The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Until 1803, any country, however, could import any number of slaves into the Danish islands, though none were to be exported any more from them. In fact, many continued to be so, for the island of Saint Thomas, close to Puerto Rico, remained a transit market for the Spaniards, and that trade seems to have reached its peak only in 1800. The truth about this commerce is difficult to disentangle, since some ships which were really North American, or English, sailed under Danish flags even after 1808.

  The Danish commerce was abolished because the price of slaves in the Danish West Indies was low, because the government thought it certain that the British would abolish the trade shortly, and because it seemed that, on the two or three ships which were sent every year from Copenhagen, many members of the ships’ companies died. The Danish forts on the Guinea coast, such as Christiansborg Castle at Accra, were also expensive. The Danes believed that they could arrange for the number of slaves needed by encouraging natural increase.

  The Danish trade flourished between 1792 and 1802. Many slaves taken to the Danish West Indies islands at Saint Croix and Saint Thomas were re-exported, often to Cuba, where nearly two hundred Danish ships seem to have gone between 1790 and 1807, carrying well over twelve thousand slaves.

  Much encouraged by this news, in April 1792, Wilberforce tried again to carry a bill abolishing the trade. This was the occasion for one of the greatest debates in the history of legislative assemblies. “Africa, Africa,” said Wilberforce, to begin with, “your sufferings have been the theme that has arrested and engages my heart. Your sufferings no tongue can express, no language impart.” The orator pointed out how Denmark had now abolished the slave trade. Could Britain really be far behind? He described how, only the previous year, six British captains, to the outrage of a French captain present, had fired on an African settlement on the river Calabar, merely in order to secure lower prices of slaves. The record of the debate then states: “The House, in a burst of indignation, vociferated ‘Name! Name!’ Mr Wilberforce for a long time resisted. At last, the cry overcame him and he gave the following names of ships and captains: the ship Thomas, of Bristol, Captain Philipps; the Betsey of Liverpool, captain Doyle; the Recovery, of Bristol; the Wasp, Captain House; the Thomas of Liverpool; and, the Anatree, of Bristol.”

  Many declarations were made, as before, in favor of the status quo; the first such was that by James Baillie, a Scotsman from Inverary, the agent for Grenada, who had lived both on that island and on Saint Kitts. He owned a plantation in Demerara and talked, in this, his only speech in the Commons, of the “wild, impracticable and visionary scheme of abolition”; he thought that there was brutality on innumerable ships, not just slave ships, and in innumerable European armies; and that there was more wretchedness in the parish of Saint Giles in London, where he lived, than in the colonies. He also thought that the revolution in Saint-Domingue had been directly caused by the unfortunate discussion of abolition of the slave trade. Then Benjamin Vaughan, a Unitarian merchant who confessed to being “a West Indian by birth,” profession, and private fortune, also vindicated the planters.VIII The future Lord Liverpool, the long-serving prime minister in the next century—then plain Robert Jenk-inson—pointed out that no major foreign slave-trading nation had shown any inclination to follow the British example; Denmark was of no importance. Banastre Tarleton once more inveighed against the folly of allowing a “junto of sectarians, sophists, enthusiasts, and fanatics” to destroy a trade which brought in £800,000 a year and employed 5,000 seamen, as well as 160 ships.

  But the speeches attacking the slave trade were of a high quality. Thus Robert Milbanke, Lord Byron’s future father-in-law, argued, in the spirit of Adam Smith, that, where slavery was used as a form of labor, “every operation was performed in a rude and unworkmanlike manner.”

  Then came what turned out to be the decisive oration: Henry Dundas, the “indispensable coadjutor” of the ministry (treasurer of the navy and the leading politician on the Board of Control of the East India Company), in effect minister both for Scotland and for India, whose control over Pitt was both so profound and so inexplicable, introduced, in his broad Scottish accent, and ungraceful manner, “as a compromise,” the word “gradually” into the motion. His intention, he said, was to propose a middle way. He conceded that the trade “ought to be ultimately abolished but, by moderate measures, which should not invade the property of individuals, nor shock too suddenly the prejudices of our West India islands.” The cooperation of the planters with any new law was surely essential. He agreed that newly imported slaves were likely to inspire revolts. Dundas also talked airily of the imperial network of investments in undeveloped lands as a major argument against immediate abolition. He suggested one or two further amendments: a prohibition on the import of elderly slaves, and an agreement, such as had occurred in the United States, to abolish the foreign trade. Dundas had, in 1778, taken the side of the slave Joseph Knight, in a Scottish version of the Somerset case. He had been on the side of the angels then. But time, power, and age seem to have taken their toll, and the reasonableness of his procrastination scarcely concealed that he now sided with the West Indian interests.IX

  Charles James Fox ridiculed Dundas. Advocates of “moderation” reminded him of a passage in Middleton’s life of Cicero: “To break open a man’s house, and kill him, his wife and family in the night is certainly a most heinous crime, and deserving of death, but even this may be done with moderation.” Fox pointed out that, if a Bristol ship were to go to France and the democrats were to sell the aristocrats into slavery, “such a transaction . . . would strike every man with horror . . . because they were of our colour.” Fox thought that, if the plantations could not be cultivated without slaves, they ought not to be cultivated at all.

  Pitt, the prime minister, next made what was, by all accounts, the most eloquent speech of his career. Though confessing himself exhausted—it was already five o’clock in the morning when he began to speak—he described the trade as “the greatest practical evil which has ever afflicted the human race.” He analyzed Dundas’s position without losing track of his own. How was the slave trade ever to be eradicated if every nation was “prudentially to wait till the concurrence of all the world?” For the last twenty minutes of this speech, Pitt, his friends thought, “seemed to be really inspired.” He imagined how a Roman senator, looking at the world of the second century A.D., and speaking to “British barbarians,” might say, “There is a people that will never rise to civilisation.” He adjured the House—immediately, and without any delay—to restore Africans to “the rank of human beings.” Towards the end of his oration, he quoted two lines of Virgil:

  Nos primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis;

  Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper . . .

  and the first rays of the early-morning sun are said to have entered the House of Commons behind the Speaker’s chair at that moment.X

  The Commons then voted (it was April 3) 230-85 in favor of Dundas’s amended motion “that the slave trade ought to be gradually abolished”. The vote was taken at half past six in the morning. Returning home by foot across a still sleeping London, Fox, Charles Grey (the future prime minister of the Reform Bill), and William Windham (who later deserted the cause of abolition, for reasons still unclear) agreed that Pitt’s speech “was one of the most extraordinary displays of eloquence they had ever heard.” They had been present, as they believed, at the supreme moment of parliamentary democracy.25

  The votes on these motions, if inadequate for Wilberforce, Fox, Burke, and Pitt, constituted a remarkable change from what had happened the previous year. Yet the main event in recent politics was the revolution in Saint-Domingue, an occurrence which was already causing a real shortage of sugar, and not just in France. Perhaps the impact of that terrible event was to make the members realize that an end had to come one day to the system of slave plantations. Of course, Saint-Domingue was referred to in the debate. Whence, for example, asked Samuel Whitbread, the nonco
nformist brewer, did the slaves there learn the cruelties they practiced? Where, he answered himself, but from the French planters?

  In the subsequent debate in the House of Lords on this same motion, the lord chancellor, still old obstinate Lord Thurlow, wondered why, if the slave trade were such a vile crime, it had taken the House of Commons till 1792 to realize it. The duke of Clarence, the future King William IV, chose to make his maiden speech on this occasion, and stated, probably with the support of his father, King George III, that he had unequivocal proof that the slaves were not as a rule treated in the manner which had so agitated the public mind. He had, after all, been in Jamaica as a midshipman in the navy and, when ill, had been cared for by a famous mulatto nurse, Couba Cornwallis. Slaves in his opinion lived in a state of humble happiness. All the same, and despite this royal sermon, the Lords supported Dundas’s amendment. (In the course of the debate, Lord Barrington, grandson of a Bristol merchant trading to Virginia and Maryland, Sir William Daines, made the interesting comment that slaves appeared to him so happy that he often wished himself in their situation.)26

  What Dundas’s amendment signified in practice was less than clear. Britain had committed itself to abolish the slave trade, at some indefinite time in the future. The date seemed to depend on Dundas himself, who made it every day evident that his motion for delay was a ruse for indefinite postponement. The suggestion that the final date should be 1796 was soon agreed; but nobody expected that commitment to be fulfilled. The most brilliant orators in British history had been outmaneuvered, as had the parliamentary leader, Wilberforce, of the most powerful movement of agitation which any country had experienced. The consequences would have become immediately apparent, no doubt, and Wilberforce, Clarkson, and their friends would have acted differently, had it not been that, when Parliament resumed in early 1793, war with revolutionary France was about to begin (which it did in February, just after the execution of King Louis XVI). Wilberforce’s opposition to the conflict lost him support everywhere; Pitt’s responsibility for leading the nation at war caused his attention to shift to matters other than humanitarian.XI

  Now, too, every attack on the slave trade could be represented as an attack on ancient British institutions, apparently everywhere under attack, precisely because of the French Revolution—and the war. This did not seem the moment for any adventure. Lord Abingdon, in his youth a friend of liberty—and of John Wilkes—in April 1793, in the House of Lords, specifically linked the demands for abolition of the traffic with the disastrous obsession with the rights of man which had so damaged France: “What [else] does the abolition of the slave trade mean more or less in effect than liberty and equality?” In this debate, the duke of Clarence again declared how impolitic and unjust it would be to abolish the slave trade, and described Wilberforce as either a fanatic or a hypocrite. (“William made a most incomparable speech,” remarked his brother, the prince of Wales.)27

  So, for the moment, such merchants as Richard Miles and Jerome Bernard Weuves in London, with their ships the Spy and the Iris, or Sir James Laroche and James Rogers in Bristol, with the African Queen and the Fame, as well as John Tarleton, Daniel Backhouse, Peter Baker, James Dawson, and Thomas Leyland in Liverpool, with the Eliza, the Princess Royal, and the Ned, could sleep in peace a few more years; and their captains, Samuel Courtauld and Hugh Thomas included, could sleep happily, in their high-strung hammocks. Their equivalents in North America, Rio de Janeiro, and even Havana in Cuba seemed equally confident. True, the vast French slave trade had collapsed as a consequence of the revolution and the war, but the years of the middle 1790s were good ones for France’s neighbors.

  The slave trade did particularly well in 1793 in, for example, Britain’s prime colony of Jamaica, which imported a record number of 23,000 captives that year. The total for 1791-95 was just under 80,000, far more than in any other quinquennium (even if at least 15,000 were re-exported to Cuba). In 1791, Jamaica employed 250,000 slaves and, in 1797, she would employ 300,000. The output of sugar increased, too: Jamaica produced 60,000 tons in 1791, over 70,000 by 1800—its greatest year ever being 1805, when it was the biggest exporter of sugar in the world, producing nearly 100,000 tons.28 For the first time, too, in the years after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Jamaica was producing substantial quantities of coffee: 22 million tons in 1804. By then, Britain was also exporting (re-exporting) as much coffee as it did wool.

  Jamaican planters were, of course, horrified at the possibility of abolition of the traffic: they not only busied themselves with reinforcing resistance to the idea in Westminster, but began to do what they could to encourage the breeding of slaves at home. Thus a Jamaican law of 1792 offered incentives to both proprietors and overseers of estates who could show a natural increase during the year. The wife of the governor of Jamaica, Lady Nugent, recorded in her diary that Lewis Cuthbert, a planter, told her that, at his Clifton plantation—on the Liguanea plain, now part of Kingston—“he gave two dollars to every woman who produced a healthy child.”29

  Then, as many opponents of abolition had argued in debate in London, the supposition that the British might be about to bring their slave traffic to an end did have the effect of stimulating their rivals. When the Dutch minister to London heard of the first vote against the slave trade in the Commons, he sent a special messenger home to Amsterdam so that his countrymen would be able to take advantage of the opportunity. But though this did inspire a brief revival of the Dutch slave trade, the French conquest of Holland, and the subsequent establishment of the Batavian Republic, under French influence, in 1795, made the continuation of such activities on any large scale unthinkable. Yet the thought of abolition was unacceptable in Holland: a few years later, the fiscal at Elmina, on the Gold Coast, Jan de Maree, would write that it would do “irreparable damage to our richest source of trade.”30, XII

  The news from the United States was equally discouraging for the cause of abolition. Despite the successful prosecution of the brig Hope,XIII other such lawsuits proved unsuccessful, and the slave traders of Rhode Island continued unperturbed. The Quakers tried their usual tactics of persuasion by correspondence but, for once, they were ineffective. Dr. Samuel Hopkins of Newport told Moses Brown that a printer who had promised to print one of his pamphlets had explained to him later that “he had consulted his friends and they tell him that it will greatly hurt his interest to do it, that there is so large a number of his customers either in the slave trade or in such connection with it, or so disposed with respect to it, to whom it will give the greatest offence, that it is not prudent for him to do it. . . . In vain do I tell him that he has fallen from his profession.”31, XIV

  The Spanish colony of Cuba, too, was expanding, not withdrawing in any way from, her slave interests, and here traders of Liverpool such as Baker and Dawson, and Thomas Leyland, were deeply engaged. There were 500,000 acres of land in sugar cane in Cuba in 1792 in comparison with little more than 3,000 in 1762, there were 530 sugar mills throughout the island, and the slave population, though far behind its neighbors, was over 80,000. French refugees to Cuba from Saint-Domingue were establishing coffee farms both in East Cuba and near Havana, often using more slaves than the sugar planters. Steam engines were being introduced for the first time into the sugar plantations. But this technological innovation seemed to have no effect on the planters’ need for slaves from Africa.

  In 1792, Francisco de Arango and Ignacio, the count of Casa Montalvo, young, well-educated members of the planter oligarchy in Cuba (both of them were sons of men who recalled the British occupation of Havana), set off on another voyage of inquiry to England. Arango, then in his twenties, was the most intelligent criollo of his generation; later, he would be known as the “Colbert of Cuba.” He accepted that the trade in slaves was a “miserable” thing, but what he wanted was an adequate supply of slaves to enable his island to compete with Jamaica, and then to end the traffic.XV Arango told Spanish ministers that the high price of sugar after the collapse of Frenc
h production in Saint-Domingue could make Cuba as rich as Mexico. All that was needed was freedom to introduce slaves into Cuba for eight years. As a consequence, for the first time, in 1792, a Cuban vessel, El Cometa, captain Pedro Laporte, set off from Havana, with slaving cargoes such as aguardiente, tobacco, and some white sugar, to Africa direct and, without losing a single sailor, brought back 233 slaves, of whom 87 were women. This expedition was repeated in September of the same year, under a French captain, Pedro Lacroix Dufresne.33

  So it was that, during these very years when the issue of abolition had been so sensationally raised in Britain, the world’s major commercial power, the slave trade was growing as never before on an island in which that nation, like the United States, already had many interests. Official statistics suggest that, in 1790, about fifty ships entered Havana, bringing 2,270 slaves. Of these, six were North American (including James de Wolf’s María), two Dutch, thirty Spanish, seven English, one “Anglo-American,” whatever that may mean, two French, three Danish, and two unknown. The next year, free-for-all slave trading in Havana was extended till 1798. Both the old subsidy and the per-capita tax were removed, as was the requirement that a third of the slaves imported had to be women. The maximum tonnage of foreign slavers was raised to 500 tons, too. Agents of foreign slave traders, such as Allwood, the representative of Baker and Dawson of Liverpool, were able to establish themselves legally in Havana—including, after 1792, French agents, who, in theory, had been excluded from the first arrangements (even though, illegally, many French slavers had come in: perhaps thirty-two between 1790 and 1792). Allwood, meantime, remained the largest importer: the captain-general of Cuba, perhaps bribed, evaded the order of the government in Madrid to expel him for attempted corruption of officials.