Edward Everett, American minister to Great Britain during the Creole affair, former governor of Massachusetts, and orator remembered for his two-hour Gettysburg Address preceding Lincoln’s two-minute Address.
In contrast to the very tense US-UK political-military relations, at the cultural level Americans in all regions were captivated by at least one young Englishman: Charles Dickens. Americans devoured pirated editions of The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), Oliver Twist (1837–1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841).[49] In September 1841, just two months before the Creole affair erupted, twenty-nine-year-old Dickens wrote to his publisher: “It would be a good thing, wouldn’t it, if I ran over to America about the end of February, and came back, after four or five months, with a One Volume book?”[50] Dickens planned his visit for early 1842.
1. In 1790, the US population was 4 million, and in 1860, it was 31 million. The population had increased by one-third every decade.
2. The “Monroe Doctrine” was set out in President Monroe’s seventh annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. A key contributor was Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Monroe stated: “[T]he American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”
3. Michael Fathers, “Catastrophe at Kabul,” review of William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42 in the Wall Street Journal, April 13–14, C-6.
4. For an excellent and exhaustive treatment see Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha America, 1994).
5. John Darwin, “The Men Who Would Be King,” review of Dalrymple, Return of a King in the New York Times Book Review, May 26, 2013, 14.
6. Seth G. Jones, “Costly Mistakes in an Afghan Adventure,” review of Dalrymple, Return of a King in the Washington Post, June 23, 2013, B-7.
7. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 368.
8. Mark M. Smith, “More True Sons of Liberty,” review of Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy in the Wall Street Journal, September 14–15, 2013, C5.
9. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 269.
10. Ibid., 272.
11. The would-be killer was an eighteen-year-old barman from London; the attempt was theatrical, and his trial was a sensation. His plea of insanity carried the day, and he was sent to Bedlam. See John Sutherland, “How Not to Kill A Queen,” review of Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy in the New York Times Book Review, July 29, 2012, 10.
12. David Waller, “Worth Being Shot,” review of Murphy, Shooting Victoria in the Times Literary Supplement, August 2, 2013, 25.
13. Confirmed on June 22, 1772, in the famous case of Somerset v. Stewart, written by Lord Mansfield, the chief justice of the King’s Bench. See Norman S. Poser, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
14. The 1827 case of The Slave Grace.
15. A regiment from Barbados and a battalion from Bermuda were sent to assist. In 1832, Parliament appointed a Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery throughout the British Dominions, which was to consider the best way to effect abolition “whilst ensuring the safety of all classes in the colonies.” The committee issued its report in 1833.
16. August 28, 1833, “An Act for Abolition of Slavery throughout British Colonies,” with effect one year later.
17. The former slaves, of course, received no compensation. However, the Caribbean Community (Caricom), which includes former British colonies, together with Suriname and Haiti, currently are claiming reparations for the former slaves. Among the unsettled questions are who should pay, how much should be paid, and who should be paid. These issues are considered in The Economist, October 5, 2013, 42.
18. Howard Jones, To The Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1843 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), xii.
19. The formal caption is The British North America Act, 1840 (3&4 Victoria, c. 35).
20. For an excellent and compressive study of the issues, see John E. Noyes, “The Caroline: International Law Limits on Resort to Force,” in International Law Stories (New York: Foundation Press, 2007).
21. R. Y. Jennings, “The Caroline and McLeod Cases,” American Journal of International Law 32, no. 1 (January 1938): 82.
22. Jones, To The Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 27.
23. Fillmore was not an unimportant political figure: in 1841, he came in second place in the race for speaker of the House, and was elected vice president under Zachary Taylor in 1848. Fillmore became president in 1850, when Taylor died.
24. Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997), 519.
25. Minister Fox’s letter to Webster, and Webster’s reply of April 24, 1841, were attached to President Tyler’s Message to Congress of June 1, 1841.
26. In an ironic twist, in March 1840, the US Supreme Court found that the federal power over foreign affairs was exclusive, and therefore the state of Vermont had no power to surrender fugitives to a foreign government (Canada). See Holmes v. Jennison, 39 US 540 (1840).
27. In August 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis was beginning, a Justice Department Memorandum for Attorney General Robert Kennedy highlighted the Caroline incident, and the position taken by Secretary of State Webster. The memorandum also noted that the Webster statement on self-defense was also quoted with approval by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Abram Chayes, The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), appendix I. Webster’s Rule is still followed, for example, by Israeli scholars of international law in the twenty-first century in the context of use of force against terrorists. See Noyes, “The Caroline,” 301.
28. Edward P. Crapol, John Tyler: the Accidental President (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 91.
29. David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 313.
30. Jones, To The Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 40.
31. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 186.
32. Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), 264.
33. Paul Albury, The Story of the Bahamas (London: MacMillan Education, 1975), 135. The author notes that by 1856, there were 302 ships licensed to engage in salvage, and, astonishingly, that nearly one-half of the able-bodied men of the colony were engaged in wrecking.
34. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 104.
35. Ibid, 107.
36. It was not until 1846 that Alexandria was retroceded to Virginia and was no longer part of the District of Columbia.
37. From the Statement of the Umpire Bates in the case of the Enterprise, January 15, 1855, as reported in Report of Decisions of the Commission of Claims Under the Convention of February 8, 1853.
38. For a review of the history of the writ, see Arthur T. Downey, Civil War Lawyers: Constitutional Questions, Courtroom Dramas, and the Men Behind Them (Chicago: ABA Books, 2010), 135.
39. Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 201.
40. 24 Cong. 1st Sess, 727. Quoted in Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 106.
41. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation, 202.
42. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation, 202n58.
43.
Bahamas National Archives, Nassau, Box 8, Governor’s Despatches, 1839–1844.
44. The treaty was formally proclaimed in the United States on February 18, 1815. The tenth article provided: “Whereas the Traffic in Slaves is irreconcilable with the principles of humanity and Justice, and whereas both His Majesty and the United States are desirous of continuing their efforts to promote its abolition, it is hereby agreed that both the contracting parties shall use their best endeavours to accomplish so desirable an object.”
45. A special session of the Senate was called by outgoing president Martin Van Buren on January 6, 1841. It convened on March 4 and adjourned on March 15. The “extra” session of the 27th Congress was called by President Harrison on March 17. It convened on May 31 and adjourned on September 13. The second session—the so-called long session—convened on December 6, 1841 and did not adjourn until August 31, 1842.
46. This was also the formal title of the first US envoy to the United Kingdom after the War of 1812, John Quincy Adams, who was appointed on February 28, 1815, and presented his credentials in London on August 8, 1815. The first US ambassador was Thomas Bayard, who presented his credentials to the Court of St. James and opened the first US embassy in London, on June 22, 1893.
47. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic, 107.
48. The people of Richmond gave Stevenson a grand dinner in early January 1842, at which he was hailed as “a man of the purest private character, of undoubted political integrity; one of the best Speakers the House of Representatives ever had, and above all he has managed our various difficulties with England in a manner so satisfactory to the country . . . that even Webster himself says ‘he is an honor to his country.’” Richmond Enquirer, January 11, 1842.
49. Dickens’s novels were initially published as serials in monthly papers. For example, Oliver Twist was serialized in monthly numbers of Bentley’s Miscellany beginning in February 1837 and ending in April 1839.
50. Jill Lepore, “Dickens in Eden,” The New Yorker, August 29, 2011, 52.
Chapter 3
The British Bahamas
The islands of the Bahamas were the site of Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the New World in 1492, but the native people of the Bahamas disappeared within twenty years. English Puritans arrived in the mid-1650s. In the early 1700s, law and order collapsed, and Blackbeard—Edward Teach, a former British privateer—and other pirates made Nassau their base of operations in the Caribbean.
The Bahamas became a British Crown Colony in 1718. Not surprisingly, given the geographic proximity, there were many ties between America and the Bahamas. England acquired east Florida from Spain in 1763, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War), and the Spanish withdrew from their brief occupation of the Bahamian islands. East Florida remained an English colony until 1783, at which time it was ceded back to Spain.
At the time of the American War of Independence, British Loyalists were virtually driven out of what is now the United States. Several thousand of them—mostly from Georgia and South Carolina—came to east Florida with their slaves. At the time of the retrocession of east Florida to Spain in 1783, the English colonists were given eighteen months to remove themselves and their property (i.e., their slaves). While some returned to Georgia and South Carolina, most were taken by British transport to the Bahamas. Those Loyalists received grants of Crown land in the Bahamas.[1] The influx from the United States of these Loyalists and their slaves “probably doubled the population of the colony, tripled the slave population, and increased the percentage of blacks in the population to about two-thirds.”[2] The “Loyalist invasion” from the United States brought talented people to the Bahamas, such as Joseph Eve of Pennsylvania, who invented a cotton gin, which helped the Bahamas become an exporter of cotton.[3] These Loyalists constructed public buildings, churches, and libraries.
During the War of 1812, the Bahamas played a minor role. Nassau was a resupply location for British warships—the naval station in Nassau was under the jurisdiction of the West Indies station headquartered in Jamaica—and the Bahamas depended upon imported food from the United States brought by neutral ships. The Bahamas did play a significant role as a prisoner of war depot for American POWs, most of whom were brought from captured merchant vessels and a few privateers. A total of 836 American POWs were received and held during the period August 1, 1812, to March 13, 1815.[4]
On March 25, 1807, the British Parliament made the transatlantic slave trade illegal, effective in January of 1808.[5] In time, this had a profound impact on the population and society of the Bahamas. After 1807, many slavers took a gamble on not being caught, since “a slave purchased for $20 in Africa could be sold in Cuba for $350 [and many] slavers would first drop off their cargo of slaves on an isolated Bahamian cay until they could smuggle them into Cuba to sell.”[6] To suppress the illegal slave trade, British ships were stationed along trade routes, and they seized slave ships and brought them to the nearest British port, where they were condemned as prizes.[7] The Africans on those confiscated ships were to be protected and provided for by the British, specifically the local collector of customs. The Bahamas were located just north of Cuba, and so many slave ships were confiscated at Nassau, the main port and seat of the government of the Bahamas. Thousands of liberated Africans were settled in the Bahamas. The duty of the collector of customs was to bind the Africans to suitable masters so they could learn a trade; apart from serving as apprentice domestics or laborers, some enlisted in the navy and in the Second West India Regiment stationed in the Bahamas.[8]
On February 8, 1841, the British governor general of the Bahamas faced a dilemma when two or three hundred Africans were brought into Nassau, originally bound for Cuba. Governor Cockburn wrote to London on that date, explaining that atrocities had taken place on the slave ship, including the murder of at least one African. Cockburn was uncertain whether his Admiralty Court in Nassau had jurisdiction to try those responsible, since a foreigner committed the murder on board a foreign ship engaged in the African slave trade. In his letter of that date to the attorney general, Cockburn reported that the “inclination of my mind . . . is so strongly in favor of the existence of the jurisdiction”[9] that he would not hesitate to indict such a murderer.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the influx of liberated Africans increased apprehension among prominent whites. Slave owners were particularly unhappy, because there were now significant numbers of free Africans who would compete with their slaves and depress their “property” value. Previously, most of the slaves in the Bahamas had been born in the Americas, and they did not have strong or direct ties to Africa and to African culture. But after the termination of the slave trade in 1808, the liberated Africans who arrived in the Bahamas, especially those who settled on the island of New Providence on which Nassau is located, maintained strong African connections. Their Africanness impacted Bahamian society and culture in language, religion, music, and food. The numbers of Africans liberated in the Bahamas grew during the 1830s, especially on the island of New Providence and around its port of Nassau. Villages of freed Africans were created outside Nassau: Grant’s Town (1820s), Carmichael (1832), Adelaide (1831), and Gambier (1830s).[10] The Africans divided themselves into ethnic groups, such as the Yoruba, Congoes, Eboes, Mandingos, Fullalis, and Hausas, and retained many of their tribal distinctions and languages.
Although slavery remained legal in the Bahamas into the 1830s, the government took a series of steps in the period from 1823 to 1833 to ameliorate the conditions of the slaves. Even before that, however, the conditions of slaves in the Bahamas, especially in New Providence and its capital, Nassau, were generally better than elsewhere in the British West Indies, because a significantly smaller percentage of slaves there were field hands.[11] These steps comprised a trilogy of statutes, beginning with the Amelioration Act, passed in January 1824. It legalized slaves’ marriages and prohibited the breakup of slave families.
The second statute, passed in 1826, allowed slaves to give evidence in civil and criminal cases[12] and it permitted slaves to inherit and to own real estate and personal property. The third act was passed in 1830 and clarified the rights of the slaves.
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