by Hugh Thomas
The British government, for all their investment in intelligence, seem never to have realized the true picture of the Spanish scheme of things, and persisted in their efforts to seek formal agreements which they supposed would be honorably maintained by the other party. This was a policy which Castlereagh as foreign secretary in London pursued also with Portugal, with whom he arranged a new treaty, in July 1817. That constituted a modest extension of the undertakings previously concluded between the two countries. The navies of both countries were now to be able to board merchant ships suspected of illegal trading; and that meant, above all, the British navy, for the Portuguese had no stomach for such work. Still, ships found to have slaves on board illegally were to be detained, and their captains sent for trial, either in Sierra Leone or in Rio, by the usual creation of a mixed court, British and Portuguese judges being present in both places. The ships would be sold. Slaves found aboard would be freed as emancipados and employed as servants or free laborers to private persons of “known integrity” or in public works. Two months after the treaty, the government of Portugal promulgated a domestic law which announced punishments but only for illegal traders and captains: confiscation of the ship, heavy fines, and exile to Mozambique. South of the equator, slaving was still to be legal, for another five years. The law of 1813 had specified that surgeons were to be carried on every slave ship; but now amateurs, “negro bleeders,” were to be enough. The law of 1813 had limited slaves to five for each two tons of displacement up to 201 tons, and only one slave for each additional ton. But after 1818, five slaves would be carried per two tons regardless.
Further, as in Cuba, the law relating to emancipados proved impossible to apply, and most of the Africans concerned were treated as if they were still slaves: while the sentence of “exile to Mozambique” merely enabled the criminal to share in the continuing use of that territory as a slaving colony.
The treaty, though, caused fury in Brazil. The planters and merchants there, in circumstances wholly different from those in Cuba, began, for the first time, to contemplate independence. There seems never to have been any secret assurance from Lisbon to Rio that the trade in slaves would go on, as there had been in the case of Spain and Cuba; whatever the intentions of Portugal, the merchants of Brazil were determined to go on trading in slaves in their old harbors. Most of them took the British official opposition to the traffic lightly: Were not Brazilian planters still being afforded credit by British banks to buy slaves? Were not British goods extensively used in stocking up ships which left Rio or Bahia for African shores? Just after the signature of the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1817, the import of slaves increased “beyond all former example,” as the British minister, Henry Chamberlain, put it in May 1818, adding that twenty-five ships had “arrived here since the beginning of the year, none of them bringing less, and many more, than 400. . . .” Comparable figures were repeated annually.22
It would be a mistake to suppose that Brazilian independence was inspired only by anger over the slave trade. All the same, when, in 1823, Dom Pedro, the regent, so dramatically proclaimed the independence of the country, and his own place as first emperor, he was sustained by a public opinion whose resentment of the government in Lisbon had been enhanced by its acceptance of English pressure on the subject of the slave trade.
Thereafter, Britain had to deal not so much with Portugal but with the new empire of the south. The first move was made by a Brazilian. In November 1822, Canning was approached in London by an unofficial Brazilian representative of Dom Pedro, General Filisberto Caldeira Brant (the future marquis of Barbacena), about the possibility of diplomatic recognition. Canning explained that Brazil’s involvement in the slave trade would have first to be considered. These remarks fell on unexpectedly favorable ears for Brant, like his master Dom Pedro, personally opposed the slave trade, and even talked of the desirability of the abolition of slavery altogether: they were interested in the replacement of slaves by European labor partly out of philanthropy but also because they feared what a black majority might do. In a later discussion, Canning implied that, if Brazil were to offer abolition of the traffic, he could promise that Britain would recognize Brazil. Brant, for his part, said that he was prepared to wager, but not to promise that, if there were to be recognition and, if Britain were to agree to admit Brazilian sugar, the traffic would be abolished within four years. Canning then asked for the backing of his own Cabinet for an arrangement along these lines, arguing that “the great mart of the legal slave trade is Brazil.”23 But Brant never obtained authority from his government. Dom Pedro’s chief minister, Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, was probably more hostile to slavery than anyone in the country, but he feared the social consequence of immediate abolition.VII Soon Dom Bonifacio was forced from office, partly because of his critical views on slavery. Still, the Brazilian Assembly debated the matter openly and remarkably concluded by only asking for a minimum of four years before the abolition of the trade. A treaty along those lines was ratified in 1826. The agreement was similar to that made with Spain, with respect to Cuba; it provided for the end of the slave trade in three years. After 1830, therefore, trafficking in slaves would be considered piracy by the new Brazilian government. A commercial treaty was also signed, which gave Britain a privileged position in Brazil and, of course, Britain recognized the new country.
But a long debate in the Brazilian Assembly followed over whether to ratify these documents. The Brazilian minister for foreign affairs, the marquis of Queluz, a Portuguese-born aristocrat who had, in 1821, published a criticism of the slave trade, explained, in a remarkably frank letter to the Chamber of Deputies, that, in accepting the British demands, the government was “acting for the good of the nation in conceding willingly what would have been taken from it by force.” Most speakers in the debate, whatever the merits of the matter, complained that Brazilians had been constrained to accept abolition by Britain: it was not the Chamber of Deputies which was making the law, but the “English who dictated it, the English who are imposing it on us, and the English who are to execute it against the unfortunate Brazilians.” Thus Raimundo da Cunha Matos, who had spent many years in Africa, and who believed that “the moment had not come for Brazil to abandon the importation of slaves.” Few Brazilians believed in Britain’s humanitarian motives. Most thought that she must want to ruin Brazilian agriculture in order to benefit the British West Indies. Britain, they even thought, desired to break Brazil’s links with Angola in order to help London to “become lords of Africa.” As for the working conditions of slaves, Brazilian deputies pointed to the thirty-five saints’ days, as well as Sundays, when the slaves of their country could dance and sing, and contrasted that with the hard life which, they believed, obtained in slave communities in British colonies in the Caribbean. In the event, however, the treaty was ratified, and the new country braced itself for abolition in 1830. In Luanda, merchants wondered how they would in future pay for the goods to which they had become used. What legal trade could there seriously be? Beeswax? Ivory?24
Meantime, the slave trade to Brazil, threatened with a speedy conclusion, rose to new heights, just as it had done in Cuba in similar circumstances: slaves imported into Rio totaled over 30,000 annually in 1826, 1827, and 1828, and reached 45,000 and nearly 60,000 in 1829 and 1830. In Brazil, capital was “everywhere embarked in the purchase of Negroes,” a British observer remarked; and another traveler, the Reverend Robert Walsh, journeying from Rio to Minas Gerais in 1828, recalled meeting every day caravans of slaves “such as Mungo Park described in Africa, winding through the woods, the slave merchant, distinguished by his large felt hat and poncho, bringing up the rear on a mule, with a long lash in the hand. It was another subject of pity to see groups of these poor creatures cowering together at night in the open ranches drenched with cold rain, in a climate so much more frigid than their own.” There was, he thought, “such a glut of human flesh in the markets of Rio that it has become an unprofitable drug.”25
Parad
oxically, the defenders of the trade began to insist that Africans were needed in order to civilize Brazil: “Africa civilizes Brazil” declared Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos. At the same time, “heaping barrels of gunpowder into the Brazilian mine” was a frequent metaphor of the abolitionists, who began to exhibit, by implication, something like racial prejudice when they insisted that it was necessary for Brazil to end the slave trade in order to ensure the survival of a white population.
In May 1830, Dom Pedro, in his annual speech from the throne, confirmed that the Brazilian slave trade would soon be declared illegal. But a year later, convinced of his own unpopularity, he abdicated in favor of his six-year-old son; and though one reason for his bad reputation was his continuing link with the now hated Portuguese, another was his treaty on abolition with Britain. Yet this resignation did not prevent a new Brazilian government, in November 1831, from passing legislation which would make the import of slaves illegal. Canning’s onetime interlocutor, General Brant introduced the bill into the Senate. Article 1 stated that all slaves entering Brazil would automatically be free. The police were given powers to examine ships which they suspected of bringing in captives. Fines, imprisonment, rewards, bounties were all prescribed. Various regulations followed, including one which enabled Africans who thought that their import had been illegal to present themselves to judges.26
This radical measure was not passed primarily for philanthropic reasons. It was partly done “to show the English,” as the phrase was: to indicate good intentions but not necessarily to promise good actions. Most rational Brazilians thought that the commercial benefits of being on good terms with Britain overshadowed everything. Others were frightened by recent slave revolts in the province of Bahia. It had seemed for a moment as if African religious wars might repeat themselves in Brazil. Recent revolts had been directed by intelligent men able to read and write Arabic. In the slave quarters of Bahia at this time, there sometimes seemed more literate people than there were in the “Great Houses.” “It was not uncultivated blacks who arrived here [in those days],” wrote the historian Nina Rodrigues, “but highly civilized members of warrior peoples, who knew how to read and write in Arab script, and who sometimes had entered into the service of masters less refined than themselves. In addition, they had the religious spirit of Islam. . . . They were difficult to turn into docile machines for cultivating the land. . . .”27 There had been a Hausa rising in Brazil in 1807, a more general Islamic one in 1809, and less easily identifiable rebellions in 1814, 1816, 1822, and 1826; thereafter an upheaval almost every year. Many whites were killed before the rebellions were at last crushed.
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The Netherlands signed a treaty with Britain similar to that which the latter had arranged with Spain and Portugal, and also in 1818. It provided for abolition to be guaranteed by a British naval right of visit and search. There would be a court in Surinam (as well as in Sierra Leone) to balance those in Havana and Rio. It was agreed that a Dutch naval squadron should be established to the same purpose. This arrangement was achieved without much trouble by the British minister at the Hague, Richard de la Poer Trench, Lord Clancarty, who persuaded Castlereagh to permit him to give presents to those who helped; in the end, though, and despite Holland’s virtual abandonment of the commerce in slaves, it was only the intervention of the new anglophile King Willem of the Netherlands which led his Cabinet to act as the British desired.VIII Though no slavers had set out from the Netherlands for Africa after 1808, some Dutch merchants did continue to participate in the illegal trade to Surinam, as suggested by Heine, in his poem “Das Sklavenschiff” (as did some French ships, such as La Legère of 1823, whose Captain Dubois escaped prosecution on the curious, if romantic, ground that his father had been murdered in the Vendée). Meantime, the Dutch were busy on the Gold Coast in pursuit of “legitimate commerce,” and a fine proconsul, Governor Daendels, busied himself with widening the main road from Elmina to Kumasi.28
But even the Anglo-Dutch Treaty was evaded. For example, the Dutch judge at Sierra Leone, Van Sirtema, intervened on the side of the slavers. This was shown when, in 1819, H.M.S. Thistle, captained by Lieutenant Hagan, arrested the Dutch ship Eliza off the so-called Grain Coast. She had certainly been carrying slaves, but they had all been unloaded save for one, who provided the overt reason for Lieutenant Hagan’s action. Van Sirtema ruled Hagan out of court on the legalistic ground that the treaty spoke of “slaves,” not “a slave.”29, IX
The Dutch agreed in 1823 that a vessel could be condemned if she was obviously equipped for slaving, even if she had not yet purchased a slave. This “equipment” was as Canning had defined it.X Several Dutch ships were condemned under these clauses in 1825-26. For some Dutch slaving continued. The sugar planters of Surinam needed slaves after the Napoleonic Wars, or thought that they did. Their production of sugar was modest in comparison with that of Cuba and Brazil, but they were deeply involved in the crop. Often Dutch ships concealed themselves under French flags. Crews on such ships were often, indeed usually, not Dutch. Then there were some incidents such as that of La Fortunée, which, in 1827, was seized by a British naval vessel and taken to the Anglo-Dutch court in Sierra Leone, since the ship’s papers had been thrown overboard and the crew had been ordered to learn some strange Christian names which could be taken for Dutch. All together, twenty-three ships were charged before the Anglo-Dutch courts, all but one at Freetown, the remaining one in Paramaribo. The latter, La Nueve von Snauw, was in 1823 declared a legal prize, the 54 slaves on board were freed, and the one English member of the crew was tried in Barbados.
Dutch planters seem not to have been able to afford slave prices after 1830. All the same, the interfering activities of the British judges in Paramaribo continued to incense the local planters, and the last British judge there, Edward Schenley, left fearing for his life, after having denounced some slaveowners for cruelty. In absentia, after his return to England, he was found guilty of the slander for reporting ill of planters, in reports published in England.
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British abolitionists, who to the outside world now seemed to include ministers as well as polemicists, had also to deal, in relation to the slave trade, with the complex position of the United States. Britain wanted to influence policy in Washington but found it difficult to do so. The United States had not been represented at the conferences organized by Castlereagh after the Napoleonic Wars, for the traditional reason that the country was determined to avoid “entangling alliances” and was not concerned to look for “monsters” to destroy. For example, when approached on the question of the slave trade in 1818 by Castlereagh, Richard Rush, the cultivated Pennsylvanian (son of the abolitionist Dr. Benjamin Rush), who had previously been secretary of state and was then minister in London, insisted, on the instructions of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, that “nothing but the actual finding of slaves on board was ever to authorise a seizure or a detention” by a British naval ship. The “peculiar situation and institutions of the United States” prevented the kind of agreement which Britain desired. The “admission of a right in officers of foreign ships of war to enter and search the ships of the United States in time of peace, under any circumstances whatever, would meet with universal repugnance in the public opinion of this country.”30 Had the British been able to realize the feelings which the United States still had about Britain’s continuing claim in time of war to be able to impress into their navy sailors on board seized merchant ships, North American statesmen might have been more willing to accept the British position on the right of search. For, after all, Britain was proposing a mutual right; and the scheme was to be limited to a specific coast and to specific ships.
Actually, Britain’s request did not seem unreasonable to everyone in the United States. In 1817, for example, a committee of the House of Representatives urged the opening of negotiations leading to a grant of the right of search and, in 1819, a great lawyer, then young, Judge Story, denounced the clandestin
e continuation of the slave trade before a grand jury in Boston. He recalled the passage in the Declaration of Independence where all men were declared free and equal, with inalienable rights. How could it be that slaves were excluded from that clause? He bravely concluded, with regard to the slave trade: “If we tolerate this traffic, our charity is but a name, and our religion is no more than a faint and elusive shadow.”31
The territories where the trade was tolerated in that time were still Louisiana and East Florida. Slaves were concentrated at Galveston in Texas (still part of Mexico), and then bought by enterprising merchants in New Orleans. Many of these captives were procured, in the first instance, by pirates who, using armed vessels, would capture bona-fide Spanish slavers on the high seas. In March 1818, the Collector of Customs of Brunswick, Georgia (McIntosh), told the Secretary of the Treasury that “African and West Indian negroes are almost daily illicitly introduced into Georgia.” Collector Chew of New Orleans assured the government that “to put a stop to that traffic a naval force suitable to these waters is indispensable,” for, otherwise, “vast numbers of slaves will be introduced to an alarming extent. . . .”32
Florida was still Spanish.XI Many settlements there had become bases for trading slaves to North America, especially Amelia Island, just off the coast at Jacksonville, a kind of Curaçao of the nineteenth century. So great was the trade there that “three hundred sail of square rigged vessels were seen at one time in the Spanish waters waiting for cargoes.” Another center was Barataria Bay, south of New Orleans, a site well known for many kinds of contraband goods in the years leading up to 1820, by law a part of the United States but a private, if illegal, fief of Jean and Pierre Lafitte, two Bayonne-born adventurers. Their technique was to send pirates out to capture Spanish slavers and bring their cargoes, via the bayous, the lakes and creeks to the west of the Mississippi, to the mainland. Jean Lafitte, first established in a blacksmithery in New Orleans about 1810, is a familiar figure in the history of the slave trade, a criminal with good manners, as much noted for his lavish hospitality as for his ruthlessness. Lafitte owed much of his success to his skillful manipulation of a British offer of pardon for past offenses in return for help against the United States in the siege of New Orleans in 1814.
