by Hugh Thomas
The Wanderer set off for Charleston, then went to Trinidad, with Corrie on board, the master being a certain Captain Semmes. The vessel reached Port-of-Spain, pleasantries were exchanged with the governor and the other British authorities, and then the ship set off theoretically for Saint Helena, in fact for the Congo River. The British warship Medusa found her in the latter estuary, flying both the flag of the New York Yacht Club and that of the United States. The captain of the Medusa dined, with some of his officers, aboard the Wanderer. Captain Egbert Farnham, who had joined the vessel as supercargo, and had once been one of the filibusterers of William Walker,VII the “grey eyed man of destiny,” jokingly asked the British if they would like to inspect the Wanderer in order to see if she were equipped to carry slaves. The British officers laughed: the idea that such a sumptuous boat sailed by such gentlemen could descend to such a thing seemed preposterous. The British officers left after dinner; and the Wanderer, for her part, made for a prearranged rendezvous and picked up 409 slaves aged between thirteen and eighteen.
This United States ship encountered no naval intervention, for, “notwithstanding that . . . the river Congo is the great slave mart to which America vessels resort,” the British commissioner in Luanda reported in 1859, “no cruiser of the United States has entered that river for six months.”
The Wanderer returned to Georgia about December 1, losing about seventy or eighty dead slaves en route, and landing her cargo of about 325 slaves at Jekyll Island, off Brunswick, Georgia, in small boats. A local sailor reported that “a few of them appeared sick, but the majority appeared lively.” Most were then taken up the river Saltilla, in a steamer of Lamar’s (the Lamar), to his Duigbonon plantation; a few others passed by Savannah itself. Over the next few months, numerous reports occurred all over the South of these slaves being seen. Some were taken to New Orleans by train. But the true story came out; the ship was confiscated at Brunswick in December; several of the owners, including Corrie, were arrested. Lamar raged: “I distributed the negroes,” he wrote, “as best I could; but I tell you things are in a hell of a fix; no certainty about anything. . . . The yacht has been seized. They have all the pilots and men who took the yacht . . . to testify. She will be lost certain and sure, if not the negroes. Dr. Hazelhurst [has] testified that he attended the negroes and swore that they were Africans of recent importation. . . . All of these men must be bribed. [And] I must be paid for my time, trouble, and advances. . . .”29
Lamar was soon charged with slave trading and other offenses. But in the summer of 1860, it was easy enough for a Lamar to be acquitted by a court in Savannah. Egbert Farnham also escaped condemnation because his jury was deadlocked. The ship was publicly sold, but it was bought back by Lamar for a quarter of its value. Most of the slaves seem to have been sold at six or seven hundred dollars a head, or even $1,000 and some, in Alabama, were reported to have been sold at sixteen to seventeen hundred. Captain Semmes set off in no time for a run to China for “coolies . . . worth from $340 to $350 each in Cuba and cost but $12 and their passage.” The British Embassy was naturally informed. The minister, Lord Napier, reported, a trifle optimistically, that the event had “had the effect of waking up the American cabinet to a sense of their disgraceful position in regard to the abuse of the American flag on the coast of Africa.”30, VIII
* * *
I “Nace el negro, y desde luego / Por falta de cultura / En un caos de amargura / Se ve atribulado y ciego.” Plácido was son of a dancer from Burgos and a mulatto hairdresser.
II On leaving the island in 1850, Roncali is said to have received a present of 50,000 pesos so that he could continue to protect the interests of the merchants when he got back to Madrid.
III Pezuela had prevented the re-emergence of a slave trade in Puerto Rico, though that island had in 1846 for the first time a majority of black or mulatto persons: 216,000 whites and 226,500 slaves and free blacks.
IV Others involved were William Manuel Basilio da Cunha, and another Portuguese, José da Costa Lima Viana. Other partners included a Cuban, John Alberto Machado, and two North Americans, Benjamin Weinberg and John P. Weeks.
V It has been suggested that Lamar’s letter book was forged in order to discredit a cousin of his, Lucius Lamar, secretary of the interior under President Cleveland.
VI He would resign from the Confederate Congress when Jefferson Davis refused to accept Lincoln’s peace proposals. He afterwards crossed the lines and became a Unionist.
VII Walker, an adventurer in Nicaragua, had recently been executed.
VIII The Wanderer undertook another journey, perhaps with Charles Lamar’s connivance, under Captain D. S. Martin, to Dahomey. But the crew rebelled, and left the captain in a rowboat off the Canary Islands. Corrie was briefly imprisoned and expelled from the New York Yacht Club, but that seems to have been the only loss of standing encountered by Lamar’s gang of imaginative lawbreakers.
36
Cuba, the Forward Sentinel
“Cuba . . . the forward sentinel of our interests in the New World.”
Captain-General Dulce, 1859
THE PLANTERS OF CUBA were conscious in 1860 that they served a major international enterprise, for the island was by then producing over a quarter of the world’s sugar. The Spanish Antilles supplied a fifth of the British market, and three-quarters of that of the United States. It is, therefore, comprehensible that Spanish governments should still not wish to act in a way which might lose the revenue which this saccharine eminence brought, or drive the planters of sugar to rebellion.
But others were unprepared to accept that serene indifference to the cruelty which reliance on slavery entailed. Thus, in 1860, the persistent English liberal Lord John Russell (now foreign secretary again, in a government headed by Palmerston) proposed a conference of the main powers (Spain, Britain, France, the United States, Portugal, and Brazil) to put an end to “an increasing traffic [in slaves] and finally to assure its complete abolition.” Eighty-five ships, Russell understood, presumably from his secret agent’s reports, had been fitted out in the previous eighteen months, and a mere twenty-six of these had landed from twelve to fifteen thousand slaves in Cuba.1
Russell was probably influenced by the evidence of growing support in the British West Indies for the idea of the annexation of Cuba to the United States. Planters there were disillusioned by Britain’s apparent double-headed attitude to slavery, buying Cuban-grown sugar with one hand and seeking to end the slave trade with the other. Robert Baird, writing in 1849, had even said he thought that “Cuba would be a much better customer of England in the hands of our enterprising brethren of the New World than she is at present in the hands of Spain.” Others said the same in Jamaica.
Secretary of State Lewis Cass discussed Russell’s idea of a conference with Tassara, the Spanish minister in Washington. Conferences did not then have the automatic charm for diplomats that they have in the twentieth century. Cass was certain that, at such an occasion, the British would assert their claim to inspect foreign ships. Neither he nor Tassara accepted that the trade was on the increase: “In this policy of the English,” he agreed, “there is something of fanatic self-interest.”2 Spain, too, rejected the proposal of Russell, arguing, with tacit support from the United States, that other powers should not discuss purely Anglo-Spanish matters.
Cass knew that the efforts to prevent the slave trade adopted after the Webster-Ashburton Treaty had failed. But he considered that American captains destroyed their papers only because of the wanton threats of British captains. He sought every argument to defend the United States and, even in September 1860, was ready to announce that his country had reached “the happy condition of having no objects of concern to engage the philanthropic care and sympathies of the government and people, so that their benevolent energies, having no employment in their own country, must necessarily seek it in other countries less blessed. . . .”3
Cuba was on everyone’s mind in the United States during those last month
s before the Civil War. In 1860, for example, Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey, insisting that his department was active in the pursuit of slavers (a boast which, in the late 1850s, was beginning to have a basis of truth), added, in his report to Congress, that “Cuba is the only [legal] mart in the world open to this [international] trade. . . . If Cuba were to pass under the constitution of the United States by annexation, the trade would then be effectively suppressed.”4 That was true, though, if Cuba had become a state of the Union, it would presumably have ceased to be illegal to sell there slaves born in the United States; and the Cubans could have sold their slaves to the Southern Confederacy.
Meantime, the slave trade was still being undertaken illegally in New York, though it is improbable that any slaves followed those on the Wanderer into the Union: all had Cuba as their destination. In 1856, the New York deputy marshal declared that the business of fitting out slavers “has never been prosecuted with greater energy than at present. The occasional interposition of the legal authorities exercises no apparent influence for its suppression. It is seldom that one or more vessels cannot be designated at the wharves, respecting which there is evidence that she is either in or has been concerned in the traffic [to Cuba].”5 The British Consul in New York reported that, out of 170 slave-trading expeditions, presumably to Cuba, fitted out in the three years preceding 1862, 74 were known or believed to have sailed from New York. For example, in the summer of 1859, the bark Emily set off from New York with all the equipment necessary for a slaver: 15,000 feet of lumber, 103 casks of fresh water, 100 barrels of rice, 25 barrels of codfish, 20 barrels of pork, 50 barrels of bread, 150 boxes of herring, two boilers, 10 dozen pails, and two cases of medicines. Commander John Calhoun on the U.S.S. Portsmouth sent her home under guard. But the case was dismissed. Then there was the case of the Orion, under Captain John E. Hanna, 450 tons, owned by Harrison S. Vining, a merchant who seems to have only dabbled in the slave trade. H.M.S. Pluto caught her, bound for Havana, with 888 captives. She was sent home, under escort, from Africa, and some of the traditional difficulties followed between Britain and the U.S. But on this occasion the ship was condemned by Judge Nathan Hall, an honest if austere magistrate the climax to whose parochial life had been his service as postmaster-general under Millard Fillmore. Then, while Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey urged the rather lazy United States commander of the Africa squadron, Commander Inman, to “renew his exertions,” United States Special Agent Benjamin Slocomb found what he described as evidence of a slave company directed by “Colonel” John Newman of Tuckpaw River, Louisiana, with agencies in Mobile, Nashville, and New Orleans. Its purpose was to dispose of African slaves from a diversity of sources, including some brought by the Wanderer, some bought in Cuba, and some kidnapped in the Bahamas. But Newman turned out to be a liar, and eventually Slocomb would assure Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson that, despite the endless rumors, the only real expedition to Africa from the United States during these years had been that of the Wanderer. Stories continued, however, of slave dealing and there were frequent tales of large secret companies, with headquarters in New York. The case of the Clotilde, under Captain Meagher, alleged to have landed 116 slaves in South Carolina in July 1859, may have been a hoax, despite accusations to the contrary by many historians, including the great Bancroft.6
All the same, Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic leader, said he thought that 15,000 slaves had been landed that year in the United States by North Americans. He himself claimed to have seen 300 in a pen at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and also some in Memphis, Tennessee. It seems possible that, in 1859, eighty-five slavers, capable together of carrying between thirty and sixty thousand slaves, were fitted out in New York alone, intending to serve the markets of Cuba. However many were carried, they sold at high prices, well over $1,000 a head (a few extra qualifications, such as some agricultural training or fluency in Spanish, raised further the price). The profit was such that the captain of the New York ship Sultana thought it economical to destroy his ship after landing nearly a thousand Africans in northern Cuba rather than risk capture; the crew could claim that they were castaways. The difficulties seemed merely to stimulate the slave traders to efforts every day more international. By 1857, the British had concluded no fewer than forty-five treaties against slaving on the west coast of Africa, yet the trade continued. In the late 1850s, yet one more new company was founded in Cuba, whose agents were to be found in Mozambique as well as in New York. The crews included mixed Spanish and Portuguese, and the ships included steamboats made in Hartlepool in England.
The Continental Monthly reported, imaginatively: “The number of persons engaged in the slave trade and the amount of capital embarked in it exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been, until of late, the principal port in the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Boston and Portland [Maine] are only second to her. . . . Slave dealers . . . contributed largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organization, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.”7 But after several seizures, the center of the traffic moved elsewhere; some ships in these years even set off, it was said, from Liverpool, England, and Wilmington, Delaware (where the Cuban John A. Machado’s Mary Francis was certainly fitted out)—as well as, of course, from Havana. (The accusation against Liverpool derived from the appearance of the brig Lily, which sailed from that city in 1852 with a cargo of rum and gunpowder. Some ships from Cardiff were said to jettison their coal as soon as they were out of sight of Wales, and head south for the profitable harbors of tropical Africa.)
• • •
Late in 1859, President James Buchanan (well disposed to England, having had a happy time leading in the United States legation in London during the Crimean War) took two decisive steps in the United States campaign against the slave traffic. First, he allowed four private steamships (which had been brought together by the U.S. Navy for an ultimately unnecessary naval action against Paraguay) to be added to the Africa squadron. That squadron itself was also at last moved from its twenty-year headquarters in the remote Cape Verde Islands to the center of the slave trade in Angola. Second, four American steamers were stationed for the first time off Cuba. The significance of the latter departure was shown by the fact that, in July 1860, Lieutenant Stanley, on the Wyandotte, off Havana, reported that three separate individuals had offered him $25,000 not to cruise off certain places of Cuba at certain times.
These assignments of ships were important. Between 1841 and 1859, only two ships laden with slaves had been detained by the U.S. Navy, though many suspicious vessels had been boarded. But in 1860 alone, the United States naval squadron captured eight slave ships, carrying over 4,000 slaves. Off Angola, the naval vessel San Jacinto captured the Storm King of New York, bound for Cuba with 619 slaves, and also the New York slaver Bonito, with 750 slaves, with the same destination. (The captain of the Storm King outmaneuvered the U.S. marshal’s officers, and later the deputy marshal of New York, Thomas Rynders, who admitted accepting a bribe of $1,500 for allowing the ship to leave.) Off Cuba, the steamer Mohawk, under Lieutenant T. A. Craven, arrested the Wildfire. Craven also detained the bark Mary J. Kimball and the brig Toccoa, the latter owned by Anthony Horta, but leased to Galdis and Nenniger of Havana, both bound for Africa. Craven took these vessels to Key West, where Judge William Marvin declared the Toccoa indeed to be a slaver, on circumstantial evidence. He challenged Horta to prove that she was not so. Horta secured the liberty of his boat; she immediately sailed across the Atlantic, to be captured by the Spanish naval ship Neptuno, with 627 slaves on board. The future Confederate raider Lieutenant John Maffitt, on the Crusader, seized the Bogotá, in the old Bahama channel, with 400 Africans on board. (Maffitt always recalled how the slaves broke their hatches with a shout and much singing.) Later, Maffitt seized the brig Joven Antonio, on which he found everything re
ady for slaves. He took the ship into Key West, where José Colón of Cárdenas claimed it. Finally, Commodore Inman, the commander of the United States squadron, on the Constellation, captured the Cora two days out of Sagna la Grande, with 705 slaves.
Yet despite these minor triumphs of the United States Navy, the Cuban slave trade still prospered. In 1859, more slave-trading expeditions set out from Cuba or the United States for Africa than at any time since 1820. Perhaps as many as 170 slave voyages for the benefit of Cuba were arranged in New York in 1859-61; and the consul of the United States in Havana, Robert Shufeldt, a veteran of the African and Brazilian naval squadrons and a man of gigantic frame and great diplomatic skills, would report in 1863, that “However humiliating may be the confession . . . nine tenths of the vessels engaged in the slave trade are American.”8 The British thought that, in 1859-61, nearly 80,000 slaves were imported. These cost $1,000 each, so only the rich could buy them, but there were an increasingly large number of rich men in the island. There seemed no reason to suppose that the state of affairs would change. The size of Julian Zulueta’s new steam-powered ships grew and grew: one such brought in 1,500 slaves in 1860. Thomas Wilson, a British merchant in Havana, thought that “the only remedy is to back the Americans to acquire the island.”9 Joseph Crawford, in his twentieth year as British consul-general in Havana, wrote in February 1861 to Palmerston that there was still no will on the part of the Spanish government, or its officers, to carry out any of the provisions of the treaty banning the slave trade. He thought, therefore, that, “we have to abandon our efforts of persuasion with Spain to put an end to the traffic . . . and proceed to the immediate adoption of the most energetic measures to compel its observance.”10 Palmerston, in a fine speech in the House of Commons that same month, said that, over the slave trade, “the conduct of Spain might have given us just cause for war if we had thought proper to avail ourselves of it.” (The origin of this debate was a motion by Stephen Cave, whose interest in the subject may derive from his Bristol origins, to the effect that the means chosen by the government for suppressing the slave trade had failed. Cave made one of the strongest anti-Spanish speeches that the House of Commons had heard: Spain, he said, “enjoyed a pre-eminence for barbarity in the dark annals of the New World. . . .”)11
