Freedom
Page 1
Freedom
The Overthrowing of the Slave Empires
JAMES WALVIN
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
For Byron Criddle, a friend of fifty-eight years.
Contents
Map: Significant Slave Revolts & Rebellions in Freedom
Introduction
1 People as Things: The Slave Trade
2 Sinews of Empire: Africans and the Making of the American Empires
3 Slave Defiance
4 The Slave Owners’ Nightmare: Haiti
5 The Friends of Black Freedom
6 Freeing Britain’s Slaves
7 The Fall of US Slavery
8 The End of Slavery in the Spanish Empire
9 The Last to Go: Brazil
10 Abolition in the Wider World
11 Slavery in the Modern Age
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography and Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
Introduction
ON THE EVE of the French Revolution, all of Europe’s major maritime powers, and a number of thriving colonies in the Americas, were keen to have a share of the transatlantic business of slavery. Shipping Africans to the Americas and using them (and their offspring) to labour mainly in agricultural work was a lucrative concern, which no one seemed able to resist. A century later, those same nations had banned the slave trade, had freed all their former slaves and were now vehemently opposed to slavery. Not only was their antipathy expressed in the upper echelons of power (in formal politics, government and diplomacy) but it had also caught the imagination of millions of ordinary people: people who were increasingly well informed via the explosion of literacy and the world of cheap print. To make the point more crudely: in the late eighteenth century, most Atlantic slave owners and slave traders felt confident that they could ride out any criticism of slavery; by the late nineteenth century, they had all vanished and only an eccentric would have felt confident to defend slavery publicly in the West. At its height, the Atlantic slave system formed a massive international industry that linked Europe, Africa and the Americas. For all its crude violence, it was a finely tuned commercial enterprise that generated prosperity at all points of the Atlantic compass (and beyond). It was a matter of major commercial and strategic concern for all of Europe’s maritime powers, and for the emergent economies of the Americas. Equally, it became a source of economic importance in Africa itself, to the merchants, traders and heads of state who pandered to the demands of the slave ships. From the earliest days when Iberians shipped Africans to Spain and Portugal, to the last days of the trade to Brazil and Cuba, it was a commerce that attracted entrepreneurs and speculators (both large and small) and it seduced governments who were keen to enhance their nations’ power, wealth and status. But slavery was a commercial system fraught with human and natural dangers. European powers fought each other for slave colonies, for essential trading posts on both sides of the Atlantic and for control of the shipping routes that bound the system together. In addition to the great risks of oceanic travel and settlement, Europe’s slaving powers faced the unavoidable dangers of African diseases and the threats posed by their maritime and strategic rivals. Above all, however, all faced the inescapable dangers posed by the slaves themselves.
Europe’s Atlantic trade scattered millions of enslaved Africans across the Americas. From the Chesapeake Bay to the River Plate, a string of American colonies disgorged a host of lucrative commodities (sugar and rum, tobacco and cotton, coffee, timber and many others), which transformed the taste and consumption habits of millions of people. In the process, new economies emerged in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The entire system rested on the Africans, taken from their diverse homelands, shipped to the Americas and finally turned over to a lifetime’s arduous toil mainly in tropical and semi-tropical settlements. The numbers involved are astounding. Between the early sixteenth century and 1866 more than twelve million Africans were loaded onto Atlantic slave ships, and more than eleven million survived to landfall in the Americas. That oceanic journey – the ‘Middle Passage’ of popular parlance – was a unique and hellish experience, which left deep-seated physical and personal scars on every African who stepped ashore in the Americas. It was a brutal transportation, the memory of which lay at the heart of all slave communities, and was refreshed, year after year, by new groups of Africans joining existing slave communities, fresh from the Atlantic crossing.
The Africans, and their descendants born in the Americas, were kept at work by a system of control and management that was ruthless, callous and extremely brutal. Those who stepped out of line – slaves who resisted or refused to comply – were subject to a range of draconian punishments. There was, moreover, nothing secret about how the slave system worked. What happened on the slave ships and plantations was openly discussed both in the American colonies and in the European heartlands. Yet the severity and cruelties of slavery went largely unchallenged for much of its history. There were, it is true, occasional doubts raised about slavery from the early days, but criticisms of cruelty, or about whether slavery was an efficient labour system, were isolated voices drowned out by the commercial success of the system. Morality and religion counted for little when weighed in the balance against the huge commercial benefits generated by slavery.
The wellbeing and development of Western societies from around the seventeenth century was in large measure paralleled by their involvement with slavery. For more than two centuries, slavery marched in step with Western material progress, though other factors were also at work, notably the West’s ability to tap possessions and trading systems in Africa, India and Asia. But slavery stood out as the dominant form of labour that, alone, seemed capable of bringing the luxuriant lands of the Americas to profitable cultivation. It was a form of slavery – chattel slavery – like no other.
The Africans toiling in the Americas had been bought and traded, each with a price on his or her head, from Africa to the slave ships, from the quaysides of the Americas to auction blocks and sales rooms clean across the Caribbean and the continental mainlands. They found themselves inherited and bequeathed, exchanged and bartered, just like other items of trade in any commercial transactions. The surviving paperwork of slavery provides stark evidence of this at every turn. In slave ships’ logs, the ships’ masters tabulated Africans by number – not by name. In plantation ledgers, sugar planters listed their slaves alongside the beasts of the field. Nor was this merely the march of impersonal economics: the slave’s status as an object, as an item of trade, was supported by the law. Legislation and courtrooms on both sides of the Atlantic gave legal shape to slavery. The essential heart of this range of legal transactions – from papal law, through diplomatic agreements to a multitude of statutes – was the status of the African slave as an item of trade: as things.
Just as the law had shaped the origins and development of slavery, it also pronounced the formal death sentence on slavery. When the slave trade was banned, and when slaves were emancipated, each step involved changes in the law. Legislation, proclamations, court cases and constitutional changes conferred formal freedom – but that tells only one side of a complex story. When black freedom was viewed in this light, it was even possible to regard emancipation as a gift, conferred on the slaves, by others. But what we need to know is why those changes came about. Behind the various legal enactments of freedom lay deep-seated changes in attitudes towards slavery. And at the heart of those changes were the actions of the slaves themselves.
If we focus not on the emancipators and their political backers, but on the slaves – if we consider slave emancipation as an aspect of slave
activity, as something that took place because of what the slaves did – the story of emancipation begins to look quite different. What follows, then, is an attempt to explore how slaves were the critical element in securing their own freedom. The intention is to place slaves centre-stage in explaining why the massive and previously unchallenged slave empires of the Americas were overthrown.
To understand how that happened, and to see more clearly the role slaves played in overthrowing slavery itself, we need first to come to terms with two major issues. Firstly, why and how were so many millions of Africans shipped into the Americas? Secondly, what role did those Africans play in the remarkable development of the Americas? When we grasp the enormity of both those issues – the transatlantic trade in Africans and the impact of African slave labour in the shaping of the early Americas – we are in a better position to assess the role of Africans in bringing slavery to an end.
I
People as Things: The Slave Trade
MORE THAN ELEVEN million Africans landed in the Americas as slaves. All of them had endured the torments of enslavement in Africa followed by many months of agonies on the Atlantic slave ships. This experience, of capture and transportation, was the seminal and defining experience of every single African shipped to the slave colonies between the late fifteenth century and 1867 (when the last Africans landed in Cuba). Each carried with them not only memories of the world they had left behind – their lives in Africa – but what had happened to them (and others who did not survive) as they were forcibly moved, by land and then by sea, to the bewildering world of America. The millions of survivors of the Atlantic slave trade were the people who formed slave communities that quickly proliferated from the colonies of North America to the River Plate – and most places in between. Even before settling into the rigours of American slavery, they had undergone a traumatic experience that had no real precedence in human history. There had, of course, been many previous slave trades. But none like this.
Civilisations that made extensive use of slave labour often had to rely on the arrival of fresh slaves to replenish the enslaved communities. These human supplies came from slave traders who pillaged societies across whole continents in search of human plunder. Conquered peoples were force-marched, shipped and traded from one end of Europe to another. Victorious Roman armies, for instance, marched their captives ahead of the legions as they entered Rome. Vikings moved slaves from western Europe to the Black Sea and beyond to central Asia: Arab and African traders shifted captives across the hostile vastness of the Sahara to the slave markets of the Mediterranean and Cairo. Wherever slavery thrived, there we find slave traders happy to supply enslaved peoples.
There was, however, little in the history of slavery that approached slave trading in the Atlantic world between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. This oceanic trade was unique in its size, its geographic reach and its global influence. It lasted for four centuries in which time more than twelve million people were loaded onto ships destined for the Americas; one million would not survive the journey. It also created an increasingly complex social and economic network that linked Europe, Africa and the Americas, and involved, in varying degrees, all the major maritime nations of Europe and the Americas.
Of all the people (Europeans and Africans) who landed in the Americas before 1820, the Atlantic slave ships transported 80 per cent. African slaves were the major pioneers of great expanses of the Americas. The misery and suffering on the slave vessels, first widely exposed in the late eighteenth century, have haunted the public imagination ever since. Yet, despite the slave ships’ fearsome death rate, and despite the damage they inflicted on the survivors, the Atlantic slave trade laid the foundations for an astonishing commercial success. The survivors of the Atlantic crossing, in the words of David Brion Davis, ‘became indispensable in creating the prosperous New World that by the mid-nineteenth century began attracting millions of voluntary European immigrants’.[1] African slaves were the foundations on which later societies were built.
Europeans had been familiar with Africans long before the Atlantic slave trade, and with enslaved Africans, mainly via ancient trading links across the Mediterranean. They had also long been curious about the riches of Africa itself, especially the spices and precious metals – gold above all else – that were so valued in Europe and which came overland from Africa. The rise of Islam, however, created a barrier and prompted the need to find new maritime routes to Africa’s riches, so, in the fifteenth century, the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile embarked on those exploratory maritime voyages that gradually established sailing routes along Africa’s Atlantic coast, round the Cape and thence to the riches of India and beyond – and across the Atlantic.
The Portuguese led the way, establishing trading posts and new societies on the Atlantic islands and along the African coast. By the end of the fifteenth century, they had rounded the Cape and opened up the seaborne routes to Asia. They began trading with Africa at the northern trading post of Arguin, which had inland links all the way to Ethiopia. There, and at the multitude of settlements and trading posts dotted along the Atlantic coast, they found Africans keen to trade for the variety of European and Asian goods on offer. In return, they provided numerous goods – including African slaves.
From the first, Africa seemed a commercial cornucopia, but it was also dangerous. Sailing there, and exploring the treacherous coastline, posed a multitude of hazards, but most dangerous of all were Africa’s diseases. The men sent to work at the European posts died in great numbers – many within months. The survivors found themselves wedged between the threats of Africa and the dangerous enormity of the Atlantic. Yet for four centuries, those settlers and traders, and the men who sailed in and out on the Atlantic vessels, thought it worth the risks. Trade with Africa was lucrative, and in time nothing was more lucrative than the trade in African humanity. At first, however, other prizes beckoned, especially the gold (hence the Gold Coast). The potential rewards began to outweigh the natural risks, and by the end of the sixteenth century, Europe’s major maritime powers all sought their share of trade on the African coast, each nibbling away at what the Portuguese claimed was their monopoly.
The first slave traders shipped Africans from one coastal region of Africa to another; from the Niger Delta, from the Portuguese bases in Congo and Angola, to bases on the Gold Coast. There the slaves were traded for local gold. In time, Europeans constructed sixty forts along that stretch of coast to provide a defence against Africans, against European foes and, increasingly, as holding pens for the slaves awaiting transfer to the Atlantic ships. Today, the major forts are tourist sites, visited by tens of thousands of people every year.
The major forts became the local commercial HQs for European trading companies, which were initially monopoly ‘charter companies’ designed to secure the vital flow of African slaves to their slave colonies in the Americas, and to keep other Europeans out. The initial attempts to provide slaves via national monopolies proved inadequate: the slave colonies wanted more Africans than the companies could provide and, eventually, this led to a more open trade. The forts survived, often changing hands as European powers jostled and fought for strategic and commercial dominance on the slave coast (and in other parts of the world). As the slave trade expanded, so too did the major forts. The original Portuguese fort at Elmina, for example, was transformed into a major fortification, with resident and local staff of skilled craftsmen, clerics and administrators. Soon it had its own local community of Africans, Europeans and their mixed-race descendants – all dependent on work in and around the fort. In time, the fort became the massive castle we are familiar with today – a building that seems more suited to a medieval European kingdom. Successive generations of European owners – by turns Portuguese, Dutch and British – nonetheless found it well-suited to their colonial and trading presence on the Gold Coast.
All the early European traders followed this pattern. Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, Danish, Germans �
�� all constructed fortified trading posts and HQs along the Gold Coast. They also developed fortified positions at other spots on or near the coast: at Bunce and James Island (Gambia), at Sherbro (Sierra Leone), on Gorée Island (Senegal), at Accra (Ghana), Ouidah (Benin) and São Tomé. Some soon faded, others were little more than temporary and quickly became overgrown.[2] Of course, this type of development was not unique to West Africa and major fortifications sprouted in all corners of the world where European imperial powers put down military or commercial roots. They were (and are still) visible in the Caribbean and North America, in India and south-east Asia. But on Africa’s Atlantic coast the forts offered Europeans a unique mix of advantages: they were defensive and strategic sites (in a world of global conflict), trading posts (for a massive Atlantic economy) – and they were prisons for armies of Africans destined for the slave ships.
The larger forts were indeed European castles transplanted to the African coast. The design, construction and defences were European in style. The designers and craftsmen were European, and so was much of the fabric – the building materials. Vast quantities of bricks to construct the forts were shipped from Europe as ballast. The yellow/greenish bricks used at Elmina can be seen in many Dutch courtyards. The Danes, Germans and English did the same, constructing key features of their own forts with bricks, lime, mortar, tiles and metalware imported from their homelands.[3]
As demand for slaves in the Americas increased, Europeans began gathering Africans from a wide range of African locations. By the end of the slave trade, in the 1860s, Africans had been rounded up at myriad points along a coastal expanse stretching from Senegambia in the north, to Angola, and even round the Cape to Mozambique. Slaving locations changed from time to time, as colonial powers waxed and waned in Africa, and as Europeans developed new bases on the coast – much depending on internal African events (such as warfare, famine and changes in state power). Some slave-trading positions were not even on the coast, but on offshore islands, on inland lagoons or even deep within Africa’s massive river systems.