The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  Still, after a while, slave ships began to be seized by United States naval vessels. One such was the 350-ton bark Pons, with 896 slaves on board which, in 1845, the Yorktown took from Cabinda to Liberia. In 1846, Lieutenant Bisham, on the Boxer, seized the Boston ship Málaga (under Captain Charles Lovett, owned by Josiah Lovett, Elliot Woodbury, and Seward Lee), also in Cabinda Bay, as an auxiliary to the slave trade. The Málaga was sent home to Boston. But the criminal case against it was abandoned, since there was no proof of slaving; indeed, auxiliaries never carried slaves. Bisham also seized the Senator but released her. She went on to take on board 900 slaves, of which 300 died. Bisham was later sued by the owners of the Málaga for false arrest.

  The naval officers were upset. What incentive was there for the energetic pursuit of justice if, at the end of a dangerous journey, and a slave trader was finally seized, they were, if the case faltered, to be faced with the possibility of damage for false arrest? That anxiety continued. When, as late as 1860, Lieutenant William Le Roy, on U.S.S. Mystic, seized a suspicious New York brig, he declared as a preliminary that, should his “expectations not be realized, I most earnestly hope the court will find the cause of supposition sufficiently strong to relieve me of all claims of damage etc. . . .”

  Despite these impediments, the patrolling continued. Thus, in 1848, Lieutenant O. H. Berryman, on the Onkahye, seized the U.S. whaler Laurens as a slaver, just outside Brazilian waters, on the evidence of her first mate. Lieutenant Commander William W. Hunter, on the U.S. steamer Allegheny, seized the Louisa, of Philadelphia, Captain Joseph Souder, but could not prove that she was a slaver. Then he seized the Juliet, 138 tons, from Portland, Maine, Captain Nathaniel Gordon, son of a respectable seagoing family, but again Hunter could find no “equipment.” But subsequently she sailed across the Atlantic, and there were rumors, almost certainly true in view of the later history of Captain Gordon,I that she carried slaves back, though not to Rio. In all, twenty-eight slave ships were seized by the United States navy between 1844 and 1854.

  Perry was succeeded by Admiral Skinner in 1844, and he by Captain Andrew Hull Foote in 1849. As a temperance captain, Foote was responsible for abolishing the liquor ration in the United States Navy, not the slave trade.II He sought good relations with Britain, but the inferior size of his squadron prevented joint cruising, and he no doubt agreed with a subordinate who wrote: “It is the policy of the English ship-masters to represent the Americans as engaged in the slave trade; . . . if, by such accusations, they can induce British or American men of war to detain and examine the fair trader, they thus rid themselves of troublesome rivals.”3

  As for British cooperation with France, in 1845 the latter country at last agreed to establish twenty-six cruisers between the Cape Verde Islands and 16° 30’ (approximately the Bay of Dos Tigres, in southern Angola), provided that Britain did the same. British ships were still not permitted to search ships flying the French flag even if their captains’ suspicions about the real identity of a vessel were aroused. The French too would continue to limit themselves, insofar as power of capture was concerned, to ships flying their own flag and ships with no flag, and they would not seek any authority to interfere with Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian ships: “The effect of the French squadron,” Palmerston said, “is more to prevent than to capture; they effectively prevent any slave trade under the French flag.”4

  Still, it seemed in 1845 that at last an international force against the slave trade was in being. Britain had over thirty ships engaged in the naval patrol, and France had twenty-eight. North American ships numbered three to eight, and even the Portuguese had nine. Neither Brazil nor Spain were making any contribution to naval patrol. But there were in the late 1840s some sixty ships of other nationalities off Africa: a formidable challenge to the traffic in slaves.

  Nevertheless, imaginative slave captains continued to make fun of this parade of an international police. One who did so was a United States shipbuilder, Joshua Clapp, from New York, who first came to public notice in 1845, when he was tried in his home city, but acquitted, for taking a ship of his own, the Panther, to buy slaves in Africa. He then removed to Rio, where he bought two fully rigged ships, three barks, three brigs, and two schooners, several of which he had himself built. In reality, these ships belonged to Brazilians, but Clapp was the formal proprietor. About half the vessels bringing slaves to Brazil were, in the 1840s, thus owned by citizens of the United States. George Profitt, United States minister in Rio, reported in 1844 that the trade “is almost entirely carried out under our flag, in American-built vessels.”5 In 1850, Congress demanded a report from the executive about illegal searches; the report, signed by President Fillmore, stated that, of ten United States vessels recently (illegally) inspected by the British, nine were, in fact, slavers.

  In 1842, Britain arranged that a new equipment clause was introduced into yet another anti-slave-trade act in respect of Portugal. Echoing the earlier convention made between Britain and Spain on the same subject, it permitted search on the high seas, “provided it was carried out in the mildest manner.” The Brazilian Parliament debated the matter. That chamber was against all recent British antislave measures. A fine speech was, however, made by Antônio Carlos de Andrada, a younger brother of that José Bonifácio who, as prime minister, had opposed the slave trade in the 1820s: “I am an enemy of the traffic in slaves. I see in this commerce all possible evils, an attack on Christianity, on humanity, and on the true interests of Brazil. . . . This commerce is carried on for the benefit of one race, is anti-Christian, and I do not believe that man was born for slavery. I believe that the blacks, the mulattoes, the greens, if there are any, are quite as good as we are.”6 But even Andrada disliked the high-handed way in which Britain had imposed her laws on Brazil, and abhorred the idea of British action off the coast.

  Aberdeen’s new “Brazil (Slave Trade) Bill” only received the royal assent in England after long debates in Parliament. It seemed necessary to the Government, since the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1817 abolishing the trade in 1831 fell into desuetude in 1845: unless something were done, Britain would have no legal basis on which to arrest any Brazilian ships. But Brazil would not allow a new treaty. So Aberdeen’s bill declared unilaterally that the British navy now had the right to seize pirates, on the ground that Brazil herself had once accepted that the trade constituted piracy. Any vessel which was apprehended would be tried by British Admiralty courts, not the Mixed Commissions set up under the treaty of 1826. It was a harsher document than any which Britain had passed, or would pass, in relation to Spain, even if it had more respect for the façade of legality than Palmerston’s act had had. Even Joaquim Nabuco, the statesman who was becoming leader of the Brazilian antislavery movement, described Aberdeen’s new bill as “an insult to our dignity as an independent people.”

  Aberdeen received an official protest ten pages long from his counterpart, Limpo de Abreu: Was it not a principle of international law that ships of one state could not in peacetime search the ships of another? Unless, of course, the right were specifically conceded by both sides. The treaty of 1817 might have given Britain such a right, but that convention had by then expired. The treaty of 1826 obliged Brazil, but only Brazil, to treat her slave traders as pirates. Britain had nothing to do with the matter. That treaty had anyway lapsed, and no one in Brazil would make any effort to renew it. The court at Rio was also wound up in 1845. It seemed, therefore, in the middle of the 1840s, that all Britain’s efforts were being made to seem pointless.7

  Abreu soon fell, but his successor, Cavalcanti, an aristocrat from one of Brazil’s oldest families, told the British chargé: “You cannot expect us to assist England or consent to stop the trade while you are seizing Brazilian vessels, insulting our flag, and illegally condemning them.” So Brazil refused to negotiate while Aberdeen’s act remained law and rejected British terms for a new treaty.

  In the meantime, the trade in these years to Brazil exceeded previous records,
most of the slaves being disposed of to the coffee and sugar plantations now stretching along the two hundred miles south of Rio. “All the appliances of this trade were brought to a peak of perfection which is astonishing and which nothing but the immense profit can explain,” Lord Howden, the British minister in Rio, wrote in the late 1840s. The slave merchants now made careful studies of maneuvers of the British fleet in Africa, they devised decoys, and they brought fast new steamers into use (including, apparently, some of “the best that England could manufacture,” as “Hurry” Hudson observed when he was British minister in Rio). The British government’s records suggested that there were over 3,000 slave voyages to Brazil between 1821 and 1843.8 A British merchant living in Brazil reflected, in 1846, that Brazil was comparable to the British West Indies a generation before: “Scarcely an individual exists,” he wrote, “who either directly or indirectly is not personally interested in the support of the slave system, and who would not look with the utmost distrust upon any change. . . .”9

  There was some United States Navy activity off Brazil. A small force had been stationed there to deal with the matter of slaving under the United States flag. But it was inadequate. The cruisers were too large to surprise Brazilians landing slaves in small ships. The volatile United States minister, the Virginian Henry Wise, discovered a United States vessel, the Porpoise, in the harbor of Rio. A man “far gone in chivalry,” Wise had been a defender of slavery when a member of the House of Representatives; and he would, in 1859, as the governor of his state, both praise and hang John Brown, after the attack on Harpers Ferry. Now, despising Brazilians more than he hated abolitionists, he was an improbable but effective ally of the British in the campaign against the trade in slaves. The Porpoise had not actually been a slaver but had been an auxiliary to the trade, carrying to Africa cargoes needed for the purchase of slaves but not bringing back captives herself. Wise asked the Brazilian authorities to arrest four United States citizens on the ship so that they could be sent to North America for trial. While waiting for a reply, he went on board himself and instituted a United States guard at the gangway. No one could land, not even Brazilians. There was outrage in the city, the Brazilian naval authorities threatened to seize the Porpoise, and Wise abandoned the prize. He sent home a dispatch: “I beseech—I implore the President . . . to take a decided stand on this subject. You have no idea of the effrontery and the flagrant outrages of the African slave trade and of the shameless manner in which its worst crimes are licensed here. . . . Every patriot . . . would blush for our country did he know and see how our citizens sail and sell our flag to the uses and abuses of that accursed traffic. . . . We are a byword among nations . . . the only people who can fetch and carry . . . everything for the slave trade.” But all he received was a reprimand for exceeding his instructions.10

  The fact was, as the minister in Rio told Palmerston (foreign secretary in London again, after the fall of the Tory government in June 1846): “Brazil [still] lives upon slave labour. The government is carried on by the daily receipts of the Customs Houses. Foreign trade depends upon exports, and they cannot be obtained at present, unless by that most expensive of all systems of production, the labour of the slave.”11 The United States consul in Rio, for his part, wrote in 1847: “The slave power in this country is extremely great, and a consul doing his duty needs to be kindly and effectually supported at home. In the case of the Fame, where the vessel was diverted from the business intended by her owners, and employed in the slave trade . . . I sent home two mates . . . for trial, the first mate to Norfolk [Virginia], the second mate to Philadelphia. What was done with the first mate I know not. In the case of the man sent to Philadelphia, Mr Commissioner Kane states that a clear prima facie case is made out, and then holds him in bail in the sum of $1,000 which would be paid by any slave trader in Rio . . . !”12

  Most Brazilians, their ancestors having used African slaves for three hundred years, still thought of slavery as part of the natural order of things. In this, they were in agreement with the slaveowners of the South of the United States. Brazilian entrepreneurs also believed that people of Portuguese stock were the European colonizers who had “best succeeded in fraternising with the so-called inferior races,” through manumission and sexual liberty. “Slothful but filled to overflowing with sexual concerns,” the greatest of Brazilian historians, Gilberto Freyre, wrote, “the life of the sugar-planter tended to become a life which was lived in a hammock: a stationary hammock, with the master taking his ease, sleeping, dozing. Or a hammock on the move with the master on a journey . . . or, a squeaking hammock, with the master copulating in it. The master did not have to leave his hammock to give orders to his negroes.”13

  Slave traders continued to seem the “nabobs of the Brazils. . . . They form the dazzling class of the parvenus millionaires,” declared a British naval surgeon. In 1846, Henry Wise wrote to James Buchanan, then secretary of state, a “northern man with southern principles”: “There are only three ways of making a fortune in Brazil, either by the slave trade, or by planting, or by a coffee commission house. . . . The slave traders then are either the men in power, or those who lend to the men in power and so hold them by the purse strings. Thus the government is itself in fact a slave trading government, against its own laws. . . .”14 Immensely rich merchants, such as Manuel Pinto da Fonseca or José Bernardino da Sá, whose main concerns were slaving, dominated Brazilian society. They were the chief capitalists of the country as well as the chief providers of labor. They alone could easily provide loans and mortgages. The foreign minister, Barão de Cairu, told the British minister, in January 1847, with astonishing frankness, that he could not see how any government of Brazil could enforce the law of 1831 or, indeed, any other such law: “I know of none who could do it or attempt it and, when ninety-nine men in every hundred are engaged in it [the trade in slaves], how is it [abolition] to be done? . . . The vice [of trading slaves] has eaten into the very core of society. Who is so sought after, so feasted in this city as Manuel Pinto [da Fonseca]? You know him to be the great slave trader par excellence of Rio. Yet he and scores of minor slave dealers go to court—sit at the tables of the wealthiest and most respectable citizens—have seats in the Chamber as our representatives, and have a voice even in the Council of State. They are increasing in vigilance, perseverance, audacity. . . . What they touch turns to gold. . . . You know my individual abhorrence of this cursed traffic—but . . . what am I to do? . . . I cannot be the man in Brazil from whom all his countrymen would turn away in contempt and aversion. I will not bell the cat . . .”15

  Given that the slave trade to Cuba was no less prosperous as that to Brazil, questions began to be asked again in Britain as to how long Palmerston’s “benevolent crotchet for patrolling the coasts of Africa and Brazil” (John Bright’s expression) was to last. Though the arguments of Joseph Sturge and Thomas Fowell Buxton against naval patrolling had not made much headway, a new, original, more powerful opposition was now taking shape. This was the Free Trade group in Parliament, led by William Hutt, member for Gateshead, supported by Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Gladstone; the first two had close connections with Manchester, the latter had been brought up in Liverpool.III These Free Traders had allies in the Whig Cabinet in the shape of the third Earl Grey, colonial secretary in the late 1840s and a critic of Palmerston.

  Hutt and his friends disliked the threat of force implicit in Britain’s antislavery policy. They thought that Palmerston’s menaces to Brazil over the slave trade were ruining Britain’s long-term trading interests: no good cause was worth the trouble if it damaged trade. They also thought the naval patrol too expensive. Hutt called the West Africa Squadron “buccaneers,” and denounced Britain’s “blundering and ignorant humanity.” Not only, he declared, had Britain failed to suppress the slave traffic, but it was growing (180,000 slaves were being exported a year, in his opinion, rather than the Foreign Office’s figure of 36,758: a discrepancy characteristic of such estimates in that era
of illegal trade). Nor, he thought, could the country afford the cost of the naval detachment off Africa; that expense was serious, since “England is annually weeded of her best and bravest in order to carry on this idle and mischievous project of stopping the slave trade.” Hutt argued that quarreling with such good commercial partners as France and the United States over the right of search was threatening the peace of the world; and that “our unavailing attempts to suppress the traffic worsened the lot of the slaves by making the misery of the Middle Passage worse than ever.” He also pointed out that, merely during the previous five years, the cost in wages of the naval operations against slavery had totaled £655,000, that of the mixed courts had mounted up to £103,000, while 385 sailors had died on the coast or had been killed in action.16

  Cobden, the great Free Trader, who lived in Cottonopolis—Manchester—put the matter even more brutally: what moral right had the English, the largest sellers of textiles to Brazil, made from slave-grown cotton, to refuse to take slave-grown sugar in return? The government, he and his friends thought, were merely advocating “lucrative humanity.” Did not British firms sell three-eighths of the sugar, half the coffee, and as much as five-eighths of the cotton exported from Brazil?17 In 1845, another voice was heard: that of Macaulay, the Whig historian, who had distanced himself from his father Zachary’s concerns, and who believed that his obligations “in respect to negro slavery had ceased when slavery itself ceased in that part of the world for the welfare of which I, as a member of this House, am accountable.” He insisted on the hypocrisy of importing, for refining and re-exporting, Brazilian sugar: “We import the accursed thing; we bond it; we employ our skill and machinery to render it more alluring to the eye and to the palate; we export it to Leghorn and to Hamburg; we send it to all the coffee houses of Italy and Germany; we pocket a profit on all this; and then, we put on a pharisaical air, and thank God that we are not like those sinful Italians and Germans, who have no scruple about swallowing slave-grown sugar. . . .”18