by Hugh Thomas
Whereas Liverpool merchants more than maintained their interest, those from the United States seem to have compensated in Cuba for losing some of their markets in North America itself. Indeed, in the 1790s, United States slave ships sailed more often to Cuba than to anywhere else—South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Georgia were far behind. There was another innovation in the traffic in the 1790s for North Americans: it became for a time profitable for traders to buy slaves on one Caribbean island and sell them on another. This was, for J. and T. Handasyde Perkins of Boston, as they pointed out themselves, a “business which we are particularly well situated to effect. . . . We will do the business at 5 percent.”34 Sometimes that meant taking from Savannah, Georgia, a cargo of rice or indigo to exchange for slaves in the Windward Islands and sell them in Cuba. That was done, for instance, by Captain William McNeill in the Perkins’ Clarissa.
This North American trading to Havana was, of course, illegal, under the federal law which forbade the trading of slaves to foreign states. So the merchants ran risks of prosecution at home. A lawsuit in Salem was, indeed, once brought against Sinclair and Waters, the owners of the Abeona, by a private individual, Stephen Cleveland. The owners lost the case, but refused to pay the fine of £4,000. Three of their vessels were then seized by the court. The owners appealed. The court became entangled in discussion of its own competence, and the case did not prevent the Abeona from sailing again.
In these years, Salem, whose merchants had done little with respect to the trade in the past, became the most important Massachusetts slave port. The brothers Joseph and Joshua Grafton were the first leaders, though John White and George Crowninshield soon caught up; the latter found the business rather expensive: “We find prime slaves were not to be purchased for less than 200 galls. rum each,” they wrote thoughtfully to Captain Edward Boss, who wanted to take out one of their ships to the slave harbors.35 Whatever the price, Boss was all the same to be found with the sloop General Green, with slaves to sell in the river Surinam in 1794.
Among the captains to be found in Havana was James de Wolf, the outstanding captain and merchant in this era of North American slave trading. De Wolf, with his “florid cheeks, a blunt nose, gray eyes, an upper lip as sheer as a carpenter’s plane, and big, capable sailor’s hands,” was one of five brothers of Bristol, Rhode Island, who were all for a time slave captains or merchants. They were sons of Mark Antony de Wolf, who, it will be recalled,XVI had captained slave ships for his father-in-law, Simeon Potter in the early 1770s. The de Wolfs entered the trade in their own right after the American Revolution. James de Wolf, a hero of several naval fights against the British, was the outstanding individual. Before he was twenty, he was master of his own ship; before he was twenty-five, he had made enough money from the slave trade to last him the rest of his life. Though operating from a house on Mount Hope, a hill outside the little port of Bristol, he would sometimes go down to Charleston or Savannah to superintend the landing of slaves from his ships. He sensibly married the daughter of William Bradford, the owner of Bristol’s large rum distillery (and a United States senator), when rum was still the main slave cargo on the African coast. Simeon Potter, writing to his successful nephew in 1794, explained how, despite the new federal law which prohibited the citizens of the United States from carrying slaves to other nations, there were ways in which vessels could still be fitted out for the trade. James profited from this advice, and he or other members of the family fitted out eighty-eight journeys to Africa for slaves between 1784 and 1807. In order to benefit from this form of labor the more, James de Wolf bought a sugar plantation in Cuba—one of the first North Americans to invest in that island after it became legal to do so in 1790.36
It was not simply Cuba in the Spanish empire where planters and traders were now taking advantage of the new conditions: the slave trade to Lima also expanded in the 1790s, slaves being bought as a rule in Buenos Aires or Montevideo and taken overland to Peru. The greatest merchant there was José Antonio del Valle Cortés, a well-connected mayor of Lima, who had become count of Premio Real for his services in the colony’s fight against the Inca rebellion of Tupac Amaru; between 1792 and 1803, he sold an average of 270 slaves a year on the Lima market. Del Valle’s son Juan Bautista bought a substantial hacienda, Villa, south of Lima, where he put fifteen hundred African slaves to work his cane fields. Sales in Caracas also increased, the buyers being the cocoa farmers of the valley: 350 slaves a year were sold there at the end of the century, another of Baker and Dawson’s representatives from Liverpool, Edward Barry, being the major seller.37
Though the international news was, therefore, far from promising, the abolitionists found some encouragement at home. For example, they gained comfort from a financial crash in Bristol. Some of the outstanding merchants were ruined—among them James Rogers, the most vociferous in his denunciations of abolition. The last in the great series of admirable Scottish philosophers, James Beattie, published in 1793 the second volume of his Elements of Moral Science, in which (as usual among British writers of the era, following Montesquieu) he firmly stated, “All the men upon earth whatever their colour are our brethren.”38 Further, though the new war with France delayed innovation in politics, it had the same consequence for commerce as had occurred during all the wars of the century. Indeed, because of the fighting, and the conversion of so many merchant ships into privateers, no ships left Liverpool for slaving in 1794.
Yet there were always new merchants ready to seize any opportunities which opened up as a result of the renewed war in Europe. The United States, not France, was the obvious candidate now for succession to Britain as the world’s major slaver, should abolition be carried through. Zachary Macaulay, who was still in Sierra Leone, wrote from there in 1796 to the Reverend Samuel Hopkins in Newport, “You will be sorry to learn that, during the last year, the number of American slave traders on the coast has increased to an unprecedented degree. Were it not for their pertinacious adherence to that abominable traffic,” he added, rather optimistically, “it would, in consequence of the war, have been almost wholly abolished.”39
Despite the war and the contrived hostility of Thurlow and Dundas, as well as of the duke of Clarence (with all that that suggested), Wilberforce held fast to his mission. He was still supported by both Pitt and Fox, even if the former’s mind had to be on the war. In 1794, when it was supposed that the trade would end in 1796, he successfully introduced a bill providing for a ban on British merchants’ sale of slaves to foreign markets. The same opponents as usual spoke against him (Tarleton, Sir William Young, Alderman Newman). There were some new voices, too, such as that of Edmund Lechmere, member for Worcester who thought that, “since all Europe was in a state of confusion, it would be highly imprudent to adopt any untried expedient.” Also among the Tory opposition there appears for the first time the name of Robert Peel, member for Tamworth, the first cotton king to sit in Parliament, who thought that the Africans were not yet sufficiently mature to deserve liberty. Wilberforce on this occasion persuaded the Commons to vote for him, but the House of Lords as usual defeated him, the names of the lords who opposed being, apparently, not recorded.
It thus became clear, seven years after the first debate on the matter in the House of Commons, that the parliamentary effort to end the slave trade would constitute a long struggle.40 As Lord Shelburne—Pitt’s predecessor as prime minister, and the first such statesman to write an autobiography—once put it: “it requires no small labour to open the eyes of either the public or of individuals but, when that is accomplished you are not got a third of the way. The real difficulty remains in getting people to apply the principles which they have admitted and of which they are now so fully convinced. Then springs the mine composed of private interests and personal animosity.”41
* * *
IMolineux, whose property was in Saint Kitts, was a special enemy of the Reverend Ramsay and, when that philanthropist died, in the summer of 1789, from calumnies inspired by the planter
s, his friends thought, Molineux wrote to his illegitimate son in Saint Kitts: “Ramsay is dead: I have killed him.”
IIThis was a speech which the generous Charles Fox later described as “the most brilliant and convincing speech that ever was . . . delivered in this or any other place” (“O si illum vidisse, si illum audivisse . . .”).
IIITarleton had fought bravely in the American war, and his crippled hand, with two fingers lost in action, became an asset in elections. He was the lover of the actress Perdita Robinson, ex-mistress of the prince of Wales, but afterwards he and his wife were thought excessively uxorious: they not only customarily sat on the same chair but ate off the same plate.
IVThe expression by André Malraux with regard to the early stages of the Spanish Civil War.
VJean-Baptiste-Joseph de Lubersac, who had already demonstrated his liberalism by voting in the States-General for the abolition of hunting rights.
VITallien in Bordeaux fell in love with the granddaughter of one of Bordeaux’s prominent négriers, Dominique Cabarrus: she “sweetened his life,” and dictated his career; shortly afterwards, he married her.
VIIThe latter captain’s deliveries can be seen in illustration 57.
VIIIVaughan later became an extreme radical, fled to France on being suspected of treachery, and eventually went to live, and die, in the United States.
IXDundas originally proposed January 1, 1800, as the date to end the trade, but others, including Pitt, “saw no reason why 1793 was not preferable.” The years 1794. and 1795 were also canvassed. This was the occasion when Lord Carhampton, whose grandfather had been governor of Jamaica, said that “gentlemen might talk of inhumanity but he did not know what right anyone had to do so inhumane a thing as to inflict a speech of four hours long on a set of innocent, worthy and respectable men.” Dundas was a formidable parliamentary opponent for the abolitionists: Lord Holland recalled how “he never hesitated in making any assertion and, without attempting to answer an argument, he either treated it as quite preposterous or, after some bold misstatements and inapplicable maxims, confidently alleged that he had refuted it.”
XAlas, Pitt’s biographer John Ehrman says that he knows of no evidence that the sun did so rise.
XIEnglish political history may not be understood unless it be realized that Parliament in those days sat between January and August, never in the autumn.
XIIThe trade in the Dutch empire had never recovered after the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, in the early 1780s; and the many slaves needed by the Dutch colonists in Surinam were often carried there by North Americans.
XIIISee page 520.
XIVIn 1792, Kentucky entered the union as a new slave state. When the South (Georgia and the Carolinas) relinquished claims on the territory to the west of them, they had stipulated that any new state there should be slaveholding. By now, the Northern and Southern populations in the new nation were more or less equal, and expansion was expected to be a lateral matter.
XVThe countess of Merlin, a niece of Montalvo, would express in the 1840s what Arango seems to have thought fifty years earlier: “Nothing is more just than the abolition of the slave trade; nothing is more unjust than the abolition of slavery.”32 She thought the latter a violation of the rights of property, an attack on something which all governments had always supported, and even helped to finance.
XVISee page 285.
27
Why Should We See Great Britain Getting All the Slave Trade?
“Why should we see Great Britain getting all the slave trade to themselves? Why should not our country be enriched by that lucrative traffic?”
John Brown, member of the House of Representatives from Rhode Island, 1800
CAPTAIN JAMES dE WOLF St Thomas, April 1 1796 This will inform you of my arrival in this port safe, with seventy-eight well slaves. I lost two on my passage. I had sixty-two days’ passage. I received your letter and orders to draw bills on thirty days sight, but I have agreed to pay in slaves—two men slaves at twenty-eight joes and one boy at twenty-five joes and another at twenty joes.I I found times very bad on the coast. Prime slaves are one hogshead and thirty gallons of rum or seven joes gold and boys one hogshead of rum. I left captain Isaac Manchester at Anemebue [that is, Anamabo] with ninety slaves on board all well. Tomorrow I shall sail for Havana, agreeable to your orders. I shall do the best I can and without other orders load with molasses and return to Bristol.
I remain your friend and humble servant, Jeremiah Diman.
Persistence is the most important quality in politics. It was possessed in heroic quantity by Wilberforce who, in the spring of 1795, again inspired a motion in the House of Commons which would have enabled the country to go ahead with the abolition of the slave trade at the time which Henry Dundas had once suggested, at the beginning of 1796. But by now the public mood was in favor of indefinite delay. The consequences of the revolutions in France and Saint-Domingue, the war, and the social problems at home caused the opposition to abolition to become far stronger. That year was one in which many people supposed that a revolution in the French style would break out in England, and the abolitionists were uncertain what to do. Yet, as usual, Wilberforce was supported by Fox and Pitt. All, as usual, spoke well, even if Pitt’s other preoccupations had somewhat dimmed his advocacy of “practical justice and rational liberty”—in comparison only, however, with what had prevailed in 1792. Dundas spoke of the desirability of further delays: “The propriety of abolishing the slave trade he thought no man could doubt; yet he thought it equally clear that this was not the period for its abolition.”1 As noted (in a letter to his sister) by the young George Canning, Pitt’s most brilliant protégé, now in Parliament for the first time, Wilberforce’s motion, “to the disgrace of the House, was negatived by . . . 78 to 61, in defiance of plain justice and humanity. . . . For my own part, the slave trade is a question upon which I find it so difficult to conceive how there can exist but one feeling. . . . When the question is put to me ‘Shall such enormities go on—for any purpose, under any circumstances, to any degree?’ I feel myself compelled at once, without looking to the right or the left, or taking any other than a straightforward view of the matter to answer with an unequivocal and unqualified ‘No’ . . .
“Of the leaders,” Canning continued, “I rather suspect that Sheridan has some little doubts upon the subject; but he was not present—indeed, I do not think he would divide against the measure, even if he thought against it much more decidedly than I suspect him to do.II Of us younger ones—Jenkinson [the future prime minister, Lord Liverpool], is a slave trader, so is Charles Ellis [he had been born in Jamaica where he had a plantation] . . . so is Granville Leveson [later the first earl Granville, a gambler known later, when ambassador to Paris, as “le Wellington des joueurs”]. . . . Seeing Leveson . . . I began to remonstrate with him jokingly upon his savageness in dividing so improperly.”2
Some businesses had anticipated the vote going the other way. Thus Alexander Houston and Co., one of the leading West Indian houses of Glasgow, assuming that the slave trade would end, speculated in the purchase of slaves. But, in the event, they had to maintain an army of unwanted Africans in Jamaica, of whom disease killed many, and the firm in consequence went bankrupt in 1795: the biggest financial disaster in the history of Glasgow till that date, and the worst in the history of the British slave trade.
The next year, 1796, Wilberforce yet again put his case to the legislature, securing permission, by 93 to 67, to introduce a bill on the subject.III Yet again, Fox and Pitt spoke eloquently for abolition. Yet again, Dundas insisted that, evil as the slave trade was, it was not possible for Parliament to give effect to the bill at that moment. Sir Philip Francis told the House that, if he had not voted in favor of abolition in 1789, he would have inherited a great fortune from a lady who had property in the West Indies. Wilberforce lost his bill, which demanded abolition of the trade as from January 1, 1797, on the bill’s third reading, by only four votes, 70 to 74.3 It was believed t
hat the abolitionists lost some votes because of the rival attractions of a new comic opera presented that night.
The list of those who, all the same, voted with Wilberforce included as usual the greatest names in English political life: Pitt, Canning, Fox, Sheridan, as well as Francis. Yet their speeches had now become a little repetitious, lacking new information, partly because Clarkson, the essential linchpin, the packhorse, the patient traveler, the interviewer—indeed, the slave as it would have been put at that time—of the abolition movement, had collapsed. “All exertion was then over,” he himself reported; “the nervous system was almost shattered. . . . Both my memory and my hearing failed me. . . .”4 He had done the work of a hundred men and, according to his own account, had traveled on a large scale all over England in search of evidence. His place would soon be taken by James Stephen, the equally possessed son of a supercargo who had lived at the minor slave port of Poole, had been a lawyer at Saint Kitts in the Caribbean and saw, in England’s current discomfiture by France, a divine retribution for her part in the slave trade. (Stephen’s hostility to slavery had been fired by seeing two slaves condemned in Saint Kitts to be burned alive.)
The interest of British public opinion in the matter of slavery was maintained up to a certain point by another lawsuit comparable to that of the Zong, though with a different conclusion. This was Tatham v. Hodgson. A ship left Liverpool for Africa and picked up 168 slaves. She then set off for the West Indies. The voyage took over six months because of bad weather, and 128 slaves died en route—most of them as a result of starvation, since the captain had laid in food for only the usual six to nine weeks. The question was whether the loss of slaves could be attributed to the perils of the sea, in which case the insurance company would pay the owners. Lord Kenyon—the new lord chief justice, after Mansfield’s retirement—asked sharply whether the captain of the ship had also starved to death. The answer was no. In the end, Kenyon’s judgment was that the shipowners were not entitled to call on the underwriters to make good their loss.
