by Hugh Thomas
Some of these businessmen, like Bernardino da Sá, had, as will be seen, interests in Africa in the form of factories or barracoons, where slaves in Angola or Mozambique could be held before they were shipped.
Lesser merchants, the so-called volantes, might sail themselves to Africa in small boats and bring back, say, forty slaves. The slave trade employed many thousands of people. For example, there were the owners and crews of boats who escorted the slaves ashore, the guards who took the slaves inland, and also the teachers of Portuguese whose task was to enable Africans to speak the language of the empire. Port officials, underpaid bureaucrats, small-scale judges and police chiefs, army officers and naval officers all shared in both profits and bribes, the last sometimes themselves made in the form of slaves. The secretary of the Portuguese legation in Rio was said to receive a thousand milréis each time he allowed a slave ship to leave harbor under a Portuguese flag. A certain Colonel Vasques made the fortress of São João, at the entrance of the harbor of Rio, into a slave depot from which he himself landed over 12,000 slaves in 1838 and 1839, and the commander of the adjacent fortress of Santa Cruz did the same. Officials or magistrates who refused to collaborate could go in fear of their lives, as occurred in the case of Agostinho Moreira Guerra, a judge whose criticism of the slave trade led to threats of assassination and his resignation in 1834.
Two regents of Brazil,III Nicolau Vergueiro and Pedro de Araújo Lima, later marquis of Olinda, seem to have been themselves engaged in trading slaves; the former was directly concerned through a company over which he presided and which bore his name.
For a time in the 1830s, all the same, the government seemed to condemn the trade: “The shameful and infamous traffic in blacks continues on all sides,” the Minister of Justice Feijó complained in 1832, because, he added, the authorities themselves were “interested in the crime.”4 Brazilian warships seized one or two slavers. But in the end the perceived needs of the planters, and the wealth of the merchants, succeeded in reducing such intervention to naught. Most magistrates and governors of provinces were prepared to connive at slave dealing, for they themselves were usually landowners and slave employers. Slave ships were openly insured.
Coffee was Brazil’s biggest export in the 1830s, and slaves on farms providing those beans constituted the largest division of the captive labor force in the country. The convention, as so often noticed before in respect of the sugar industry, was that this army of Africans had to be constantly replenished, as a result of deaths from disease, overwork, and excessively brutal discipline. The owners continued feckless in their attitudes to their slave property: one planter asserted that the high death rate “did not represent any loss to him for, when he bought a slave, it was with the intention of using him for a year, longer than which few could survive, but that he got enough work out of him not only to repay this initial investment, but even to show a good profit.” The shortage of slaves initiated yet one more innovation in the history of slaving: theft. In the 1820s and 1830s, the newspapers of Rio were full of stories of gangs organized for stealing slaves in the capital, men working for the benefit of planters or ranchers in the north. O Diario de Pernambuco in 1828 reported: “It is public knowledge that slave-stealing goes on in this city almost daily, and that there are men who make a business of this. Some entice and lure the blacks. . . . they meet in the streets, others take them into their homes and keep them there until they can be put aboard ship or otherwise be got out of the city; others make a deal with the first ones they meet and take them to some distant place to sell them.”5 In 1846, Father Lopes Gama, in his O Sete de Setembro, would even accuse planters from illustrious families, including the Cavalcantis and the Rego Barroes, of slave stealing.
By the late 1830s, imports of slaves into Brazil had reached “fearful and impressive” levels, according to the British minister in Rio (whose legation was virtually the abolitionist headquarters on the continent). The illegal trade was now responsible every year for landing over 45,000 slaves. The law of 1831 was a dead letter. One conservative prime minister, Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, declared, before he entered office: “Let the English carry into execution this treaty which they have forced upon us by abusing their superior power; but to expect that we should co-operate with [them] . . . in these speculations, gilded with the name of humanity, is unreasonable.”6 In 1836, a report was published in Rio which sought to show that the slave trade was to the benefit of the slaves; “without slavery,” the author went on to ask, “what would become of America’s export trade?IV Who would work the mines? The fields? Carry on the coastal trade?”7
In the early days of the illegal trade, planters in Brazil had feared British threats and the commercial consequences of a serious quarrel with London. But by the late 1830s, they were more perturbed by fears of a successful black revolution, as had occurred in Haiti. They had reason to be anxious. For another serious rebellion of slaves, the “revolt of Malé,” with a strong Islamic undercurrent, broke out in 1835. It was repressed with brutality: whippings with five hundred or even more strokes were common punishments for mullahs accused merely of teaching friends to read the Koran in Arabic. Even the planter-dominated legislature of Bahia began in consequence to talk of ending the slave trade, with the corollary that the large population of free Africans of Brazil should be expelled and re-established in a new Sierra Leone or Liberia in Africa. A distinction then began to be made between those freed slaves who had come originally from Africa, and who, it was thought, might reasonably be deported; and those who had been born in Brazil, of slave parents, who might be expected to remain. Some of the former, horrified at the unjust punishments which they had seen (they were usually carried out in public), did set off on return journeys to Africa. One of these was in 1836 on the English schooner Nimrod, hired by two rich Brazilian free blacks. It returned 150 slaves to Elmina, Winneba, and Agué on the Gold Coast. What then happened to them is obscure. But it was in this atmosphere that, in the summer of 1837, Canning’s ex-interlocutor, the marquis of Barbacena, introduced a new bill on the slave trade into the Brazilian Assembly. He was unsuccessful; but he comforted himself that Wilberforce had had to wait for nearly twenty years between his first move against the trade and his triumph in 1807.
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Cuba, alongside Brazil, was the other great consumer of slaves from Africa in the nineteenth century. In comparison, Mexico, independent after 1822, now could only afford about 3,000, concentrated in the regions of Veracruz and Acapulco. It was easy enough for the conservative criollos who ran that country after independence to prohibit the slave trade in 1824, and even to suppress the institution itself in 1829: Indian workers were available. But Cuba was different.
In the early part of the century, it seemed that the island might be known as much for its coffee as for its sugar, but that dream vanished when the two thousand or so coffee plantations in Cuba (which, for a time in the 1830s, exceeded the land under sugar cane) were ruined by hurricanes. Sugar had anyway captured the imagination of the Cuban criollos. There were nearly a thousand sugar plantations in 1827, more than twice as many as in the late eighteenth century. The average number of slaves on these was about seventy, some of them being specialized drivers or engineers.V
The biggest Cuban sugar mill, San Martin, which belonged for many years to a company in which the queen regent of Spain was a prominent shareholder, employed 800 slaves and in 1860 produced 2,670 tons of sugar a year; in comparison, the biggest Jamaican estate, in the great days of that island’s prosperity, a hundred years before, belonging to Philip Pittucks, had employed only 280 slaves and produced less than 200 tons. The difference was thus enormous.
Probably the slave population of Cuba was 200,000 in 1817, or two-fifths of Cuba’s population. Slaves were everywhere to be seen, above all as servants in the city of Havana, whose 100,000 inhabitants made it one of the great cities of the Americas, ranking in size after the City of Mexico and Lima, and before Boston and New York. There
was a relatively large number of free blacks: say, 24,000, perhaps 12 percent of the total population. This was the consequence partly of a tradition of owners’ granting favorite slaves their freedom on their deathbed, and partly of a custom enabling purchase of freedom, sometimes done on the basis of payments over many years (coartación). In 1825, Humboldt commented: “In no part of the world where slavery exists is manumission so frequent as in the island of Cuba.”8, VI Mulattoes, too, were more numerous than elsewhere in the Caribbean, the women being the heroines in a thousand songs about returning Spanish entrepreneurs, the “indianos” of many novels.
Slaves in the city of Havana were often looked after well: “You see pampered slaves exceedingly well treated, and indulged over much; but the contrast between them and the slaves on the plantations is as great as can well be conceived. . . . It is the worst sort of slavery I have seen anywhere,” remarked the outspoken British consul David Turnbull in 1850.10 A businessman, Joseph Liggins, from the same country, in Cuba in 1852, said that his impression was that the slaves worked eighteen hours a day, and seven days a week during the six-month harvest. So “the annual mortality is considerable and the deficiency is, of course, supplied by the slave trade.”11 The priests made sure that the slaves were baptized at birth or capture, and absolved on their deathbed, but on no other occasion did the Church pay much attention. Despite the high-flown doubts of the Vatican on the matter, articulated every fifty years or so, in the most direct of language, no priests in Cuba seem to have admonished their flock for buying, or even selling, slaves. Indeed, the sales of slaves were sometimes announced in church for the following Sunday, “before the church doors.” The British commissioners in Havana commented in 1826: “The exhortations of the clergy upon this subject [that is, the slave trade] are, we suspect, neither zealously given nor seriously listened to.”12
Slaves were similarly to be seen in Puerto Rico, though her landowners never embarked on the grandiose exploitation of sugar and coffee which characterized Cuba. The import of slaves into that island was about 1,250 a year in the 1820s. But that trade seems to have been extinct on a regular basis by 1835,VII for economic rather than moral reasons. Still, as Lord Palmerston once pointed out, in relation to Cuba, “a feeling which arises from other circumstances is perhaps as sure a foundation on which to build upon as one that arises from moral opinion.”13
The prosperous Cuban colony offered a good example, in the first half of the nineteenth century, of an old oligarchy adapting itself to a new industry. Some of the families who controlled the production of coffee and sugar in Cuba in 1820 had been landowners for generations. Several were noblemen, many more would become so (a good and cheap way of keeping the planters loyal), and sometimes their titles were most agreeable: there was a Marqués de la Real Proclamación and a Marqués de las Delicias, as well as a Marqués del Prado Ameno. Their family connections were endless, their hospitality generous. They were adapting to new technology. In 1827, fifty out of the thousand or so sugar plantations were driven by steam engines. Steamboats carried slaves from Africa; and railways—introduced in Cuba before Spain—carried sugar to the ports.VIII
As in Brazil, the British attitude to the slave trade after 1820 was considered either absurd or Machiavellian. The British commissary judge Henry Kilbee wrote in 1825 to Canning: “It is universally believed that abolition was a measure which Great Britain, under the cloak of philanthropy, but really influenced by jealousy of the prosperity of this island, forced upon Spain by threats or other means.” There were, of course, many who still remembered the thousands of slaves brought from Africa before 1807 by firms such as Baker and Dawson of Liverpool, and sold successfully by that company’s Cuban representative, Philip Allwood. Many of the slaves so imported were still alive. Cuesta y Manzanal had also used experienced Englishmen to teach backward Spanish sailors how to carry out the trade when he and his partners first began to send ships to Africa for slaves.
In Cuba, after 1825, in the light of the unrest of slaves and the threats of rebellions by criollos against Spanish imperial authority, despotic powers had been given to the Spanish governors, the captains-general. Brazil had a parliamentary assembly, however ineffective it might seem, and a free press, however little it might feel inclined to criticize the status quo. True, Cuba sent deputies to the Cortes in Madrid, but that legislature was often bypassed, and was never strong, while the Cuban deputies were a tiny minority among many whose main attention was concentrated on pressing domestic problems. In any case, after 1838, the Cuban deputies were not seated any more.
In Cuba, the illegal slave trade began earlier than it did in Brazil, and it lasted longer. The Spanish official who managed the transition from legal to illegal trading in Cuba was the skillful and cynical treasurer, Alejandro Ramírez. He dominated captains-general and slave merchants alike. Just after his death, a new captain-general, General Francisco Dionisio Vives, arrived in Havana and confirmed all Ramirez’s innovations, in which he was afterwards helped by the new treasurer, Claudio Martínez de Pinillos. Vives, who was sixty years of age when he went to Cuba, and who had served throughout the peninsular war, could, like his predecessors, justify, to himself as to the king of Spain, his support for the slave trade by reference to the necessity of pleasing the planters at a time when there were possibilities of a liberal invasion from Venezuela inspired by Bolívar, and rumors of other plots which could have led to the independence of the island—something which every Spaniard hoped to prevent, because of the every day greater importance of Cuba in the Spanish economy.
Vives, an Anglophobe through and through, sometimes insisted to English and North American visitors that he had done what he could to prevent the continuation of the slave trade: had he not permitted, in January 1826, the circulation of a letter from the archbishop of Cuba to all parish priests that they should look on the trade as “a true crime”? But privately he had written the previous year to his minister of foreign affairs: “I conceal the existence of the slave trade and the introduction of slaves as much as is possible, given the treaty obligations, because I am completely convinced that, if there is no slave labor, the island’s wealth will disappear within a few years, for prosperous agriculture is dependent upon these laborers and, at the moment, there is no other means of obtaining them.” (No doubt he had seen, or knew of, the letter sent by the king in 1817 asking for the trade to continue, to which Governor-General Tacón referred in the 1840s.14, IX)
When the British complained that, though they had pointed out that a slave ship, the Mágico, had landed half its slaves before being captured by the British naval schooner, the Union, Vives insisted that it was not his business to prosecute the slave trade when the captives had reached land. A similar dispute occurred with respect to the Spanish schooner Minerva, in August 1826. The ship was chased into the harbor of Havana by two British cruisers. One British captain then sought unsuccessfully to search the ship. Thwarted, he placed a watch and, at night, he and his colleagues observed six boatloads of slaves being landed from the Minerva at a wharf. Vives refused to allow any case to be heard by the court of mixed commission since the events complained of had not occurred on the high seas.
As well as privately backing the slave trade, Vives encouraged gambling, neglected dealing with robbery in the streets, smiled on corruption of every kind, and even turned a blind eye to piracy (a gang of Muslim pirates were for a time active in the bay of Havana). “Si vives como Vives, vivirás,” it was said of him in Havana, “if you live as Vives lives, you will live well.” He became count of Cuba on his return to Spain in 1832: the only time that that appropriate title was granted.
Between Vives and Kilbee, the British judge in Havana, there was a permanent duel. Kilbee was energetic and ambitious, and wanted to offer rewards to informers who observed breaches of the treaty. He wished slaveholders to prove that they had obtained their slaves legally. But Spanish officials insisted that, since the trading of slaves within the island was not prohibited, the
scheme was pointless and the idea of rewards impracticable. Kilbee could point out innumerable cases of the law being broken. From merely reading El Diario del Gobierno, he could see that over forty slavers set out from Havana in the eight months June 1824 to January 1825. The information was passed on to Canning in London who, in turn, informed the minister in Madrid, and asked him to tell the Foreign Ministry there that, unless they supported Britain over the slave trade, they could not expect help with their own weak position in the Caribbean in relation to the United States and France.
It is true that, in 1826, the Spanish government proclaimed that any slave who proved his own illegal importation could claim to be free. Logbooks of ships coming from Africa were also henceforth to be given to the port authorities, so that the latter could assure themselves that no slaves had been introduced. Kilbee and his staff, isolated moralists in a labyrinth of evasion, were for a time encouraged by these innovations. But the port authorities were slow, and the logs always bland, even when there was evidence that, as in the case of the brig Breves in 1827, the vessel had landed 400 slaves on the coast near Havana. Kilbee reported to London that such things were “regarded by the public as marks of the ingenuity displayed by this government in thwarting the attempt made by His Majesty’s commissioners.”15
Nor had there been anything like a permanent solution of the problem of the emancipados. In the 1830s, most of them had been allocated to individuals—perhaps 3,800 were disposed of in 1832—and were working as slaves in all but name. The government ensured that as many as possible were allocated to work on public projects, such as aqueducts, or prisons. But the continuing threat, as it seemed to be, of the arrival of new free labor from Africa disturbed the criollos’ peace of mind; the entry, for instance, of H.M.S. Speedwell, with over 600 slaves from the slaver Águila, caused much anxiety. The new treasurer, Martínez de Pinillos, begged the new British judge to send the men to Sierra Leone. But that needed an agreement between the governments of London and Madrid. In the short term the “liberated” Africans were distributed in the old way, as laborers were throughout the island.
