The secretary of state for war and colonies then formally instructed Cockburn, “Her Majesty’s government cannot legally surrender these persons to take their trial in the United States.” Lord Stanley then acknowledged that, as a consequence, “upon the charge of murder there is no power vested anywhere for bringing these persons or any of them to trial.” Stanley then instructed Cockburn to advise Consul Bacon that, even though the law officers of the Crown are “strongly” of the opinion that a charge of piracy cannot be sustained, since that is the only charge upon which this case can be judicially investigated, Cockburn is to afford every facility for such an investigation, if Bacon wants to make that charge in the commissioners’ court in Nassau. If the consul declines to institute any such prosecution, the matter can be discharged “according to the regular course of law.” Lord Stanley closed his letter by once again stating that Her Majesty’s Government “entirely approve” the course which Cockburn took in “difficult circumstances.”
In light of the position taken by the Crown lawyers and Lord Stanley, Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, announced in the House of Lords on February 14 that the American slaves held in custody in Nassau would be freed.
On March 29, 1842, Sir Francis wrote to Lord Stanley, acknowledging his letter of instruction of January 31 and expressing appreciation that London had approved his handling of the Creole matter. But then Cockburn said he still sought “further and more detailed instructions for future guidance.” Lord Stanley replied on April 30, reproaching Cockburn for failing to be specific in his request for guidance: “It would have been more convenient if you had recapitulated the specific questions on which you felt yourself to be still insufficiently instructed.” Stanley, nevertheless, provided guidance for the future: when a vessel arrives in port, and if you have “credible testimony” that persons on board were “illegally detained against their will . . . it would be your duty to verify the fact and to afford to persons so circumstanced the protection of the British Law.”
On April 5, Governor Cockburn wrote to Lord Stanley to advise him of the measures he had taken to comply with Stanley’s confidential letter of instructions of January 31 concerning the Americans who had been kept in custody in Nassau. The special session of the admiralty court in Nassau was ordered to assemble on April 16. While claiming to have had no conversation with anyone on the topic, Cockburn said that it was “very doubtful whether the grand jury will find a Bill against the accused, or whether the Judges will agree to any postponement of the trial.” In other words, Cockburn was signaling that he had arranged for the matter to be handled according to “the regular course of law,” as Stanley had desired.
On April 17, Cockburn reported to Stanley on the implementation of the plan. The special session of the admiralty court had indeed assembled on April 16, and the Americans in custody were brought into the court by the provost marshal. The attorney general moved on behalf of the new American consul—Timothy Darling, who had been formally recognized by Cockburn on April 6—that the Americans should be committed for trial for piracy at the next general session, since there was not sufficient evidence for an indictment on that charge at this time. The court had before it all the depositions made by all the various participants in the events. In addition, Consul Darling submitted a statement explaining that, if the motion by the attorney general were granted, he would ask his government to make arrangements to bring from the United States those witnesses relevant to the piracy charge.
The court retired and discussed the matter privately for an hour, and, upon their return, the chief justice delivered the unanimous decision of the admiralty court: there was nothing in any of the depositions that would in any way warrant support that an act of piracy had been committed, and therefore the motion was denied and those Americans who had been detained “were discharged accordingly.”
The seventeen former slaves—two of whom had died while in custody—left the court on the same day, April 16, 1842, and were free. They quickly melted into Bahamian society.[18]
Therefore, by mid-April 1842, events in Nassau moved to a secondary level. The Creole was long gone, and the remaining former American slaves were free. There was no longer a dramatic and emotional conflict to be discussed between Governor Cockburn and the new American consul. The focus turned sharply to Washington, where the Creole affair merged with long-standing, unresolved, and contentious British-American issues.
1. We, the People: The Story of the United States Capitol (Washington, DC: US Capitol Historical Society, 1991), 28.
2. Joyce Appleby, “A Stumbling, Fiery End to War of 1812,” review of Steve Vogel, Through the Perilous Fight: Six Weeks that Saved the Nation, in the Washington Post, May 5, 2013, B-6. Sir George’s assignment, after the burning of Washington, was to convey Napoleon to St. Helena in the South Atlantic; he remained as governor of that British possession for a few months. See also Stuart Butler, “Defending Norfolk: An Early Battle with the British in 1813 Saves a Thriving American Port,” Prologue 45 (2013): 10–18. A photo of a portrait of Sir George appears on p. 16.
3. In the report of the investigations by the magistrate, Robert Duncome, the slaves are identified as “one hundred and thirty-five black passengers” along with four white passengers.
4. This dramatic encounter is not mentioned in Woodside’s deposition, but is detailed in the formal protest made by Gifford on December 2, 1841, in New Orleans.
5. This narrative is taken from the deposition sworn to by Woodside in front of Bacon on that same Friday, November 13, 1841.
6. According to Gifford’s testimony in the later Louisiana Supreme Court case, two of the slaves had stayed in the cabin, Rachael Glover (about thirty years old) and Mary, a mulatto girl of about thirteen years; the boy was the son of one of those two. The other two women had been in the hold during the voyage and until after the others had left the ship.
7. Edward Eden, “The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole: Popular resistance to slavery in Post-Emancipation Nassau,” Journal of the Bahamas Historical Society 22 (2000): 16.
8. This report is taken from the deposition sworn to by Gifford in front of Bacon on that same Friday, November 13, 1841. It is consistent with the depositions given by Merritt and by Stevens, the second mate, on the same day.
9. A letter reprinted from the Charleston Courier provided a report from a passenger on a ship recently returned from Kingston, Jamaica, that a schooner had arrived from Nassau “with about 60 or 70 Negroes . . . and they were a portion of those taken into Nassau by the brig Creole.” Quoted in the Richmond Enquirer, January 1, 1842, 3.
10. This idea is suggested by Eden, “The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole,” 16.
11. These figures are not from a census in Nassau, but rather come from the formal protest of the Americans, and was undoubtedly information supplied by the US consul.
12. One scholar identified this likelihood. See Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 126. Ms. Sale also put a negative twist on the protest, arguing that it “discursively erased the agency, activity, and power of the people of Nassau, and the threat they posed to British authorities had they attempted to produce a different outcome, as well as to the US crew and their supporters” (127).
13. Eden, “The Revolt on the Slave Ship Creole,” 15.
14. It is unclear what happened to Captain Ensor. Presumably, he returned to the United States on another vessel once he was well enough to travel. On January 27, 1842, there was a meeting of Richmond citizens in the grand ballroom of the Exchange Hotel, and the Richmond Enquirer of January 29, 1842, reports, “The Captain of the Creole was present.” The 1840 census shows a Robert T. Ensor living in Richmond (Henrico County), with two white females under age five (perhaps his daughter and niece), and a white female age twenty to thirty-nine, perhaps his wife. The 1850 census does not reveal any Robert Ensor, but there is an Eliza Ensor, age thirt
y, in Richmond, perhaps his wife (or widow) along with three children ranging from age twelve to eleven months. Perhaps the captain had died from his injuries, or perhaps he was simply at sea when the census was taken. Cathy Morgan of the Virginia Historical Society, December 10, 2010, provided this census research.
15. Bahamas National Archives, Secretary of State Correspondence (loose papers, 1832–1921—Gov. 15/1).
16. These were John Dodson, a former member of Parliament, and king’s advocate in the Melbourne administration, and an Oxford graduate; Frederick Pollack, a Cambridge graduate, Member of Parliament (1831–1844), and attorney general 1834–1835 and 1841–1844 in the Peel administrations; and Sir W. W. Follett.
17. Charles Dickens satirized Doctors’ Commons in Sketches by Boz (1836) and David Copperfield (1850).
18. There is evidence that one of the leaders, Elijah Morris, settled in the Village of Gambier, nine miles west of Nassau. It was this settlement where the British Navy brought Africans after the abolition of slavery. See Gail Saunders, Gambier Village: A Brief History (Nassau: 2007), 9.
Chapter 5
In the United States
In Washington
The second session of the 27th Congress opened on December 6, 1841. The next day, President Tyler sent the traditional Presidential Message that was the functional equivalent of today’s State of the Union Address. News of the Creole events had not yet reached Washington, and so Tyler made no mention of them.
Relations with Britain dominated the message, which presented a lengthy catalog of unsolved problems with Great Britain. While the message was presented in the first person (“I invite your attention”), the hand of Secretary of State Webster was undoubtedly at work. Tyler noted that, in New York, McLeod had been acquitted by a jury, but he reminded Congress of the continuing issue that arose from the 1837 burning by the British of the Caroline: “No such atonement as was due for the public wrong done to the United States by this invasion of her territory . . . has yet been made.” Tyler complained about the British practice of detaining and “visiting” American vessels off the African coast. For this, Tyler demanded of Britain “full and ample remuneration for all losses, whether from detention or otherwise, to which American citizens have heretofore been or may hereafter be subjected.” Tyler also reported on the efforts to survey the boundary line between Canada and Maine/New Hampshire, and noted that the dispute over the boundary line was causing continued problems with the British.
Near the end of his message,[1] Tyler urged substantial appropriations for an expansion of the navy: not for “foreign conquests” or to compete “with any other nation for supremacy on the ocean” but, rather, to ensure that “no nation should be permitted to invade our waters at pleasure and subject our towns and villages to conflagration or pillage.” Thus, the president underlined the fact that the US-British relationship was in trouble.[2] While the message was addressed to the US Congress, Tyler and Webster understood that the undisclosed addressee was the British government. And this was before the Creole affair had reared its head in Washington. (Because of the importance, and comprehensive character of this statement of US-UK relations, the relevant portions of the president’s message are set out at appendix II.)
The Creole arrived in New Orleans on December 2.[3] The customs collector at the port wrote immediately to Secretary of the Treasury Walter Forward about the reported rebellion. President Tyler had appointed Forward treasury secretary only three months earlier; previously, he had been the comptroller of the currency and a lawyer in Pittsburgh. The New Orleans Bee of December 3 charged that the refusal of the British authorities to give up the mutineers for trial in the United States added to the “dark catalogue of outrages” the British had committed against American slaveholders.[4] On the other hand, the positive news—that the slaves had achieved their freedom—spread like a contagion throughout the slave quarters of the American South; the message was that freedom awaited anyone who reached British soil.
By mid-December, New Orleans was virtually in flames over the Creole affair. On December 18, the customs collector sent a formal protest detailing minutely the events of the mutiny and the activity in Nassau. Gifford, the acting master, and all the crew members of the Creole signed and swore to the protest; the passengers Merritt, McCargo, and Leidner formally attested to the truth of the facts presented by Gifford and his crew. (In maritime law, a protest is a “written statement by the master of a vessel, attested by a proper judicial officer or a notary, to the effect that damage suffered by the ship on her voyage was caused by storms or other perils of the sea, without any negligence or misconduct on his own part.”)[5] The protest concluded: “if there had been no interference on the part of the legal authorities of Nassau, the slaves might have been safely brought to New Orleans.” The protest recorded Bacon’s proposal to permit the nineteen slaves who led the revolt to be sent to the United States on the Creole for trial and the British rejection of that proposition. The protest was widely reprinted in newspapers, especially in the South.[6]
On December 22, 1841, Senator Alexander Barrow of Louisiana rose in the US Senate to report that he had received a memorial from the New Orleans Insurance Company concerning the Creole. Barrow charged that this “ subject involved the question of peace or war between this country and Great Britain, and [that] it was important . . . to [settle] whether the British Government had a right to do what they who lived in the South denied to their own Government—and that was, the right of suppressing the slave trade between the States.”[7] Alabama Senator William King followed Barrow and opined that “the time was not far off when the question of war must inevitably arise.” Perhaps in an effort to calm tensions, Senator William Preston of South Carolina said that although “he knew that the temper of the nation was exasperated,” he would not allow himself to believe that an enlightened Great Britain could not be reconciled. Similarly, Virginia Senator William Cabell Rives urged some caution, but at the same time, “to make preparations for the country’s defense.”
South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun followed Rives and turned up the rhetoric. He asserted that the British action with respect to the Creole was “the most atrocious outrage ever perpetrated on the American people.”[8] Louisiana Senator Barrow rounded out the discussion, charging that the British government:
knew that the transfer of slaves from one Southern state to another was an every day’s occurrence; and if these contemptible British subjects at Nassau were permitted to seize by force of arms, the slaves belonging to American citizens and liberating them, the South would be compelled to fit our armaments and destroy Nassau, and also the towns which trampled under foot the laws of nations and the rights of American citizens.[9]
Thus, even before the year was over, senators from Virginia to Louisiana were expressing outrage over the Creole affair, and calls for a violent response were made—although there was a clear message of hope that the British would understand the importance of the coastal slave trade and somehow ensure that such events would cease.
Despite the great tension over the Creole affair, one Washington tradition continued unabated: the president’s levee, a sort of “open house” on New Year’s Day at the mansion. The East Room was glittering, and the diplomatic corps was present. According to one report, “the most conspicuous [guest] . . . was the Russian Minister, whose coat was one entire sheet of silver. A member of the late Cabinet had the beautiful wife of the Russian on his arm . . . the whole Democratic portion of the Senate were present . . . but few Whigs.”[10] The one sad note was the figure of Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who was seen “to stalk grand, gloomy and peculiar, with a clouded brow, over to his own house.” Undoubtedly, Webster’s gloom was caused by the recent events in Nassau and the prospects for a very difficult time with Great Britain.
In the Senate, on January 10, 1842, Senator Calhoun introduced a Resolution:
Resolved, That the President be requested to communicate to the Senate, a copy of the
Protest of the officers and crew of the brig Creole, on her late passage from Richmond to New Orleans, should any such have been received; or any authenticated account which may have been received, of the murder of a passenger on board, and the wounding of the captain, and others, by the slaves on board the same; and also, to inform the Senate, if, in his opinion, it can be done consistently with the public interest, what step has been taken by the Executive, in reference to the transaction, having for its object the punishment of the guilty, the redress of the wrong done to our citizens, and the indignity offered to the American flag.[11]
The next day, the Senate adopted Calhoun’s Resolution. On January 18, 1842, Secretary of State Webster sent the requested report to the president, who then transmitted it to the Senate on January 19. Webster explained that neither the owners of the slaves, nor the insurance underwriters had yet requested the assistance of the State Department. Webster also reported that he was preparing a dispatch to the American minister in London, Edward Everett.
The Creole Affair Page 14