by Hugh Thomas
The government sent Commodore Daniel T. Patterson and Colonel George T. Ross to destroy the settlement of Barataria Bay. But there were always new opportunities. For example, Commodore Louis Aury, another pirate, established himself first at Galveston Island, off what is now Houston, then at Matagorda, also in Texas but farther to the southwest, and finally also at Amelia Island, in order to smuggle slaves (he was legally an officer in the navy of New Granada, though law was not a matter to which he gave a high priority). In 1817, Governor David Mitchell of Georgia (a Scot, having been born in Muthill, Perthshire) resigned his charge in order to become United States agent for the Creek Indians and so, apparently, share in the smuggling traffic between Georgia and Louisiana, where he received slaves. (He was detected and charged in 1821, but acquitted.)
The technique here, it became clear—in the words of Richard Drake, who participated—was for “the kaffle [sic; that is, koffle], under the charge of negro drivers . . . to strike up the Escambria river and thence across the [unmarked] border [of Florida] into Georgia, where some of our wild Africans were mixed up with various squads of native blacks and driven inland until sold off, singly or in couples on the road. . . . The Spanish possessions were thriving on this inland exchange of negroes. . . . Florida was a sort of nursery for slavebreeders and many American citizens grew rich by trafficking in Guinea negroes and smuggling them continually, in small parties, through the southern United States. . . . The business was a lively one.”33
The Lafittes, meantime, established themselves at a settlement on Galveston Island which they named Campeche, where they carried on their profitable activities for several prosperous years: sometimes capturing slave ships themselves, sometimes trading with pirates, such as René Béluche or Georges Champlin, who had seized ships on the high seas. Some of the pirate slaves were sold in the United States, the rest in Cuba.
When General Andrew Jackson seized Pensacola in Florida in 1818, one of his officers, Captain Brooke, captured in the harbor the slaver Constitution, with eighty-four Africans on board, bound for a United States harbor; and Lieutenant McKeever also captured the Louisa and the Marino, with only twenty-three slaves between them. All were plainly destined for the United States market.
There was one other source of slaves: Richard Drake claimed in 1860 (in a work which owed much to the author’s desire to be sensational, but has some merits all the same) that, seven years before, he had set himself up on one of the Bay Islands off Honduras, where he regularly kept 1,600 slaves ready for sale to dealers who came from Havana as well as New York, New Orleans, Florida, and Boston. Some of these slaves, he claimed, “were taken into the great American swamps, and there kept until wanted for the market. Hundreds were sold as ‘captured runaways’ from the Florida wilderness. We had agents in every slave state [of the United States], and our coasters were built in Maine and came out with lumber. . . . If you should hang all the Yankee merchants engaged in [the trade], hundreds would fill their places,” he added comfortingly.
Estimates of the numbers of slaves imported in these years to the United States vary considerably. General James Tallmadge, a congressman from New York and subsequent president of New York University, told the House of Representatives in 1819 that it was a “well-known fact that about 14,000 slaves have been brought to our country this past year,” and Representatives Henry Middleton and Wright, from South Carolina and Virginia respectively, both of them owning substantial plantations using slaves, suggested figures the same. These estimates are probably exaggerations. The subject of this illegal slave trade has, remarkably, been avoided by historians of North America. Still, the most serious student of statistics of the trade suggests that about 50,000 slaves were introduced into the United States between 1807 and 1860; if so, the vast majority of them must have arrived in the ways suggested, and during the years 1807 to 1830.34
Largely as a result of the scandal of Amelia Island, the administration of President James Monroe in 1818 introduced a new Antislaving Act, offering a reward to smugglers of slaves who informed on their associates. Ships would also be forfeit, one-half of the proceeds of the sale going to the Government of the United States, one-half to the informers. Those accused had to prove that the slaves whom they had with them had not been brought in illegally. This bill did not excite much attention, even during its passage through Congress, though it was alleged in the debate that James Bowie of New Orleans (he of the sheath knife) made $65,000 in two years as a result, by first smuggling slaves sold to him by Jean Lafitte, and then informing on him, and so gaining the reward.
In 1819, Representative Hugh Nelson of Virginia, son of the revolutionary governor of that state, and owner of a fine estate at Belvoir in Albemarle County, with slaves, insisted on writing a death penalty into the Antislavery Act. This was cut out by the Senate. But in May 1820, a new bill was introduced which did prescribe that punishment. By the same document, the president was empowered “to cause any of the armed vessels of the United States to be employed to cruise on any of the coasts of the United States or territories thereof, or of the coasts of Africa or elsewhere,” to seize American slavers. He was also allocated $100,000 to enforce the act.
President Monroe sent a small flotilla of naval ships to the African coast. Thus Captain Edward Trenchard, with the Cyane, set off in January 1820; Captain George C. Reed followed, with the corvette Hornet, in June 1820; Captain Robert Field Stockton (son of “Richard the Duke,” senator for New Jersey), with the schooner Alligator, left in April 1821; Captain H. S. Wadsworth, with twenty-four guns, left with the corvette John Adams, in July 1821; and Captain Matthew Perry, on the schooner Shark, left in August 1821. This was the first occasion when the new United States had taken any action as far from home as West Africa. The experience afforded an interesting lesson, but otherwise it was scarcely an effective change. Yet this was the first action of the United States as an international power in the matter of the slave trade.
Of these captains, Captain Perry (brother of the hero of Lake Erie, and future instigator of trade with Japan) would report, “I could not even hear of an American slaving vessel.”35 He was, however, a man from Newport, where his statue now stands in a prominent public place, and his brother had married James de Wolf’s daughter, so perhaps any surprise at his remarkable statement should be muted. Perry did, however, halt and search a French schooner, L’Y, Captain Guillaume Segond, owned by the governor of Guadeloupe, which he was sure, from her cargo (1,000 gallons of rum, 7,000 pounds of tobacco, and a trunkful of umbrellas) was a slaver. But he could not prove it. (He was right: Segond later picked up 400 slaves and delivered them safe and sound in Guadeloupe.) He also found an unquestionable slaver of the same provenance with 133 captives on board from the river Gallinas, south of the Sénégal, the Caroline. France was not then a party to any treaty to suppress the trade, and Perry had to let her go. His officers, however, shocked by the emaciated condition of the captives, offered jointly to reimburse Perry for any loss which he might incur for illegal capture. Perry declined but elicited from the slave captain, Victor Ruinet, a paper pledging himself never to trade slaves again; but, in a year or two, that master was to be found in command again, on La Jeune Caroline and Le Prince de Orange.
On the Cyane, Captain Trenchard, who had Quaker forebears, was more successful: he captured five North American slavers; Captain Reed, on the Hornet, one; and Stockton, on the Alligator, four. (Stockton also fought two duels, one with a British officer, and later became a senator, like his father.) All the ships had been bound for Havana, and were condemned, but the masters and crews were released.
All together, between May 1818 and November 1821, 573 Africans were captured by United States naval captains, from eleven ships. Sir George Collier, still commander of the equivalent British squadron, reported with unusual warmth that his North American counterparts “have, on all occasions, acted with the greatest zeal . . . and it is extremely gratifying to me to observe that the most perfect unanimity prevailed b
etween the officers of His Majesty’s squadron and those of American vessels of war engaged in the same view. . . .”36
That statement had substance in 1821. But there was little subsequent action by the United States until after 1839 and even then, as will be seen, little further collaboration between the two English-speaking powers. Another North American captain, more observant or more honest than Perry, reporting that he had made ten captures, said, “Although they are evidently owned by Americans, they are so completely covered by Spanish papers that it is impossible to condemn them. . . . The slave trade,” he added, “is carried out, to a very great extent. There are probably no less than 300 vessels [of different nations] engaged in the traffic, each having two or three sets of papers.” Secretary of State Adams agreed that the United States ships might collaborate off Africa with British naval ships; but the practical consequences of that concession were modest.
The United States did, however, create her own Sierra Leone. Following the formation in 1816 of a “colonization society” under the auspices of Henry Clay, then speaker of the House of Representatives, eighty-six black ex-slaves on the brig Elizabeth set off in February 1820, escorted by the United States naval corvette Cyane, under Captain Trenchard, to land at Sherbro Island, where, sixty miles south of Sierra Leone, Kizel, a black from New Bedford, had established a colony of eight families at his own expense. But twenty-five of the new immigrants died of fever, as did the government agent, the Reverend Samuel Bacon. The rest went on to Sierra Leone. They were later taken to Cape Mesurado, which settlement was the basis of Monrovia (named after President James Monroe). After some fighting between these survivors and slave traders who were busy embarking slaves onto ships at Tradetown, some miles away, a settlement was established as “Liberia.” Other little colonies were also founded. All these places, like Sierra Leone, were, however, on too small a scale to make much of a contribution to the problems of slavery in the New World.
In 1820 and 1821, another committee of the House of Representatives actually recommended granting the right of search to Britain. But the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was still hostile to the idea. He told Stratford Canning, the British minister in Washington (the self-assertive cousin of George Canning): “A compact giving the power to the naval authorities of one nation to search the merchant vessels of another for offenders and offences against the laws of another . . . backed by a further power to seize and carry into another port, and there subject to decision of a tribunal composed of at least one half foreigners, irresponsible to the supreme corrective tribunal of this nation . . . was an investment of power . . . so adverse to the elementary principles and indispensable securities of individual rights that . . . not even the most unqualified approbation of the ends . . . could justify the transgression.”37
True, in early 1823, Britain and the United States together agreed to regard the slave trade as piracy. For a few months, Congress seemed to be contemplating a real agreement with Britain. On February 28, 1823, the House of Representatives requested the president to embark on negotiations with “the European maritime powers” in order to denounce the slave trade as piracy, and asked him, too, to concede a limited right of search: a qualification which was, however, lost in the Senate. (The lead among those senators who opposed this was taken by the ex-prince of North American slavers, James de Wolf of Rhode Island.) Still, Secretary of State Adams thought that a denunciation of the slave trade under the law of nations was politically possible, and sent to London a draft treaty to that effect, allowing suspect ships to be seized by the navy of any country, but always to be tried under the laws of the country of the trading vessel. Here seemed a real opportunity.
Canning, the foreign secretary, agreed to the scheme, though both he and his cousin in Washington believed that it would be much better to offer a general right of search. He added to Adams’s document a sentence to the effect that citizens of any country captured under the flag of a third power should be sent to their own countries for trial, and that citizens of that third country should be similarly treated. President Monroe laid the amended draft before the Senate on April 30, 1824. A vigorous attack was then launched on it. Senator Henry Johnson of Louisiana, in particular, proposed numerous destructive amendments—for example, one excluding the territorial waters of the United States from the treaty, as well as all mention of the application of the right of search to citizens hiring a ship of a third nation. Such exclusions were unacceptable to Britain. Stratford Canning reported to his cousin that he believed that he was “engaged in a hopeless task” in trying to secure that general right of search which alone, he maintained, could result in a swift end to the slave traffic. The consequences of these discussions—between men who were among the ablest ever to hold the portfolios of foreign affairs in both Britain and the United States—were ineffective; and so Britain was obliged to act alone for the next fifteen and more years. A determined North American congressman, Charles Fenton Mercer, representative for Virginia, tried often, in the next few months, to persuade his government to reopen discussions with Britain. He failed; it was one of the reasons why, at the age of sixty, he resigned from Congress to become a bank cashier in Tallahassee, Florida.
The reasons for Mercer’s failure were twofold. First, the constant interference by British cruisers with United States ships caused rancor (even if they were slavers) since, as John Quincy Adams had warned, United States legislators could not contemplate approving foreigners’ exposure of their country’s negligence in enforcing its own laws. The second reason was that, despite the relatively small number of its imports of slaves in the nineteenth century, slavery seemed in the United States an institution “more deeply entrenched,” at least in the South, than ever. In those years, the South was prospering, and wealth was growing faster than in the North. Cotton planters were certain that slavery was efficient as a system of labor. They thus became busy in the active protection of the prized institution: in eleven states, for example, the death penalty was now introduced for slaves who took part in insurrections, and in thirteen it became a capital crime to incite slaves to rebellion. New barriers to manumission were also devised.
As a last offer, President Monroe requested all governments in Europe to negotiate with him in order to achieve an end to the slave trade. But that well-intentioned move led nowhere. European governments distrusted conferences, and certainly did not like the idea of one presided over by the United States.
It should not be supposed that France and the United States, jointly antagonistic to the British though they were in these years, were also always in understanding with each other. In 1821, for example, relations reached a very low level. That was because Lieutenant Stockton of the United States Navy had seized four vessels off Africa flying a French flag, which he was convinced were slavers from North America. He put United States crews aboard and sent them to Boston. The French government was outraged and, in particular, raised the case of La Jeune Eugénie, which was certainly French, had sailed direct from Guadeloupe to Africa to buy slaves, and had, under the name of La Jeune Catherine, already been apprehended once by the British navy. The French minister, Jean-Baptiste Hyde de Neuville,XII called on Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in fury: “In a loud and peremptory tone, rising from his seat and with vehement gesture [he] said, ‘Well sir, since you think it proper to report to the President what I came here to say to you in confidential conversation with you, I desire you to tell him from me, as my individual opinion that, if satisfaction is not made to France . . . la France doit leur déclarer la guerre.’ ” These last words, Adams reported, “he spoke in a manner nearly frantic, dwelling on the word ‘guerre’ with a long and virulent emphasis and, without waiting for a reply, rushed out of the room, forgetting his overcoat. . . .” (Hyde later became a strong abolitionist, at least in words; in 1823, he castigated the trade in slaves as being “barbarous in a way up till now unknown in the history of barbarity.”)38
The consequences were inglorio
us. President Monroe assured France that Stockton had made a mistake, and that positive orders had now been given that the naval vessels of the United States were in no circumstances to seize slavers flying any foreign flag. No one seemed to complain. The cause of abolition was quiet so far as the United States was concerned.
• • •
Meantime, France, too, had by then made what seemed to be an adjustment to prevailing international opinion. In 1817, the government of the duke of Richelieu announced firmly that any vessel which tried to take slaves “into any of our colonies,” whether French or foreign, would be confiscated, and the captain forbidden to hold any command in future. On examination, the decree seemed to be directed as much against Britain as against slave traders: it was a statement announcing that France would assume all responsibility for her own trade. The decree also left what happened within France untouched, it did not condemn French captains who took slaves to Cuba or Brazil, and the announced punishment was inadequate. The merchants of Nantes and Bordeaux, not to speak of those of Honfleur and Le Havre, immediately realized the opportunities offered by the new document, and the decree seems, not surprisingly, to have stimulated the trade to Cuba and other third countries: in 1818, there were at least twenty-eight slave journeys, mostly from Nantes.39
