The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  In 1817, the quarrel with England came to a head with the seizure of the French slaver Louis on her way between Africa and Martinique by H.M.S. Princess Charlotte, after a regular battle in which twelve English sailors were killed. The Louis was from Nantes and its captain, and probable owner, was Jean Forest. She had obtained twelve slaves between New Sestos and Cape Mesurado when, about forty miles off the shore, she met the Princess Charlotte. There was a subsequent judgment, then a condemnation at Sierra Leone. Captain Forest, well advised, appealed to the Admiralty Court in London, where Sir William Scott gave a decision in favor of France. For that honest judge wrote, “I can find no authority which gives us the right of interruption to the navigation of states in amity upon the high seas.” No government, he added, could force the way to the liberation of Africa by trampling on the independence of other states in Europe. Sir William, who had already declared his irritation with the language of the Portuguese treaty of 1811, concluded that “to procure an eminent good by means that are unlawful is [not] consonant with private morality.”43 The British government then had to order her navy to cease to interfere with French merchant ships, even if they were plainly slavers. The naval officers complied, with reluctance, for there was nothing which they enjoyed more than to continue action against the French, even if the Bourbons were back in Paris.

  This setback to British naval hopes was accompanied by others in relation to Spain. It is true that the navy did stop and seize several Spanish slave ships. In June 1815, W. H. G. Page, a lawyer who was acting as the Cuban planters’ agent in London, complained to the Foreign Office that over two hundred ships belonging to Spaniards had been seized or condemned, all illegally. He tried to ensure that Spanish slave shippers whose vessels had been wrongly taken would be compensated. He was unsuccessful. All the same, the Spanish trade prospered and when, in February 1816, the Council of the Indies, the powerful body which had advised the Spanish Crown for three centuries about imperial questions, proposed to King Ferdinand that the slave trade should be immediately abolished, the subtle Cuban Arango, a new member of that body, asked what the haste was. Had there not always been slavery? The Cubans believed that they needed slaves, and there were plenty of merchants ready to provide them, whatever the British might formally desire. The Spanish apoderado (representative) of the Consulado de Havana in the postwar years, Francisco Antonio de Rucavado, a confidant of Arango, wrote in 1816 that he was “himself persuaded that there was no just reason for fearing that there would be an end to the traffic;” in September 1816, the treasurer of Cuba, Alejandro Ramírez, a Castilian with wide experience of the West Indies and Guatemala, told the intendant of Santiago de Cuba that there it was “not necessary to obtain permission from the captain-general for expeditions to Africa to fetch slaves.”44

  A sign that, even in Britain, there were hesitations about overhasty abolition in the Spanish empire was given in the rejection of a bill introduced into the House of Commons in May 1815, which would have proscribed the slave trade as an investment for British capital (the Foreign Slave Trade Bill). Alexander Baring—member of Parliament for Taunton, a director of the Bank of England (married to the daughter of William Bingham, the richest senator in the United States), a man of “singularly large and enlightened views,” according to Sir Charles Webster, the historian of that time; “the greatest merchant perhaps England ever had,” according to Disraeli, and until then a declared abolitionist—opposed this measure on the remarkable ground that it would “extinguish” Anglo-Spanish commerce.XIII

  The debate on this bill produced some other remarkable statements: for example, that of Joseph Foster Barham, member for Stockbridge, who argued that British capital was responsible for the Spanish slave trade (a statement apparently supported by Henry Wellesley), not to speak of half the Danish and a great part of the Portuguese. The bill was eventually defeated in the Lords, as so many earlier bills had been in the days of the great campaign of Wilberforce.45

  * * *

  IKnown in the royal family as “Silly Billy,” presumably because he was enlightened; the first secretary of the Africa Institution was the zealous ex-governor of Sierra Leone, Zachary Macaulay.

  IICaptain Coburn’s Catalina, carrying 103 slaves in November 1810; Captain Mayberry’s Eagle, carrying only three slaves to Havana; Captain Dunbar’s Rosa in June 1812, carrying 116 slaves; Captain Intoch’s American, carrying twelve slaves; and Captain Perry’s Thistle, in September 1819, bringing 698 slaves.

  IIIFor example, McDowal, Whitehead and Hibbert; M. R. Dawson; and Holland and Co., both of Liverpool; and Clark and Co. of London.

  IVDescribed by Byron as

  Hibernian Strangford, with thine eyes of blue,

  And boasted locks of red or auburn hue.

  VThis would cause a lot of trouble later—for example, when, in 1816, the ship La Nueva Amable, carrying 388 slaves, was seized off Sierra Leone, as a French ship under the cover of false Spanish papers.

  VIThe continuing inadequacy of the law was, however, shown when the governor of Sierra Leone arrested, and brought to trial, several factors established nearby who were clearly concerned in the slave trade, three of them English (Dunbar, Brodie, and Cooke). But the sentence of transportation was quashed on the ground that the court was unable to try the prisoners.

  VIIThat is, men born in Spain. The tension between them and criollos, men and women born in the colony but of Spanish blood, constituted the main problem of the later Spanish empire, and explains the movement for independence.

  VIIIThis was a new official established in Spain in imitation of a similar one in France, and transferred to the empire, in order to improve the efficiency of the administration.

  IXLord Holland’s Jamaican-born wife, the admirable Elizabeth Vassall, had in 1800 inherited from her grandfather Florentius Vassall two prosperous Jamaican sugar plantations: “Sweet River”, and “Friendship and Greenwich”, with some three hundred slaves. The Vassalls were an enormous family, descended from Samuel Vassall, the slave trader of the 1650s, with Bostonian connections.

  XHis Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge had already made him famous.

  XISurcouf was responsible for at least three more voyages, all in the vessel Adolphe: whether this armateur was teasing Benjamin Constant, one of the great opponents of the slave trade, by using this, the name of his great novel, is unknown. Surcouf has a fine street called after him in Paris, and a statue in Saint-Mals looking out to sea.

  XIIThe minister of marine for a time in 1815 was de Jaucourt, a nephew of the philosophe of the same name who had written the article about the slave trade in Diderot’s great Encyclopédie.

  XIIIBaring later became president of the Board of Trade and was the Lord Ashburton who in 1841 concluded an important antislaving treaty with the United States. His father-in-law, Senator William Bingham, had begun his career as British consul in Saint-Pierre in Martinique and had then been the continental representative in the West Indies throughout the American Revolution, laying there the foundation of his fortune in “ownership of privateers and constant trade.” He subsequently became a founder of the Pennsylvania Bank, later the Bank of North America, under the onetime Philadelphia mayor and slave trader, Thomas Willing. For other connections between Barings Bank and Cuba, see pages 648 and 681.

  29

  The Slaver Is More Criminal Than the Assassin

  “The négrier [slaver] is more criminal than the assassin because, slavery being only an agony cruelly prolonged, death is preferable to the loss of liberty.”

  L’Abbé Grégoire, Des peines infamantes à infliger aux négriers (1822)

  BRITISH MERCHANTS, we know, had been the greatest of slave traders in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, their government embarked upon a crusade to destroy that very commerce. Appropriately, the prime minister of England under whom this campaign began was Lord Liverpool, whose father—being then merely Lord Hawkesbury—had been presented with the freedom of the great slaving
city of Liverpool in June 1788 to thank him for his parliamentary support of the slave trade. In May 1796, when Hawkesbury had been created earl of Liverpool, the corporation invited him to quarter the arms of the city with his own. As a young man, the second earl of Liverpool had had most of the attitudes of his father, voting constantly against abolition, as George Canning had as constantly complained. But as prime minister, Liverpool abandoned his past prejudices and, remarkably, his administration, after the peace of 1815, embarked on one of the most moral foreign policies in British history, precisely intended to bring the slave trade to an end on a global scale.

  Liverpool’s first foreign secretary was Lord Castlereagh. Like his prime minister, he had been less than enthusiastic about abolition in the years leading up to 1807. Grenville, the final architect of abolition, would remark to Samuel Rogers, the poet, “What a frightful mistake . . . to send such a person as Lord Castlereagh to the Congress of Vienna! a man so ignorant that he does not know the map of Europe; and who can be won over to make any concessions by only being asked to breakfast by the Emperor.”1 Yet, in the end, Castlereagh’s conduct of Britain’s diplomacy in these years was a triumph of aggressive liberalism. Though a Tory, he thought that it was desirable to try and formulate general principles. His circular dispatch of January 1, 1816, for example, was a sketch for a European “confederacy” of great powers to preserve the peace of the world on which many later, less well-written, documents, such as the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Charter of the United Nations, have been based. Lampooned by radicals for his conduct in Ireland—who does not recall Shelley’s lines “I met murder in the way/ He had a mask like Castlereagh”?—this statesman did much for the cause of black slaves. Public opinion in England had, of course, been awoken by the devoted leaders of the abolitionist movement, and those men, such as Wilberforce and James Stephen, were in personal touch with the foreign secretary. Castlereagh, on the other hand, had to deal with four nations—France and the United States, Spain and Portugal—whose statesmen resented Britain’s intervention in their affairs, and saw Castlereagh’s well-meaning declarations as a “grab for world power.” The leaders of those countries did not understand the quasi-religious enthusiasm which possessed Britain with respect to abolition, nor how Castlereagh himself had become “something of an enthusiast for the cause in which he had to fight.” John Quincy Adams, who became minister to London after the Treaty of Ghent, recorded the passionate language with which Castlereagh spoke: “He passed immediately to . . . the slave trade which, he said, was now carrying on to a very great extent, and in a shocking manner; that a great number of vessels for it had been fitted out in our southern states; and that the barbarities of the trade were even more atrocious than they had been before the abolition of it had been attempted.”2

  Castlereagh used the declaration secured at Vienna to institute a permanent conference of the European powers in London. This was to be a center of information, as well as of action, about trading slaves. The first meeting of this body was held on August 28, 1816. Fourteen meetings were held before a new full conference of foreign ministers at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, two more in 1819. Alas, the conference did little more than collect information, in which most powers seemed uninterested. They complained too that it did nothing for the cause of Europeans kidnapped by Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean which interested them more. Castlereagh therefore turned his attention to private negotiations with each of the countries concerned.

  In September 1816, he wrote to the remarkable Greek who was secretary of state in Saint Petersburg, Count Capo d’Istria, that he had been hoping that the tsar would support “with force” the additional, second article of the Treaty of Paris on the slave trade. “In laying down the maxims of Christianity as to the rule of conduct between state and state,” Castlereagh said, “it would have been unworthy to have assumed a less benevolent principle towards Africa.” He added, with curious firmness, “As the preamble stands, we may defy moral criticism, if our execution shall correspond to the principles we profess.” His intention was to secure the support of Spain and Portugal for an alliance whose purpose would be the final suppression of the slave trade. But he soon convinced himself that the governments of both countries were “well matched in dishonesty and shabbiness”; for Castlereagh never appreciated the difficulties under which these two nations labored, the need to face revolutionary movements of independence in South America being an all-consuming matter; while both governments knew that too many concessions to Britain on the slave trade would jeopardize the loyalty even of Cuba, and certainly of Brazil.3

  Having been informed by the Africa Institution of London, in December 1816, that 60,000 slaves were still being carried across the Atlantic every year—15,000 they said, in North American ships flying Spanish flags—Castlereagh, at the conference of five nations at Aix- la-Chapelle in 1818, remarkably proposed that the international right of search of slave ships—a sine qua non, in Britain’s eyes, for effective control—should be complemented by “the vigilant superintendence of an armed and international police on the coast of Africa. . . . To render such a police either legal or effective in its object, it must be established under the sanction, and by the authority, of all civilised states.”4 This right of search had its origin as long ago as the fourteenth century; the novelty was to propose that it be introduced in time of peace.

  The conference at Aix was also the first to be held of the great powers of Europe when they were not at war to try and resolve their difficulties: an innovation which has been persistently followed in later days. But there were few supporters among other foreign ministers for the scheme which Castlereagh proposed, which still appeared as a way whereby “Perfide Albion” could morally justify her mastery of the seas, if not of the world—though Tsar Alexander had already thought of establishing a “neutral institution,” with a court, international fleet, and headquarters all of its own, in Africa. He had even suggested that the main nations might concede to this body “the right of visit” of suspected slave ships without arousing national jealousies. But nothing came of this, the tsar lost interest, and the Tuscan diplomat was right who wrote home to Florence from this conference: “I see clearly that we have not yet begun the golden age.”5

  For the moment, the only international police consisted of the British navy acting alone, often in dubious legal circumstances. The third commander of the British West Africa Squadron, Captain Sir James Yeo, an experienced if unlucky commander in both the American and the Napoleonic wars, reported that many North American merchants were obviously continuing to trade after 1815, carrying slaves to both Brazil and Cuba, some of them using those fast ships with twenty or more guns, which had been built as privateers in the Anglo-American War of 1812. Their technique was to make a nominal sale of their ship in Tenerife, or in Havana, to a Spanish merchant, who would provide a captain of his own nationality, with the real master continuing as passenger.

  An expanded British naval squadron seemed necessary and so, in 1818, Sir George Collier went to West Africa with one frigate, three sloops, and two gun-brigs. His instructions from the Admiralty stated ambitiously, “You are diligently to look into the several bays and creeks . . . between Cape Verde and Benguela.”6 That was an impossible task. Leaving aside that there were several hundred such bays, and several thousand such creeks, between those points, most of the territory was in the zone of tropical calm, where sailing breezes were rare, and where the prevailing wind, if such existed, was westerly or southwesterly—that is, blowing onto the shore. The current was from west to east. All these factors made it much easier to sail down the coast than to sail back, as everyone had known from the earliest days of European exploration. The steamy heat, the dazzle of the decks, the cramped conditions, and the simple diet made this work of patrol exhausting in the extreme.

  In addition, there could be no real patrolling if the navy were to keep to the open sea. Ships had to sail close inshore to know what was happening and, oft
en after dark, send boats upriver. These vessels would be met by mosquitoes at every turn—mosquitoes which, of course, sometimes brought malaria. Naval captains were also frequently obstructed by sandbars at the mouths of rivers.

  There were other difficulties. For example, Collier wrote to the Admiralty that “It is only by great cunning (or great accident) that they [the slavers] can be surprised with slaves on board. In some instances, while the boats [of the naval ship] have been rowing to the slave vessel, the re-landing of the slaves has been effected, and then [they have been] paraded on the beach, compelled to dance and make every sign of contempt for the boats’ crews. . . .”7 On one occasion, Collier himself was fined £1,500 for wrongly detaining a ship, the Gaviao, which, in his judgment, had slaves on board and was found north of the equator. In the summer of 1822, H.M.S. Myrmidon stopped sixteen slavers, of which only one was acting illegally according to the treaties.