The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Grandin, Greg

  Archivo General de la Provincia, Mendoza, Argentina [AGP (Mendoza)]

  Archivo del Arzobispado, Mendoza, Argentina [AA (Mendoza)]

  Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, Peru [AGN (Lima)]

  Archivo Arzobispal, Lima, Peru [AA (Lima)]

  Archivo General de la Nación, Montevideo, Uruguay [AGN (Montevideo)]

  Archivo Nacional de Chile, Santiago [ANC (Santiago)]

  Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago

  Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Spain [AHN (Madrid)]

  Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain [AGI (Seville)]

  Archivo Municipal de Calañas, Calañas, Spain [AMC (Calañas)]

  National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland [NARA (College Park)]

  National Archives and Record Administration, Boston [NARA (Boston)]

  Duxbury Rural and Historical Society, Massachusetts [DRHS]

  Massachusetts Archives, Boston [MA (Boston)]

  Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Baker Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  British National Archives, London [BN (London)]

  Maritime Archives and Library at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool, UK

  OTHER COLLECTIONS

  Centro de Estudios Militares del Peru (Lima), Sección Archivos y Catálogos

  Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

  New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections

  Harvard Law Library, Small Manuscript Collection

  Social Law Library (Boston)

  New Haven Colony Historical Society

  Nantucket Historical Association

  Peabody Essex Museum

  Library of Congress

  Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (Aix-en-Provence, France)

  “Melville’s Marginalia Online” (edited by Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon at http://melvillesmarginalia.org)

  The New York Public Library, Gansevoort-Lansing Collection

  The New-York Historical Society

  John Brown Carter Library, Brown University

  Archives Nationales du Sénégal (Dakar, Senegal)

  NOTES

  The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands, Boston: E. G. House, 1817.

  2. In December 1916, in a magazine called Pacífico, the Chilean Joaquín Díaz Garcés wrote a fictional short story, “El Camino de los Esclavos,” which focused on the overland journey of Mori, Babo, and their companions across the continent. Díaz Garcés had died before the Melville revival of the 1920s and Benito Cereno hadn’t been translated into Spanish until the 1940s (and wasn’t widely available in Latin America until the 1960s), so he must have learned of events on the Tryal through the work of the Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, who wrote about it in Historia de Valparaíso (Valparaiso: Imprenta Albión de Cox i Taylor, 1869, vol. 2. In a note to his story, Díaz Garcés said he hoped to open “indifferent Chilean eyes to the history of African slavery, which, for many years, also sent its sorrowful caravans across our national territory,” a reference that Julio Pinto says, in a personal communication, may refer to the forced deportation of Bolivians and Peruvians. Though he didn’t get to it, Díaz Garcés planned to follow up with another story about the “improbable” events on the Tryal. In 1944, two decades after Díaz Garcés’s death, the publishing house he helped found, Zig Zag, put out the first Latin American Spanish-language version of Benito Cereno. For Neruda, see discussion in appendix.

  3. All quotations from Benito Cereno are from the version found in Billy Budd, and Other Stories, New York: Penguin, 1986. Quotations from the novels Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick are from the Library of America editions of Melville’s work, New York, 1982 and 1983.

  4. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 469–83; Kevin Hayes, The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 79.

  5. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2: 1851–1891, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 244 for “collapsed,” p. 399 for “cold north.”

  6. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, New York: Norton, 1975, pp. 4–5.

  7. “A mere sea-drudge, a very Guinea slave,” was how a captain of a British naval ship patrolling the coast of Africa and protecting British slavers described himself in 1779. See James G. Basker, ed., Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 283.

  8. Based on selected searches done on December 8, 2012, in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database (http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces).

  9. At its most basic level, the deception the West Africans managed to pull off on the Tryal speaks to debates over slave paternalism, not just to the language the master class used to justify slavery but to questions related to what degree either masters or slaves believed the language. It’s a long debate but the place to start, as with most things related to slavery, is with W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Negro (1915). In 1959, Stanley Elkins (Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press), writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, used the phrase “total institutions” to describe slave plantations, which he compared to concentration camps, as having the same totalitarian power over the enslaved, able to destroy their personalities and force them to internalize their subordination, rendering them into infantile Sambos (as Mori first appeared to Delano). Earl Lewis’s “To Turn on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas” (in Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) discusses the importance of Elkins’s essay, along with a generation of scholars, starting in the late 1960s, that “openly rejected” Elkins’s thesis. In the early 1970s, John W. Blassingame (The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) emphasized the ability of slaves to manipulate the roles assigned to them. Eugene Genovese, in turn, spent a career documenting what he, writing with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, called the “fatal self-deception” of the master class. In 1971, Genovese, referring to house servants, said that the master class “had always thought they knew these blacks, loved them, were loved by them, and they considered them part of the family. One day they learned that they had been deceiving themselves and living intimately with people they did not know at all” (In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, New York: Pantheon Books, 1971, p. 117).

  1. HAWKS ABROAD

  1. Clifton Kroeber, The Growth of the Shipping Industry in the Río de la Plata Region: 1794–1860, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957; Carlos Noé Alberto Guevara, La problemática marítima argentina, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Fundación Argentina de Estudios Marítimos, 1981, p. 74; Rubén Naranjo, Paraná, el pariente del mar, Rosario: Editorial Biblioteca, 1973, p. 180.

  2. For the discussion of the Neptune in this chapter and subsequent ones, see the following documents in Argentina, Uruguay, and Great Britain: in the AGN (Buenos Aires), in the Tribunales collection, legajo 94, expediente 21; legajo 131, expediente 3288; in the Hacienda collection, legajo 132, expediente 3305, and legajo 120, expediente 3046; and legajo 36 in the collection named División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Guerra y Marina 9.24.4/1806. In the AGN
(Montevideo), in the collection called Protocolos de Marina (1795–1814) for the year 1805, see “Fianza don Rafael Fernández, don Jaime Illa y don Antonio San Vicente, con don Benito Olazábal.” Also in the AGN (Montevideo), in a collection called Ex. Archivo y Museo Histórico Nacional, in caja (box) 257, carpeta (file) 40, there is a document called “Obrados de la fragata ‘Aguila’ presa por la fragata ‘Neptuno.’” See also the collection called Escribanía de Gobierno y Hacienda, caja 66, expediente 157 (“Caso de la Hoop”), caja 192 (“Expediente formado sobre ocho rollos de tabaco negro del Brasil hallados en la corbeta Francesa La Ligera su capitán Hipólito Mordell procedente de la costa de África”). See also BN (London) BT 98/63, 229, and ADM 12/110.

  3. Description of Bonny is drawn from William Richardson, A Mariner of England, London: Murray, 1908, p. 47; Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyages: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008 (which stresses that the voyage of inland captives to the coast often equaled in time and suffering that of the Atlantic Middle Passage); Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, London: J. Phillips, 1788; and George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving, Mineola: Dover, 2002.

  4. BN (London) T 70/34.

  5. Leitch Ritchie, Travelling Sketches on the Sea-Coasts of France, London: Longman, 1834. Byrd, Captives and Voyages, p. 55, discusses the reputation for fatalism.

  6. Mario Falcao Espalter, “Hipolito Mordeille, Corsario frances al servicio de España,” Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay 2 (1922): 473–529. For Mordeille’s success at taking U.S. ships, see Greg Williams, The French Assault on American Shipping, 1793–1813, Jefferson: McFarland, 2010; for his taking of the Hope after a “desperate resistance” led by its captain, George Astier, see p. 183.

  7. Amédée Gréhan, ed., La France maritime, vol. 2, Paris: Postel, 1837, p. 157.

  8. For Bolton, see Clement Wakefield Jones, John Bolton of Storrs, 1756–1837, Kendal: T. Wilson, 1959, p. 51; George Baille, Interesting Letters Addressed to John Bolton, Esq. of Liverpool, Merchant, and Colonel of a Regiment of Volunteers, to Which Is Annexed Sundry Valuable Documents, London: J. Gold, 1809, p. 34. For Liverpool and French Revolution, see Cecil Sebag-Montefiore, A History of the Volunteer Forces from the Earliest Times to the Year 1860, London: A. Constable, 1908, p. 255; Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol. 93, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1942, p. 110; Patriot, November 13, 1819. For Wordsworth’s friendship with Bolton, including long evenings at Storrs Hall, see Charles Wordsworth, Annals of My Early Life, 1806–1846, London: Longmans, Green, 1891, pp. 13, 93; Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life, New York: HarperCollins, 2006, p. 392; George Canning and His Friends, vol. 2, London: E. P. Dutton, 1909, p. 288; Ian Goodall, “Storrs Hall, Windermere,” Georgian Group Journal 15 (2006–7): 159–214; William Angus Knight, ed., Letters of the Wordsworth Family from 1787 to 1855, vol. 2, Boston: Ginn, 1907, p. 129.

  9. Manuel Mujica Láinez, Aquí vivieron: Historias de una quinta de San Isidro, 1583–1924, Buenos Aires: Sudamérica, 1949, p. 106; Gréhan, La France maritime, p. 157.

  10. Here’s an example of how wars and revolutions could serve as tumbling gears, grabbing men up from one situation and leaving them in another, then again, then again, each time resulting in a change of status. Early in Britain’s fight against France, a British merchant ship calling at Cape Coast Castle purchased a cargo of captured Africans. They were considered slaves, locked in the ship’s hold, and destined for the West Indies to work on sugar plantations. That ship was captured by the French navy, which took the Africans not as slaves but as conscripts, distributing them among its frigates and men-of-war. The Africans were now sailors. By 1803, however, the British had recaptured sixty-five of them. After some debate within the councils of the Admiralty, the British deemed the Africans to be not slaves but prisoners of war, subjects—or, as the French preferred, citizens—of a legitimate, if rogue, nation. But since the British couldn’t get France to live up to its customary obligations and provide for these (or any other, for that matter, white or black) captured sailors, the British had them distributed on ships throughout the Royal Navy. They were sailors once again, as well as, presumably, new British subjects (BN (London) ADM 1/3744). See also John Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave, Worcester, 1856, for the memoir of an escaped Maryland slave who found a life of freedom on the high seas.

  11. J. Aspinall, Liverpool a Few Years Since, London, 1852, p. 8. Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 11.

  12. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. See also Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, New York: Beacon Press, 2001.

  2. MORE LIBERTY

  1. Samuel Hull Wilcocke, History of the Viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres, London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1807, p. 180.

  2. Rubén Carámbula, Negro y tambor: Poemas, pregones, danzas y leyendas sobre motivos del folklore Afro-rioplatense, Buenos Aires: Editorial Folklórica Americana, 1952, and Pregones del Montevideo Colonial, Montevideo: Mosca, 1968. See Lucio V. Mansilla, Mis memorias: Infancia-Adolescencia, Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1904, p. 132, for memories of “dark skinned hawkers” in Buenos Aires, their baskets filled with bread, milk, fish, peaches, cakes, hot empanadas, “singing of sweet cider, tripe and giblets.”

  3. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Obras completas de Sarmiento, vol. 42, Buenos Aires: Luz del Día, p. 15.

  4. John Purdy, The Brasilian Navigator; or, Sailing Directory for All the Coasts of Brasil, to Accompany Laurie’s New General Chart, London: R. H. Laurie, 1838, p. 174; Wilcocke, History of the Viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres, p. 180.

  5. AGN (Montevideo), Archivos Particulares, caja 332, carpeta 4 (“Documentos relativos al Período Colonial. Libro Copiador de correspondencia comercial, a Martín de Alzaga”).

  6. Lyman Johnson, Workshop of Revolution: Plebéian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 19–20, 299; Jerry Cooney, “Doing Business in the Smuggling Way: Yankee Contraband in the Río de la Plata,” American Neptune 47 (1987): 162–68. Vicente Gesualdo, “Los Negros en Buenos Aires y el Interior,” Historia 2; May 5, 1982: 26–49.

  7. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980, p. 24; Berenice A. Jacobs, “The Mary Ann, an Illicit Adventure,” Hispanic American Historical Review 37 (May 1957): 200–12; Charles Lyon Chandler, “The River Plate Voyages, 1798–1800,” American Historical Review 23 (July 1918): 816–26; Ernesto Bassi Arevaol, “Slaves as Commercial Scapegoats: Smuggling Clothes under the Cover of the Slave Trade in Caribbean New Granada,” paper presented at the American Historical Association Conference, New Orleans, January 5, 2013.

  8. See Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, ch. 2, particularly pp. 58–73. Adelman writes (p. 72) that “each metropolitan solution, or concession to colonial pressure, yielded to more pressure, and thus accumulated into a sweeping new model of imperial trade: the traffic in slaves was the centerpiece to fuel merchant fortunes and to expand the commercial frontier into imperial hinterlands.” The number of slaves in Spain’s American colonies, which had been steadily increasing for a century—needed to mine gold and harvest cacao in Colombia and Venezuela and pick sugar in Peru and Cuba—exploded at the end of the 1700s (Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade: New Approaches to the Americas, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 38–40). See also for what follows Frank T. Proctor, “Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Paños of New Spain
, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Americas, 60 (2003): 33–58; Kris Lane, “Africans and Natives in the Mines of Spanish America,” in Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005, pp. 159–84; Kris Lane, Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 67–69. For African and Andean interactions in coastal estates, see Rachel O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012; Nicholas P. Cushner, Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600–1767, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

  9. For Cuba, see Louis Perez, Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy, Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2003, p. 5. For discussion of deregulation, see Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para su studio, 2005, part 1 (on CD-ROM), pp. 170–75; part 2, pp. 247, 257. See part 1, p. 144, for “slavers’ fever.” For the right “to buy blacks wherever they were to be found,” see Mario Hernán Baquero, El Virrey Don Antonio Amar y Borbón, Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1988, p. 172.

  10. Alex Borucki, “The Slave Trade to the Río de la Plata, 1777–1812: Trans-Imperial Networks and Atlantic Warfare,” Colonial Latin American Review 20 (2011): 85.

  11. See letter from Thomas White to Messrs. Gardner and Dean, March 17, 1806, Slavery Collection, series II: Gardner and Dean, New-York Historical Society.

  12. My understanding of the importance of slavery to South America’s market revolution is indebted to Adelman’s Sovereignty and Revolution. The deregulation of the slave trade was a central component in Spain’s efforts to adapt the colonial system to the “pressures of ramped-up inter-imperial competition.” But, according to Adelman, unlike the large-scale, export-focused plantations found in the U.S. South and the Caribbean, slavery in South America linked together “ever more diverse and decentralized commercial hubs” throughout the whole of the continent. “It could be argued,” Adelman writes, “drawing on Ira Berlin, that South America’s expanding hinterlands were slave societies (not simply societies with slaves) where slaves were central to productive processes. Plantations existed, but they were embedded in more diversified social systems,” with smaller establishments and hybrid forms of wage and coerced labor. “Slavery helped support rapidly commercialized, relatively diffused and adaptive production in the South American hinterlands integrated by the flow of merchant capital. And as it did so, it helped colonies become increasingly autonomous, economically and socially, from metropolitan Spanish and Portuguese command.” In other words, what became American freedom—independence from Spain—was made possible by American slavery (p. 59). Such an approach opens up new ways to compare U.S. and Spanish American slavery and allows for a consideration of the economic importance of slavery without reproducing old debates about whether slavery was capitalist or compatible with capitalism. In the United States, historians have recently returned to an older scholarly tradition emphasizing the importance of slavery to the making of modern capitalism, examining slavery not just as a system of labor or a generator of profit but as a driver of finance capital and real estate speculation, as well as looking at how plantations served as organizational models for “innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management,” as Harvard’s Sven Beckert and Brown’s Seth Rockman write, in “How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism,” in Bloomberg, January 24, 2012 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes.html). See also Beckert and Rockman’s forthcoming edited collection “Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development,” to be published by University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as earlier work, including Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944, and Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Viking, 1985; Sidney Mintz, “Slavery and Emergent Capitalism,” in Slavery in the New World, ed. Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. See also Walter Johnson’s recent River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.