The Slave Trade

by Hugh Thomas

  The complexity of these matters was seen in 1846, when the British government followed their repeal of the Corn Laws by a similar revision of the law imposing duties on foreign-grown sugar. This was, of course, an encouragement to the sugar producers of both Brazil and Cuba: Captain Matson, the determined naval officer who had destroyed the barracoons in Cabinda, was by chance in Havana Bay on patrol at that time. He observed sharply how the price of slaves rose in consequence by 15 percent.

  Free Trade created difficulties for British abolitionists. The Sugar Duty Act, passed in 1846, seemed to The Anti-Slavery Reporter, the journal of Buxton and Sturge’s British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, to be causing the House of Commons to vote for the entry of the “blood stained sugars of Brazil and Cuba.” Year after year, these idealists, such as Sir Edward Noël Buxton, would introduce motions in Parliament to reinstate the sugar duties at least against Brazil and Cuba. Year after year, they would be defeated; and the cause evaporated. The affair was the occasion for eloquence, if not action.IV Disraeli’s hero in the debates against the Corn Laws in 1846, Lord George Bentinck, thought that it would cost far less to seize Cuba than to maintain the naval squadron “paying ourselves thereby . . . a just debt.”19 (This speech may have had an influence on the United States Secretary of State Buchanan when, a little later, he made an offer to Spain to buy Cuba.)

  The late 1840s were thus a conflicting time: questions were being raised about a major item of British government policy which had been supported by both parties since 1808. Palmerston and the Whigs had always supported abolition. But now, they were helping slave-grown sugar. At the same time, Quakers, who had done so much to inspire the Anti-Slavery society, were, with pacifist arguments, deploring the use of force, such as that used by Captain Denman on the river Gallinas, and Captain Matson in Cabinda. Another difficulty was seen in the divisions of opinion within the British navy: was close blockade or distant cruising more effective?

  In March 1845, the first of the apostles of abolition, Clarkson, then aged eighty-five, with the great prize of the international abolition of the slave trade still beyond his grasp, presented Lord Aberdeen with a memorandum arguing that Britain would never have the resources adequate to patrol all the potential areas of slaving. Nor was there hope of negotiating anti-slave-trade treaties with all the powers concerned; were it to be done, some countries would have bad faith, and “the cunning, fraud and audacity of slave dealers,” with their fast ships, would always outmaneuver the navy. So why did not the government turn its attention to slavery itself?20

  Aberdeen was unconvinced: he, as well as Peel, Palmerston, and Lord John Russell, foreign secretary and prime minister after 1846, still believed that the trade should be dealt with first. Palmerston, indeed, had always considered that slavery raised an issue of property which was more difficult to resolve than the trade, which he saw as iniquitous.V Russell told the radical Free Traders that Britain “would have no right to further blessings from God” if “this high and holy work,” the naval patrol, were to be abandoned without success. Yet Gladstone, still a conservative, said that “it was not an ordinance of providence that the government of one nation should correct the morals of another and that it was impracticable to try and put down a great branch of commerce.”21 Others pessimistically asked: How could the British navy hope to intercept such fast ships as Dois Amigos, which carried 1,350 slaves to Bahia in 1846, or the Audorinha, a yacht of eighty tons belonging to Joaquim Pereira Marinho, which made a brilliant series of eight voyages between October 1846 and September 1848, bringing nearly 4,000 slaves, and earning £40,000. Was Britain ready to go to war with her oldest ally, Portugal, as well as with her newest protégé, Brazil, over the issue of the slave trade, as it was argued might be necessary by John Hook (commissary judge in Freetown), by James Bandinel of the Foreign Office’s Slavery Department (he talked of “redress by force of arms”), and even by Sir Charles Hotham, the new commander of the West Africa Squadron, who spoke of the existing slave-trade patrols as “perfectly futile”? James Hudson the Minister to Brazil suggested that there should be a general blockade of Rio (“No port in the world is so capable of being blockaded as Rio”). Palmerston and Russell also toyed with blockade. But the British Cabinet were against the heavy deployment of force, even in favor of what Palmerston amiably described as “the common principles of humanity and the fundamental precepts of the Christian religion.” (That statesman had recently told the British consul in Zanzibar to “take every opportunity of impressing on the Arabs that the nations of Europe are destined to put an end to the African slave trade and that Great Britain is the main instrument of Providence for the accomplishment of this purpose.”22)

  Palmerston himself was more hostile than ever to the slave trade. When out of office, he had told the House of Commons in 1844, with some hyperbole: “If all the crimes which the human race has committed from the creation down to the present day were added together in one vast aggregate, they would scarcely equal . . . the amount of guilt which has been incurred by mankind in connection with this diabolical slave trade. . . .” One of his biographers looked on this speech as the greatest of his life, though most of the details which he recounted had figured in speeches by Wilberforce and others in the 1790s.23

  In 1847, when again foreign secretary, Palmerston returned to his most bellicose stance and told the Admiralty that the commander of the West Africa Squadron, Sir Charles Hotham, “ought to be instructed to compel king Pepple and the chiefs of Bonny by force, if necessary, to respect the lives and property of Her Majesty’s subjects, and that the Commodore will be justified in enforcing the payment of debts due to British subjects.” This was not at first sight a matter of slave-trade politics but, it undoubtedly was under the surface. For Hotham instructed one of his captains, Commander Birch, to overthrow the chief priest, Awanta. Regardless of King Pepple, Birch did as asked, and imprisoned Awanta on a man-of-war. Lord Grey, in the Colonial Office, suggested that the priest should be set onshore as far as possible from Bonny, “leaving him to take his chance.” That Whig policy of extreme laissez-faire was carried out, Awanta was landed alone in a remote part of Angola, and no more was heard of him. Soon after, Birch imposed a new treaty on Pepple, by which that king guaranteed to afford protection to British subjects in Bonny, and to accept a new version of the slave treaty concluded in 1839.24

  The foreign secretary was heartened by the long-delayed decision in February 1848 in a trial before the High Court in favor of Captain Denman against the Spanish slave merchant José Antonio Burón, who was convicted of being a criminal by the terms of his own country’s laws. (Burón had been one of those who had lost property, slaves, and trade goods during Denman’s attack on the barracoons on the river Gallinas. He had sued Denman for £180,000. Not without difficulty, Denman arranged to be defended by the government.)

  But Palmerston was still under attack from the Free Traders: William Hutt returned in February 1848 to denounce again “our darling and hopeless project” (that is, the naval squadron) by moving in the House of Commons that a new select committee should consider the best means of suppressing the trade. The motion was carried, and Hutt himself was the chairman. Gladstone, the Free Trader Cobden, and Monckton Milnes were members.

  Many witnesses were interviewed. Sir Charles Hotham, for instance, admitted that, if the trade were stopped in one place, it would be likely to break out again, like an epidemic, in another. There was also Thomas Tobin, the main Liverpool trader in palm oil, who had happy memories of his old days in the slave trade. The committee listened to an ex-slave merchant, José Cliffe. They heard the dynamic Macgregor Laird insist that the solution for Africa was to arrange voluntary emigration of Africans to the British West Indies, with free return passages available. James Bandinel, by then in retirement but for so long head of the Foreign Office’s Slavery Department, admitted that the naval patrol had in no way diminished the traffic. The committee heard how the naval patrol had, in the opinion of sev
eral witnesses, interrupted legitimate trade, by wrongly accusing certain ships of preparing to slave (for example, the brig Guiana, wrongly held in 1840, or the Lady Sale, in 1845). They heard Commander O’Bryen Hoare explain that the consul in Bahia had told him in 1844 on no account to land at that port, since $3,000 had been offered to anyone who would murder him, as a member of the naval patrol; he went on to suggest that, in the interests of the slaves, the slave trade should be legalized to Cuba and to Brazil, and the patrol withdrawn! Above all, they heard reports of naval officers who had spent months on the West African coast, watching for slavers, risking their lives, through ill-health more than enemy action; and they familiarized themselves quickly, as politicians can, with the names of a hundred inlets, sandbars, creeks, and slaving islands. The committee also received a great quantity of papers, of the greatest interest to historians even if they exhausted the members. For example, there was the Foreign Office’s remarkable list of slavers which apparently delivered slaves between 1817 (the abolition of the Spanish slave trade) and 1845: and the Committee even heard the evidence of onetime slaves, such as James Frazer, who brought the reality of enslavement home to the legislators as they sat calmly in the new Palace of Westminster.25

  Ultimately, in 1849, the committee produced a negative report: it insisted that the navy had no hope of stopping the trade, that the sufferings of the slaves were indeed increased by the navy’s activities, that the price of slaves was lower than ever in Africa, and that the size of the African slave trade was still determined by the European desire for sugar.

  In consequence of this, Hutt urged the House of Commons in March 1850 to demand the withdrawal of the West Africa Squadron. One member, Mr. Baillie, argued that it was hypocritical to claim a moral purpose in British policy. Gladstone thought: “If we really felt it our duty to cut down the slave trade at all costs, we should repeal the Sugar Duties Act, persuade America and France to allow us to search their ships, double the strength of our naval squadron, and be ruthless in using force against Spain and Brazil.”26

  This heated debate in the House of Commons would probably have been lost by the supporters of the West Africa Squadron had it not been for the eloquent advocacy of the prime minister, Lord John Russell, who said: “It appears . . . to me . . . that if we give up this high and holy work, and proclaim ourselves to be no longer fitted to lead in the championship against the curse and the crime of slavery, we have no longer a right to expect a continuance of those blessings which, by God’s favour, we have so long enjoyed. I think . . . that the high, the moral and the Christian character of this nation is the main source and secret of its strength.” It was no doubt the right line to take in reply to Gladstone, who had spoken just before. The motion was defeated by 232 to 154.27 Still, an internal report by the Admiralty of later the same year was as pessimistic as the Hutt Committee’s had been, even though the navy had intercepted 625 vessels on suspicion of being engaged in the slave trade between 1840 and 1848: nearly 70 a year on average. Of these, 578 had been condemned, and over 38,000 slaves had been freed.

  Sir Charles Hotham had, meantime, returned to the river Gallinas. Once again a British force, this time led by Captain Hugh Dunlop, entered the murderous estuary and established itself on an island there, just as Captain Denman had done ten years before. Hotham was determined to finish with the slave traders of this waterway. He believed that he could do that by ensuring that the Africans supported him more firmly than they had Denman. He would ensure this, or so he persuaded himself, by a mixture of threats and promises of a subsidy. He knew that Palmerston would support him. So a British force destroyed barracoons (including those of a Spaniard, Víctor de Bareda), liberated slaves, and browbeat the local African leaders to admit the error of their ways. Hotham accompanied this by declaring a blockade of the whole stretch of land. He acted, he reported to the Admiralty in London, with the backing of both the United States and French patrol commanders. Neither Hotham nor the navy received instructions to desist. The Spanish or Portuguese-Brazilian merchants were, on the contrary, ordered to leave by the local kings, bowing at last to this indication of British resolve. The merchants concerned were found requesting permission to leave for Brazil. Indeed, they chartered a boat for that purpose and set off for Rio. Captain Dunlop described how he received fifty-five slave merchants and their assistants on his ship—four Spaniards, the rest Portuguese—“in a miserable plight, exhausted from bad living. . . . Many of them came on board with nothing but their shirts. . . .”28

  Thus the curious effect of the agitation of Hutt and his friends was to strengthen the naval position. Supported by Palmerston, Hotham had achieved results. Most of the African coast north of the equator was now covered by antislaving treaties, and slavers preferred to beach their ships rather than face a British cruiser. Both legitimate trade (in palm oil, ivory, and gold) and British territorial influence were growing. In 1850, for example, the British bought the Danish castles on the Gold Coast, above all Christiansborg at Accra. In 1851, after interminable negotiations and unsuccessful intrigues, Commodore Bruce, with a small force, attacked and captured Lagos, since its king, Kosoko, refused to sign a treaty obliging him to end the slave trade. A puppet, Akitoye, was put on the throne, and, on New Year’s Day 1852, an antislavery treaty was duly signed. A small number of Portuguese slave traders were expelled in March, though several returned within a year. This was a triumph for “gunboat diplomacy.”

  Victory in Africa was followed by another, greater one in Brazil. There, despite the strenuous efforts of the naval patrol, the prospects for abolition did not look promising in the late 1840s. Indeed, the merchants were still bringing in substantial numbers of slaves: nearly 23,000 in 1844, 16,000 in 1845, 50,000 in 1846, and nearly 60,000 in 1847, probably the same in 1848, perhaps 50,000 the following year. British naval reports were full of stories of powerful new steamers, two-to-three-hundred-horsepower strong, such as the Providencia, commanded by a Genoese captain and crewed by Spaniards, which brought 1,400 slaves from Angola. The British consul in Rio sent home a list of suspected slave vessels which landed slaves in 1849. The slave merchants residing at Rio, he added, included two Frenchmen, one Italian, one Spaniard, two Americans, and one “Anglo-Saxon”—a certain Russell. The consul in Bahia concluded a similar report with a comment that the people concerned in the trade in that city included five Brazilians, seventeen Portuguese, three Sardinians, a Belgian, a Frenchman, and one Englishman (Marback). Their ships were of all sorts, ranging from the Antipático, which carried over a thousand slaves, to the Leteo, which carried only 105. It was true that half the slavers sent out from Bahia in 1848 seemed to have been captured. But that scarcely mattered, provided that at least a quarter of the vessels completed their journeys and brought their shining “lumps of coal” into Rio or Bahia to work on the coffee plantations, the splendid old sugar estates, and the rich gold mines of this great “country of the future,” as Brazil then, as ever, seemed. In 1848, a steamship was for the first time used in the Brazilian slave trade: Tomás da Costa Ramos, a one-armed Portuguese (“Maneta”), sent his Teresa to Angola and carried back 1,200 slaves in a space intended only for 400.

  The attraction of Brazil for investment was so great that a small trade in slaves thence from the United States even began. Hall Pringle, a British stipendiary magistrate, for example, saw the bark Roanoke leaving the Chesapeake Bay in 1849 with “six carriage loads of slaves” bound for Rio. He heard of several other ships with the same purpose. Pringle mentioned these occurrences to the British consul in Baltimore; but “he did not wish to know of them.” Many North Americans also continued in the traffic: between 1840 and 1845, sixty-four ships built in the United States were bought or sold in Rio alone and, in the same time, fifty-six ships left or entered that harbor for or from Africa. Profitt, the United States minister in Rio in 1844, had baldly told the State Department that year that the slave trade could not be carried on to any extent to Brazil “were it not for the use made by ou
r flag and the facilities given by the chartering of American vessels to carry to the coast of Africa the outfit for the trade.”VI Much the same was reported by David Tod, who had succeeded Henry Wise as United States minister. He told his secretary of state in January 1850: “Citizens of the United States are constantly in this capital, whose only occupation is the buying of American vessels with which to supply the slave trade. These men obtain sea-letters which entitle them to continue to use the United States flag and it is this privilege which enables them to sell their ships to slave traders,” who continued to use that emblem “until the Africans are landed on the coast of Brazil.” One example of the international complexity of the traffic was the case of the Agnes, Captain Hiram Gray, a vessel which traded regularly between Rio and Philadelphia. In 1843, the captain rented the ship to the most active slave trader, Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, an arrangement made, incidentally, by Weetman and Nobkirk of London. The Agnes went to Liverpool, bought muskets, bars of iron, and other British “coast goods,” and then set off via Rio for Cabinda (clearing for Montevideo). At Cabinda, Gray sold the vessel to Cunha, Pinto’s representative in that port, and 500 slaves were immediately put on board and taken to Brazil, where they were sold at Cape Frio. (Gray was later tried and acquitted at Baltimore for slave trading.) This was a typical event, as the masters of about sixty United States ships sold in Rio between 1840 and 1845 could have testified.