by Hugh Thomas
In 1797 and 1798, Wilberforce was again defeated. On these occasions, he had new supporters—such as Benjamin Hobhouse, though he came from Bristol slave-trading stockIV—and new enemies, in the shape of Bryan Edwards, member of the Jamaican Assembly, as well as of the House of Commons, and the author of a competent history of the British West Indies. Edwards had the audacity to invoke the recent work of Mungo Park to support his contention that all Africa was in a condition of absolute slavery, and suggested to Wilberforce that, if he were desirous of exercising his humanity, he should look to Britain, where “he would even meet a race as worthy of his benevolent attention as those in the West Indies, namely the chimney sweeps.”V Another critic was Canning’s friend Charles Ellis who, in 1797, proposed that the governors of West Indian colonies should be instructed to encourage the West Indian legislatures to improve the conditions on plantations until the slaves’ natural increase made the trade unnecessary. Pitt was, for a time, attracted by this idea but, in the end, sided as usual with Wilberforce.5
In 1799, Wilberforce again put the question, being supported again by the same brilliant band of fine orators. A new opponent of Wilberforce was John Petrie, a merchant and banker who had four estates in Tobago and who, in his only speech in the House of Commons, argued that abolition would be the scourge of Africa. Dundas, with whom the spirit of inspired gradualism was turning to that of outright opposition, now argued that the future of a subject as important as the trade in slaves should be decided by the legislatures of the colonies themselves—a view effectively mocked by Canning, now in the government as undersecretary at the Foreign Office. Pitt on this occasion said ironically that the opponents of abolition evidently thought that “the blood of these poor negroes was to continue flowing; it was dangerous to stop it because it had run so long; besides, we were under contract with certain surgeons to allow them a certain supply of human bodies every year for them to try experiments on, and this we did out of pure love of science.” On this occasion, the motion to abolish the trade was defeated by only 74 to 82.6
Wilberforce also introduced a bill, making the more modest suggestion that slave traders should be excluded from the colony of Sierra Leone because of its freed citizenry. This rather obvious measure passed the Commons, but even that failed to pass through the Lords: the duke of Clarence assumed the lead of those who opposed the idea, and was presented for his pains with the freedom of the city of Liverpool.
One bill which did pass the House of Commons in 1799 restricted still further the number of slaves per ton of British shipping (the average number of slaves per ship henceforth was to be 289). Slaves would now be fitted into an average space of eight square feet instead of five to six square feet. As the future prime minister Lord Liverpool argued would be the case, in his opposition to this modest proposal, the profitability of these regulated ships was declining in comparison with Britain’s competitors: for example, in 1806, the Royal Navy captured as a prize 413 slaves on board a Dutch ship which, under British regulations, would have been allowed to carry a maximum of 260 slaves.
As the new century began, Wilberforce and his friends realized bitterly that, ten years after the formation of the abolitionist movement, British ships were still carrying over 50,000 slaves a year to the Americas, and that the years 1791-1800 had seen the British slave trade at its most grandiose—nearly 400,000 slaves had been landed from about 1,340 voyages. Despite the high prices of slaves in Africa, the trade was more profitable than it had been in the 1780s: the average profit per voyage was probably 13 percent. In 1798, almost 150 ships, the highest ever, left Liverpool for Africa.VI
The British economy appeared even more to depend either on slavery, or on slave-produced goods, in the first years of the nineteenth century than when the movement for abolition had been launched. In 1803, for instance, less than 8 percent of the cotton used in Britain derived from “free areas,” such as Turkey. The rest came from slave-using plantation colonies such as Louisiana, Brazil, or Demerara (the latter was the great cotton success of the early 1800s, the “most rapidly developing colony in the world,” where most cotton plantations were owned by English investors). Between 1790 and 1806, the slave population increased in the British empire by at least a quarter and, if the new West Indian islands, conquered or merely occupied, were added to the total, the increase would be about one-half. Liverpool merchants such as Baker and Dawson (so often mentioned), John Bolton, and John Tarleton (of Tarleton and Backhouse) figure as major investors, not only in trading slaves to Demerara, but in employing them when they got there and carrying steam engines there, too. James Stephen, now Wilberforce’s brother-in-law, wrote in a tract published in 1804: “I see my country still given up without remorse to the unbridled career of slave-trading speculators,” and added, “The monster, instead of being cut off, as the first burst of honest indignation promised, has been more fondly nourished than before; and fattened with fuller meals of misery and murder. . . .”7
One modern historian, Seymour Dreschler, was, therefore, quite correct to comment, more drily: “In terms of both capital value and overseas trade the slave system was expanding, not declining.”8
It need scarcely be added that neither the Portuguese Crown nor the Brazilian ascendancy had for a moment contemplated an end of their traffic in slaves. How could they? The income to the Portuguese state from the trade, as a result of per-capita taxes on slaves, was higher than ever before. In 1770, for instance, the tax on slaves amounted to 150 contos, whereas other receipts did not attain a twentieth of that. In 1801-10, about 200,000 slaves were carried to Brazil, over three-quarters from Angola and 50,000 from the Gulf of Guinea. About 10,000 were carried every year to Rio alone. Many of these were children, because of a lack of other supplies. Even Portugal was still importing slaves in the 1770s, perhaps several thousand a year, though it was illegal. (The first prosecution for importing slaves to Lisbon came in 1798.) No one in Brazil would have disagreed with a statement by the merchants of Bahia to the king of Portugal, in the 1790s, that “the arms of slaves . . . are those that cultivate the vast fields of Brazil; without them, there would perhaps not be those things as important as sugar, tobacco, cotton and the rest which are transported to the Motherland, and which enrich and augment national commerce and the royal treasury of Your Majesty. Any objection to the slave trade [such as, it might have been added, were being made by a few hypocrites in the parliament of His Majesty’s oldest ally] . . . are attacks on the population, the commerce and the income of Your Majesty.”9
The most promising new market for slaves in these years, however, was still Cuba. Philip Baker, of Baker and Dawson took care in 1795 to inform the Commons that he had £500,000 invested in eighteen slave ships—for the service of Spain (that is, Cuba). The new circumstances there had encouraged the establishment, in Havana, of a new breed of slave traders. Havana previously had never had such merchants, for the planters on the island had usually traded there directly with the English, French, Dutch, or other captains. But now an oligarchy of merchants took shape which bought slaves and resold them to planters or, in some cases, sent ships themselves to other Caribbean ports to buy slaves. The new names included: Santiago Drake, whose interests included both trading in slaves and using them on plantations (born James Drake in England, he had gone to Havana when the old regulations were dismantled in 1792); his relations, the del Castillo family, one of whose members, José del Castillo, was dedicated to commerce of all kinds in Havana, whereas his cousins, the marquis of San Felipe and his brothers, grew sugar at their fine hacienda at Bejucal; Santiago de la Cuesta y Manzanal, a giant who would have a great future in public life and die a marquis; the de Poëy family; Cristóbal Durán (who specialized in carrying slaves from North America to Cuba); Clemente Ichaso; and Francisco Antonio de Comas. Many of these new Havana merchants had North American associates or even partners. For example, Santiago Drake had as a partner Charles Storey in that most northerly of Massachusetts ports, Newburyport, and he also
had connections in his home country. Apart from him and the de Poëys, who were originally French, most of these merchants were born in Spain, even if they soon took their place among the business leaders of Cuba.
The new merchants were certain that their mission was to bring as many slaves to Cuba in as short a time as possible. For that reason, they turned a little away from the English suppliers who had sold them so many slaves in the past: the latest English law restricting the slaves per ship seemed unbusinesslike. Between 1796 and 1807, the United States dominated the Cuban slave trade, and, in that last year, thirty-five out of the total of forty-four ships which officially entered Havana were registered as North American, though sometimes these supposed United States ships were really British: “A large proportion, perhaps all the American slave ships which are now fitted out in our ports, are owned by British subjects,” James Stephen noted.10 But when the world was at peace—as it was in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens—English ships, such as William Jameson’s Fame, and Henry Colet’s Minerva (in May 1802), still occasionally brought the biggest cargoes to Havana: 380 and 246 slaves respectively.
One interesting change occurred in Havana in the 1790s. Las Casas, the Cuban captain-general (that is, governor of the island), ruled that only slaves direct from Africa could be brought to Cuba: those who had been working for many years in other Caribbean islands were potentially suspect as bearers of evil liberal ideas. For a time, this rule was interpreted as being an instruction to those buying from foreign captains; but it was already recognized in Cuba not only that “the need for labor of this kind is not temporary but permanent,” but also that “the entry and departure of foreigners to and from our ports is not convenient while we are in a position to reach another agreement.” By 1798, following the pioneering voyage of Lafuente in El Cometa of 1792, ships were beginning to leave Cuba direct for Africa quite often, if not regularly. For example, a vessel captained by Luis Beltrán Gonet, purchased 123 slaves on the river Sénégal. In 1802, José Maria Ormazabal, on behalf of Francisco Ignacio de Azcárate, a Basque merchant established in Havana, went to Africa, on the schooner Dolores, and brought back 122 slaves after an average of fifty-eight days, making a profit of 75 percent. This direct traffic was still technically illegal, and several of the captains, crews, and financing were not Spanish but, in 1804, the Spanish government gave its approval. Any Spanish citizen was henceforth to be allowed to import slaves from Africa for another twelve years, free of all duty. Foreigners were permitted to do the same, though only for six years. Sugar mills—this decree was proclaimed with an eye to Cuba, especially—were to be provided with slave women, so that reliance on imports would, it was optimistically hoped, eventually cease (planters never liked such provisions, and as usual did their best to avoid them). This reform was the result of a note sent from the king of Spain to the Council of the Indies, in April 1803, which declared firmly, “American agriculture, which, because of its impact on the commerce and navigation of European nations and the prosperity of the colonies themselves, is so important, cannot exist without the slave trade.”11
In consequence, even official figures suggest that, in the years 1790-1810, about 150,000 slaves were imported into Cuba; nearly 14,000 in 1802 alone.
• • •
In these years, the cause of abolition in the United States suffered new complications. On the one hand, all three Southern states where the import of slaves had been left as legal in 1787 formally prohibited it: Georgia in 1798 (which provision endured, although scarcely fulfilled); South Carolina in 1788, for five years and, when that prohibition ran out, she banned the trade for another two years, a law which continued to be extended, though with modest penalties, till 1803; and, finally, North Carolina, whose legislature, though the state had in 1790 repealed her prohibitory duties on slaving, in 1794, influenced by hideous stories of events in Haiti, introduced a bill to prevent the further import of slaves.
On the other hand, there were several further lawsuits against slave traders. During the second half of 1799 alone, there were six actions for breaking the federal law of 1794. But the prohibitions on importing were not really maintained; most of the lawsuits did not prosper, for the confiscation of the slave ship, which was the usual penalty, was customarily easily circumvented by the ship’s being bought back at an artificially low price by the old owner; the government’s attempts to prevent this usually proved futile. Other cases were lost on technical grounds.
A new act of 1800 tightened the federal law, making it technically illegal for both residents and citizens of the United States to have any share in a slave ship on its way to a foreign country. The Congress voted for this law overwhelmingly, the Senate by 67 to 4. The debate in the lower house was interesting for a speech by John Brown of Rhode Island, the famous merchant of Providence, who alleged that, in 1794, the members had been “drilled into [passing the act of that year] by certain members who would not take no for an answer.” He was certain that the existence of an act in the United States against the slave trade would not prevent the exportation of a single slave from Africa, because shippers from other countries would take them. He believed: “We might as well enjoy that trade as leave it wholly to others. It was the law of that country [Africa] to export those whom they held in slavery—who were as much slaves as those who were slaves in this country. . . . The very idea of making a law against this trade, which all our other nations enjoyed, was ill policy. He could further say that it [abolition] was wrong when considered in a moral point of view since, by the operation of the trade, the very people much bettered their condition. . . . [In addition] all our distilleries and manufacturies were lying idle for want of an extended commerce [in slaves]. He had been informed that, on those coasts [of Africa], New England rum was much preferred to the best Jamaica spirits. . . .”12
There was a moment when, despite the opposition of John Brown, it seemed that this act really might spell the end of the traffic from Rhode Island and elsewhere in New England; but the federal courts were still inactive, partly because of local threats of violence and bribery. The law seems to have had no effect at all on United States slave trading to Cuba. Then, in 1804, as a result of skillfully conducted local intrigues, an abolitionist, Jonathan Russell, was removed from the decisive post of collector of customs at Bristol, Rhode Island, and substituted by Charles Collins, a brother-in-law of James de Wolf. This was a disastrous appointment, since Collins had not only once been a slave captain, but was still part-owner of the slave ships Armstadt and Minerva; the very day when he was sworn in to his new post at Newport, the latter ship landed 150 slaves at Havana. Collins remained collector for twenty years. Not surprisingly, there were for the moment no more prosecutions in Rhode Island for breaking the law on trading slaves.VII
Partly in consequence of the trade originating in Rhode Island, an apparently uncontrollable traffic seemed to swamp the states which still thought themselves in need of slave labor: in particular, South Carolina which, in December 1803, reopened her own slave trade, allowing about 40,000 new slaves to enter legally until a federal prohibition took effect in 1807. These slaves were almost all from Africa, for the legislators in the state, like the captain-general in Cuba, feared a slave rebellion if West Indian slaves should come. According to customs-house returns, scarcely likely to exaggerate, the shippers came primarily from Britain (nearly 20,000 slaves, in ninety-one ships), Rhode Island (nearly 8,000 slaves, in eighty-eight ships), Charleston itself (2,000 slaves, in thirteen ships), and France (over 1,000 slaves, in ten ships).
The main firm in Charleston in these days was that of John Phillips and John Gardner, both of whom had come down from Newport to make their fortunes, and certainly seem to have done so: they sent twenty-five ships direct to Africa in the last four years of the slave trade. A representative of the de Wolf family (Henry or “Gentleman Jim,” for example, young men still in their teens) would probably be there to receive the cargoes which their uncle James de Wolf had commissioned.
As many Africans were probably introduced into the United States in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first eight years of the nineteenth century as in the entire era since the 1620s.
An impression of the African consequences was given by Captain Matthew Benson of Rhode Island, who had himself once traded in slaves, but was now concerned primarily with camwood and gum. He wrote home to Nicholas Brown & Co. of Providence in 1800, from the coast of Sierra Leone, to say that, there, the “American hive continues its swarming beyond all previous periods. Not a week passes without arrivals. The quantity of rum, tobacco and provisions arriving since the tenth of the current [month] is almost incredible.”14 In 1806, the United States slaving fleet was said to have been almost three-quarters the size of the British one. These vessels of the former, unlike those of the latter, were, of course, unregulated by anything like the Dolben bill, and so could carry as many slaves as their captains thought fit.
The early years of the nineteenth century thus looked distinctly unpromising for the abolition of the trade, much less that of slavery itself. No one could be certain what the Congress of the United States would decide in 1807, the year when there was, by the terms of the Constitution of 1787, certain to be a new debate; nor whether anything which might be decided would be effective in practice. The slaveholding states of the United States were now responsible for about 45 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives. The slaveholders were already looking to the Senate to admit new slave states. At the same time, the old enthusiasm for abolition in England had diminished. The campaigners were growing older, the attentions of Pitt were absorbed by the war, and little really had happened in respect of abolition. The novelty of the cause had worn thin. King George III looked on Wilberforce’s activities as a jest: “How go on your black clients, Mr. Wilberforce?” he once asked that statesman at a levée.15 The standing of the navy stood high, and the navy, from Nelson to the duke of Clarence, were generally in favor of the traffic. The former once said that he was “bred in the good old school, and taught to appreciate the value of our West Indian possessions, and neither in the field nor the Senate shall their just rights be infringed, while I have an arm to fight in their defence, or a tongue to launch my voice against the damnable doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.”16 In this atmosphere, it is scarcely surprising that, between 1801 and 1807, over a quarter-million slaves (266,000) were carried by Britain, without taking into account those carried in foreign-owned vessels which were really British. The war might have tired the abolitionists, but not the slavers.
