The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  All the same, the trade in slaves in Cuba seemed at last to be in decline. The captain-general insisted, indeed, that no slaves landed in 1865, and the Foreign Office admitted that Consul Joseph Crawford had exaggerated the figures for 1859. As for Africa, the British Commodore A. P. E. Williams found the fifteen old factories at Punta da Lehna, on the Congo, on the point of collapse, though the traders themselves were still living well.

  Francisco Martí y Torres, once a friend of Tacón, with two José Ricardo O’Farrills, uncle and nephew, descendants of the South Sea factor of 1713, sought ways round the obstinately philanthropic approach of Dulce, and planned an expedition to bring slaves from Africa to the plantations which Martí owned in Malas Aguas and Pan de Azúcar. The expedition was betrayed, and the captain-general ordered the commander of the navy to pursue their ships. Several other incidents (the seizure of slaves on board the schooner Matilde; and the discovery of 278 slaves who had been disembarked from a brigantine which had been burned after delivery of the cargo) caused Dulce to begin legal proceedings against Martí, which would have been a cause célèbre had the by then aged slaver not died, in his own house in Havana, in the spring of 1866.

  Even Julián Zulueta was soon thwarted. He had bought a fast steamer in Liverpool, named it the Cicerón, and in it carried over 1,100 slaves from Dahomey to Panama. On the latter beach, Zulueta in person marched the slaves along the Central American coast to a point where he planned to transport them to Cuba. But the local governor betrayed him and the slaves were lost. When the Cicerón returned to Africa for another cargo, she was prevented from trading by a cordon of boats which the British had flung round her destination. Several other slavers were similarly apprehended. But some stories often had less satisfactory endings. For example, in 1864, H.M.S. Dart seized what was assumed to be a United States slaving brig, but the crew destroyed the papers and the vessel was let go.

  That same year, the Spanish abolitionist movement acquired a new leader: the Puerto Rican planter Julio Vizcarrando. He held the first meeting of the Sociedad Abolicionista Española in Madrid in that year, with two other Puertoriqueños (José Acosta, Joaquín Sanromá). But he had the support of liberal Spanish politicians such as Emilio Castelar, Juan Valera (a fine novelist), Segismundo Moret (grandson of an English general and an Anglophile), Manuel Becerra (later a reforming colonial minister), and Nicolás Salmerón (a philosopher and federalist). Vizcarrando was the outstanding guide whom the Spanish abolitionists needed, and he had the advantage not only of knowing the United States well, but of being married to a formidable agitator, Harriet Brewster of Philadelphia. He had liberated his own slaves in Puerto Rico, publicly denounced the injustices practiced on them and others, and founded a house of charity for the poor of San Juan; in Madrid, he used the same emblem for his movement as that which had been employed in Britain: a chained Negro on bended knee. He soon established branches of his movement in Seville, León, Barcelona, and Saragossa. He inspired a journal, the Revista Hispano-Americano, whose first editorial demanded an end to the Cuban slave trade as a precursor of other colonial reforms. Many committees in Spain asked many old questions (“What are the means for promoting matrimony among slaves?”), which lost none of their urgency for having been put by others a hundred years before.

  There were defenders of slavery in Spain, as there had been in England, France, and the United States: for example, the popular journalist José Ferrer de Couto, in his Los negros en sus diversos estados y condiciones argued that “the so-called slave trade is . . . the redemption of slaves and prisoners,” who, he thought, were far better off under Spain than they were in vile Africa. But Vizcarrando had a decisive effect.

  It was in consequence of Vizcarrando’s activity that, on May 6, 1865, Antonio María Fabié, a sevillano, could rise in the Cortes to second a motion on abolition: “The war in the United States is finished,” he declaimed, “and, it being finished, slavery on the whole American continent can be taken as finished. Is it possible to keep . . . this institution in the dominions [of Spain]? I don’t think so. . . . The Government must comply with its great obligations. . . .” Fabié admittedly had preceded this with the by then customary, even obligatory, eulogy of Spanish slavery in comparison with that of the Anglo-Saxons: “In all the history of slavery,” he said, “no country has known how to organize it as Spain has, no country has made the situation of the Negro race more elevated, more tolerable or, at times, more sweet. . . . This explains why we have preserved the institution longer than in other countries.”20

  A few days later, the liberal Cuban planters associated with the newspaper El Siglo sent a memorandum to the still influential Captain-General Serrano in Madrid (12,000 Cuban criollos signed), requesting his support for Cuban representation in the Cortes, a reform of tariffs to allow the import of flour from the U.S. and, astonishingly, an end to the traffic in slaves, which they spoke of as “a repugnant and dangerous cancer of immorality. . . . Private interests have shown themselves more powerful than the honor and conscience of the nation.” Here was a remarkable transformation!21

  It is true that a pro-Spanish party (headed by Julián Zulueta) made their own protest in reply, in a letter to the queen: whose signatories were, they said, not against changes in tariffs, but they were against political reform, including any idea of representation of Cubans in the Cortes in Madrid. But reformers were now dominant in Spain; and, in August 1865, Dulce was permitted to exile all persons “who had repeatedly endangered the peace of the island,” and to include slave merchants in this category. Those exiled to Spain included the astonished multimillionaire Zulueta: a brave and unforeseeable act.

  The following February, the conservative Antonio de Cánovas, then minister for the colonies, finally introduced into the Cortes in Madrid a bill for the suppression and punishment of the slave trade. Cánovas would become the great Spanish statesman of the later part of the nineteenth century but, if he had not been that, he would have been recognized as a historian. He was a statesman in the mold of Edmund Burke, but a Burke who exercised power. The preamble of his bill included the remarkable reminder that the ancient laws of Castile “punished the stealing of freemen by death” and also accepted that Africans were freemen.

  The bill was debated over several weeks, Generals Gutiérrez de la Concha, Pezuela, and O’Donnell, all sometime captains-general in Cuba, being among those to speak. A commission set up by Cánovas described the traffic as “infamous and inexplicable in the eyes of Christian civilization.” But slave interests continued to be well represented in Madrid—for example, by José Luis Riquelme, who had property and slaves in Cuba. He deplored the idea in the proposed new law that officials could enter plantations looking for newly imported slaves. That would revive all the troubles of 1854. “On my own plantation,” said Riquelme, “I have given liberty to those slaves who asked for it, and they have remained to work on the plantation. That is the way.”

  Cánovas replied that the belief that the prosperity of the island demanded the slave trade was out of date. The government would accept slavery for the time being “as it now exists.” But “I am obliged to suppress the slave trade . . . and I will stop at nothing in order to achieve this result.” His bill passed the Senate in April 1866 but, because of further procedural complexities associated with the fall of the Spanish government, it did not become law till May 1867, and was only promulgated in Cuba in September 1867. Its article 38 provided at last for the registration of all slaves. Black men and women not included in the registration would be deemed free. Anyone connected with the trade in slaves was to be liable to heavy punishments. As had by then occurred in most other European countries, any slave who reached Spain was also to be declared automatically free.22

  Spanish abolitionists complained that the law was less rigorous than laws in other countries, for it did not denounce slave traders as pirates. Colonial officials still found it very difficult to carry out inspections within plantations; and many believed that, “while
slavery exists, all efforts to suppress the traffic will prove futile.” Even General Dulce thought the law inadequate: he favored the arbitrary exiling of all slave merchants, men who “are very well known in the island, those who prepare slave ships; [for] in the secretariat of the civil government, information can be found concerning the most prominent people engaged in this odious speculation.”23

  By that time, the institution of slavery itself seemed to be endangered. On April 3, 1866, The New York Times published an extraordinary report: “The negroes of the haciendas of Zulueta, Aldama and the other big owners of slaves, in the jurisdiction of Matanzas, have declared themselves on strike in the last days, demanding that they be paid for their work. . . . Some troops have been sent to the haciendas to oblige them to start working again. If the mania of not wanting to work without payment extends to other haciendas, it would be difficult for their proprietors to accustom themselves to such a revolutionary state of affairs.”24

  There were few slave landings in the late 1860s. In 1867, Captain-General Joaquín del Manzano talked of just such an event, and the Admiralty in Britain confirmed the tale. About the same time, the British consul-general reported that he had seen 275 Africans brought into Havana by a Spanish naval ship, the Neptuno. Some newspapers recorded what they claimed to be other landings. L’Opinion nationale reported in Paris, in August 1866, that the slave traffic had reached even greater proportions, and declared that one dealer had paid $50,000 as a bribe to introduce 700 Africans. The New York Herald also claimed that a thousand Africans were landed near Jaruco that summer. Three hundred were said to have been taken by schooner to Marianao, a residence “where the [new] Captain General is living [probably Francisco Lersundi, not Manzano] . . . [and] afterwards, to the farm of a wealthy Spaniard. They were duly provided with the necessary passes. . . .” The abolitionist lawyer in Madrid Rafael Labra said that a Havana paper had advertised blacks from Africa for sale (though without specifying the paper). In December 1867, the captain of the British cruiser Speedwell discovered ninety-six Africans on board a slave ship off Africa, and reported that he had been told of another seven hundred being maintained in a barracoon nearby; and Cuba was of course their destination. A German traveler observed a slave ship leaving the Loango coast in 1868, but there is no evidence of when and where it arrived. The last verified landing of slaves in Cuba appears to have been in January 1870, when nine hundred captives seem to have been disembarked near Jibacoa in the province of Havana. The Cuban historian José Luciano Franco remembered meeting in Havana in 1907 an African known as María la Conguita who said that she had been carried as a slave with others to Cuba as late as 1878. But she may have had a poor memory for dates.25

  There is really no evidence for any landing of slaves in Cuba after 1870. In 1871, the head of the Slavery Department of the Foreign Office in London told a select committee of the House of Commons that he had heard stories that some slaves had found their way from Zanzibar to Cuba but, he commented, “I do not think there is any foundation for such a statement.” Even the always skeptical British consul thought that no landings of slaves were made between 1865 and 1872.

  Meanwhile, the cause of the emancipados was also resolved. In September 1869, the captaincy-general in Havana began the task of distributing certificates of liberty to all who had survived the years of ignominy, brutality, and indifference. But most of them remained to all intents and purposes slaves till their dying days. Twenty-six thousand emancipados had been liberated in Cuba since 1825: the number of really free men could not have been more than a few thousand.

  So now at last the British and other nations’ West Africa and South America squadrons, not to speak of their North America stations, could be brought to an end; about 200,000 slaves had been freed from slave ships in consequences of their efforts, even if not far short of two million had been carried. The British West Africa Squadron, which had done so much for the cause of abolition, was merged with the Cape Squadron in 1870. Its captains had over sixty years freed about 160,000 slaves, probably about 8 percent of the slaves shipped from Africa, mostly (85 percent) off Africa. They or their French, North American, Portuguese, and Spanish colleagues captured about 1,635 ships altogether: about a fifth of the 7,750 or so ships which set off for the trade in that time.IV Perhaps another 800,000 additional slaves would have been shipped if there had been no Africa squadron. Many British seamen died (1,338 in all, between 1825 and 1845) as a result of skirmishes at sea or, even worse, yellow fever and malaria contracted on land or in the rivers of the slave coast still in an age of ignorance of the causes of those diseases.26

  The Mixed Court at Sierra Leone was closed in 1871, but, though it was never used again, its sister judiciary court in Havana survived till 1892. The judges appointed under the United States-British treaty of 1861 never had to hear a case.

  So it was that the 350 years of the slave trade from Africa to Cuba came to an end without special celebration, without fanfare, and without a victory procession. But it was a triumph, all the same, for reason and humanity.

  * * *

  I The British First Lord of the Admiralty, then the duke of Somerset, circulated a paper to his Cabinet in January 1860: “The slave trade,” he wrote, “is rapidly increasing, and . . . in the present year it has grown more extensively and more successfully than for many years past. . . . There is now no effective check on the slave trade and but little risk of capture to those who conduct it”

  II He said, for instance, “By his very nature the African is indolent and lazy and to give him liberty, something which he has not known even in his own country, will make him into a vagabond.”

  III Pozos Dulces was a brother-in-law of the nationalist Narciso López.

  IV Of the vessels stopped, 1,500 were taken by British ships, 65 condemnations were French, 58 by the United States, 35 by the Portuguese, 28 by the Spaniards, and even 26 by Brazilians.

  Epilogue

  IN 1840, TURNER EXHIBITED his painting Slave Ship, depicting slavers throwing overboard dead and dying slaves. There is a typhoon coming on; the seamen seem to be in almost as bad a condition as the slaves. The picture, recalling the fate in 1781 of the Zong,I was intended to commemorate the doom of slavery.

  The exhibition of Slave Ship coincided with a grand meeting in Exeter Hall, in London, summoned to inaugurate the Africa Civilisation Society, inspired by Thomas Fowell Buxton. The meeting marked the final conversion of “the great and the good” in Britain to abolitionism, for it was inaugurated by the president of the new body, the prince consort, in his first public address in England. The duke of Norfolk, the earl marshall, was present, as was the leader of the Opposition, Sir Robert Peel. If the prince consort knew how the recently dead monarch, William IV, had spoken so often against abolition in the House of Lords, while his father was still king he kept quiet. Perhaps the duke remembered his ancestor’s investments in the South Sea Company. If so, he did not allude to the matter. If Peel recalled how his father had opposed abolition in the House of Commons earlier in the century, he too kept his thoughts to himself. Another age had begun—at least in England.

  But though the Atlantic slave trade was in 1840 within sight of its end, the end of slavery itself in the Americas took longer than Turner had imagined. Britain had already just abolished the institution, France would do so in eight years, and the United States in twenty-five. To own a slave became an offense in British India in 1862. In both Cuba and Brazil, however, the main concern of the last chapters of this book, slavery itself survived till nearly the end of the nineteenth century, with controversies raging there (as in Spain) as if the matters concerned had never been discussed in other countries. Advertisements were still placed in Brazil in the 1870s for the sale of slaves; the wording sometimes left it uncertain whether it was a human or an animal that could be bought: a cabra might be a goat, but it could also mean a female “quadroon.”

  The Ten Years’ War in Cuba, in 1868-78 (which failed to secure Cuban independence)
hastened emancipation in that colony: though the Cuban rebels, representing small planters rather than great industrial sugar monarchs, did not commit themselves to immediate abolition, they did proclaim freedom, as Bolivar had done, to slaves who fought for them.

  A new law of 1870 in Madrid of Segismundo Moret provided, in a qualified fashion, for the liberty of children born to slave families; and it also conceded liberty to all slaves over the age of sixty-five (later amended to sixty). Slaves who fought for Spain in the war against the Cuban nationalists were also proclaimed free, but there were still nearly 200,000 Cuban slaves at the end of the war.

  The passage of Moret’s law was the occasion for the great liberal orator Emilio Castelar to make one of his finest speeches, and one of the noblest of many fine orations on the matter in European legislatures. Rising from the front bench, shaking with the nerves which usually characterizes the great speaker, he declaimed: “I no longer see the walls of this room, I behold distant peoples and countries where I have never been. . . . I will say that we have had nineteen centuries of Christianity, and still there are slaves. They only exist in the Catholic countries of Brazil and Spain. . . . We have experienced barely a century of revolution, and the revolutionary peoples, France, England, and the United States, have abolished slavery. Nineteen centuries of Christianity, and there are still slaves among Catholic peoples! One century of revolution, and there are no slaves among revolutionary peoples. . . . Arise, Spanish legislators, and make this nineteenth century the century of the complete and total redemption of slaves . . . !”