by Hugh Thomas
In 1840 or so, distrust of the British was also even more profound in the United States than it had been in 1824. Was not British abolitionism active in Texas? The emancipation of the British slaves in 1833 caused alarm. The planters in the South believed that they needed their slaves more than ever, while the British, even if consumers of cotton, were seen as a threat to that form of labor. Painstakingly, Palmerston would explain to the United States minister to London, or the British minister in Washington would explain to the secretary of state, exactly how the slave trade was now working, how the bogus flag was assumed, how the fraudulent captain conducted himself, and how essential it was that all American ships fitted out as slavers should be condemned. But the United States would always refuse to concede any right of search.
The United States’ failure to act with respect to the slave trade was highlighted by the curious affair of Lieutenant Charles Fitzgerald’s prizes. This officer in the British navy on the brig Buzzard sailed into New York in the summer of 1839 with two United States ships as captures, the brig Eagle and the schooner Clara, both with slaves on board. Both ships were owned by merchants of Havana; the crews were Spanish, or Portuguese, except for the two captains, who admitted that they “had merely been hired for the purpose of protecting the vessels from capture or detention by British cruisers.” Two weeks later, another British naval vessel, H.M.S. Harlequin, sailed in, with another United States slaver, the Wyoming, in tow. Some months later still, H.M. brig Dolphin came in with two more slaving schooners, the Baltimore-built Butterfly and the Catharine. All but the last named had slaves on board at the time of the capture and, even on the Catharine, the presence of 600 wooden spoons, and 350 pairs of handcuffs, as well as planks cut ready to install a slave deck, vividly suggested the purpose of the voyage; in addition, the United States captain on that ship had on his person instructions from the owners telling him how to convince a boarding party that the Spaniards and Portuguese on board were passengers.
Despite support in New York and Baltimore in favor of the slavers, President Van Buren ordered District Attorney Benjamin F. Butler to prosecute if he could. Butler decided that the captains of the first two vessels could not be tried, because the ships were then owned by Spaniards. Captain Fitzgerald set off with those two, with their cargoes, first to Bermuda, where the Court of Admiralty refused to act, and then, back across the Atlantic, to Sierra Leone. Though Fitzgerald had by then lost the Eagle, the court there did condemn, and seize, the Clara.
Back in New York, the district attorney denounced the Catharine, the Butterfly, and the Wyoming. The merchants of Baltimore who owned the ships were then arrested and tried (Robert W. Allen, John Henderson, John F. Strohm, and Francis T. Montell). A case was brought against Captain Isaac Morris, of the Butterfly, and Captain Frederick Pearson, of the Catharine. Judge Betts confiscated the Butterfly and released the Catharine, declaring that the presence of a suspect cargo could not lead to a conviction for slave dealing. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Roger Brooke Taney, then took a major decision: though a Southern aristocrat by upbringing, an owner of slaves like his predecessor at the Supreme Court, John Marshall, a supporter of the institution of slavery, and a man who had long practiced law in Baltimore, he deplored the practices which, as he stated, had brought disgrace on the flag of the United States as it did on Baltimore. The subsequent condemnation and confiscation of the ships led to a change in practice and, for a time, no slavers seem to have been sold in that prosperous city.
In the last months of 1839, because of the scandal of the frequent use of United States flags by slavers, Van Buren sent cruisers to mount another patrol on the African coast for the first time since the 1820s. This force admittedly had two functions: first, as “a measure of precaution to protect American vessels from improper molestation”—by whom, it is easy to guess: and, secondarily only (so it would seem), “to detect those foreigners who may be found carrying, without proper authority, the flag of the United States.”
Two officers set out: Captain John S. Paine, on the Grampus, and Commander Henry Bell, on the Dolphin.VI Both stopped several slavers with double papers. Paine sensibly agreed, in March 1840 at Sierra Leone, with Commander William Tucker, on H.M.S. Wolverene, of the British squadron that, whenever he fell in with a vessel which was manifestly a slaver, showing any flag other than that of the United States, he would detain her until a British cruiser could make a search. Commander Tucker, on the other hand, would hold every suspect cruiser showing a United States flag till Paine could do the same. When Paine reported this intelligent plan to Washington, he was told that it was “contrary to the well-known principles” of the government: so Paine had to deal with the three thousand miles of African coast alone. Serious Anglo-American cooperation was delayed.
British naval officers in those days frequently did search ships flying the flag of the United States: justifiably in their view; illegally, and arrogantly, in the view of the United States. Take the case of the Mary which, owned by Joaquin Gómez, with a Spanish crew, and with papers which showed that she was a Spanish slaver, was flying a United States flag when she was apprehended by Captain Bond of the Royal Navy. Andrew Stevenson, the Virginia-born United States minister to London, told Palmerston that Captain Bond’s action “would seem to want nothing to give it the character of a most flagrant and daring outrage and very little to sink it into an act of open and direct piracy.”
Palmerston replied that, though, of course, he well knew that “British ships of war are not authorised to visit and search American vessels on the high seas, yet if a vessel which there is good reason to suppose is in reality Spanish property, is captured and brought into a port in which a mixed British and Spanish court is sitting, the Commissioners . . . may condemn her, notwithstanding that she was sailing under the American flag.”15 There had, in fact, been a great many such cases, such as the Douglass, the lago, and the Hero. There was the Tigris, the Seamew, and William and Frances. There was the Jones. Each had its little drama, its minor international scandal.
So Andrew Stevenson replied: “It becomes my duty, therefore, again distinctly to express to your lordship the fixed determination of my government that their flag is to be the safeguard and protection of all its citizens. . . . The violation of the law of the United States is a matter exclusively for its own authorities. . . .” On another occasion, Stevenson insisted that “there is no shadow of pretence for excusing, much less justifying, the exercise of any such right [of search]. . . . It is wholly immaterial whether the vessels be equipped for, or actually engaged in, slave traffic or no, and consequently the right to search or detain even slave vessels must be confined to the ships . . . of those nations with whom it may have treaties.” Palmerston said he could not think that the United States seriously intended to make its flag a refuge for slavers. He suggested that a distinction might be drawn between right of search and right of visit: “Unless some measures could be adopted for the ascertaining whether the vessels and flags were American, the laws and treaties for the suppression of the slave trade could not be enforced.” He proposed that “the right existed of ascertaining in some way or another the character of the vessel and that by her papers, and not by the colours on the flag which might be displayed.”
“I at once assured him,” said Stevenson, “that, under no circumstances, could the government of the United States consent to the right on the part of any foreign nation to interrupt, board or search their vessels on the high seas.” Palmerston thought it absurd that a merchantman could exempt herself from search by “hoisting a piece of bunting with the United States’ emblems and colours upon it. . . . Her Majesty’s Government would fain hope that the day is not distant when the Government of the United States will cease to confound two things which are in their nature entirely different, will look to things, not words and, perceiving the wide and entire distinction between the right of search, which has, heretofore, been the subject of discussion between the two countries, and the right
of . . . visit which almost all other Christian nations have mutually given each other for the suppression of the slave trade, will join the Christian league; and will no longer permit the ships and subjects of the Union to be engaged in undertakings which the law of the Union punishes as piracy.”16
Relations were for a time so bad between Britain and the United States in 1841 that Andrew Stevenson reported home that in London there was a “general impression that war is inevitable.” At the same time, General Cass, the Anglophobe United States minister in Paris, did what he could to prevent France from agreeing with Britain on any subject; in particular, he applauded when, in 1841, France refused to ratify the so-called Quintuple Treaty which had been signed in London (Britain, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia), which declared the slave trade to be piracy and which authorized whatever ships of war might be available to search every merchant vessel belonging to one of the signatory powers “which shall, on reasonable grounds, be suspected of being engaged in the traffic in slaves.” The French refusal to ratify prevented the right of search from becoming a common maritime policy in EuropeVII Cass had sent Guizot, the French foreign minister, on his own initiative, a note warning the Europeans against using force to accomplish their ends.17
An effort was also made by Palmerston to extend the area of the cooperation between the British and the French to cover the whole Atlantic. This idea was thwarted (probably by the influence of General Cass). The issue was inflamed by the rough British handling of the crew of the Nantes merchant ship Marabout—she was not a slaver—in December 1841. A wave of anti-British feeling swept through French public opinion, excited by a nationalist press. Thus even such journals as Le Constitutionnel which, for so long, had been a defender of everything British, insisted, on January 6, 1842, that “philanthropy is only a pretext for Britain’s action”; other journals mocked British “holy philanthropy.” The incident had the most adverse consequences in France for the cause of abolition, which was still commonly represented by the defenders of slavery (and the slave trade) as an English conspiracy.
As in the case of Britain’s relation to the United States, there were more serious problems at issue between Britain and France than the slave trade. The question of policy towards Egypt, for example, had nearly caused war between the neighbors in 1840. Between the United States and Britain, the matters at issue included the questions of the Maine boundary, the Oregon Territory, and the affair of the burning of the U.S. ship Caroline at Niagara in 1837. All these disputes interacted, and the inevitable bad feelings were made infinitely worse by the disputes over the slave trade.
Britain had her difficulties with Brazil, too. Though new Liberal governments in Rio did give some difficulties to the practitioners of the slave trade, they were soon overthrown—not without numerous little incidents between the British and the Brazilians, as when Lieutenant Cox, of H.M.S. Clio, landed in the Piumas Islands, half a mile offshore from Campos, about 150 miles north of Rio, and captured a slave ship with 300 slaves. The next week, when taking water in Campos, Cox and his men were attacked by men working for the slave traders, four sailors were wounded, and the rest were imprisoned. The British chargé d’affaires protested, and the sailors were released, but the Brazilian foreign minister, Aureliano, said, with some spirit, “I would prefer that Brazil should be erased from the list of nations rather than she should subject herself to the disgraceful tutelage of another which should arrogate to herself the right of interfering imperiously in the internal administration of my country.”18
The continuance of the slave trade in Brazil became every day more linked in the Brazilian mind with the question of national sovereignty, as well as economic survival. Even ministers who were anxious to diminish, if not to abolish the slave trade, or who were friendly to Britain, naturally had to avoid the appearance of bowing to that power.
The slave trade to Cuba still seemed to be increasing. For example, in 1837, an English abolitionist, David Turnbull, who had traveled in the West Indies, including Cuba, thought that, out of 71 slave ships operating on the coasts of Cuba, 40 were Portuguese (if probably owned by Cubans), 19 Spanish, 11 United States, and one Swedish. A few ships were even built in Liverpool. He added: “Two extensive depots for the reception and sale of newly imported Africans have lately been erected . . . under the windows of His Excellency’s [the captain-general’s] residence, one capable of containing 1,000, the other 1,500, slaves. . . . These were constantly full.”19 The British commander off the coast, Captain Tucker, about this time reported that the Spanish captain-general now received $16 for each slave landed, the commander of naval force $4, the collector of customs $7, and lesser officials lesser amounts. Slaves at this time cost over $300.
Britain was still determined to maintain pressure on Spain. She demanded in late 1840 a census in Cuba of all slaves: if slaves introduced since 1820 were found, they would be confiscated. This idea caused renewed outrage. The Spanish Council of State in Madrid rejected the scheme as something which would be “the renunciation of authority by the government of a free and independent nation and a public confession of its impotence.” They then went on the intellectual offensive: Had not all the white nations in their time introduced slaves? And, the first official use of an argument which was often to be repeated, had not “the situation in Spanish colonies [with respect to the treatment of slaves] always been better than in other ones?” The increase in slaves in Cuba, the Council added, untruthfully, had nothing to do with the slave trade, but “derived from the marriage and raising of slaves,” as it did in the United States.20
The municipality of Havana added, for good measure, that, if a census such as Britain proposed were to be established, there would be a rebellion of criollos. Mariano Torrente, an economist and littérateur, argued that Spanish slaves had a standard of living “much more favorable than that of the peasants of Europe. . . . What right has Britain, having paid so little recompense to Spain, to demand the destruction of the huge investment of blood and money in the Antilles? Having destroyed her own prosperity in Jamaica, she now plainly wanted to do the same in Cuba.”21 Many other such statements were made which were no doubt approved by the new captains-general, first General Joaquín de Ezpeleta and then General Pedro Telléz Girón, prince of Anglona, who together ruled only three years, between 1838 and 1841. It is obvious that, as in 1817, the Spanish government told their representatives in Cuba to avoid carrying out the terms of the treaty. Captain-General Tacón, in another section of that extraordinary letter of 1844, previously noticed, said as much: the government, said Tacón, “did not allow any doubts that its will was to resist, so far as it was possible, the demand of Her Britannic Majesty to prevent whoever was continuing to infringe the first treaty.” Thus it is not surprising that Cuban officialdom remained obdurately hostile in the face of aggressive British philanthropy.22
During Captain-General Ezpeleta’s time in Cuba, Pope Gregory XVI entered the controversy on the question of slavery when, on December 3, 1838, he issued a bull which, in language which followed a pure abolitionist line, prohibited Christians from carrying out the slave trade. The bull complained that the slave merchants treated slaves “as if they were true and impure animals,” and accused them of fomenting wars so that there would be slaves to sell. Those who carried on trading slaves would be excommunicated. The bull eventually appeared in the Gaceta de Madrid in 1840; and the British consul, Tolmé, asked to have it published in Cuba. The captain-general, the prince of Anglona, refused to do so: as remarkable an action for a consul of England as for the representative of the Catholic king.
The next captain-general, General Jerónimo Valdés, seemed at first inclined to wish to fulfill the spirit of the bull of Pope Gregory. An Asturian, he was a friend of the new liberal dictator of Spain, General Espartero, whom he had supported in his coup of 1840; he had gained his captaincy-general in consequence. As a law student, he had taken part in the rising against the French at Oviedo in 1808; later he had been chief of staf
f to the last viceroy fighting against the independence of Peru; after years of combat in the harsh valleys and harsher mountain roads of that “chamber of horrors” (Bolivar’s expression), he had commanded half the royalist army at the terrible Spanish defeat of Ayacucho in 1824. Now aged fifty-seven, he arrived in Cuba in 1841 and immediately told the slave traders that, after six months, he would seize any slave ships which arrived in any Cuban port. This public declaration, the first such made by a Spanish official of his rank in Cuba, turned Valdés, for a few months, into the darling of the British in Havana. But they soon changed their minds when, in October 1841, they heard the captain-general had taken refuge, as his predecessors had done, behind the lame defense that he could act only at sea against slave dealers, and not on land. But then Valdés did seize some illegally imported slaves, to whom he sent copies of his own instructions ordering compliance with the law: an unheard-of action by an official in Cuba. A Spanish naval vessel even brought a captured slaver into the harbor of Havana in March 1842 and, in June of that year, the captain-general declared it to be illegal to buy ships from abroad and register them as Spanish: a serious blow to those who had been lately in the habit of buying excellent, fast ships in Baltimore. But Valdés was a tactician and a Spanish patriot, not an idealist. He was acting out of what he perceived as a necessity, to try and seem to meet at least some British demands, rather than court defeat by that nation’s destructive abolitionism (as it appeared), and so risk losing Cuba for Spain altogether.
