The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  In much the same way, many families of Nantes had relations or agents in the French Caribbean, especially in Saint-Domingue, where, for example, the Walshes of Nantes had plantations. The Gradises of Bordeaux also had their cousins, the Mendèses, looking after their interests there.

  Many merchants had themselves been captains of ships in the trade. The most distinguished example was, no doubt, Captain Jean Ducasse, “the hero of Gorée,” who became one of the main beneficiaries of the French asiento of the early eighteenth century. Another was Manuel Bautista Peres, the Portuguese converso, a captain of slave ships from Angola in the early seventeenth century before establishing his great fortune in Lima. About a quarter of the slavers in Nantes had once been ships’ captains, or were sons of such—for instance, Louis Drouin, the “second-richest man in Nantes,” was the son of Captain René Drouin. The most successful slave merchant of La Rochelle, Jacques Rasteau, had been a captain when young. Slave captains who became merchants in North America included Godfrey Mallbone and Peleg Clarke in Newport and James de Wolf in Bristol, Rhode Island, along with Joseph Grafton in Salem, Massachusetts. Obadiah Brown, founder of the firm which became Nicholas Brown & Co., went as supercargo on Providence’s first slave voyage, in 1736. In New York, Jasper Farmer, who, in the 1740s, captained the Schuyler family’s Catherine, later himself invested in slave ships trading to Africa. In England, Captains James Bold and John Kennion, both of Liverpool, became rich merchants, the latter being the monopolist in Havana during the British occupation. Patrick Fairweather, of Liverpool, was a slave captain in the 1770s but, by the 1790s, owned his own ship, the Maria. The most successful slave merchant in Liverpool in the 1790s was John Dawson, who had begun life as a captain of privateers, capturing the French merchant ship Carnatic in 1778 on the high seas, and bringing it back, full of diamonds, to the Mersey. He married the daughter of the powerful shipbuilder Peter Baker, several times mayor, and he and Baker collaborated in the late 1780s to carry a great number of slaves to Cuba, owning over twenty ships, some of them capable of carrying a thousand slaves.

  Sometimes ships were captained by men who either owned them or had a share in them. This happened often in the early Portuguese days, and continued till the late eighteenth century: and later examples were Thomas Hinde of Lancaster, and William Deniston and Peter Bostock of Liverpool, as well as John Rosse of Charleston.

  The most powerful merchant at the end of the eighteenth century in London was Richard Miles, who had been employed by the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa at several British forts on the Gold Coast, and ended his official career as commander of Cape Coast Castle. He had always, by his own statement to a select committee of the English Privy Council, “traded the whole time on his own account.” He was a cultivated man, who could speak Fanti.

  In some ways, though, the concept of a slave trader acting as an individual is misleading. For most “independent” slave voyages were financed by partnerships, with, say, six or more merchants participating in the cost of the voyage, perhaps associating again on other occasions; in smaller ports, such as Whitehaven, in England, professional men, spinsters, pawnbrokers, and milliners were all investors in the trade. The same was true of La Rochelle especially when, in the late eighteenth century, slaving vessels accounted for over a third of the number of voyages which set off from the town. The most frequent type of association, in Liverpool as in Newport, in Nantes as in Rio, leading to a slave voyage was one of relations, the only tie which could be trusted to endure. So the slave trade seemed, to a great extent, a thing of families: the Montaudoins, the Nairacs, the Foäches, the Cunliffes, the Leylands, the Hob-houses, the de Wolfs, the Browns. Many partnerships were between father and son: for example, Guillaume Boutellier et fils at Nantes, David Gradis et fils at Bordeaux, Jacques and Pierre Rasteau at La Rochelle. Often, though, a trader would have many partners in his working life: Isaac Hobhouse, the most interesting slaver of Bristol—he never traveled, he said, because he had “such a feeble constitution . . . that I stir little abroad”—traded in company with seven major associates, two of them his brothers.1

  Complete outsiders might also seek shares. Carter Braxton, a planter of Virginia, later a revolutionary statesman, wrote in 1763 to Nicholas Brown & Co., of Providence, Rhode Island: “Sirs . . . I should be very glad to be concerned in the African Trade and will be a quarter of the voyage, if you choose it. . . . I should choose to be insured, and whatever Expence came to my Share more than the slaves sent, I would remit by return of the vessel that bro’t the slaves. The whole of the voyage I leave you to conduct and you may begin to prepare if you please, . . . [for] the price of Negroes keeps up amazingly.”2

  Nearly all Liverpool slave voyages were financed by people who lived in Liverpool—though Liverpool society embraced many conditions, and though there were one or two exceptions from farther afield, such as manufacturers from Sheffield, or gunmakers from Birmingham who also invested. French firms often depended on silent partners from far away: in order to survive the difficult years of war, Henry Romberg, Bapst et Cie of Bordeaux relied, for instance, on Frederick Romberg and the Walckiers brothers, of Brussels—one of the rare involvements of the latter city in the transatlantic slave trade. Financiers in Paris, such as Dupleix de Bacquen-court, Duval du Manoir, and Jean Coton, Tourton et Baur invested heavily in, first, Law’s New Company of the Indies, later in Antoine Walsh’s Société d’Angola and the Société de Guinée. Eventually these hardheaded men turned to invest in private firms. Thus, two-thirds of the Begouën-Foäche partnership of Le Havre after 1752 belonged to Parisians.

  Successful slaveowners would often buy substantial country properties, as, of course, most merchants did. Jacques Conte, the slaver who led the revived trade in slaves at Bordeaux during the Peace of Amiens, in 1802 established his agreeable château at Saint-Julien-Beychevelle, in the heart of the great vineyards of the Médoc. Richard Oswald, as has been noted, found rural happiness at Auchincruive in Ayrshire, a house designed by the brothers Adam, while his partner, John Boyd, had himself built a vast pile at Danson Hill, near Bexley Heath. Thomas Leyland of Liverpool established himself in Walton Hall, outside Liverpool. Another slave merchant of Liverpool, George Campbell, erected a strange, ecclesiastic-looking house with gargoyles, which he appropriately named Saint Domingo, at Everton. John Brown’s house at Providence, Rhode Island, was the best house in New England; and, in a few years, the same would be said of James de Wolf’s clapboard mansion, Mount Hope, about twenty miles away, overlooking the port of Bristol: “Spacious and substantial. Nothing was wasted, and nothing stinted,” wrote the historian of the family; while the United States Gazetteer would add, “For elegance of style, for the general splendor of its appearance, and the beauty and extensiveness of the various improvements, it will rank among the finest in our country.” There was a deer park.

  Equally, in South Carolina, Henry Laurens bought at least eight properties, including his own favorite, the Mepkin plantation, on the Cooper River; his chief rival in the slave trade, Samuel Brailsford, bought the Retreat plantation, on Charleston Neck, in 1758. Long before, the Jorges had bought property near Constantina—in the Sierra Morena, to the north of Seville—where they made a strong wine which they used in the slave trade.

  Some slave merchants founded good collections of pictures: in London, for example, the Boyds, George Aufrère, and Oswald. Oswald had a good collection of Dutch masters, including a Rubens; Aufrère claimed to possess a Dürer, a Raphael, and a Rembrandt; but Boyd owned what he considered to be three Brueghels, nine Rubenses, a Velázquez, four Turners, and sixteen Morlands. It was said that Baltasar Coymans had many pictures in his house in Cádiz, including “some marine landscapes”; his dining room was full of maps.

  Other slave traders invested in manufactures; thus the Browns of Providence “introduced the cotton manufacture into the country,” said their historian, who added amiably that that “was financed originally by the transfer of funds acquired in maritime
pursuits”—not all slaving, admittedly.3 In Nantes, the greatest slaving family, the Montaudoins, were the first into the manufacture of cotton. John Kennion of Liverpool—the would-be monopolist of Havana in 1762—interested himself in the same in Rochdale; and the omnifarious Samuel Touchett, whose achievements in manufacturing cotton led him into slave trading, invested in Paul’s spinning machine. Brian Blundell of Liverpool invested in coal; Henry Cruger and Lyonel Lyde, both of Bristol, interested themselves in iron; and Joseph and Jonathan Brooks of Liverpool were the biggest builders of the city and built the famous town hall, designed by John Wood, with its sculpted heads of slaves on the frieze. Samuel Sedgely of Bristol was also concerned in the shipment of convicts to Maryland. John Ashton, a slave trader in Liverpool in the 1750s, helped to finance the Sankey Brook Canal, which linked his city so creatively with Manchester. Still, the profits of the slave trade never seem to have been a decisive reason for an industrial development, even if many successful slave merchants participated in them.

  Some slave merchants would end their lives as bankers: the best example is Thomas Leyland, who founded his own bank, Leyland and Bullins, in 1807, and died in 1827 leaving the then splendid sum of £600,000.

  All Christian denominations were involved in the slave trade. But, usually, the dominating religion of the port concerned decided the religious complexion of the merchants. In Liverpool, London, and Bristol, for instance, most slave merchants were Anglicans; in Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon, and Seville—and, of course, in Bahia and Luanda—most were Catholics. But in La Rochelle, the slave merchants were mostly Huguenots, as they were Calvinists in Middelburg, and there were important Huguenot slaving firms elsewhere: the Dhariettes and the Nairacs in Bordeaux, as well as the Ferays in Le Havre. The Nairacs believed that they were not ennobled, and the Laffons de Ladébat were so, because of their religion, though the former had sent twenty-five ships to Africa between 1740 and 1792, and the Laffons a mere fifteen.

  Quakers were important in the slave trade in the eighteenth century in New England, especially in Newport, where the Wanton family was still trading slaves in the 1760s. Friends were also prominent in the slave trade in Pennsylvania, often carrying slaves from the West Indies to their own city. Among these, William Frampton seems to have carried the first slaves to Philadelphia in the 1680s; he was followed by James Claypole, Jonathan Dickinson (he carried Africans from Jamaica to Philadelphia on his ship Reformation), and Isaac Norris (who, however, had some doubts about the commerce: “I don’t like that kind of business,” he wrote to Dickinson as early as 1703), as well as William Plumstead, Reese Meredith, John Reynell, and Francis Richardson.4 In England, the Quaker gunmaking firm of Farmer and Galton of Birmingham sent at least one ship, the Perseverance, to carry 527 slaves to the West Indies.5

  In Brazil, the slave merchants of Bahia had their own religious brotherhood, which organized a regular procession at Easter, beginning at the Church of San Antônio da Barra, whither a bust of Saint Joseph, long venerated at Elmina as the patron of the slavers, was brought in 1752.

  The bishop of the Algarve in 1446 may have been the only prince of the Church to send out a caravel to Africa. But other spiritual potentates were shareholders in voyages. The Cardinal Infante Enrique, brother of King Philip III of Spain, was, through his secretariat, a formidable trader in slaves to Buenos Aires during the early seventeenth century. Both the Jesuits and their traditional enemies were much involved. In Bordeaux at the end of the eighteenth century, most Freemasons appear to have been slave merchants.

  For a time, in both Spain and Portugal, the slave trade was dominated by Jewish conversos: for example, Diego Caballero, of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, benefactor of the Cathedral of Seville; the Jorge family, also in Seville; Fernão Noronha, a Lisbon monopolist in the early days in the delta of the Niger, and his descendants; and the numerous merchants of Lisbon who held the asiento for sending slaves to the Spanish empire between 1580 and 1640. The most remarkable of these men was Antônio Fernandes Elvas, asentista from 1614 to 1622, connected by blood with nearly all the major slave dealers of the Spanish-Portuguese empire during the heady days when it was one polity.

  Yet these men had formally become Christians. The Inquisition may have argued, and even believed, that many of them secretly practiced Judaism, tried some of them in consequence, and left a few of them to be punished by “the secular arm.” Some no doubt were, indeed, secret Jews, but it would be imprudent to accept the evidence of the Holy Office as to their “guilt.” That body, after all, was said to have “fabricated Jews as the Mint coined money,” as one inquisitor himself remarked.6

  Later, Jews of Portuguese origin played a minor part in the slave trade in Amsterdam (Diogo Dias Querido), in Curaçao, in Newport (Lopez and the Riberas), and in Bordeaux (the Gradises, Mendèses, and Jean Rodrigues Laureno).II In the late seventeenth century, Jewish merchants, such as Moses Joshua Henriques, were prominent in the minor Danish slave trade of Glückstadt. But, more important, there is no sign of Jewish merchants in the biggest European slave-trade capitals when the traffic was at its height, during the eighteenth century—that is, in Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and Middelburg—and examination of a list of four hundred traders known to have sold slaves at one time or another in Charleston, South Carolina, North America’s biggest market, in the 1750s and 1760s suggests just one active Jewish merchant, the unimportant Philip Hart. In Jamaica, the latter’s equivalent was Alexander Lindo, who later ruined himself providing for the French army in their effort to recapture Saint-Domingue.

  Old enemies of the Jews, Gypsies played a minor part in the slave trade, in the cities of Brazil in the eighteenth century, where they gained a name for sadism and were suspected of stealing children to sell as slaves.

  Many slave traders were deputies, or members of Parliament, or their equivalent. In England, for example, in the eighteenth century, the list includes Humphrey Morice, George René Aufrère, John Sargent, and Sir Alexander Grant, all of London; James Laroche and Henry Cruger of Bristol; Ellis Cunliffe, Charles Pole, and John Hardman of Liverpool, as well as Sir Thomas Johnson, mayor of Liverpool, who was partly responsible for one of the first slave ships to leave his city, the Blessing, in 1700. French deputies to the National Assembly in 1789 included the biggest slave trader of Bordeaux, Pierre-Paul Nairac. The slavers in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia included Thomas Willing, mayor of that city; Henry Laurens of Charleston; Carter Braxton of Richmond, Virginia; and Philip Livingston of New York. John Brown of Providence became a congressman for Rhode Island, and James de Wolf of Bristol would become a United States senator. Caleb Gardner and Peleg Clarke, both slave captains, served in the Rhode Island Assembly. Back in England, most mayors of Liverpool in the second half of the eighteenth century were traders in slaves. Miles Barber, the mayor of Lancaster in the 1750s, was the richest of that little port’s slave traders.

  Slave traders were often philanthropists. Foster Cunliffe is recalled on a plaque in Saint Peter’s Church, Liverpool, as “a Christian devout and exemplary in the exercise of every private and public duty, friend to mercy, patron to distress, an enemy only to vice and sloth. . . .” Brian Blundell of Liverpool was a founder of the Blue Coat school. Robert Burridge, last of a slave-trading family in the Dorset port of Lyme Regis, was similarly remembered for his charity towards the aged, the infirm, and “such poor as generally receive the Lord’s supper.” Philip Livingston of New York founded a professorship of divinity at his own old university, Yale, and helped establish the first Methodist society in America. John Brown in Providence founded the admirable university which now bears his name. Abraham Redwood’s library in Newport still stands secure as a monument to that trader’s munificence. René Montaudoin in Nantes gave away thousands to charities. Even the hardheaded Isaac Hobhouse of Bristol left a guinea to be paid to each of the twenty poor men and women who lived in the street adjoining the quay at Minehead, where he had been born.7

  The slave trade engaged the inter
ests of many foreigners in the places concerned; at the beginning, in Lisbon and Seville, Florentines took a decisive part. These included Columbus’s friends the Berardi brothers, whose headquarters was Seville and, of course, Bartolommeo Marchionni. That entrepreneur’s Seville agent in the early 1500s was Piero Rondinelli, also of Florence. Another Florentine interested in the slave trade in the mid-sixteenth century was Giacomo Botti, an associate of Hernán Cortés, to whom that conquistador left his best bed. Then there were the early imperial privileged monopolists (Gorrevod, and the Welsers’ representatives) while, from the beginning, many Genoese were to be found in the Spanish trade, culminating with Grillo and the Lomelins, who obtained the asiento as late as the 1660s. Coymans in Cádiz was, of course, Dutch. In Nantes, George Reidy and Benjamin Thurninger came from Switzerland, and Irish immigrants, such as the Jacobite Antoine Walsh, were at the top of a long list of foreign-born slave merchants of the eighteenth century. (Other Irish slave dealers were to be found in Havana: Richard O’Farrill of Longford, for example, in the early eighteenth century and, far more wealthy, Cornelius Coppinger of Dublin in the 1760s, the gaunt ruins of whose castle still bleakly stand near Glandore, County Cork.) An important investor in Nantes was the firm of Peloutier (Germans in origin) and Bourcard (or Burckhardt), connected with the Basel firm of Christoph Burckhardt, who formed a partnership in 1756 to manufacture calicoes for the slave trade. In Rhode Island, Aaron Lopez and his brother-in-law, Abraham Ribera, were originally Portuguese as well as Jewish. Henry Laurens in Charleston had a Huguenot grandfather, as did James Laroche in Bristol, England, and George Aufrère of London.

  The colossal slave trade from Angola to Brazil was, by the late eighteenth century, generally organized by Luso-Africans, descendants of lançados, Portuguese adventurers who had stayed behind to live with Africans. They would obtain the slaves from, or in, the interior, hold them in “barracoons”III at Luanda, on the coast, and then treat directly with Brazilian captains, from Rio de Janeiro and Bahia.