The Creole Affair

by Arthur T. Downey

  The islands of the Bahamas were particularly suited to produce wreckage to the benefit of the local salvage business; the islands had shallow seas and thousands of barely concealed reefs. An increasing number of wrecks there brought seamen from Bermuda to the Bahamas where local shipyards started to build vessels specifically for the wrecking business.[33] Fast boats were needed, since there was a large area to patrol, and there were advantages to being the first boat on the scene of a wreck. By law, all salvaged goods were to be brought to the capital, Nassau. The wreckers were permitted to claim 40–60 percent of the value, the government claimed 15 percent for customs duties, and the warehouses and shipyards took their commissions too. Thus, all local parties thrived on salvage. Some outside the Bahamas considered the wreckers to be semi-pirates.

  The Comet and the Encomium

  The Comet sailed from the District of Columbia in 1830, heading to New Orleans with a cargo of 164 slaves. She became stranded on one of the keys off Abaco Island in the northern Bahamas. Wreckers took the crew and all persons on board to Nassau, where the British authorities liberated the slaves. Similarly, the Encomium sailed from Charleston, South Carolina, in January 1834, heading for New Orleans with a cargo of forty-five slaves. She too was stranded at the same place, and the wreckers also took the cargo, crew, and slaves to Nassau, where local authorities liberated the slaves. One scholar summed up the combined impact of the Comet and Encomium affairs:

  Coming at a time of deepening southern fear over the security of the slaveholding system, the two incidents seemed to be part of an ominous international pattern that included the Nat Turner uprising, the Garrisonian escalation of antislavery vehemence, and the triumph of abolition in the British colonies.[34]

  The US government made a claim against the British government for compensation for the value of the lost slaves. In May 1839, the Van Buren administration reached an agreement with the United Kingdom for compensation. The British agreed to pay about $115,000, including interest and expenses, for the 179 slaves who were freed.[35] The State Department then distributed the funds, about 80 percent of which went to insurance companies that had already reimbursed most of the slave owners who had the foresight to have purchased insurance for their “property.” As the Van Buren administration was about to leave office in early 1842, Secretary of State Forsyth transferred the British funds to the US treasurer. By 1842, other claimants surfaced, but the treasurer refused to pay them unless authorized by Congress. A bill was introduced in the House providing that authorization. On February 13, 1843, Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio—an outspoken abolitionist—objected. He argued that the slaves were not “property,” as the United States had claimed to the United Kingdom, and so the funds the British paid had been extorted from the people of England by fraudulent pretenses. As a result, he said, he could not involve his Ohio constituents in this fraud by voting for such a bill. The bill passed, despite Giddings’s passionate argument. Thus, the claimants received a proportional distribution of some $7,695 remaining in the fund.

  The Enterprise and the Hermosa

  The brig Enterprise sailed from the port of Alexandria, the District of Columbia,[36] on January 22, 1835, bound for Charleston, South Carolina. She carried merchandise, seventy-eight slaves, and their owners. A hurricane pushed the Enterprise well off course, and she began to leak, and so on February 11, she put in to Port Hamilton in Bermuda for supplies and to refit. She remained at anchor in the harbor, rather than alongside at the wharf, as the vessel took on the needed supplies and the sails were repaired. During this time, no one from shore was permitted to communicate with the slaves. When it was time to leave, on February 19, the captain went to the customs house to clear the brig for its departure. That’s when a problem surfaced: the captain was told that there was a delay in getting the papers, but that he could return the next morning when they would likely be available. The captain protested the detention of the ship’s papers and explained his fear that “the colored people of Hamilton would come on board his vessel at night and rescue the slaves, as they had threatened to do.”[37] The port authorities assured the captain that the “colored people would do nothing without the advice of the whites.”

  At almost six o’clock that same evening, the chief justice of Bermuda sent a writ of habeas corpus on board requiring the slaves to be brought to his court. (Known as the Great Writ, the full Latin name is habeas corpus ad subjiciendum [we command that you bring the body]; it requires that a person being detained be brought to a court by the custodian and the reason for the detention be explained.)[38] A “file of black soldiers armed” then came on board and ordered the captain to bring all the slaves to the court. The chief justice interviewed each of the slaves well into the night, asking whether they wanted to remain free in Bermuda or to return to the United States as slaves. Seventy-two declared that they would remain on the shore; a woman and her five children decided to remain on board when the Enterprise sailed the next day.

  The US minister in London, Martin Van Buren, was instructed to demand compensation for the liberated slaves, but the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, Lord Palmerston, refused. The United Kingdom rejected the claim, because at the time of the Enterprise slavery had been abolished in Bermuda, unlike the situation prevailing at the time of the other two earlier vessels, the Comet and the Encomium. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina chided Minister Van Buren “for merely ‘tapping gently’ at Lord Palmerston’s door for the compensation due to slaveholders.”[39]

  Senator Calhoun—a former vice president and secretary of war, and a future secretary of state—led the congressional assault against the British actions, calling the freeing of the slaves on the Enterprise “one of the greatest outrages ever committed on the rights of individuals by a civilized nation.”[40] In March 1840, Calhoun, angered by the British position, introduced a series of Senate Resolutions asserting the rights of slaveholders under international law. The Resolutions offered a statement of international law that, when a ship is forced by weather or otherwise into a port of another nation, she and the people and cargo are placed under the protection of that nation. In its final paragraph, the Resolution applied that principle to the Enterprise:

  that the seizure and detention of the negroes on board by the local authority of the island, was an act in violation of the law of nations, and highly unjust to our own citizens to whom they belong.

  Calhoun supported his proposals in a speech on March 13, 1840, in which he viciously attacked the British antislavery position, which he cleverly contrasted with the harsh British treatment of the Irish, Indians, and Chinese. Calhoun asserted that the British had to adopt one of two untenable propositions: either British municipal laws were superior to international law, or slavery itself was a violation of international law. The first proposition would lead to war, and the second was without foundation.[41] Calhoun’s speech was reprinted as a pamphlet and also appeared in newspapers from Baltimore to South Carolina.[42] The Senate easily adopted Calhoun’s Resolutions.

  The schooner Hermosa sailed from Richmond heading toward New Orleans with thirty-eight slaves on board. On October 19, 1840, she was wrecked on a key at Abaco, the Bahamas. Bahamian wreckers came alongside and took off the captain, crew, and passengers, along with the slaves. The captain of the Hermosa asked the salvage leader to take them to a port in the United States. However, the wrecker refused and carried them all to Nassau. Upon arrival in Nassau, on October 22, the captain of the Hermosa was careful to ensure that the slaves were not put ashore and also that they had no communication with anyone on shore. The vessel remained in the harbor at anchor, a distance from the wharves. The captain got to shore and called on the US consul, John F. Bacon. Fifty-one-year-old Bacon had arrived at his post in Nassau only seven months earlier, having practiced law in New York State and also having served as clerk of the New York Senate. The captain enlisted Bacon’s assistance in procuring another vessel to take the crew, passengers, and slaves to
a port in the United States.

  At that point, uniformed magistrates, supported by British West Indian soldiers carrying muskets and bayonets, took possession of the vessel and arranged to transport the slaves to the shore. From there, a guard of soldiers marched the slaves to the office of the magistrate, where, after some judicial proceedings, they were set free. This was done in the face of the urgent remonstrances of the Hermosa’s captain and of the American consul.

  On December 1, the governor general of the Bahamas, Sir Francis Cockburn, wrote to the British secretary of state for war and the colonies, Lord John Russell, concerning the Hermosa. Cockburn explained that the ship would have been lost, but for the “gallant exertions of the boatmen” who saved the crew and passengers from “a watery grave.” Cockburn was careful to point out that he decided not to “afford [the thirty-eight slaves] the use of the Government Building at Roslyn . . . which is appropriate to the use of captured Africans, lest it should have the appearance of [Cockburn’s] taking any possession of them.”[43] Cockburn also lamented the fact that the boatmen who salvaged the goods and personnel received no remuneration from the ungrateful Americans.

  In short, during the decade preceding the Creole affair, there were four instances of American vessels arriving in British Caribbean ports with slave “cargo.” All of them were caused by acts of nature; none was caused by violent revolt and murder on the part of the slaves. In all of them, the slaves were freed. In all of them, the US government protested vigorously to the British authorities, and in some the British paid compensation.

  African Slave Trade Interdiction

  In 1808, the United States outlawed the importation of slaves. In Article 10 of the Treaty of Ghent,[44] which ended the US-UK War of 1812, both countries expressed moral condemnation of the African slave trade and implied that both countries would take action against it. (John Quincy Adams was one of the American negotiators in that Belgian city in late 1814.) But it was only the British Navy that was strong enough to be relatively effective in suppressing the slavers. Increasingly, slave traders from third countries found it smart to hoist an American flag on their vessels, knowing that the American government opposed any action by the British Navy to board and search American ships. While secretary of state (1817–1825), John Quincy Adams suggested an agreement with the British for a joint cruising plan based on an understanding that the slave trade was considered piracy under international law. The Senate, however, refused to consent. Similarly, in 1834, the British proposed to Secretary of State Forsyth that the United States join with the United Kingdom and France to stop the slave trade, but the Americans again decided that it would deal with the slave trade by its own naval patrols.

  The 27th Congress began its extra session[45] on May 31, 1841, and President Tyler sent his first Presidential Message. Near the end of the message, Tyler addressed the issue of the African slave trade. He suggested there was reason to believe that it was on the increase, but that it was pointless to attempt to understand why. Nevertheless, Tyler said that the “highest considerations of public honor, as well as the strongest promptings of humanity, require a resort to the most vigorous efforts to suppress the trade.”

  In June 1841, the House of Representatives passed a Resolution seeking information with respect to the seizure of American vessels by British armed cruisers “under the pretense that they [the American ships] were engaged in the slave trade,” to which Tyler responded with a report from Secretary Webster listing all the efforts made by diplomatic notes since 1837 on that subject. There had been more than twenty diplomatic exchanges on this topic so far just in 1841. For example, Minister Stevenson sent a note on April 16, 1841, to Lord Palmerston concerning the “continued seizure and detention of American vessels by British cruisers on the high seas,” about which Stevenson expressed “painful surprise” that the “repeated representations on the subject” had “failed to receive the attention which their importance merited.” In that same note, Stevenson added yet another list of four American vessels that had been boarded by British naval officers. Stevenson concluded that “these continued aggressions upon the vessels and commerce of the United States cannot longer be permitted.” Webster wrote to Stevenson on June 18, 1841, explaining that President Tyler had read with interest the accounts of his exchanges with Lord Palmerston on this subject and was “strongly impressed.” He added that the United States was “determined to protect its flag.”

  In September 1841, Lord Aberdeen replaced Lord Palmerston as British foreign secretary. Minister Stevenson lost no time in sending a note to Lord Aberdeen, on September 10, complaining about the problem of the African slave trade. On October 13, Lord Aberdeen responded with the fullest statement of the British position: yes, the flag of a vessel is prima facie evidence of the nationality of a vessel, but it is “sufficiently notorious that the flags of all nations are liable to be assumed” by those who have no right, and the American flag “has been employed for the purpose of covering this nefarious traffic.” Indeed, the fact that the slave trade is “extensively carried on under the fraudulent use of the American flag” justifies the British action, since there are reasonable grounds of suspicion; this “abuse creates the right of inquiry.” Of course, if the British cruiser had “a knowledge of the American character of any vessel, his visitation of such a vessel would be entirely unjustified.”

  The second session of the 27th Congress began on December 7, 1841, and Tyler sent another message (see appendix II). This time, the section dealing with the African slave trade was sharply focused on the British practice of interdicting American flagged vessels off the African coast. He explained that however much the United States would like to see the end of the African slave trade, the United States could not accept the claim of the United Kingdom to have a right to “visit and detain vessels sailing under the American flag, and engaged in prosecuting lawful commerce in the African seas.” He also promised to urge upon Great Britain “full and ample remuneration for all losses, whether arising from detention or otherwise, to which American citizens have heretofore been subjected, by the exercise of rights which this Government cannot recognize as legitimate and proper.”

  New Faces

  The year 1841 saw a near total change in the people dealing with US-UK relations:

  On the British side, the prime minister, William Lamb (the Viscount Melbourne) left office on August 30, and his foreign secretary, John Temple (the Viscount Palmerston), left his office on September 2. The new prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, took office on August 30, and his new foreign secretary, George Hamilton Gordon (the Earl of Aberdeen), took over in September. The secretary of state for war and the colonies had been Lord John Russell until August 30, but Lord Stanley succeeded him on September 3.

  On the American side, President Van Buren left office in March and was succeed by President Harrison; Tyler became president on April 4. Secretary of State Webster succeeded Forsyth on March 6, and the US minister in London, Andrew Stevenson, resigned on October 21 and was replaced on December 16 by Edward Everett.

  The only person who remained in place during this period was the British minister in Washington, Henry S. Fox, who was at his post from 1836 until 1843. Fox was not a political heavyweight. He was a professional diplomat, having served previously in Italy, France, and Brazil. Fox was unhappy with his posting in Washington and became somewhat of a recluse. Another professional diplomat, Richard Pakenham, did not replace Fox until December 1843.

  This enormous change in personnel in a single year would be unsettling to the bilateral relations of any two countries at any time. But to have this taking place at a time—1841—when US-UK relations were severely strained was unprecedented. The absence of close personal relationships and habits of dealing with each other carried dangers. On the other hand, with new faces on both sides of the Atlantic, there was the opportunity to begin a fresh approach in the US-UK relationship and perhaps to reduce the tensions.

  In contrast to the British appr
oach, the American envoys were political figures of some weight. The US minister to Britain from 1836 until October 21, 1841—formally known as the “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James”—was Andrew Stevenson.[46] He had been a Democratic congressman from Virginia who had served as the 15th Speaker of the US House of Representatives, from December 1827 to June 1834. The new president, John Tyler, had previously represented the same first congressional district of Virginia that Stevenson had earlier represented. Stevenson’s tenure in London, however, was made difficult because he was a slave owner, a position that was seen as an irritant to the growing abolitionist sentiment in the United Kingdom. In 1838, an Irish leader denounced Stevenson in public as a “slave breeder.” The outraged Stevenson responded by taking steps to challenge his British accuser to a duel. In the end, however Stevenson let the issue drop.[47] This embarrassment did not help Stevenson in his task of defending America’s interests with respect to the United Kingdom. In late 1841, Stevenson returned to Virginia, where he was celebrated as a national hero for having defended American interests in the case of the Enterprise and other slave shipping interests.[48]

  Secretary of State Webster decided that his old friend from Massachusetts, Edward Everett, would make an excellent replacement for Stevenson. Everett was close to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and was a Whig. His term as governor of Massachusetts had ended in 1840, after which he traveled extensively in Europe. He also had the virtue of being available for this new assignment. Webster had little trouble in persuading President Tyler to appoint Everett to the London post. On November 20, 1841, even before Webster was advised that Everett had arrived at his new post, Webster wrote to Everett to instruct him that the two subjects of the “most commanding interest and highest importance” were the Caroline problem and the British search of American vessels off the African coast. Webster had not yet received any information about the Creole event.