Circa1865

The following commentary regarding past slavery in the United States is excerpted from a recent editorial from the editors of Chronicles Magazine. It is an excellent review and consideration of America’s past with a proper dose of perspective added.

American Slavery Reconsidered

“Some historical perspective may be helpful here. When the United States came into being in the late 18^th century, human slavery existed in much of the world, including in the British and French empires, and perhaps most brutally in Africa, from whence most of America’s slave came.

If slavery were a collective sin, it existed everywhere since the dawn of humanity as a desirable form of labor. The American South did not produce a slave system of unsurpassed brutality, but one that allowed the slave population to multiply at an unsurpassed rate for servile labor. We may point this out even when speaking about an institution that we are well rid of.

We’ve never bought the argument that slavery was especially wicked on these shores because of the passage in the Declaration of Independence about all men being equal. The French proclaimed their Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens in August 1789 but still maintained a vast slave population in the West Indies. Robert Paquette, a leading historian of slavery in the western hemisphere, raises the rhetorical question:

Does anyone think that a slave in 19^th century Virginia would have preferred being relocated to a sugar plantation in Cuba or Brazil, or to becoming a serf in Russia or China? Unlikely.

Paquette also finds it remarkable that the data he learned as a university student from a Jewish Marxist professor, Robert Fogel, about the relatively benign condition of slaves in the American South (relative to other places where slavery was practiced) can no longer be discussed even in supposedly conservative journals.

Jefferson wanted slaves gradually freed and colonized outside the United States. Although Lincoln changed course [in later 1862 to obtain black troops], he too long favored the settlement of manumitted slaves in Haiti or Central America.

There is also no evidence that most of those who died in the Civil War gave their lives specifically to rid this country of slavery. It is also inconceivable that slavery would not have disappeared even without the bloodbath that Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern States brought about. Slavery disappeared elsewhere without the catastrophe that befell the United States in the 1860s.”

(Chronicles Magazine, April/May 2021, pp. 5-6)

Published in 1900 by Col. John Taylor Wood, “The Capture of a Slaver” provides a first-hand account of the pre-Civil War efforts to suppress the ongoing slave trade to Brazil, Cuba, and the rest of the Spanish West Indies. Though many slavers were built in England, and also New England. As late as 1860, New York City, Portuguese “blackbirders” bribed customs officials to arrange false identifications for ship bound for Cuba to be outfitted as slave ships. They then sailed for Africa to purchase slaves, then to Cuba and Brazil with their human cargoes.

The abbreviated account below is dated in the late-1840’s when Wood was a junior officer aboard the USS Porpoise, a 224-ton brigantine assigned to hunt slavers on the coast of Africa. After capturing a Spanish slaver and taking its human cargo to Liberia to experience “freedom,” he learned a valuable lesson about the Dark Continent.

The Capture of a Slaver

“We had been cruising off the coast of Liberia when we were ordered to the Gulf of Guinea to watch the Bonny and Cameroon mouths of the great Niger river. We could gather information from the natives through our Krooman interpreter. [Fishermen from the Kroo tribe in Sotta Krou in Liberia]. At Little Bonny we heard that two slaving vessels were some miles upriver and ready to sail, waiting only until the coast was clear.

After a long chase of one departing slaver, it was caught by luck and our cannon shearing the topgallant yard and it was finally boarded. The Spaniard captain spoke English and was violently denouncing the outrage done to his flag; his government would demand satisfaction for firing on a legitimate trader on the high seas. Without a doubt if he had reached his cabin, he would have blown up the vessel, for in a locker over the transom were two open kegs of powder. Asked what his cargo consisted of, he replied: “About four hundred blacks bound for Brazil.”

From the time we boarded we had heard moans, cries and rumblings coming from below. Once the hatches were removed there arose a hot blast from below, sickening and overpowering. In the hold were three or four hundred human beings, gasping and struggling for breath, dying, their bodies, limbs, faces, all expressing terrible suffering. After an hour of work lifting and helping the poor creatures on deck, they were laid out in rows with a little water and whiskey stimulant reviving most of them. Some, however, were too far gone to be resuscitated.

I was anxious to hear their story and our Krooman interpreter assisted in translation. Most were from a long distance and brought to coast after being sold by their kings or parents to Arab traders for firearms or rum. Once at the depots near the coast they were sold to the slaver captains for up to fifty dollars a head. In Brazil or the West Indies, they were worth two to five hundred dollars each. This wide margin of course attracted unscrupulous adventurers, who, if successful in running a few cargoes, would greatly enrich themselves.

On the fourteenth day we reached Monrovia, Liberia, a part of the African coast selected by the US government as the home of emancipated slaves; for prior to the abolition excitement which culminated in war, numbers of slaves in the South had been manumitted by their masters with the understanding that they should be sent to Liberia. The passages of the Negroes was paid, each family given a tract of land and sufficient means to build a house. Many intermarried with the natives, lost the English tongue, and had even gone back to the life and customs of their ancestors, sans clothing, sans habitations, and worship of a fetich.

After much negotiation with the colony king and promising cloth and buttons for his wives), he grunted his approval and asked that he might chose a few of the captives for his own use. Certainly not,” I answered, “neither on board or on shore as these are free men and women.”

When the cargo of liberated Africans was called up from the hold and ordered into the boats to go onshore, not one of them moved. They evidently divined what had been going on and dreaded leaving the safety of the vessel. They could only understand that they were changing master’s and preferred the present ones. By noon the men were all onshore, and then began with the girls. They were more demonstrative than the men, and with looks and gestures begged not to be taken out of the vessel.

I instructed the mate to have a gig manned to go ashore and obtain a receipt from the Governor for my late cargo. After landing, we approached a thick grove of palms surrounded by three or four hundred chattering savages of all ages, headed by the king. With the exception of him and a few of his head men, the clothing of the group would not have covered a rag baby. They were no doubt discussing the appearance of the strangers and making their selections. The king then gave me a receipt for the blacks landed, but said it was impossible for him to prevent the natives from taking and enslaving them.

Then bidding the king good-bye I returned on board, sad and weary after as one feels after being relieved of a great burden. At the same time, I wondered whether the fate of these people would have been any worse if the captain of the Spanish slaver had succeeded in landing them in Brazil or the West Indies.”

(The Capture of a Slaver. John Taylor Wood; Paula Benitez, editor. Create Space Independent Publishing, 2017, excerpts pp. 4-30)

The Efik Chief’s Slave Raids

“Once the native African chiefs saw that they could gain wealth from the sale of slaves to whites – some chiefs possessed European style two-storied wooden houses as early as 1785 – they soon found the means of providing yet more slaves. The Efik of Old Calabar, on the Cross River estuary in what is now the Calabar Province of Nigeria, ‘enslaved those of their own people who were guilty of theft or adultery, and also captured or purchased slaves from neighboring tribes.’

Isaac Parker, a ship-keeper who jumped ship in Duke Town in 1765 and remained there for six months, describes one of these raids. The Efik chief asked him ‘to go to war with him.’

He agreed, and they fitted out and armed the canoes and went upriver, ‘lying under the bushes in the day when they came near a village, and taking hold of everyone they could see. These are handcuffed, brought down to the canoes, and so proceeded up the river till they got to 45 captures. They then returned to Duke Town where the captains of the shipping divided the captives among the ships.

About a fortnight later they went out again for eight or nine days, plundering other villages higher upriver and capturing about the same number of villagers as before.

But the Europeans seldom engaged in the slave raids and used to buy their slaves from native brokers who lived in coastal towns. These slaves might be prisoners of war, criminals condemned to slavery, or debtors sold into slavery to satisfy creditors, or children stolen from a village.”

(The Slaves of Timbuktu. Robin Maugham. Harper & Brothers, 1961, pp. 32-33)

After the loss of her American colonies and intense colonial economic competition with France, the British government became abolition-minded not out of pity for those they had purchased from African tribes to labor in America and the West Indies, but to destroy the successful French colony of San Domingo – as well as the American South’s labor system from which Yankee shipping interests were earning vast fortunes.

This was not lost on John C. Calhoun, who in mid-August 1844 wrote American Minister to France William R. King that “It is too late in the day to contend that humanity or philanthropy is the great object of the policy of England in attempting to abolish slavery on this continent. [In abolishing slavery in her colonies], She acted on the principle that tropical products can be produced cheaper by free African labor and East India labor, than by slave labor.”

Calhoun contended that England “calculated to combine philanthropy with profit and power, as is not unusual with fanaticism,” with the experiment turning out to be a costly one. And in order to regain her superiority, England must destroy her economic competition through emancipation.

Britain, France and Abolition

“The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. “Sad irony of human history,” comments Jaures, “The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.”

Nantes was the center of the slave-trade. As early as 1666, 108 ships went to the coast of Guinea and took on board 37,430 slaves, a total value of more than 37 millions, giving the Nantes bourgeoisie 15 to 20 percent on their money. In 1700 Nantes was sending 50 ships a year to the West Indies with Irish salt beef, linen for the household and for clothing the slaves, and machinery for the sugar-mills.  Nearly all the industries which developed in France during the eighteenth century had their origin in goods or commodities destined either for the coast of Guinea or for America. The capital from the slave-trade fertilized them; though the bourgeoisie traded in other things than slaves, upon the success or failure of the traffic everything else depended.

The British bourgeois, the most successful of slave-traders, sold thousands of smuggled slaves every year to the French colonists and particularly to San Domingo. But even while they sold the slaves to San Domingo, the British were watching the progress of this colony with alarm and with envy. After the independence of America in 1783, this amazing French colony suddenly made such a leap as almost to double its [sugar] production between 1783 and 1789.

The British bourgeoisie investigated the new situation in the West Indies [and] prepared a bombshell for its rivals. Without slaves San Domingo was doomed. The British colonies had enough slaves for all the trade they were ever likely to do. With tears rolling down their cheeks for the poor suffering blacks, those British bourgeoisie who had no West Indian interests set up a great howl for the abolition of the slave trade.”

(The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, Vantage Books, 1963, excerpts pp. 47-48; 50-51)

Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden was a British naval officer who served in the suppression of the slave trade prior to the American Civil War, and then became a blockade runner under the pseudonym “Captain Roberts,” running the blockade successfully twenty-seven times. He authored the postwar book, “Never Caught.”

Hobart-Hampden wrote of delivering the human cargo of a captured slaver to British authorities, who would feed and clothe the Africans, and then serve seven years as apprentices – which he compared to a form of slavery itself – and after which they were free. He added: “I fear they generally used their freedom in a way that made them a public nuisance wherever they were. However, they were free, and that satisfied the philanthropists.”

Satisfying the Philanthropists

It was at the time when philanthropists of Europe were crying aloud for the abolition of the African slave trade, never taking for a moment into consideration the fact that the state of the savage African black population was infinitely bettered by their being conveyed out of the misery and barbarism of their own country, introduced to civilization, given opportunities of embracing religion, and taught that to kill and eat each other was not to be considered as the principal pastime among human beings.

At the period I allude to (from 1841 to 1845) the slave trade was carried out on a large scale between the coast of Africa and South America; and a most lucrative trade it was, if the poor devils of Negroes could be safely conveyed alive from one coast to another.

I say if, because the risk of capture was so great that the poor wretches, men, women and children, were packed like herrings in the holds of the fast little sailing vessels employed, and to such a fearful extent was this packing carried on that, even if the vessels were not captured, more than half the number of blacks embarked died from suffocation or disease before arriving at their destination, yet that half was sufficient to pay handsomely those engaged in the trade.

On this point I propose giving examples and proofs hereafter, merely remarking, en passant, that had the Negroes been brought over in vessels that were not liable to be chased and captured, the owners of such vessels would naturally, considering the great value of their cargo, have taken precautions against overcrowding and disease.

Now, let us inquire as to the origin of these poor wretched Africans becoming slaves, and of their being sold to the white man. It was, briefly speaking, in this wise.

On a war taking place between two tribes in Africa, a thing of daily occurrence, naturally many prisoners were made on both sides. Of these prisoners those who were not tender enough to be made into ragout were taken down to the sea coast and sold to the slave dealers, who had wooden barracks established ready for their reception.

Into these barracks, men, women and children, most of whom were kept in irons to prevent escape, were bundled like cattle, there to await embarkation on board the vessels that would convey them across the sea.

Perhaps while on their way [to Brazil the loaded slaver] was chased by an English cruiser, in which case, so it has often been known to happen, a part of the living cargo would be thrown overboard, trusting that the horror of leaving human beings to be drowned would compel the officers of the English cruiser to slacken their speed while picking the poor wretches up, and thus giving the slaver a better chance of escape.”  

(Hobart Pasha; Blockade-Running, Slaver-Hunting, and War and Sport in Turkey, Augustus Charles Hobart-Hampden, Horace Kephart, editor, Outing Publishing, 1915, excerpts pp. 60-68)

The author of the 1928 source below notes that as of that date, “Liberia, the country of free Negroes, there are over two hundred thousand slaves. In Sierra Leone, the other freemen’s colony, slavery was abolished on January 1 of this year, by decree of the Legislative Council.”

A National Institution

“It would be a task of many pages if I attempted to give a full account of the origin and causes of slavery in Africa. As a national institution, it seems to have existed always. Africans have been bondsmen everywhere: and the oldest monuments bear their images linked with menial toils and absolute servitude.

England to-day, with all her philanthropy, sends, under the Cross of St. George, to convenient magazines of lawful commerce on the [African] coast, Birmingham muskets, Manchester cottons, and Liverpool lead, all of which are righteously swapped at Sierra Leone, Acra, and on the Gold Coast, for Spanish or Brazilian bills on London.

Yet what British merchant does not know the traffic on which those bills are founded, and for whose support his wares are purchased?  France . . . dispatches her Rouen cottons, Marseille brandies, flimsy taffetas, and indescribable variety of tinsel geegaws. Germany demands a slice for her looking-glasses and beads; while multitudes of our own worthy [Boston] traders, who would hang a slaver as a pirate when caught, do not hesitate to supply him indirectly with tobacco, powder, cotton, Yankee rum, and New England notions, in order to bait the trap in which he may be caught. It is the temptation of these things, I repeat, which feeds the slave-making wars of Africa, and forms the human basis of those admirable bills of exchange.

Such may be said to be the predominating influence that supports the African slave trade; yet, if commerce of all kinds were forbidden with that continent, the customs and laws of the natives would still encourage slavery as a domestic affair, though of course in a very modified degree.

A slave is a note of hand that may be discounted or pawned; he is still a bill of exchange that carries him to his destination and pays the debt bodily . . . Thus, slavery is not likely to be surrendered by the Negroes themselves as a national institution.”

(Adventures of a Slave Trader: Being an Account of the Life of Captain Theodore Canot, Trader in Gold, Ivory &Slaves on the Coast of Guinea: His Own Story as Told in the Year 1854 to Brantz Mayer, Garden City Publishing, 1928, excerpts pp. 126-128)

When Christopher Columbus set sail “on his first expedition across the Atlantic, accumulated imports of Negro slaves into the Old World were probably in excess of twenty-five thousand,” and many white slaves worked the Mediterranean sugar plantations with them.

By the last half of the sixteenth century the center of sugar production shifted across the Atlantic, and by 1600, Brazil had become Europe’s leading sugar supplier. Portuguese ships brought needed labor for Brazilian plantations, slaves readily purchased from the tribes of West Africa.

Plantations of the Old World

“Slavery is not only the most ancient but also one of the most long-lived forms of economic and social organization. It came into being at the dawn of civilization, when mankind passed from hunting and nomadic pastoral life into primitive agriculture. And although legally sanctioned slavery was outlawed in its last bastion – the Arabian peninsula – in 1962, slavery is still practiced covertly in parts of Asia, Africa and South America.

One high-water mark was reached during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire when, according to some estimates, three out of every four residents of the Italian peninsula – twenty- one million people – lived in bondage. Eventually Roman slavery was transformed into serfdom, a form of servitude that mitigated some of the harsher features of the old system.

The Italians were quite active in importing slaves from the area of the Black Sea during the thirteenth century. And the Moors captured during the interminable religious wars were enslaved on the Iberian peninsula, along with Slavs and captives from the Levant [eastern Mediterranean].

Black slaves were imported into Europe during the Middle Ages through the Moslem countries of North Africa. Beginning about the middle of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese established trading posts along the west coast of Africa below the Sahara with the aim of capturing or making relatively large purchases of black slaves. Although Negroes continued to be imported into the Old World until the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was the New World that became the great market for slaves.

It was Europe’s sweet tooth, rather than its addiction to tobacco or its infatuation with cotton cloth that determined the extent of the Atlantic slave trade. Sugar was the greatest of the slave crops. Between 60 and 70 percent of all the Africans who survived the Atlantic voyages ended up in one or the other of Europe’s sugar colonies.

Sugar was introduced into the Levant [eastern Mediterranean] in the seventh century by the Arabs. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries [Mediterranean] colonies shipped sugar to all parts of Europe. Moreover, the sugar produced there was grown on plantations which utilized slave labor. While the slaves were primarily white, it was in these islands that Europeans developed the institutional apparatus that was eventually applied to blacks.”

(Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, W. Fogel and S. Engerman, W.W. Norton, 1974, excerpts pp. 13-17)

At the time of Columbus’s exploration in 1492, slavery in West Africa was common. The dominant Songhay, Ghana and Mali empires waged war against each other, enslaved those captured, and exacted slave tributes from their weaker neighbors. When the first Europeans ventured down Africa’s western coast, they found these tribes of substantial military power who were not to be threatened.

Each Side Knew Human Bondage

“The Africans, like other people throughout the world, had practiced slavery since prehistoric times. They took prisoners of war and forced them into domestic service, as they did to their criminals. A Dutchman describing Guinea in the sixteenth century wrote:

“The Kings of the Townes have many Slaves, which they buy and sell, and get much by them; and to be briefe, in those Countries there are men to be hired to worke or goe of any errand for money, but such as are Slaves and Captives, which are to spend their days in Slaverie.”

In Dahomey, one of the kingdoms, the ruler owned plantations run by overseers, who were expected to derive the maximum return from the estates. The slave laborers were inhumanly driven . . . a group of people known as the Nupe conquered and enslaved the more primitive tribes of northern Nigeria and set them to agricultural labor. The Ashanti used slaves in systematic agriculture and imposed a tribute of 2,000 slaves annually on one defeated tribe.

In Africa’s medieval states people conquered in wartime were treated as the feudal vassals had been. Historian Basil Davidson points out: “In the Songhay region of the fifteenth century along the Middle Niger, “slaves” from the non-Muslim peoples of the forest verge were extensively used in agriculture . . . “

A follower of the great Songhay ruler Askia Muhammud, [African scholar Mahmud] Kati wrote that when the emperor took the throne in 1493, he inherited 24 tribes of vassals. As time passed, the difference in status between the free man and the “slave” became less clear . . . [with] the decisive factor [being] the widening gap between the nobility and the rest of the people. All were subjected to the rulers to feudal arrangements by mutual duties and obligations. It was a system that varied from place to place . . . but it was essentially a tribal feudalism, and in some parts of Africa it still persists.

From their coastal forts . . . the Europeans conducted peaceful trade with the Africans. Each side had goods that the other wanted. Each side knew human bondage. The medieval Europeans sold slaves even of their own faith or nation, as did the Africans. Neither continent was a stranger to the slave trade. Both sides had long accepted it, and both sides joined in practicing it.”

(Slavery, A World History, Milton Meltzer, Da Capo Press, 1993, excerpts Slavery II, pp. 17-23)

New England rum and Yankee notions were exchanged for African slaves as Boston and Newport rivaled each other for slave trade prominence in the early 1700s. Annually, about 1800 hogsheads of rum were traded to African tribes for their slaves, and this left little for consumption in the colony.

From this profitable trade in human merchandise, “an opulent and aristocratic society” developed in Newport; Col. Thomas Hazard of Narragansett and Mr. Downs of Bristol “were names that loomed large in the commercial and social registers of that day. Their fortunes were accumulated from the slave trade.”

It is worth noting that had there been no transatlantic slave trade carried on by the British and New Englanders, the American South would have had no peculiar institution.

Greatest Slave Carriers of America

“The growth of Negro slavery in New England was slow during the seventeenth century. In 1680, there were only 20 slaves in Connecticut, two of whom had been christened. In 1676, Massachusetts had 200 slaves . . . in 1700 Governor Dudley placed the number at 550, four hundred of whom were in Boston.

In 1730, New Hampshire boasted of but thirty slaves. The Eighteenth Century, however, saw the rise of the New England colonies as the greatest slave-carriers of America. Quick to see the unprofitableness of the Negro slaves as a laborer in such an environment, when the price of a slave was greater than the labor returned, the ingenious Yankee soon found a market in the West Indies for slaves, exchanged for rum, sugar and molasses on the Guinea Coast.

Massachusetts early assumed a commanding position in this trade. The ports of Boston and Salem prospered especially. Their merchants carried on a “brisk trade to Guinea” for many years, marketing most of their slaves in the West Indies.

Peter Faneuil, whose “whole lineage in held in peculiar honor” in Boston, was typical of the many comfortable fortunes amassed from the profits of this traffic. The name Jolley Bachelor, which was carried by one of his ships engaged in the slave trade, typifies the spirit of the time in regard to this profitable business.

As opulence increased, the number of slaves grew proportionately. In 1735, there were 2,600 Negroes in Massachusetts; in 1764 the number had increased to 5,779. In 1742, Boston alone had 1,514 slaves and free Negroes, the number having almost quadrupled in about forty years.

[In 1696] the brigantine Sunflower arrived at Newport with forty-five slaves. Most of them were sold there at thirty to thirty-five pounds a head; the rest were taken to Boston for disposal.

Subsequently, however, the slave trade of Rhode Island outstripped that of Massachusetts. Governor Wood, early in the Eighteenth Century, reported that the colony had one hundred and twenty vessels employed in the trade. Newport rivaled Boston as New England’s premier seaport. It had twenty or thirty stills going full blast to supply rum for the African trade.”

(Slave-Holding in New England and Its Awakening, Lorenzo J. Greene; Journal of Negro History, Vol. XIII, Number 4, October 1928, Carter G. Woodson, editor, excerpts pp. 495-497)

After the British themselves, New Englanders were responsible for populating the colonies with slaves purchased from African tribes, and the invention of Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney in 1793 sent demand for slaves and cotton soaring.

With the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, New England Federalists unhappy with the new political supremacy of Virginia called upon the North “to combine to protect the commercial interests against the vicious slave-holding democrats of the South.” Thus began the descent into war between the sections.

Inheritors of Britain’s Colonial Labor System

“Slavery was disappearing from the North. The rector of the Swedish churches in America told the American Philosophical Society that the introduction of “mechanism” in the Southern States would eliminate the need of slaves; but the invention of the cotton gin led to the opposite result.

Defenders of slavery declared it was a necessary evil that would eventually cure itself. The slaveholder could not be held guilty of crime because slavery as a very common thing is due to the state of society, for which the slaveholder is not responsible. Slavery in America is preferable to liberty in Africa because the slave gets better care and acquires the Christian religion.

In fact, the underlying reasons for importing slaves is to further the Christian religion. Respectably opponents, generally in New England, questioned the argument that slavery is a curse of society, not of the individual. It is no more valid, they said, than the notion of drunkenness and adultery are not delinquencies of the individual. The greatest evil is that the slaves will eventually outnumber the whites, and this must lead either to the most horrible event, intermarriage, or the destruction of the whites.

For the most part, the critics looked for remedies in the abolition of the slave trade, the growth of voluntary manumission, and even the growth of trade and commerce with Africa in the manner pictured by [economist James] Swan. It was agreed that pecuniary considerations were the most important barrier to voluntary manumission, but the slaveholder was told to trust to the Lord for his recompense.

The general attitude was best expressed by the Baptist clergyman Samuel Jones of Philadelphia. The slave trade is abominable; the possession of slaves is not profitable except in the newly settled regions where the costs of labor are very high. But the slave owners are innocent inheritors of the institution and not obliged to free their slaves, “at least not until they have been fully reimbursed the full amount of their cost on equitable principles.”

(The Economic Mind in American Civilization: 1606-1865, Joseph Dorfman, Viking Press, 1946, excerpts pp. 280-282)