AN UGLY FEATURE OF EARLY SEAFARING--THE SLAVE TRADE AND ITS
PROMOTERS--PART PLAYED BY EMINENT NEW ENGLANDERS--HOW THE TRADE GREW
UP--THE PIOUS AUSPICES WHICH SURROUNDED THE TRAFFIC--SLAVE-STEALING AND
SABBATH-BREAKING--CONDITIONS OF THE TRADE--SIZE OF THE VESSELS--HOW THE
CAPTIVES WERE TREATED--MUTINIES, MAN-STEALING, AND MURDER--THE REVELATIONS
OF THE ABOLITION SOCIETY--EFFORTS TO BREAK UP THE TRADE--AN AWFUL
RETRIBUTION--ENGLAND LEADS THE WAY--DIFFICULTY OF ENFORCING THE
LAW--AMERICA'S SHAME--THE END OF THE EVIL--THE LAST SLAVER.
At the foot of Narragansett Bay, with the surges of the open ocean
breaking fiercely on its eastward side, and a sheltered harbor crowded
with trim pleasure craft, leading up to its rotting wharves, lies the old
colonial town of Newport. A holiday place it is to-day, a spot of splendor
and of wealth almost without parallel in the world. From the rugged cliffs
on its seaward side great granite palaces stare, many-windowed, over the
Atlantic, and velvet lawns slope down to the rocks. These are the homes of
the people who, in the last fifty years, have brought new life and new
riches to Newport. But down in the old town you will occasionally come
across a fine old colonial mansion, still retaining some signs of its
former grandeur, while scattered about the island to the north are stately
old farmhouses and homesteads that show clearly enough the existence in
that quiet spot of wealth and comfort for these one hundred and fifty
years.
Looking upon Newport to-day, and finding it all so fair, it seems hard to
believe that the foundation of all its wealth and prosperity rested upon
the most cruel, the most execrable, the most inhuman traffic that ever was
plied by degraded men--the traffic in slaves. Yet in the old days the
trade was far from being held either cruel inhuman--indeed, vessels often
set sail for the Bight of Benin to swap rum for slaves, after their owners
had invoked the blessing of God upon their enterprise. Nor were its
promoters held by the community to be degraded. Indeed, some of the most
eminent men in the community engaged in it, and its receipts were so
considerable that as early as 1729 one-half of the impost levied on slaves
imported into the colony was appropriated to pave the streets of the town
and build its bridges--however, we are not informed that the streets were
very well paved.
It was not at Newport, however, nor even in New England that the
importation of slaves first began, though for reasons which I will
presently show, the bulk of the traffic in them fell ultimately to New
Englanders. The first African slaves in America were landed by a Dutch
vessel at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The last kidnapped Africans were
brought here probably some time in the latter part of 1860--for though the
traffic was prohibited in 1807, the rigorous blockade of the ports of the
Confederacy during the Civil War was necessary to bring it actually to an
end. The amount of human misery which that frightful traffic entailed
during those 240 years almost baffles the imagination. The bloody Civil
War which had, perhaps, its earliest cause in the landing of those twenty
blacks at Jamestown, was scarcely more than a fitting penalty, and there
was justice in the fact that it fell on North and South alike, for if the
South clung longest to slavery, it was the North--even abolition New
England--which had most to do with establishing it on this continent.
However, it is not with slavery, but with the slave trade we have to do.
Circumstances largely forced upon the New England colonies their unsavory
preëminence in this sort of commerce. To begin with, their people were as
we have already seen, distinctively the seafaring folk of North America.
Again, one of their earliest methods of earning a livelihood was in the
fisheries, and that curiously enough, led directly to the trade in slaves.
To sell the great quantities of fish they dragged up from the Banks or
nearer home, foreign markets must needs be found. England and the European
countries took but little of this sort of provender, and moreover England,
France, Holland, and Portugal had their own fishing fleets on the Banks.
The main markets for the New Englanders then were the West India Islands,
the Canaries, and Madeira. There the people were accustomed to a fish diet
and, indeed, were encouraged in it by the frequent fastdays of the Roman
Catholic church, of which most were devout members. A voyage to the
Canaries with fish was commonly prolonged to the west coast of Africa,
where slaves were bought with rum. Thence the vessel would proceed to the
West Indies where the slaves would be sold, a large part of the purchase
price being taken in molasses, which, in its turn, was distilled into rum
at home, to be used for buying more slaves--for in this traffic little of
actual worth was paid for the hapless captives. Fiery rum, usually
adulterated and more than ever poisonous, was all the African chiefs
received for their droves of human cattle. For it they sold wives and
children, made bloody war and sold their captives, kidnapped and sold
their human booty.
Nothing in the history of our people shows so strikingly the progress of
man toward higher ideals, toward a clearer sense of the duties of humanity
and the rightful relation of the strong toward the weak, than the changed
sentiment concerning the slave trade. In its most humane form the thought
of that traffic to-day fills us with horror. The stories of its worst
phases seem almost incredible, and we wonder that men of American blood
could have been such utter brutes. But two centuries ago the foremost men
of New England engaged in the trade or profited by its fruits. Peter
Fanueil, who-built for Boston that historic hall which we call the Cradle
of Liberty, and which in later years resounded with the anti-slavery
eloquence of Garrison and Phillips, was a slave owner and an actual
participant in the trade. The most "respectable" merchants of Providence
and Newport were active slavers--just as some of the most respectable
merchants and manufacturers of to-day make merchandise of white men,
women, and children, whose slavery is none the less slavery because they
are driven by the fear of starvation instead of the overseer's lash.
Perhaps two hundred years from now our descendants will see the
criminality of our industrial system to-day, as clearly as we see the
wrong in that of our forefathers. The utmost piety was observed in setting
out a slave-buying expedition. The commissions were issued "by the Grace
of God," divine guidance was implored for the captain who was to swap
fiery rum for stolen children, and prayers were not infrequently offered
for long delayed or missing slavers. George Dowing, a Massachusetts
clergyman, wrote of slavery in Barbadoes: "I believe they have bought this
year no less than a thousand negroes, and the more they buie, the better
able they are to buie, for in a year and a half they will earne _with
God's blessing_, as much as they cost." Most of the slaves brought from
the coast of Guinea in New England vessels were deported again--sent to
the southern States or to the West Indies for a market. The climate and
the industrial conditions of New England were alike unfavorable to the
growth there of slavery, and its ports served chiefly as clearing-houses
for the trade. Yet there was not even among the most enlightened and
leading people of the colony any moral sentiment against slavery, and from
Boston to New York slaves were held in small numbers and their prices
quoted in the shipping lists and newspapers like any other merchandise.
Curiously enough, the first African slaves brought to Boston were sent
home again and their captors prosecuted--not wholly for stealing men, but
for breaking the Sabbath. It happened in this way: A Boston ship, the
"Rainbow," in 1645, making the usual voyage to Madeira with staves and
salt fish, touched on the coast of Guinea for a few slaves. Her captain
found the English slavers on the ground already, mightily discontented,
for the trade was dull. It was still the time when there was a pretense of
legality about the method of procuring the slaves; they were supposed to
be malefactors convicted of crime, or at the very least, prisoners taken
by some native king in war. In later years the native kings, animated by
an ever-growing thirst for the white man's rum, declared war in order to
secure captives, and employed decoys to lure young men into the commission
of crime. These devices for keeping the man-market fully supplied had not
at this time been invented, and the captains of the slavers, lying off a
dangerous coast in the boiling heat of a tropical country, grew restive at
the long delay. Perhaps some of the rum they had brought to trade for
slaves inflamed their own blood. At any rate, dragging ashore a small
cannon called significantly enough a "murderer," they attacked a village,
killed many of its people, and brought off a number of blacks, two of
whom fell to the lot of the captain of the "Rainbow," and were by him
taken to Boston. He found no profit, however, in his piratical venture,
for the story coming out, he was accused in court of "murder,
man-stealing, and Sabbath-breaking," and his slaves were sent home. It was
wholly as merchandise that the blacks were regarded. It is impossible to
believe that the brutalities of the traffic could have been tolerated so
long had the idea of the essential humanity of the Africa been grasped by
those who dealt in them. Instead, they were looked upon as a superior sort
of cattle, but on the long voyage across the Atlantic were treated as no
cattle are treated to-day in the worst "ocean tramps" in the trade. The
vessels were small, many of them half the size of the lighters that ply
sluggishly up and down New York harbor. Sloops, schooners, brigantines,
and scows of 40 or 50 tons burden, carrying crews of nine men including
the captain and mates, were the customary craft in the early days of the
eighteenth century.
In his work on "The American Slave-Trade," Mr. John R. Spears gives the
dimensions of some of these puny vessels which were so heavily freighted
with human woe. The first American slaver of which we have record was the
"Desire," of Marblehead, 120 tons. Later vessels, however, were much
smaller. The sloop, "Welcome," had a capacity of 5000 gallons of molasses.
The "Fame" was 79 feet long on the keel--about a large yacht's length. In
1847, some of the captured slavers had dimensions like these: The
"Felicidade" 67 tons; the "Maria" 30 tons; the "Rio Bango" 10 tons. When
the trade was legal and regulated by law, the "Maria" would have been
permitted to carry 45 slaves--or one and one-half to each ton register. In
1847, the trade being outlawed, no regulations were observed, and this
wretched little craft imprisoned 237 negroes. But even this 10-ton slaver
was not the limit. Mr. Spears finds that open rowboats, no more than 24
feet long by 7 wide, landed as many as 35 children in Brazil out of say 50
with which the voyage began. But the size of the vessels made little
difference in the comfort of the slaves. Greed packed the great ones
equally with the small. The blacks, stowed in rows between decks, the roof
barely 3 feet 10 inches above the floor on which they lay side by side,
sometimes in "spoon-fashion" with from 10 to 16 inches surface-room for
each, endured months of imprisonment. Often they were so packed that the
head of one slave would be between the thighs of another, and in this
condition they would pass the long weeks which the Atlantic passage under
sail consumed. This, too, when the legality of the slave trade was
recognized, and nothing but the dictates of greed led to overcrowding.
Time came when the trade was put under the ban of law and made akin to
piracy. Then the need for fast vessels restricted hold room and the
methods of the trade attained a degree of barbarity that can not be
paralleled since the days of Nero.
[Illustration: "A FAVORITE TRICK OF THE FLEEING SLAVER WAS TO THROW OVER
SLAVES"]
Shackled together "spoon-wise," as the phrase was, they suffered and
sweltered through the long middle passage, dying by scores, so that often
a fifth of the cargo perished during the voyage. The stories of those who
took part in the effort to suppress the traffic give some idea of its
frightful cruelty.
The Rev. Pascoa Grenfell Hill, a chaplain in the British navy, once made a
short voyage on a slaver which his ship, the "Cleopatra," had captured.
The vessel had a full cargo, and when the capture was effected, the
negroes were all brought on deck for exercise and fresh air. The poor
creatures quite understood the meaning of the sudden change in their
masters, and kissed the hands and clothing of their deliverers. The ship
was headed for the Cape of Good Hope, where the slaves were to be
liberated; but a squall coming on, all were ordered below again. "The
night," enters Mr. Hill in his journal, "being intensely hot, four hundred
wretched beings thus crammed into a hold twelve yards in length, seven
feet in breadth, and only three and one-half feet in height, speedily
began to make an effort to reissue to the open air. Being thrust back and
striving the more to get out, the afterhatch was forced down upon them.
Over the other hatchway, in the fore part of the vessel, a wooden grating
was fastened. To this, the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of
the hold and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made
them flock, and thus a great part of the space below was rendered useless.
They crowded to the grating and clinging to it for air, completely barred
its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures in length
fourteen inches and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances
succeeded. The cries, the heat, I may say without exaggeration, the smoke
of their torment which ascended can be compared to nothing earthly. One of
the Spaniards gave warning that the consequences would be 'many deaths;'
this prediction was fearfully verified, for the next morning 54 crushed
and mangled corpses were brought to the gangway and thrown overboard. Some
were emaciated from disease, many bruised and bloody. Antoine tells me
that some were found strangled; their hands still grasping each others'
throats."
It is of a Brazilian slaver that this awful tale is told, but the event
itself was paralleled on more than one American ship. Occasionally we
encounter stories of ships destroyed by an exploding magazine, and the
slaves, chained to the deck, going down with the wreck. Once a slaver went
ashore off Jamaica, and the officers and crew speedily got out the boats
and made for the beach, leaving the human cargo to perish. When dawn broke
it was seen that the slaves had rid themselves of their fetters and were
busily making rafts on which the women and children were put, while the
men, plunging into the sea, swam alongside, and guided the rafts toward
the shore. Now mark what the white man, the supposed representative of
civilization and Christianity, did. Fearing that the negroes would
exhaust the store of provisions and water that had been landed, they
resolved to destroy them while still in the water. As soon as the rafts
came within range, those on shore opened fire with rifles and muskets with
such deadly effect that between three hundred and four hundred blacks were
murdered. Only thirty-four saved themselves--and for what? A few weeks
later they were sold in the slave mart at Kingston.
[Illustration: DEALERS WHO CAME ON BOARD WERE THEMSELVES KIDNAPPED]
In the early days of the trade, the captains dealt with recognized chiefs
along the coast of Guinea, who conducted marauding expeditions into the
interior to kidnap slaves. Rum was the purchase price, and by skillful
dilution, a competent captain was able to double the purchasing value of
his cargo. The trade was not one calculated to develop the highest
qualities of honor, and to swindling the captains usually added theft and
murder. Any negro who came near the ship to trade, or through motives of
curiosity, was promptly seized and thrust below. Dealers who came on board
with kidnapped negroes were themselves kidnapped after the bargain was
made. Never was there any inquiry into the title of the seller. Any slave
offered was bought, though the seller had no right--even under legalized
slavery--to sell.
A picturesque story was told in testimony before the English House of
Commons. To a certain slaver lying off the Windward coast a girl was
brought in a canoe by a well-known black trader, who took his pay and
paddled off. A few moments later another canoe with two blacks came
alongside and inquired for the girl. They were permitted to see her and
declared she had been kidnapped; but the slaver, not at all put out by
that fact, refused to give her up. Thereupon the blacks paddled swiftly
off after her seller, overtook, and captured him. Presently they brought
him back to the deck of the ship--an article of merchandise, where he had
shortly before been a merchant.
"You won't buy me," cried the captive. "I a grand trading man! I bring you
slaves."
But no scruples entered the mind of the captain of the slaver. "If they
will sell you I certainly will buy you," he answered, and soon the
kidnapped kidnapper was in irons and thrust below in the noisome hold with
the unhappy being he had sent there. A multitude of cases of negro
slave-dealers being seized in this way, after disposing of their human
cattle, are recorded.
It is small wonder that torn thus from home and relatives, immured in
filthy and crowded holds, ill fed, denied the two great gifts of God to
man--air and water--subjected to the brutality of merciless men, and
wholly ignorant of the fate in store for them, many of the slaves should
kill themselves. As they had a salable value the captains employed every
possible device to defeat this end--every device, that is, except kind
treatment, which was beyond the comprehension of the average slaver.
Sometimes the slaves would try to starve themselves to death. This the
captains met by torture with the cat and thumbscrews. There is a horrible
story in the testimony before the English House of Commons about a captain
who actually whipped a nine-months-old child to death trying to force it
to eat, and then brutally compelled the mother to throw the lacerated
little body overboard. Another captain found that his captives were
killing themselves, in the belief that their spirits would return to their
old home. By way of meeting this superstition, he announced that all who
died in this way should have their heads cut off, so that if they did
return to their African homes, it would be as headless spirits. The
outcome of this threat was very different from what the captain had
anticipated. When a number of the slaves were brought on deck to witness
the beheading of the body of one of their comrades, they seized the
occasion to leap overboard and were drowned. Many sought death in this
way, and as they were usually good swimmers, they actually forced
themselves to drown, some persistently holding their heads under water,
others raising their arms high above their heads, and in one case two who
died together clung to each other so that neither could swim. Every
imaginable way in which death could be sought was employed by these
hopeless blacks, though, indeed, the hardships of the voyage were such as
to bring it often enough unsought.
When the ship's hold was full the voyage was begun, while from the
suffering blacks below, unused to seafaring under any circumstances, and
desperately sick in their stifling quarters, there arose cries and moans
as if the cover were taken off of purgatory. The imagination recoils from
the thought of so much human wretchedness.
The publications of some of the early anti-slavery associations tell of
the inhuman conditions of the trade. In an unusually commodious ship
carrying over six hundred slaves, we are told that "platforms, or wide
shelves, were erected between the decks, extending so far from the side
toward the middle of the vessel as to be capable of containing four
additional rows of slaves, by which means the perpendicular height between
each tier was, after allowing for the beams and platforms, reduced to
three feet, six inches, so that they could not even sit in an erect
posture, besides which in the men's apartment, instead of four rows, five
were stowed by putting the head of one between the thighs of another." In
another ship, "In the men's apartment the space allowed to each is six
feet length by sixteen inches in breadth, the boys are each allowed five
feet by fourteen inches, the women five feet, ten by sixteen inches, and
the girls four feet by one foot each."
"A man in his coffin has more room than one of these blacks," is the terse
way in which witness after witness before the British House of Commons
described the miserable condition of the slaves on shipboard.
An amazing feature of this detestable traffic is the smallness and often
the unseaworthiness of the vessels in which it was carried on. Few such
picayune craft now venture outside the landlocked waters of Long Island
Sound, or beyond the capes of the Delaware and Chesapeake. In the early
days of the eighteenth century hardy mariners put out in little craft, the
size of a Hudson River brick-sloop or a harbor lighter, and made the long
voyage to the Canaries and the African West Coast, withstood the perils of
a prolonged anchorage on a dangerous shore, went thence heavy laden with
slaves to the West Indies, and so home. To cross the Atlantic was a matter
of eight or ten weeks; the whole voyage would commonly take five or six
months. Nor did the vessels always make up in stanchness for their
diminutive proportions. Almost any weather-beaten old hulk was thought
good enough for a slaver. Captain Linsday, of Newport, who wrote home from
Aumboe, said: "I should be glad I cood come rite home with my slaves, for
my vessel will not last to proceed far. We can see daylight all round her
bow under deck." But he was not in any unusual plight. And not only the
perils of the deep had to be encountered, but other perils, some bred of
man's savagery, then more freely exhibited than now, others necessary to
the execrable traffic in peaceful blacks. It as a time of constant wars
and the seas swarmed with French privateers alert for fat prizes. When a
slaver met a privateer the battle was sure to be a bloody one for on
either side fought desperate men--one party following as a trade legalized
piracy and violent theft of cargoes, the other employed in the violent
theft of men and women, and the incitement of murder and rapine that their
cargoes might be the fuller. There would have been but scant loss to
mankind in most of these conflicts had privateer and slaver both gone to
the bottom. Not infrequently the slavers themselves turned pirate or
privateer for the time--sometimes robbing a smaller craft of its load of
slaves, sometimes actually running up the black flag and turning to piracy
for a permanent calling.
In addition to the ordinary risks of shipwreck or capture the slavers
encountered perils peculiar to their calling. Once in a while the slaves
would mutiny, though such is the gentle and almost childlike nature of the
African negro that this seldom occurred. The fear of it, however, was ever
present to the captains engaged in the trade, and to guard against it the
slaves--always the men and sometimes the women as well--were shackled
together in pairs. Sometimes they were even fastened to the floor of the
dark and stifling hold in which they were immured for months at a time. If
heavy weather compelled the closing of the hatches, or if disease set in,
as it too often did, the morning would find the living shackled to the
dead. In brief, to guard against insurrection the captains made the
conditions of life so cruel that the slaves were fairly forced to revolt.
In 1759 a case of an uprising that was happily successful was recorded.
The slaver "Perfect," Captain Potter, lay at anchor at Mana with one
hundred slaves aboard. The mate, second mate, the boatswain, and about
half the crew were sent into the interior to buy some more slaves.
Noticing the reduced numbers of their jailors, the slaves determined to
rise. Ridding themselves of their irons, they crowded to the deck, and,
all unarmed as they were, killed the captain, the surgeon, the carpenter,
the cooper, and a cabin-boy. Whereupon the remainder of the crew took to
the boats and boarded a neighboring slaver, the "Spencer." The captain of
this craft prudently declined to board the "Perfect," and reduce the
slaves to subjection again; but he had no objection to slaughtering naked
blacks at long range, so he warped his craft into position and opened fire
with his guns. For about an hour this butchery was continued, and then
such of the slaves as still lived, ran the schooner ashore, plundered, and
burnt her.
[Illustration: "THE ROPE WAS PUT AROUND HIS NECK"]
How such insurrections were put down was told nearly a hundred years later
in an official communication to Secretary of State James Buchanan, by
United States Consul George W. Gordon, the story being sworn testimony
before him. The case was that of the slaver "Kentucky," which carried 530
slaves. An insurrection which broke out was speedily suppressed, but
fearing lest the outbreak should be repeated, the captain determined to
give the wretched captives an "object lesson" by punishing the
ringleaders. This is how he did it:
"They were ironed, or chained, two together, and when they were hung, a
rope was put around their necks and they were drawn up to the yard-arm
clear of the sail. This did not kill them, but only choked or strangled
them. They were then shot in the breast and the bodies thrown overboard.
If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, the rope was
put around his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck, and his leg
laid across the rail and chopped off to save the irons and release him
from his companion, who at the same time lifted up his leg until the other
was chopped off as aforesaid, and he released. The bleeding negro was then
drawn up, shot in the breast and thrown overboard. The legs of about one
dozen were chopped off this way.
"When the feet fell on the deck they were picked up by the crew and thrown
overboard, and sometimes they shot at the body while it still hung,
living, and all sorts of sport was made of the business."
Forty-six men and one woman were thus done to death: "When the woman was
hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect, and she was thrown
overboard living, and was seen to struggle some time in the water before
she sunk;" and deponent further says, "that after this was over, they
brought up and flogged about twenty men and six women. The flesh of some
of them where they were flogged putrified, and came off, in some cases,
six or eight inches in diameter, and in places half an inch thick."
This was in 1839, a time when Americans were very sure that for
civilization, progress, humanity, and the Christian virtues, they were at
least on as high a plane as the most exalted peoples of the earth.
Infectious disease was one of the grave perils with which the slavers had
to reckon. The overcrowding of the slaves, the lack of exercise and fresh
air, the wretched and insufficient food, all combined to make grave,
general sickness an incident of almost every voyage, and actual epidemics
not infrequent. This was a peril that moved even the callous captains and
their crews, for scurvy or yellow-jack developing in the hold was apt to
sweep the decks clear as well. A most gruesome story appears in all the
books on the slave trade, of the experience of the French slaver,
"Rodeur." With a cargo of 165 slaves, she was on the way to Guadaloupe in
1819, when opthalmia--a virulent disease of the eyes--appeared among the
blacks. It spread rapidly, though the captain, in hopes of checking its
ravages, threw thirty-six negroes into the sea alive. Finally it attacked
the crew, and in a short time all save one man became totally blind.
Groping in the dark, the helpless sailors made shift to handle the ropes,
while the one man still having eyesight clung to the wheel. For days, in
this wretched state, they made their slow way along the deep, helpless and
hopeless. At last a sail was sighted. The "Rodeur's" prow is turned toward
it, for there is hope, there rescue! As the stranger draws nearer, the
straining eyes of the French helmsman discerns something strange and
terrifying about her appearance. Her rigging is loose and slovenly, her
course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the
wheel. A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue. But
she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing
strip of sea and is answered from the "Rodeur." The two vessels draw near.
There can be no launching of boats by blind men, but the story of the
stranger is soon told. She, too, is a slaver, a Spaniard, the "Leon," and
on her, too, every soul is blind from opthalmia originating among the
slaves. Not even a steersman has the "Leon." All light has gone out from
her, and the "Rodeur" sheers away, leaving her to an unknown fate, for
never again is she heard from. How wonderful the fate--or the
Providence--that directed that upon all the broad ocean teeming with
ships, engaged in honest or in criminal trade, the two that should meet
must be the two on which the hand of God was laid most heavily in
retribution for the suffering and the woe which white men and professed
Christians were bringing to the peaceful and innocent blacks of Africa.
It will be readily understood that the special and always menacing dangers
attending the slave trade made marine insurance upon that sort of cargoes
exceedingly high. Twenty pounds in the hundred was the usual figure in the
early days. This heavy insurance led to a new form of wholesale murder
committed by the captains. The policies covered losses resulting from
jettisoning, or throwing overboard the cargo; they did not insure against
loss from disease. Accordingly, when a slaver found his cargo infected, he
would promptly throw into the sea all the ailing negroes, while still
alive, in order to save the insurance. Some of the South American states,
where slaves were bought, levied an import duty upon blacks, and cases are
on record of captains going over their cargo outside the harbor and
throwing into the sea all who by disease or for other causes, were
rendered unsalable--thus saving both duty and insurance.
In the clearer light which illumines the subject to-day, the prolonged
difficulty which attended the destruction of the slave trade seems
incredible. It appears that two such powerful maritime nations as Great
Britain and the United States had only to decree the trade criminal and it
would be abandoned. But we must remember that slaves were universally
regarded as property, and an attempt to interfere with the right of their
owners to carry them where they would on the high seas was denounced as an
interference with property rights. We see that even to-day men are very
tenacious of "property rights," and the law describes them as
sacred--however immoral or repugnant to common sense and common humanity
they may be. So the effort to abolish the "right" of a slaver to starve,
suffocate, mutilate, torture, or murder a black man in whom he had
acquired a property right by the simple process of kidnapping required
more than half a century to attain complete success.
The first serious blow to the slave-trade fell in 1772, when an English
court declared that any slave coming into England straightway became free.
That closed all English ports to the slavers. Two years after the American
colonists, then on the threshold of the revolt against Great Britain,
thought to put America on a like high plane, and formally resolved that
they would "not purchase any slave imported after the first day of
December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the
slave-trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we
hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who
are concerned in it." But to this praiseworthy determination the colonists
were unable to live up, and in 1776, when Jefferson proposed to put into
the Declaration of Independence the charge that the British King had
forced the slave-trade on the colonies, a proper sense of their own guilt
made the delegates oppose it.
It was in England that the first earnest effort to break up the
slave-trade began. It was under the Stars and Stripes that the slavers
longest protected their murderous traffic. For a time the effort of the
British humanitarians was confined to the amelioration of the conditions
of the trade, prescribing space to be given each slave, prescribing
surgeons, and offering bounties to be paid captains who lost less than two
per cent. of their cargoes on the voyage. It is not recorded that the
bounty was often claimed. On the contrary, the horrors of what was called
"the middle passage" grew with the greed of the slave captains. But the
revelations of inhumanity made during the parliamentary investigation were
too shocking for even the indifferent and callous public sentiment of that
day. Humane people saw at once that to attempt to regulate a traffic so
abhorrent to every sense of humanity, was for the nation to go into
partnership with murderers and manstealers, and so the demand for the
absolute prohibition of the traffic gained strength from the futile
attempt to regulate it. Bills for its abolition failed, now in the House
of Lords, then in the House of Commons; but in 1807 a law prohibiting all
participation in the trade by British ships or subjects was passed. The
United States moved very slowly. Individual States under the old
confederation prohibited slavery within their borders, and in some cases
the slave trade; but when our forefathers came together to form that
Constitution under which the nation still exists, the opposition of
certain Southern States was so vigorous that the best which could be done
was to authorize a tax on slaves of not more than ten dollars a head, and
to provide that the traffic should not be prohibited before 1808. But
there followed a series of acts which corrected the seeming failure of the
constitutional convention. One prohibited American citizens "carrying on
the slave trade from the United States to any foreign place or country."
Another forbade the introduction of slaves into the Mississippi Territory.
Others made it unlawful to carry slaves to States which prohibited the
traffic, or to fit out ships for the foreign slave trade, or to serve on a
slaver. The discussion caused by all these measures did much to build up a
healthy public sentiment, and when 1808--the date set by the
Constitution--came round, a prohibitory law was passed, and the President
was authorized to use the armed vessels of the United States to give it
force and effect. Notwithstanding this, however, the slave trade, though
now illegal and outlawed, continued for fully half a century. Slaves were
still stolen on the coast of Africa by New England sea captains, subjected
to the pains and horrors of the middle passage, and smuggled into Georgia
or South Carolina, to be eagerly bought by the Southern planters. A
Congressman estimated that 20,000 blacks were thus smuggled into the
United States annually. Lafitte's nest of pirates at Barataria was a
regular slave depot; so, too, was Amelia Island, Florida. The profit on a
slave smuggled into the United States amounted to $350 or $500, and the
temptation was too great for men to be restrained by fear of a law, which
prescribed but light penalties. It is even matter of record that a
governor of Georgia resigned his office to enter the smuggling trade on a
large scale. The scandal was notorious, and the rapidly growing abolition
sentiment demanded that Congress so amend its laws as to make manstealers
at least as subject to them as other malefactors. But Congress tried the
politician's device of passing laws which would satisfy the
abolitionists, the slave trader, and the slave owner as well. To-day the
duty of the nation seems to have been so clear that we have scant patience
with the paltering policy of Congress and the Executive that permitted
half a century of profitable law-breaking. But we must remember that
slaves were property, that dealing in them was immensely profitable, and
that while New England wanted this profit the South wanted the blacks.
Macaulay said that if any considerable financial interest could be served
by denying the attraction of gravitation, there would be a very vigorous
attack on that great physical truth. And so, as there were many financial
interests concerned in protecting slavery, every effort to effectually
abolish the trade was met by an outcry and by shrewd political opposition.
The slaves were better off in the United States than at home, Congress was
assured; they had the blessings of Christianity; were freed from the
endless wars and perils of the African jungle. Moreover, they were needed
to develop the South, while in the trade, the hardy and daring sailors
were trained, who in time would make the American navy the great power of
the deep. Political chicanery in Congress reinforced the clamor from
without, and though act after act for the destruction of the traffic was
passed, none proved to be enforcible--in each was what the politicians of
a later day called a "little joker," making it ineffective. But in 1820 a
law was passed declaring slave-trading piracy, and punishable with death.
So Congress had done its duty at last, but it was long years before the
Executive rightly enforced the law.
It is needless to go into the details of the long series of Acts of
Parliament and of Congress, treaties, conventions, and naval regulations,
which gradually made the outlawry of the slaver on the ocean complete. In
the humane work England took the lead, sacrificing the flourishing
Liverpool slave-trade with all its allied interests; sacrificing, too, the
immediate prosperity of its West Indian colonies, whose plantations were
tilled exclusively with slave labor, and even paying heavy cash indemnity
to Spain to secure her acquiescence. Unhappily, the United States was as
laggard as England was active. Indeed, a curious manifestation of national
pride made the American flag the slaver's badge of immunity, for the
Government stubbornly--and properly--refused to grant to British cruisers
the right to search vessels under our flag, and as there were few or no
American men-of-war cruising on the African coast, the slaver under the
Stars and Stripes was virtually immune from capture. In 1842 a treaty with
Great Britain bound us to keep a considerable squadron on that coast, and
thereafter there was at least some show of American hostility to the
infamous traffic.
The vitality of the traffic in the face of growing international hostility
is to be explained by its increasing profits. The effect of the laws
passed against it was to make slaves cheaper on the coast of Africa and
dearer at the markets in America. A slave that cost $20 would bring $500
in Georgia. A ship carrying 500 would bring its owners $240,000, and there
were plenty of men willing to risk the penalties of piracy for a share of
such prodigious profits. Moreover, the seas swarmed then with adventurous
sailors--mostly of American birth--to whom the very fact that slaving was
outlawed made it more attractive. The years of European war had bred up
among New Englanders a daring race of privateersmen--their vocation had
long been piracy in all but name, a fact which in these later days the
maritime nations recognize by trying to abolish privateering by
international agreement. When the wars of the early years of the
nineteenth century ended the privateersmen looked about for some seafaring
enterprise which promised profit. A few became pirates, more went into the
slave-trade. Men of this type were not merely willing to risk their lives
in a criminal calling, but were quite as ready to fight for their property
as to try to save it by flight. The slavers soon began to carry heavy
guns, and with desperate crews were no mean antagonists for a man-of-war.
Many of the vessels that had been built for privateers were in the trade,
ready to fight a cruiser or rob a smaller slaver, as chance offered. We
read of some carrying as many as twenty guns, and in that sea classic,
"Tom Cringle's Log," there is a story--obviously founded on fact--of a
fight between a British sloop-of-war and a slaver that gives a vivid idea
of the desperation with which the outlaws could fight. But sometimes the
odds were hopeless, and the slaver could not hope to escape by force of
arms or by flight. Then the sternness of the law, together with a foolish
rule concerning the evidence necessary to convict, resulted in the murder
of the slaves, not by ones or twos, but by scores, and even hundreds, at a
time. For it was the unwise ruling of the courts that actual presence of
slaves on a captured ship was necessary to prove that she was engaged in
the unlawful trade. Her hold might reek with the odor of the imprisoned
blacks, her decks show unmistakable signs of their recent presence,
leg-irons and manacles might bear dumb testimony to the purpose of her
voyage, informers in the crew might even betray the captain's secret; but
if the boarders from the man-of-war found no negroes on the ship, she went
free. What was the natural result? When a slaver, chased by a cruiser,
found that capture was certain, her cargo of slaves was thrown overboard.
The cruiser in the distance might detect the frightful odor that told
unmistakably of a slave-ship. Her officers might hear the screams of the
unhappy blacks being flung into the sea. They might even see the bodies
floating in the slaver's wake; but if, on boarding the suspected craft,
they found her without a single captive, they could do nothing. This was
the law for many years, and because of it thousands of slaves met a cruel
death as the direct result of the effort to save them from slavery. Many
stories are told of these wholesale drownings. The captain of the British
cruiser "Black Joke" reports of a case in which he was pursuing two slave
ships:
"When chased by the tenders both put back, made all sail up the river, and
ran on shore. During the chase they were seen from our vessels to throw
the slaves overboard by twos, shackled together by the ankles, and left in
this manner to sink or swim as best they could. Men, women, and children
were seen in great numbers struggling in the water by everyone on board
the two tenders, and, dreadful to relate, upward of 150 of these wretched
creatures perished in this way."
In this case, the slavers did not escape conviction, though the only
penalty inflicted was the seizure of their vessels. The pursuers rescued
some of the drowning negroes, who were able to testify that they had been
on the suspected ship, and condemnation followed. The captain of the
slaver "Brillante" took no chance of such a disaster. Caught by four
cruisers in a dead calm, hidden from his enemy by the night, but with no
chance of escaping before dawn, this man-stealer set about planning murder
on a plan so large and with such system as perhaps has not been equaled
since Caligula. First he had his heaviest anchor so swung that cutting a
rope would drop it. Then the chain cable was stretched about the ship,
outside the rail, and held up by light bits of rope, that would give way
at any stout pull. Then the slaves--600 in all--were brought up from
below, open-eyed, whispering, wondering what new act in the pitiful drama
of their lives this midnight summons portended. With blows and curses the
sailors ranged them along the rail and bound them to the chain cable. The
anchor was cut loose, plunging into the sea it carried the cable and the
shackled slaves with it to the bottom. The men on the approaching
man-of-war's boats, heard a great wail of many voices, a rumble, a splash,
then silence, and when they reached the ship its captain politely showed
them that there were no slaves aboard, and laughed at their comments on
the obvious signs of the recent presence of the blacks.
[Illustration: "BOUND THEM TO THE CHAIN CABLE"]
A favorite trick of the slaver, fleeing from a man-of-war, was to throw
over slaves a few at a time in the hope that the humanity of the pursuers
would impel them to stop and rescue the struggling negroes, thus giving
the slave-ship a better chance of escape. Sometimes these hapless blacks
thus thrown out, as legend has it Siberian peasants sometimes throw out
their children as ransom to pursuing wolves, were furnished with spars or
barrels to keep them afloat until the pursuer should come up; and
occasionally they were even set adrift by boat-loads. It was hard on the
men of the navy to steel their hearts to the cries of these castaways as
the ship sped by them; but if the great evil was to be broken up it could
not be by rescuing here and there a slave, but by capturing and punishing
the traders. Many officers of our navy have left on record their
abhorrence of the service they were thus engaged in, but at the same time
expressed their conviction that it was doing the work of humanity. They
were obliged to witness such human suffering as might well move the
stoutest human heart. At times they were even forced to seem as merciless
to the blacks as the slave-traders themselves; but in the end their work,
like the merciful cruelty of the surgeon, made for good.
When a slaver was overhauled after so swift a chase that her master had no
opportunity to get rid of his damning cargo, the boarding officers saw
sights that scarce Inferno itself could equal. To look into her hold,
filled with naked, writhing, screaming, struggling negroes was a sight
that one could see once and never forget. The effluvium that arose
polluted even the fresh air of the ocean, and burdened the breeze for
miles to windward. The first duty of the boarding officer was to secure
the officers of the craft with their papers. Not infrequently such vessels
would be provided with two captains and two sets of papers, to be used
according to the nationality of the warship that might make the capture;
but the men of all navies cruising on the slave coast came in time to be
expert in detecting such impostures. The crew once under guard, the first
task was to alleviate in some degree the sufferings of the slaves. But
this was no easy task, for the overcrowded vessel could not be enlarged,
and its burden could in no way be decreased in mid-ocean. Even if near the
coast of Africa, the negroes could not be released by the simple process
of landing them at the nearest point, for the land was filled with savage
tribes, the captives were commonly from the interior, and would merely
have been murdered or sold anew into slavery, had they been thus
abandoned. In time the custom grew up of taking them to Liberia, the free
negro state established in Africa under the protection of the United
States. But it can hardly be said that much advantage resulted to the
individual negroes rescued by even this method, for the Liberians were not
hospitable, slave traders camped upon the borders of their state, and it
was not uncommon for a freed slave to find himself in a very few weeks
back again in the noisome hold of the slaver. Even under the humane care
of the navy officers who were put in command of captured slavers the human
cattle suffered grievously. Brought on deck at early dawn, they so crowded
the ships that it was almost impossible for the sailors to perform the
tasks of navigation. One officer, who was put in charge of a slaver that
carried 700 slaves, writes:
"They filled the waist and gangways in a fearful jam, for there were over
700 men, women, boys, and young girls. Not even a waistcloth can be
permitted among slaves on board ship, since clothing even so slight would
breed disease. To ward off death, ever at work on a slave ship, I ordered
that at daylight the negroes should be taken in squads of twenty or more,
and given a salt-water bath by the hose-pipe of the pumps. This brought
renewed life after their fearful nights on the slave deck.... No one who
has never seen a slave deck can form an idea of its horrors. Imagine a
deck about 20 feet wide, and perhaps 120 feet long, and 5 feet high.
Imagine this to be the place of abode and sleep during long, hot,
healthless nights of 720 human beings! At sundown, when they were carried
below, trained slaves received the poor wretches one by one, and laying
each creature on his side in the wings, packed the next against him, and
the next, and the next, and so on, till like so many spoons packed away
they fitted into each other a living mass. Just as they were packed so
must they remain, for the pressure prevented any movement or the turning
of hand or foot, until the next morning, when from their terrible night of
horror they were brought on deck once more, weak and worn and sick." Then,
after all had come up and been splashed with salt water from the pumps,
men went below to bring up the dead. There was never a morning search of
this sort that was fruitless. The stench, the suffocation, the
confinement, oftentimes the violence of a neighbor, brought to every dawn
its tale, of corpses, and with scant gentleness all were brought up and
thrown over the side to the waiting sharks. The officer who had this
experience writes also that it was thirty days after capturing the slaver
before he could land his helpless charges.
No great moral evil can long continue when the attention of men has been
called to it, and when their consciences, benumbed by habit, have been
aroused to appreciation of the fact that it is an evil. To be sure, we,
with the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors and our minds filled with
a horror which their teachings instilled, sometimes think that they were
slow to awaken to the enormity of some evils they tolerated. So perhaps
our grandchildren may wonder that we endured, and even defended,
present-day conditions, which to them will appear indefensible. And so
looking back on the long continuance of the slave-trade, we wonder that it
could have made so pertinacious a fight for life. We marvel, too, at the
character of some of the men engaged in it in its earlier and more lawful
days, forgetting that their minds had not been opened, that they regarded
the negro as we regard a beeve. If in some future super-refined state men
should come to abstain from all animal food, perhaps the history of the
Chicago stock-yards will be as appalling as is that of the Bight of Benin
to-day, and that the name of Armour should be given to a great industrial
school will seem as curious as to us it is inexplicable that the founder
of Fanueil Hall should have dealt in human flesh.
It is, however, a chapter in the story of the American merchant sailor
upon which none will wish to linger, and yet which can not be ignored. In
prosecuting the search for slaves and their markets he showed the
qualities of daring, of fine seamanship, of pertinacity, which have
characterized him in all his undertakings; but the brutality, the greed,
the inhumanity inseparable from the slave-trade make the participation of
Americans in it something not pleasant to enlarge upon. It was, as I have
said, not until the days of the Civil War blockade that the traffic was
wholly destroyed. As late as 1860 the yacht "Wanderer," flying the New
York Yacht Club's flag, owned by a club member, and sailing under the
auspices of a member of one of the foremost families of the South, made
several trips, and profitable ones, as a slaver. No armed vessel thought
to overhaul a trim yacht, flying a private flag, and on her first trip her
officers actually entertained at dinner the officers of a British cruiser
watching for slavers on the African coast. But her time came, and when in
1860 the slaver, Nathaniel Gordon, a citizen of Portland, Maine, was
actually hanged as a pirate, the death-blow of the slave-trade was struck.
Thereafter the end came swiftly.
**Transcriber's Note: Page 91: changed preeminance to preëminence