The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Sir Robert Mends, another experienced officer (he had lost an arm in a battle of the American Revolution, while still only thirteen years of age) who succeeded Sir George Collier as commander, wrote from his flagship, the Owen Glendower, on which he would die in 1823, off Cape Coast: “The traffic in slaves has not decreased. Nor do I see how it can whilst it is supported by European protection in the most open and avowed manner. . . .”8

  Disillusion was thus never far away from serving officers, as well as sailors, in the West Africa Squadron. The failures of the squadron to bring back a swift and overwhelming victory, as the navy had been used to expect during the Napoleonic Wars, led, too, to a fall in the size of rewards available. In 1824, rates were cut to £10 a head for a slave liberated. To compensate for this, the Crown gave the navy half the proceeds of any sale of a confiscated slave ship.

  British consuls also reported all manner of ships actively slaving in harbors north of the equator: for example, the Brazilian Volcano do Sud, whose crew, when captured by an English cruiser, H.M.S. Pheasant, in 1819, murdered the boarding party and delivered their cargo of 270 slaves at Bahia as if nothing had happened. Further, the legal Portuguese ban on trading slaves from north of the equator was a stimulus to trading to the south of it, and that included commerce from East Africa and Mozambique. In 1824, fifteen slavers, with 500 slaves on board each of them, were reported to be leaving East African ports for Brazil, where their cargoes were sold for $200 each. Inland merchants in Mozambique had bought them for no more than a few beads each, if they were not kidnapped, and then sold to the Portuguese traders for, say, $20. The excuses used by Portuguese captains to justify slaving were also without end: thus, in 1822, H.M.S. Morgania, Captain Knight, captured a Portuguese ship, the Emilia, just north of the equator, with 396 slaves on board. The captain of that Emilia declared that he had loaded his vessel at Cabinda, well south of that line. But the slaves themselves said that they had only been on board the ship a short time, the water casks seemed much fuller than would have been the case if the Emilia had come from Cabinda, and the slaves had clearly been branded only a short time previously.

  In the circumstances, therefore, it became obvious that abolition could only be achieved if naval force was supported by diplomacy; and what seemed to be several achievements of this kind were soon registered. For example, in 1817, Radama, king of eastern Madagascar, made a treaty by which, in return for his agreement to end the slave traffic, Britain paid him $10,000 a year for three years. Castlereagh made similar treaties with the imam of Muscat and, in 1822, with the sultan of Zanzibar. These were modest arrangements which would, however, be followed by many other, more far-reaching, undertakings in Africa.

  It was on the basis of information collected by a new “Slave Trade department” in the Foreign Office from consuls, naval officers, and travelers that, in September 1822, at the last regular meeting of European powers following the Congress of Vienna, at the lovely city of Verona, the duke of Wellington, the British representative, was able to insist that thirty-five European vessels had entered African waters north of the equator in order to slave in the first seven months of 1821, and 21,000 slaves had been bought. Should not the slave trade be treated as piracy? But at this meeting the idea of joint international naval action about the slave trade was blocked by Chateaubriand, speaking for France. It was not, that great writer now foreign minister insisted, that France needed slaves for her own colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe; nor even that the illegal slaving lobby in Nantes and Bordeaux was overpowering, though it was powerful (Ducudray-Bourgault, president of the Tribunal of Commerce in that city was a négrier). Nor was Chateaubriand speaking thus because of his father’s role as a slave trader; those were matters on which the brilliant statesman chose to dwell neither in his speeches nor in his memoranda. He was simply expressing the traditional French hostility to allowing Britain a free hand on the ocean. He was bored with the question raised so ardently by the English: “It’s very singular,” he wrote, “this perseverance of the Cabinet of Saint James in introducing to a discussion about more important and more pressing matters, this remote . . . question of the abolition of the slave trade.”9

  George Canning, veteran abolitionist since his first days in Parliament in the 1790s, succeeded Castlereagh in 1822 as foreign minister in London, when the latter tragically killed himself, when out of his mind. Witty and arrogant, impudent and cultivated, this determined opponent of slaving had been for years member of Parliament for Liverpool: a fact which showed how life had changed in that commercial city. Canning entered office believing innocently that “two or three years might suffice to sweep the African and American seas of the atrocious commerce with which they are now infested.” He proposed that the powers should boycott the produce of countries still engaged in the slave trade.10

  Canning’s foreign colleagues refused to take him seriously. His “proposed refusal to admit Brazilian sugar . . . was met (as might be expected) with a smile; which indicated on the part of continental statesmen a suspicion that there might be something of self-interest in our [that is, British] suggestion. . . .” Canning pointed out to the duke of Wellington that the slave trade had become even more inhumane since formal abolition, because of the methods used to conceal the cargoes, “which it hardly ever seems to occur to its remorseless owners . . . consists of sentient beings.” Wellington was to press this “scandal of the civilised world” on all the attendants at the congress. Canning then suggested prohibitions on the use of Portuguese and Brazilian flags by foreigners, an international declaration that the slave trade constituted piracy, and a boycott of all Brazilian products.

  But setbacks caused the new foreign secretary to fall back, for the next seven years, on Castlereagh’s own policy of last resort, namely, direct negotiation with individual countries. He thus embarked on a large number of dispatches, numbering over a thousand, on the subject of the slave trade. It was Canning who, in relation to the slave trade to Cuba, defined in what circumstances a naval captain might reasonably suppose that a merchant ship was a slaver, even though no slaves were on board: ships anchored, or “hovering,” off the coast of Africa which contained greater supplies of food and drinking water than could be consumed by the crew, say, of thirty; spare planks in the hold which could easily be used to make a slave deck; and, more obviously, supplies of shackles and handcuffs, as well as hatches fitted with open gratings instead of closed tops.

  There remained, meantime, some inconsistencies in the British position, which were seized upon by their enemies as indication of hypocrisy, if not of perfidy. Thus, when the new republic of Central America formally abolished slavery in 1825, numerous black slaves fled there from next-door British Honduras (Belize) whence, after a difficult debate in the Congress, they were handed back on the insistence of the British governor. It became more and more obvious that to attack the slave trade so vehemently, but at the same time to maintain the institution of slavery, was illogical. Then, any celebration that there might have been in abolitionist circles that, at last, in 1820, slave-grown sugar had been overtaken as the main import into Britain, was effectively dampened by the knowledge that the crop’s successor as the prime import was cotton—above all, from the United States—another slave-made product.

  As was the case with sugar, Britain imported far more cotton than she needed to clothe herself. It was the export of cotton goods made in Lancashire to the continent of Europe which made that county great in the nineteenth century; and Lancashire’s demand for cotton not only assisted, but helped to cause, the settlement of the American Southwest with slave plantations. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, until 1860 and the Civil War, Britain took half or more of the total United States cotton crop: in 1800, the United States sent Britain about 30 percent of her cotton imports; in 1860, 88 percent. British credits to, and investment in, the business underpinned the rule of “King Cotton.” Not surprisingly, therefore, Britain’s continental enemies, such as the
slave traders of Nantes, mocked their island neighbor by saying that she was “as chivalrous as a ball of cotton.”

  In March 1824, Britain passed a bill declaring that any British subject found guilty of trading slaves should be deemed guilty of “felony, piracy and robbery, and should suffer death without benefit of clergy and loss of lands, goods and chattels as pirates, felons and robbers upon the seas ought to suffer.” Strong language, it might be said, for a commerce which until eighteen years before had been carried on by the best men in British commercial life and which, for over two hundred years, had been practiced by royal dukes, peers, and lord mayors. No prosecution, however, was brought against a British subject under this head, though there continued to be a few English-born slave merchants and seamen in the trade to Cuba, Brazil, or Suriname in the mid-nineteenth century (for example, Captain John Discombe, captain of the Eliza, probably an English ship, declared a prize at Freetown in 1819; William Woodside, captain of the De Beym, captured at Gallinas in 1825; Jacob Walters, captain of the Hoop, an English ship, also seized at Gallinas, in 1826; Neil Williams—or was he Guillaume Neil?—found at Old Calabar in 1829, on board La Jeune Eugénie, with fifty slaves on board and all his ship’s documents in English). English traders also procured slave ships for Pedro Blanco, the Spanish chief trader of the river Gallinas, about 1830, and a certain Jennings, who was known to supply cauldrons, shackles, etc., for Pedro Martínez, also of Spain. But, for all such hypocrisy, and philistinism, the British in the nineteenth century remained generally law-abiding. The modification of the Navigation Laws in 1825 to permit free trading anywhere in the world by the British West Indies was an earnest of this proposition.

  Such curious facts of economic life rendered unimportant the various, often grudgingly slow or meaningless declarations of emancipation by new Latin American sovereign states, whose slave populations were tiny. Venezuela abolished slavery in 1821.I Colombia and Chile also abolished slavery after their independence the same year; while Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829. All these countries, as well as Argentina, pledged the assistance of their navies to help Britain, but though the symbolism was useful, in practice those forces counted for nothing. It may be a satisfaction, though, to friends of Latin culture to recall that the institution of slavery formally vanished in what had once been the Continental Spanish Empire long before it did in the United States.

  • • •

  Britain’s efforts to bring an end to the slave trade also included conventional diplomacy with the main powers involved. Each of these countries responded after her own fashion to the British pressure. Each shared the common view, expressed most forcefully by France, that British abolitionism was hypocritical. That this interpretation was shared by many high-minded men, who were not English, is indicated by a comment by Goethe, whose compatriots were not engaged in the slave trade, who had no personal interest in the matter but who, in a conversation with Eckermann, would remark: “While the Germans are tormenting themselves with philosophical problems, the English, with their great practical understanding, laugh at us and win the world. Everybody knows their declamations against the slave trade; and, while they have palmed off on us all sorts of humane maxims as the foundation of their proceedings, it is at last discovered that their true motive is a practical object, which the English always notoriously require in order to act, and which should have been known before. In their extensive domains on the west coast of Africa, they themselves use the blacks, and it is against their interest for blacks to be carried off . . . so they preach with a practical view against the slave trade. Even at the Congress of Vienna, the English envoy denounced it with great zeal; but the Portuguese envoy had the good sense to reply quietly that he did not know that they had come together to sit in judgement on the world or to decide upon principles of morality. He well knew the object of England; and he had also his own which he knew how to plead for and to obtain.”11

  If the great Goethe had this interpretation of English motives, it is unsurprising that the same idea was held by those actually concerned with slaving in Havana, Nantes, Rio de Janeiro, and Charleston, many of whom were additionally convinced that the English were determined to prevent the sugar and coffee production of their neighbors from flourishing by any means that they could.

  In 1818, a new British-Spanish treaty dealt with the slave trade. This agreement was made on the basis of another recommendation by the Council of the Indies, in the teeth of the opposition of the Cuban interests, on behalf of whom Arango, with his colleague Rucavado, acted in Madrid. The British at this time purported to think that, since the Spanish decree of 1804 permitted the trading of slaves for only a further twelve years (by foreigners for six), the commerce was actually illegal in Spain. But the government in Madrid disagreed.

  In some ways complementing the Portuguese-British treaty of 1815, but in other respects going further, the new Anglo-Spanish Treaty provided that all Spanish subjects would be prohibited from engaging in the slave trade after May 30, 1820. Captains and masters captured with slaves would be imprisoned for ten years in the Philippines, and their cargoes declared free. Naval vessels of both nations undertook to report any merchant ship of either nation suspected of carrying a slave cargo; and, if one were found, the ship would be taken before a mixed tribunal at Sierra Leone (that is, not an exclusively British court) or, if in American waters, at Havana (the arrangements were similar to those provided for British-Portuguese collaboration). The “right of search” was, of course, in Castlereagh’s mind “indispensable. It is the basis of the whole,” he thought. But the need to establish that slaves were on board before that right was exercised would be a hindrance to the patrol, as time would show.

  Another clause of the treaty provided that, when a tribunal declared a ship a prize, that vessel would be sold, and the two governments would share the profits; the slaves found aboard would receive a certificate of freedom. These emancipados, as they were known, were then to be delivered to the governments at the city where the tribunal had made its decision. Finally, in a provision which caused much criticism in London, the British agreed to pay £400,000 as compensation for the losses suffered hitherto by the Spaniards. The sum was questioned by the House of Commons, even if Brougham said that the agreement was cheaply bought.

  Many Spanish slave ships had been seized in the eight years 1810-1817, and some Spanish lives had been lost in resisting capture. The Cuban planters’ man in London, W. H. G. Page, persuaded Dr. Joseph Phillimore, member of Parliament for Saint Mawes (and also Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford) to raise the question of compensation for those ships illegally confiscated. But the Foreign Office thought that all such claims should be referred to the Spanish government. Britain implied to the Spanish ambassador, still the count of Fernán Núñez, that they were reluctant to make any concessions to Spain, even over obvious wrongdoing by British naval officers, until the slave trade had been fully abolished in Madrid. Admittedly, the ships intercepted by the British navy constituted only a tiny percentage of the boats which set out: in the eighteen months from January 1816 to September 1817 alone about 150 vessels set off for Africa from Havana, nine from Trinidad, thirty from Santiago de Cuba, and sixteen from Matanzas.

  The king of Spain did not, however, pass on his £400,000 to the negreros of Cuba. He bought five frigates and three ships of the line from the tsar of Russia in which to send out more soldiers to recapture his dominions in South America. The chance of making this desirable purchase (a “negocio escandaloso” for some) was one of the reasons why the treaty was signed in the first place.

  The British had been active in Madrid before this treaty was signed. Charles Vaughan, the British minister, talked to every member of the Council of State. He also distributed copies of a pamphlet, Bosquejo del comercio en esclavos, by the liberal writer Blanco White. But he had to pass on to London the news that the planters of Havana had offered $2 million to the Spanish government to be allowed to maintain the trade legally, and another $500,0
00 every year afterwards while the private permission remained. In the event, it was the influential General Castaños—the captain-general of Catalonia, who at Bailén in 1808 had inflicted on Napoleon his first defeat—who persuaded the king to concede over the issue in the interest of maintaining good relations with Britain. Spain, he said, needed British help against the United States’ threats both to New Spain and to Florida.

  Wilberforce praised God for the agreement; and if, in the debate on the matter in the House of Commons, Sir Oswald Mosley, the Whig member for Midhurst, declared that “it was not for us to teach Spain humanity,” the enlightened Sir James Mackintosh commented that “the Right of Search was practical abolition.” But it soon became clear that the treaty in practice would mean less than it seemed at first sight.12

  Before signing this document, José García de León y Pizarro, Spain’s new foreign minister, wrote to the authorities in Puerto Rico and Cuba (now provinces, instead of colonies, of Spain), urging that they seek to arrange that slave ships in the next three years should carry women as at least one-third of their cargo, so that, “by propagating the species, the abolition of the slave trade may be less noticeable in the future.” The tone of Pizarro’s letter suggests that he at least hoped to cajole what remained of the empire into a genuine acceptance of abolition. But his “Virginian solution” was rejected by a Cuba determined to develop her sugar industry in the same style as that of her neighbors in Jamaica, Brazil, and Saint-Domingue. For the other surviving parts of the empire, such as Mexico, Madrid’s concession was of no great importance.

  The news of the treaty reached Havana in February, and a longer letter from the foreign minister arrived in March (since the treaty had been signed in September, and Havana was then only four weeks away by fast ship, it would seem that the ministers in Madrid took an inordinately long time wondering how to express themselves). The governor, General José Cienfuegos, nephew of the enlightened statesman of the previous century, Jovellanos, summoned a meeting of the Real Consulado. Representatives of the old families of Cuba were all there: Ignacio Pedroso; the Marquis Cárdenas de Montehermoso; Manuel de Ibarra; and Ciriaco de Arango, a cousin of the economist. Also present was a member of the new generation of dealers in slaves, mostly peninsula-born but now a major economic power in Havana, Santiago de la Cuesta y Manzanal, the well-known merchant of giant physique, who appeared “so large that he looks as if he kept all his money within himself for safety.”13