending home eight more important Portuguese ones in the spring of 1863. He also suspended the governor of Havana, Pedro Navascues, for complicity in a slaving expedition. By this time, the British consul-general had begun to trust Dulce and even to collaborate, as he had suggested. In 1864, José Agustín Argüelles, governor of Colón in Central Cuba, despite his famous name in antislaving circles, fled to the United States when accused of selling 141 slaves whom he had freed after intercepting a ship of Zulueta’s (the two were probably in collaboration). He was sent back to Cuba, to be tried and sentenced to life in the galleys (which sentence, admittedly, he did not serve).18

  Though, as captain-general, Dulce continued to enjoy emergency powers, as all his predecessors had done since 1825, he allowed the Cubans to publish newspapers; and one of these, El Siglo, became the center of liberal Cuban opinion which, led by the prog
ressive agronomist the count of Pozos Dulces (Francisco Frías y Jacott) and José Morales Lemus (both of whom had been in favor of Cuba’s annexation to the United States in the 1840sIII), was prepared to argue in favor of an immediate abolition of the slave trade, including an end to the brutal Yucatec and Chinese immigration. El Siglo also suggested trying again to find incentives to attract white colonists. Though hoping to maintain slavery, at least for the time being, these enlightened planters feared a Southern victory in the North American Civil War, for they believed that a triumphant Confederacy would be sure to impose high tariffs on Cuba in order to protect their own increasingly important sugar in Louisiana.

  The reasons for these changes in mood were various: first, there was the continuing high cost of slaves which the merchants thought that they could obtain (in 1864, prices of slaves in Havana reached $1,250-$1,500); second, manumission had depleted the slave labor available; thirdly, despite the relative political failure of most of the new independent Latin American states, there was an increasing sense of national destiny among Cubans; and, finally, the Civil War in North America stimulated abolitionist sentiment on the island.

  All the same, 1863, the second year of that conflict, saw the entry into Cuba of nearly 25,000 slaves, according to Spanish archives. A leading merchant of Havana summed things up as they still seemed to him: “For many reasons Spain would gain with the abolition of the slave trade . . . but the government recognizes, as does everyone here, that the economic problem is connected with the existence of slavery, since the island’s wealth depends on slave labor. Hence the benign tolerance and leniency that is employed in dealing with such an infamous trade.”19 Slavery itself still seemed to be firmly established: there were over 350,000 slaves on the island, of whom two-thirds were male; almost half lived on sugar mills, about 25,000 on coffee plantations, and under 18,000 on tobacco farms.