[CTRL] Sins of the Fathers

[Kris Millegan]

-Caveat Lector-   <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">
</A> -Cui Bono?-

an exerpt from:
Sins of the Fathers
James Pope Hennessy©1967
All rights reseved
Capricorn Books
New York, NY
LCCN 67-11141
286 pps – 1969 pbk – Out-of-print
-----
-- Up in Boston, and despite clear evidence to the contrary, people will deny
that Bostonians ever had anything to do with the slave trade, and the
Massachusetts Historical Society has even gone to the pains of publishing
documents to show that the New England slave trade was centred on Newport,
Rhode Island. In Newport itself the clapboard town's complicity in the trade
cannot be ignored, but emphasis is laid on the leading part played in it by
immigrant Portuguese Jews like Aaron Lopez, who lie buried there in the calm
and shady little graveyard of the first American synagogue. In
Charlottesville, Virginia, you get embarrassed replies if you ask how it came
about that the venerated Thomas Jefferson who wrote against slavery still
owned slaves and constructed Monticello with slave labour. When you get down
into the Carolinas some of the descendants of the planters and merchants,
some members of the old and charming aristocracy of Charleston and elsewhere,
can scarcely understand why one thinks the old days of slavery were bad at
all. They will refer to Roman slaves, to Saxon slaves, even to the building
of the Egyptian pyramids, as well as, of course, to slavery as mentioned in
the Bible. 1 got the uneasy feeling that I recall having had many years ago
in Montgomery, Alabama — that to certain nostalgic Southerners it is the
abolition of slavery, rather than its original existence, that constitutes
the real crime.--
-- The slave trade was, of course, only one section of the widespread
shipping interests of the Rhode Island merchants, who also dealt in whale and
sperm oil, in spermaceti candles, and in and import-export business with the
ports of Europe. Most of these firms were family concerns — there were
Christopher, George and Robert Champlin, the four Brown brothers of
Providence Plantation, a large family named Wanton, as well as individuals
like Philip Wilkinson and Stephen d'Ayrault, junior. From 1790 on the slave
trade was chiefly in the hands of the brothers de Wolf, the youngest of whom,
Levi, is said to have 'retired in disgust after making one voyage to
Africa'.--
-- But though the Jews of Rhode Island remained as unmoved by African misery
as the planters of the South or as the merchants of Liverpool and Bristol,
there flourished in New England one body of noble-minded persons to whom the
slave trade and slavery itself had always been anathema: the Quakers. In 1773
the Rhode Island Quakers, in particular, received powerful and expert support
for their views from a new recruit to their ranks in the person of Moses
Brown, youngest of the four slave-trading brothers of Providence Plantation.
Converted to Quakerism, Moses Brown gave up slaving to devote the remainder
of his life to fighting the trade, and to trying to persuade his immediate
family and other prominent Rhode Island merchants to desist from it as well.
The zeal of the convert is frequently derided, yet Moses Brown in America,
like John Newton in England, was specifically equipped by experience to
preach the abolition of an evil trade in which he had himself for so long
taken part.--



Chapter 13
The Great Column of Blood

I

CALABAR because of its deep water anchorage and efficient and obliging native
traders might be popular with European ships' masters, but the actual export
product of this eerie region — Calabari Negroes — were not always in demand
on the other side of the Atlantic. In the West Indies, planters could not on
the whole afford to be choosy, and would accept Calabaris or anything else
reasonably young and healthy that they could get. On the great rice and
indigo plantations of South Carolina, however, Calabaris were not wanted.
'There must not be a Calabar amongst them,' the eminent Charleston slave
trader Henry Laurens wrote to the St Kitts merchants, Smith and Clifton, when
indenting for a fresh stock of slaves in 1755. 'Prime negro men of any
country except Calabar bring great prices with us, £40 stg. and upwards,'
Laurens wrote in September of the same year to another St Kitts middle-man.
Apart from the fact that the chief demand in and around Charleston was for
Gambians and other tall races, and that he refused to handle what he termed
'a scabby flock' of new slaves from the Delta, Laurens gave an interesting
reason for the prejudice against the natives of Calabar: 'Stout healthy
fellows sell to most advantage with us,' he wrote to Peter Furnell, of
Jamaica; 'the country not material if they are not from Calabar which slaves
are quite out of repute from numbers in every cargo that have been sold with
us destroying themselves.' The Calabaris, in fact, carried with them over the
sea their inborn contempt for the value of human life, and their longing for
the African nether-world the gate to which was death.

Henry Laurens was partner in the firm of Austin and Laurens, which aimed to
sell not more than seven hundred Negro slaves a year. There were some dozen
firms handling the retail slave trade in Charleston, but in the
mid-eighteenth century, Austin and Laurens were the largest and most
successful of them all, with one quarter of the whole Charleston trade in
their hands. In 1748 Laurens had gone to England to make business contacts.
His surviving letter-books form a corpus of extremely detailed and immediate
information on the American end of the slave trade and show once again how
risky, if profitable, this trade could be. International wars, or the
possibility of them, affected slave-prices in Charleston, as did the state of
the crops of rice and indigo on which the wealth of the southern planters
then depended. His correspondence was widespread — he would write to
Devonshire, Reeve and Lloyd of Bristol, to Samuel Touchett of London, to
Lascelles and Maxwell of London, to Smith and Clifton of St Kitts and to
Barbados firms such as Law, Satterthwaite and Jones, or Gidney Clarke. Henry
Laurens was one of the leading citizens of Charleston and one of the greatest
plantation owners in South Carolina. Apart from slaves. he dealt in rice and
indigo, rum, beer, wine and deerskins. On most of his goods he charged a five
per cent commission, but for slaves he raised this to ten. Apparently alone
among the merchants of Charleston, Laurens felt personal doubts about slavery
— 'You know, my dear Sir, I abhor slavery' he once wrote to his eldest son;
and after the Declaration of Independence he made elaborate plans to manumit
his slaves. Through no fault of his own he was unable to put these plans into
effect. Henry Laurens was in no way typical of the merchants and planters of
the Low South, nor were his liberal views shared by his fellow-citizens in
Charleston.

And now, with the fine and hospitable city of Charleston, South Carolina, and
the allied vista of the columned plantation palaces and the superb gardens
and parklands of the South we are entering a realm of conflict — a conflict
between aesthetics and morality which is, to say the least of it,
disquieting. Pacing the brick pavements and the cobblestones of Charleston,
peering through wrought iron gateways at the tall town-houses, at the
spacious porticoes and at the yards abloom with camellias and jessamine, with
gardenias, azaleas and the coral vine, it is hard to recognize that all this
civilized beauty has its roots in the sacked villages of West Africa, and in
the slave-dungeons of the coastal castles and forts. How connect with these
latter Gaddesden House on East Bay Street, or the Nathaniel Russell House on
Meeting Street or any of the other mansions built by the planters to escape,
in summer-time, from the malarial swamps in which their Negroes toiled and
died? Yet all these houses, town and country alike, are the product of the
dungeons of Elmina, the slave-pens at Whydah, the stinking ships lying off
Anamabu, the night-raids by long-boat upriver at Sierra Leone. Middleton
Place and Marshlands and Boone Hall owe their existence to hard bargaining
for human flesh in the Gambia or Benin.

Ouspensky once wrote of the two histories — the history we all learn at
school, the official history, which he called the history of crime; and the
real history running on simultaneously with quiet persistence and which he
took to be represented by medieval cathedrals such as Notre Dame de Paris. It
is tempting but not possible to try to wrench this theory round to apply it
to the marvellous houses of the Old South, but these form in fact a bloody
chapter in the history of crime. The builders of Notre Dame were anonymous
but they were free. The plantation houses of America stand on slave-dug
foundations, are built of slave-baked bricks and slave-cut stones and
slave-felled timber. Public buildings, moreover, were often financed by a tax
on the importation of slaves: 'I am in hopes that this year, please God,
there will come in a good many negroes' (Governor Nicolson of Virginia wrote
to the Council of Trade and Plantations in London in June Of 1700) 'so that
there may be money enough in a year or two to build a house for his Majesty's
Governor, as also the Capitol'. By the seventeentwenties there were indeed
enough Negroes to produce money as well as labour for such purposes and, in
the words of the author of The Mansions of Virginia 1706-1776 'the new
economic system was showing its effects and the era of great houses in the
new style had begun'.

In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller has asserted that 'the days of
the great plantations bequeathed to the brief and bleak pattern of our
American life a color and warmth suggestive, in certain ways, of that lurid,
violent epoch in Europe known as the Renaissance'. But does this really hold?
The standard of elegance and comfort in the country houses of the Old South
was usually far higher than that of the learning of their owners, and it
would seem ludicrous to compare life on the old rice plantation with that
which, in Italy, produced the Baptistery at Florence or the Venetian palazzi.
Furthermore the masons and the bricklayers of Tuscany or the Veneto were
neither lashed, nor bought, nor sold. In America, as Miller reminds us, 'the
great houses followed the great crops; in Virginia tobacco, in South Carolina
rice, in Mississipi cotton, in Lousiana sugar. Supporting it all, a living
foundation, like a great column of blood, was the labour of the slaves'.

Travelling down the eastern seaboard of the United States in a search for
material for this book, I was interested by the difference of attitude to my
subject as one ventured further and further south. Up in Boston, and despite
clear evidence to the contrary, people will deny that Bostonians ever had
anything to do with the slave trade, and the Massachusetts Historical Society
has even gone to the pains of publishing documents to show that the New
England slave trade was centred on Newport, Rhode Island. In Newport itself
the clapboard town's complicity in the trade cannot be ignored, but emphasis
is laid on the leading part played in it by immigrant Portuguese Jews like
Aaron Lopez, who lie buried there in the calm and shady little graveyard of
the first American synagogue. In Charlottesville, Virginia, you get
embarrassed replies if you ask how it came about that the venerated Thomas
Jefferson who wrote against slavery still owned slaves and constructed
Monticello with slave labour. When you get down into the Carolinas some of
the descendants of the planters and merchants, some members of the old and
charming aristocracy of Charleston and elsewhere, can scarcely understand why
one thinks the old days of slavery were bad at all. They will refer to Roman
slaves, to Saxon slaves, even to the building of the Egyptian pyramids, as
well as, of course, to slavery as mentioned in the Bible. 1 got the uneasy
feeling that I recall having had many years ago in Montgomery, Alabama — that
to certain nostalgic Southerners it is the abolition of slavery, rather than
its original existence, that constitutes the real crime.

In the Old Slave Mart Museum on Chalmers Street in Charleston — a building
which in fact, was probably never a slave-market at all — a leaflet assures
the tourist that the wooden stalls on the second floor of this converted barn
were places in which 'prospective buyers could inspect slaves offered for
sale. This again gives the lie to the popular image of the slave tied in
chains standing before the public and subject to every indignity'. We are
further told that surviving handbills show that slave-families were sold
together and not, as every Northern and foreign eye-witness has recorded,
ruthlessly split up. 'Thus,' the writer of this curious leaflet concludes,
'we have a record of a business — a sad and unfortunate one, yes — but still
a business and not, as some may say, a mere exercise in cruelty.' The
implication of this sentence beggars comment.

In the Southern States what 1 have earlier termed the Myth of the Merry and
Contented Slave is still very much alive. In places like Charleston,
inhabited by some of the most winning and civilized people 1 have ever met,
it goes hand in hand with paternalism and with the cloying conviction that
Negroes are quaint and sweet. In the museum there are collections of old
Negro proverbs such as: 'If you knock de nose de eye cry', for example, or
'as de ole crow fly, so de young one too' or

Sick chicken got de pip
I see it in her eye.
Stand back, nigger boy,
And let dat chicken die.

Family tales of Negro cosiness and loyalty have been handed down, and when I
was impolite enough to mention Uncle Tom's Cabin, a respected Charlestonian
friend replied tartly: 'Mrs Stowe knew nothing. How could she, coming from
Cincinnati!'

Back volumes of the South Carolina Gazette contain, however, many items which
contradict the Myth of the Merry and Contented Slave. 'The negroes it seems
have again begun the hellish practice of poisoning,' runs a news paragraph
for January 1761 which records the hanging of a male and a female slave on
Wadmalah Island. The number of advertisements for runaway slaves in the Gazett
e and other Southern papers do not suggest contentment either. In 1761 a
Negro man is sought and may be recognized by 'his country marks on his face
and down his breast and belly'; or (in 1749) 'Sarah a lusty black wench with
a very remarkable child of brick colour, has white curl'd hair and a
twinkling in its eyes'; or 'a new negro from the Papaw country, his country
name Arrow'; or 'a Mundingo negro with his country marks on his temple and
cheeks'. Thus did the proud tribal cuts made in childhood as a sign of family
and station become a means of identifying runaway Africans who were then
handed back to the plantation overseer with his lash. If several slaves were
on the loose, their owners would combine in volunteer bands which held a form
of meet on horseback before the hunt began.

In the streets of Charleston a curfew for Negroes was enforced. Any Negro
found walking about after dusk without a written permit from his master or
mistress was arrested. Owners often made extra money by hiring out their
domestic slaves, who were then given a copper identity disc bearing name,
date and occupation to wear. Albino Negroes and mulattoes were exhibited for
money as freaks or curiosities — a GaZette advertisement for May 1743
announces one such exhibition at the house of Mrjoel Poinsett in Charleston.
Mr Poinsett was showing for a week in June, and for five shillings a head
entrance fee, 'a WHITE Negro girl, of Negro parents, she is as white as any Eu
ropean, has a lovely blush in her countenance, grey eyes continually
trembling, and hair fisled [sic] as the wool of a white lamb'.

The position of domestic slaves on the Southern plantations was as privileged
as in the West Indies. They were nattily dressed, the footmen chosen for
their height and looks, the ladies' maid rustling about 'in the scarcely worn
silks of her young mistress' and, according to the freed slave Frederick
Douglass (who escaped from the Lloyd plantation in Maryland in the year 1838)
'they resembled the field hands in nothing except their colour, and in this
they held the advantage of a velvet-like glossiness, rich and beautiful. The
hair, too, showed the same advantage'. But even these favoured beings lived
on a knife edge and could at any moment be given a flogging for some trivial
or imaginary offence. Douglass records many unsavoury incidents of his
boyhood, one of the worst of which was watching the aged Colonel Lloyd thrash
his old and trusted Negro coachman, who had been with him all his life, and
whom he forced to take his unmerited punishment kneeling. Writing of the
Lloyd plantation as 'secluded, dark and out of the way' Douglass explains
that, even in Maryland, such estates were run as total tyrannies. The
constant use of the cow-hide whip was, he points out, contagious, and Negroes
in positions of slight authority over others would lash their fellow-slaves
mercilessly. 'Everybody in the South' (he concludes) 'seems to want the
privilege of whipping somebody else.'

Life on the old plantation was certainly lurid and violent; but there, we may
think, its resemblance to Renaissance Italy most distinctly ends.

'Our orders are that you embrace the first fair wind and make the best of
your way to the coast of Africa, and there invest your cargo in slaves. As
slaves, like other articles, when brought to market, generally appear to the
best advantage; therefore too critical an inspection cannot be paid to them
before purchase.' These instructions to a ship's master in 1785 were issued
not in Charleston, South Carolina, but in Salem, Massachusetts.

Except for the famous witch trials of 1692,* there has never been anything
very lurid and violent about Salem. The quiet Sabbath atmosphere of Salem,
the gabled houses, the surrounding woods of birch and maple, the brisk New
England air with the tang of the sea would seem the antithesis to that of the
Carolina mansions and plantations, mysterious with Spanish moss swaying from
the branches of the live oaks, and ostentatious to a degree which the
Founding Fathers could never have envisaged. Yet it was from Salem, as well
as from Boston and from Newport, that the slaving ships set sail for the
coast of Guinea. One of the grievances of white Southerners in the nineteenth
century — probably even a covert grievance still today — was that the Yankees
who had become so vociferously humanitarian over the evils of slavery were
the direct descendants of the chief American traders in slaves. [* An
expression of public hysteria which only lasted four months, resulted in
nineteen hangings and one pressing to death, and had its origins in an
accusation that a West Indian slave named Tituba who belonged to a local
Congregationalist clergyman had helped two other women bewitch ten young
girls.]

This is not to say that there had not always been voices raised in sonorous
protest against slavery in the Northern and Middle States. The Philadelphia
Quaker, Anthony Benezet, published tracts upon the subject in 1762 and 1767,
calling Negro slavery 'a lamentable and shocking instance of the influence
which the love of gain has upon the minds of those who yield to its
allurements' and condemning the slave trade itself as 'a trade which is
entered upon from such sensual motives and carried on by such devilish
means'. Writing in 1783 to a young lady who had lately moved from Maryland to
New jersey, the Boston merchant, Matthew Ridley, then in Paris told her:
'Time might reconcile you to the sight of the slaves. It is however a painful
reflection to a generous mind and ought never to have been introduced. It is
one of the evils that it will be very difficult to correct. Of all
Reformations these are the most difficult to [? ripen] where the roots grow
as it were in the pockets of men.' Actual Negro slavery in New England was
never as prevalent as in the South, largely because there was no economic
need for slaves, no plantation life, and a climate then considered far too
cold for African survival. All the same, a French visitor to Boston in 1687
recorded that there was scarcely a household of any consequence in Boston
city which did not possess one or more Negro slaves. Boston slaves were thus
wholly domestic; in a letter of February 1738 from Peter Fancuil of Boston to
Captain Bulkeley of the ship Byam this Bostonian merchant asked him to
purchase in Antigua 'for the use of my house, as likely a strait-limbed Negro
lad as possible you can, about the age of 12 to fifteen years, and if to be
done, one that has had the smallpox'. The New England attitude to their own
slaves was, we may surmise, more humane than that of most Southerners, and we
might take a random inscription from a New England gravestone as
representative of this:

In memory of Caesar.

Here lies the best of slaves
Now turning into dust;
Caesar the Ethiopian craves
A place among the just.

His faithful soul has fled
To realms of heavenly light,
And by the blood that Jesus shed
Is changed from Black to White.

Jan. 15 he quitted the stage
In the 77th year of his age.

1780

But the fact remains that it was the New Englanders who, on that side of the
Atlantic, were most busily and thriftily engaged upon the Triangular Trade.

Theirs was the Triangular Trade with a difference. Slave ships out of New
England, which were smaller than those out of Bristol, London or Liverpool,
out of Holland or Metropolitan France, were known as 'rum-boats' because
instead of the conventional copper bars and brass basins, bright cottons and
glass beads, their sole cargoes were kegs of rum. It was with this beverage
that slaves were bought up and down the Guinea coast. For instance, in the
accounts of the Newport ships TittBitt and Cassada Garden, lying off Anamabu
in 1756, African men are recorded as fetching one hundred and fifteen gallons
of rum each, and African women ninety-five gallons apiece. New England's
particular contribution to the spread of alcoholism in West Africa was to
encourage the drinking of rum instead of brandy. Until 1723 the favourite
drink on the coast had been French brandy, but in that year the Rhode
Islanders introduced the novelty of rum. This caught on quickly and
(according to a tax protest by the Colony to the Board of Trade dated 1764)
'from small beginnings increased to the consumption of several thousand
hogsheads yearly, by which the French are deprived of the sale of an equal
quantity of brandy'. In 1764 the consumption of rum was 'annually increasing
upon the coast', and the Rhode Islanders looked forward 'a few years' to the
satisfying probability that 'the sale of French brandies there will be
entirely destroyed'.

Most New England ships took their slaves to sell in the West Indies — whence
great numbers were sent up to the colonies in America -- and with the profits
made they bought molasses, which they took back to New England to be made
into rum for the West African market. It has been stated that by 1750 there
were sixty-three rum distilleries in Massachusetts alone, turning out some
12,500 hogsheads a year, with another thirty distilleries in Rhode Island. In
the year 1752 a Yankee captain, trying to stock up quickly with rum so as to
get away to the African coast, was informed by his agent that there was not
enough rum to go round, and that his hope of loading his sloop with it in
five weeks was not realistic: 'We cannot give you any encouragement of
getting that quantity of rum -these three months, for there are so many
vessels loading for Guinea, we can't get one hogshead of rum for cash.'

Nicholas Owen, whom at the beginning of this book we found peaceably making a
shell picture on the Sherbro River, tells us that 'our old Europeans' thought
the Yankee captains comical. He explains that in an eighteenth-century New
England seaport, 'if a man is esteemed for his honesty in public, let him be
what profession so ever, he is to be preferred in a ship to these and other
parts of the world, if he can take an observation and is acquainted with that
part of navigation called plain sailing without any of the practical part of
seamanship'. New England butchers, carpenters or farmers might turn up on the
Guinea Coast in charge of a rum-boat, and Owen suggests that they returned
safely home 'more by chance than art'. But he himself did not think European
factors and ships' masters right to laugh at 'the great many remarks of
simplicity laid to the charge of these people'. He admired the Yankee
captains because they did not swear and were 'an industrious holiest people,
who despise the gaudy toys of the foolish for things more substantial and
necessary for the life of man'. The eager involvement in the slave trade of
these sober, and sober-minded, persons who loved God and eschewed profanity
may well make one ponder. A modern historian of Rhode Island has even
suggested that a slaving voyage made under such a captain must have been the
making of many a likely New England lad. 'Think of the effect, the result of
a slave voyage on a youngster starting in his teens' (wrote H. W. Preston,
Director of the Rhode Island State Bureau of Information in his Rhode Island
and the Sea, published in Providence in 1932). '. . . What an education was
such a voyage for the farmer lad. What an enlargement of experience for a
country boy. If he returned to the farm his whole outlook on life would be
changed. He went out a boy; he returned a man.'

III

Whether the blithe country boy off a farm outside Concord ' or the
fisherman's son from Gloucester, Massachusetts, returned from Guinea men or
brutes is open to conjecture, but certain it is that their restricted New
England outlook would have been sharply widened by their experiences on the
Gambia or amidst the flying human heads of Old Calabar. The authors of Black
Cargoes believe that the conditions of seamen serving on the New England
slavers were better than those of seamen on European ships. Yankee captains
did not usually carry a cat-o'-nine-tails) and the comparative classlessness
of rural New England society prevented the captains from exercising too
haughty or too absolute a power. Many of their crew might also be their
relatives or neighbours 'and the captain was frequently reminded of what the
neighbours might say'. These authors appositely quote Whittier's lines on the
fate of an unpopular Marblehead skipper:

Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, Tarr'd and feather'd and carried in a
cart By the women of Marblehead!

On the other hand, the Negro slaves on Yankee ships suffered more on the
Middle Passage because the ships were so small. Slaves on these brigs and
sloops were only released from their chains to work the pumps in a crisis,
for many of the New England ships were so unseaworthy that 'you could see
daylight all around the bows under the deck'. The eighteenth-century Boston
News Letter, which carried frequent advertisements of slaves for sale on
Beacon Street or Summer Street, also recorded melancholy details of
successful ship-board mutinies — as, for example, an uprising on board a
Rhode Island ship, Captain Beer commanding, which was lying off Cape Coast
Castle in the winter Of 1746. This ship was already loaded with 'a number of
negro slaves, and a considerable quantity of gold dust on board; the said
slaves found an opportunity to rise against the Master and men and killed the
said Master and all the crew, except the two Masters [Mates] who by jumping
overboard and swimming ashore saved their lives. What became of the vessel
and negroes afterwards the letter* does not mention'. On another occasion, in
1765, a Captain Hopkins from Providence was obliged, while on the Middle
Passage and owing to the sickness of many of his crew, to call upon a certain
number of slaves to help run the ship. These slaves managed to release the
rest, and the whole drove of them attacked the crew; they were overpowered in
the end, but eighty of the valuable people were either killed, wounded or
thrown overboard during the tussle.[* i.e. a letter 'from the coast of
Guinea' which was dated 14 January 1747 and reached Boston via Barbados.]

Such was the enthusiasm with which New England merchants plunged into the rum
trade that sometimes they unintentionally created a glut of that spirit on
the Guinea Coast. The Boston GaZette for 12 September 1763, reports 'the very
discouraging accounts' of two Rhode Island captains on the Guinea Coast, who
complained of the shortage of slaves and that prices in rum were consequently
rising. Twenty more vessels were setting out from Newport, carrying nine
thousand hogsheads of rum all told — 'a quantity much too large for the
places on the coast where that commodity has generally been vended'.
Agreements could sometimes be made with English ships on the coast, whereby
they exchanged trade goods with the Yankees for so many gallons of rum, but
all the same a glut was not unusual. In 1736 a Captain Cahoone, writing from
Anamabu to his owner, the merchant Ayrault of Newport, Rhode Island, said he
had never seen so much rum on the coast 'at one time before', and that there
were also swarms of French slavers — 'never seen before for number, for the
whole coast is full of them'. He reports that there were seven sail 'of us
rum men' at Anamabu alone — Cwe are ready to devour one another, for our case
is desperate ... I have got on board sixty-one slaves and upwards of thirty
ounces of gold, and have got thirteen or fourteen hogsheads of rum yet left
on board, the trade is so very dull it is actually enough to make a man
crazy.' But as always, the fortunes of the coast fluctuated; forty years
later a second mate, Peleg Green, from Newport, was writing to Aaron Lopez,
one of the leading Jewish slave-merchants there, that he had reached Anamabu
and found 'times to be very good, thanks be to God for it, there was only one
rum man, that is Captain Johnson of Boston and he had almost done before we
arrived'. But, in general, as we know, slaving on the coast was a long and
tedious business, made all the worse by sickness and by the rains that began
in May and lasted till October. As at Cape Coast Castle and the other forts
on shore, alcohol was both a necessity and a menace to the seamen on board
their anchored ships.

And what of our country boy, fresh from the sea-winds of Cape Cod and the
quiet and ordered beauty of the trim villages of New England, snug and
Breughel-like in the snow, a mass of lilacs and of linden trees in summer?
Everyone has perhaps his own conception of what constitutes manhood, but
might we not legitimately suppose that a career begun on a Gloucester fishing
schooner would be more likely to turn our boy into a man than service on even
the best-run slave ship? Even if we picture all New England slave ship
masters to have been as stern and religious as Captain Ahab himself, we must
assume that, once on the coast of Guinea and engaged in the frantic febrile
search for slaves, they had not too much time left over to inquire into the
morals of their crew or to shield some rustic mother's lad from the riveting
realities of life on the African coast. On board many of the slave ships, the
captains did make some effort to limit the crews' drinking habits. But
expeditions by open boat, either down the coast or upriver, with the aim of
picking up slaves piecemeal or in small 'parcels', were impossible to
control. On these trips, kegs of rum and brandy formed a natural part of a
longboat's cargo; men soaked to the skin by tropical rain for days together
could hardly be expected to refrain from cracking such kegs open and
replacing what they drank by river-water. 'The blacks who buy the liquor'
wrote John Newton 'are the losers by the adulteration; but often the people
who cheat them are the greatest sufferers'. Further, the sailors would
inevitably swill palm-wine in great quantities, either sold them by the
Africans or offered by kindly black acquaintances. And then there was the
problem — one on which no New England mother would have cared to dwell — of
the African women. 'Problem' is in fact the wrong word. The real difficulty
lay in the apparent availability of African women on the coast, and in the
danger that voluntary liaisons or attempted rape would often lead to a
seaman's death either by knife or poison. For the captains it was irritating
enough to have their men sick or dying of fever. That they should risk being
murdered for their pleasures was too senseless and capricious altogether.
Newton remarks that many captains did make efforts to keep their seamen under
control, but that many more did not mind how their men spent their spare time
so long as they did their jobs properly on board.

The hunt for and purchase of the slaves was degrading in itself, but, for a
neophyte, the intense sexuality of life on the Guinea Coast was irresistibly
alluring and corruptive. Amongst West Africans virility was, and remains, a
status symbol. A chief was often chosen for the number of his wives, which
meant for the number of his children; and in order not to lose his power and
perhaps his life it was essential for him to be surrounded by living and
squalling proofs of his sexual potency. Outwardly, Negro girls and women of
good families behaved with discretion; but white lovers and the gifts they
brought were popular with them, and many of the seamen, like the garrison
soldiers in the forts, were thought to have literally worn themselves away
copulating in the night dews on the coast: 'and lewdness' (John Newton
sententiously reminds us) 'too frequently terminates in death'.

Apart from these perilous and obvious manifestations of manhood, the Guinea
Coast had much else to show the travelling boy from Beverley or Marblehead.
Even the whaling ships at home could not compare in splendour with, say, the
state war-canoes of the two Kings of Bonny, King Pepple and King Holiday. To
old hands like Captain Hugh Crow, it was always clear that King Pepple was in
some unidentifiable way the social and constitutional superior of King
Holiday. They would never make state visits to anchored European ships
together, although it was thought by the Europeans that they were more or
less co-partners on the Bonny throne. Sometimes they quarrelled, when King
Holiday would withdraw with his retinue to seek sanctuary in Fish Town, a
holy place of safety far out in the mangrove swamps and which was ruled by
priests. The two kings, like all the others down the coast, wore gold-laced
hats, but King Pepple would sometimes sport a pair of scarlet leather boots
which seemed too small for him and which caused him to topple over when he
was drunk. The ceremonial canoes of Bonny were famous for their size and
their construction, cut, like those of Calabar, from the log of a single
giant cotton-tree.

There were fifteen rowers on each side, as well as a complement of one
hundred and fifty armed men. When equipped for war — that is to say for
slaving forays — the canoes shot by with colours flying, drums beating and
horns blowing. Seated musicians played on other instruments and some of the
retinue danced up and down the middle of the boat. The rowers kept 'admirable
time' with their paddles, and the great war-canoes sped rapidly, relentlessly
on their predatory course. Bonny offered other novel and interesting
spectacles — not least amongst them that of the big land-crabs creeping in
and out of holes in the earthen house-floors after an important homefuneral.
'Although there is no doubt the ugly creatures consume the bodies' (Captain
Crow explains) 'the inhabitants cat them with a great deal of relish.'

Tales such as these, which really needed pruning rather than elaboration,
would echo, months later, through the neat parlour of some weatherboarded
farm cottage in Massachusetts as the boy (now a man) displayed the bright,
obscene sea-shells, the live parrot or monkey, and the dried snake-skins
brought back as presents to his parents and his demure sisters. Other sights
and episodes would be wisely left unmentioned, to be mulled over in the
warmth and privacy of an attic bed, or while milking the cows in the chill
New England dusk. The temptation to go a second time to the coast of Guinea
would grow until it became irresistible. For whatever Africa finally makes of
you, and however incomprehensible that continent begins to seem, it does
inspire you with a gnawing nostalgia, and exercises over those who have once
been there a pull as strong, I think, as the more publicized and legendary
pull of the East.

IV

Of the New England ports which served as main pumpingstations to the great
column of blood down South, Newport was the most active. Although the Newport
slave merchants used Barbados as a main information centre on current prices,
and also sold in other West Indian islands, they did a brisk, direct trade wit
h Charleston firms, and almost regarded the city of Charleston as yet another
West Indian island. Samuel and Williarn Vemon, of Newport, traded chiefly
with Austin and Laurens, the Charleston firm already mentioned. The Vernon
letter-books are as detailed as those of Henry Laurens, and show with what
painstaking competence the American trade was run. In June 1756, for
instance, Austin and Laurens had reported to their Newport correspondents
that a Negro girl sold to a planter named Yarnold had died after the sale,
and that they had persuaded him to take the matter to arbitration — the
question being whether he should pay for her or not. This incident riled the
Newport traders: 'we don't imagine whether he bought the girl at a public or
private sale that you warranted her to be perfectly sound and well — which is
not customary for new slaves, and whether we are not entitled to as much
compensation as he is — or whether he can't afford to bear such a loss as
well as we are we can't say. These things we think are quite foreign from the
dispute.' This particular case was of consequence, for it involved a matter
of principle — that slaves fresh from Africa should never be guaranteed sound
— and it could have set a dangerous precedent by which the traders stood to
lose a good deal, since newly arrived slaves often died from past
ill-treatment on the Middle Passage, from the physical shock of plantation
conditions, or from suicidal melancholia.

Charleston firms had sometimes to complain of the state of a slave ship's
cargo, either because of sickness contracted on the voyage or because the
Negroes had been carelessly selected on the Guinea Coast. 'We have this day
sold to the amount of £7,445-12/- currency, in which two are included that
sold at vendue for only £35., 1 12s' (Henry Laurens wrote, again in 1756, to
the Vernon brothers of Newport) :

They seemed past all hopes of recovery. God knows what we shall do with what
remain, they are a most scabby flock, all of them full of crockeraws —
several have extreme sore eyes, three very puny children and add to this the
worst infirmity of all others with which which 6 or 8 are attended (vizt) Old
Age — those the vessel brought last year were very indifferent but these much
worse ... We had a sloop arrived with one hundred and fifty prime slaves from
the factories at Gambia and Bence Island the evening before the sale of your
negroes which would not at all have injured your sale had they been good, for
we did not discover what a prime parcel they were until the first day's sale
was over.

The Vemons replied that although this news showed that it had been 'a very
bad voyage' for them personally, they were certain that Austin and Laurens
had used their 'best endeavours' in the sale.

The slave trade was, of course, only one section of the widespread shipping
interests of the Rhode Island merchants, who also dealt in whale and sperm
oil, in spermaceti candles, and in and import-export business with the ports
of Europe. Most of these firms were family concerns — there were Christopher,
George and Robert Champlin, the four Brown brothers of Providence Plantation,
a large family named Wanton, as well as individuals like Philip Wilkinson and
Stephen d'Ayrault, junior. From 1790 on the slave trade was chiefly in the
hands of the brothers de Wolf, the youngest of whom, Levi, is said to have
'retired in disgust after making one voyage to Africa'.

Although they were distinguished for sobriety — Newport slaving captains of
the pre-Revolutionary era belonged to the Fellowship Club of Newport, the
rules of which forbade gambling, drinking, quarrelling and swearing — that
high moral tone on which New Englanders have ever prided themselves was not
always audible in their ships along the Guinea coast. Captain Samuel Moore,
of Boston, who traded in the Gambia River in the seventeen-thirties was a
notorious cheat, who passed off pewter forgeries as Maria Theresa dollars,
and got himself into trouble with the King of Cassan for giving him inferior
trade goods. Simeon Potter, a ship-owner of Bristol, Rhode Island, issued
instructions to his captains that they were to deal with African rather than
European slave-traders, to make sure to water the rum as much as possible
'and sell as much on the short measure as you can'. It was Potter's theory
that the heat of the sun would make the rum rise in the kegs so that it mixed
with the water; and he is on record for remarking: 'Money? Why I'd plough the
sea to porridge to make money !' Simeon Potter had a sister who had been
given the good old New England christian name of Abigail. Miss Abigail
married one of her brother's supercargoes, Marc Antoine de Wolf, a Jew from
the French island of Guadeloupe. De Wolf settled down in his wife's home town
of Bristol, Rhode Island, and sent several of their eight sons into the slave
trade. The most famous of these, James de Wolf, was tried before a Newport
grand jury in 179 1, and found guilty of murder for having thrown into the
sea a Negress who had contracted small-pox while on board his ship. By the
time the verdict was reached he had already left the state. James de Wolf was
later elected to the United States Senate, and lived on into a distinguished
old age.

    The de Wolfs were not the only Jews prominent in the Rhode Island slave
trading ventures. We have already come across the name of Aaron Lopez, who,
with his partner, Jacob Rodriguez Rivera, owned the most successful slaving
business in the state. Aaron Lopez was a man with a long, ascetic, olive face
who wore a white tie-wig. He has been described as boundlessly knowledgeable
in commerce, of irreproachable integrity and of 'polite and amiable manners'.
His characteristics, we learn, were 'hospitality and benevolence' and he was
considered 'an ornament and a valuable pillar in the Jewish society of which
he was a member. Thus he lived and thus he died; much regretted, esteemed and
loved by all'. Aaron Lopez had a nephew, Abraham Lopez, and a son-in-law,
Abraham Pereira Mendes, who made trips for the firm to Jamaica and New York.
In May 1752, for example, the New York Gazette carried an advertisement which
read: 'To be sold by Abraham Pereira Mendes, a parcel of likely young
negroes, pimento, coffee etc. at the house in Smith's Fly, lately in
occupation of Roger Pell, innkeeper. N.B. If any person has a mind to
purchase any of the goods mentioned, they may inquire of Mr Daniel Gomez.' In
1767, when on a mission to Jamaica, Mendes reported back to his father-in-law
that a consignment of Negroes was 'in such poor order' owing to being cooped
up in too small a brig for him to do anything but sell them off cheaply: 'To
my great surprise I found the negroes nothing to what I expected.' His
father-in-law replied that it gave him 'no small pleasure' to learn that
Mendes was on the spot in Kingston 'to assist Cap-tain All in the disposal of
his small cargo'. Captain All's small cargo, however, turned out as we see to
consist almost entirely of 'refuse slaves', and Captain All himself f`ell
ill. He left King-ston for Newport in November but, although the prudent
Mendes had 'got the cash ' for the boys' he would not send it by Captain All:
'the vessel having poor rigging and going on the winter's coast would not
venture to remit by him the money, but shall wait for your further orders.
Could I [have] got insurance made here would have remitted.' British
occupation of Newport during the Revolutionary war ruined many of the
merchants there. Aaron Lopez lost all his thirty vessels, and went to live in
benevolent retirement in the little Massachusetts township of Leicester.

Were we, at this late stage of our contemplation of the slavetraders, still
capable of feeling either astonishment or pain we might perhaps experience
both when looking at these Rhode Island Jews. Like the Jewish slavers of
Jamaica, Lopez and his ramified relatives were of Sephardic origin.
Persecuted in Portugal, these families had sought sanctuary in America, where
they could practise their faith in freedom and grow rich respectably. You
might have supposed, might you not, that a national and religious group which
had chosen freedom would hesitate at making a fortune by enslaving others?
You would have been sadly wrong.

But though the Jews of Rhode Island remained as unmoved by African misery as
the planters of the South or as the merchants of Liverpool and Bristol, there
flourished in New England one body of noble-minded persons to whom the slave
trade and slavery itself had always been anathema: the Quakers. In 1773 the
Rhode Island Quakers, in particular, received powerful and expert support for
their views from a new recruit to their ranks in the person of Moses Brown,
youngest of the four slave-trading brothers of Providence Plantation.
Converted to Quakerism, Moses Brown gave up slaving to devote the remainder
of his life to fighting the trade, and to trying to persuade his immediate
family and other prominent Rhode Island merchants to desist from it as well.
The zeal of the convert is frequently derided, yet Moses Brown in America,
like John Newton in England, was specifically equipped by experience to
preach the abolition of an evil trade in which he had himself for so long
taken part.

V

It is reckoned that 'articulate criticism of the trade in Negroes' began in
North America with the publication of Samuel Sewall's pamphlet The Selling of
Joseph: a Memorial which was printed in Boston in June 1700. Sewall was a
jurist of distinction who kept a well-known diary, in one passage of which he
recorded that he had 'been long and much dissatisfied with the trade of
fetching negroes from Guinea' and that lie had determined 'to write something
about it'. Expressed with tortuousness, his arguments were in fact simple: if
the Negroes bought for the slave trade were, as was alleged, captives taken
in tribal wars, how could we know that these wars had been justified? 'Every
war is upon one side unjust' (wrote Sewall). 'An unlawful war can't make
lawful captives. And by receiving we are in danger to promote and partake in
their barbarous cruelties.' He further suggested that if a party of Bostonian
cronies had gone down to the Brewsters to fish and had there been attacked
and captured by 'a stronger party from Hull' and afterwards sold as slaves to
an outward bound ship 'they would think themselves unjustly dealt with, both
by sellers and buyers. And yet' (he concluded) ' 'tis to be feared, we have
no other kind of title to our Niggers.' His pamphlet met with what he called
'frowns and hard words', but also with approval in some quarters. It was not
till many decades later in that century that the Quaker campaign against
slavery began to have a real effect. Dr Samuel Hopkins, pastor of the First
Congregational Church in Newport and an ardent abolitionist wrote to his
friend, Levi Hart, in 1787: 'We have no men of any other denomination in
these States, who appear so conscientious, discerning, faithful and zealous,
in this matter, as these Quakers do.' 'The Friends' (Hopkins wrote in 1784 to
Moses Brown) 'have set a laudable example in bearing testimony against the
slave trade, and exerting themselves to suppress the slavery of the Africans;
and I must say, have acted more like Christians, in this important article,
than any other denomination of Christians among us. To our shame be it
spoken!' Hopkins said that he had 'dared publicly to declare' that the town
of Newport was 'the most guilty, respecting the slave trade, of any on the
continent, as it has been, in a great measure, built up by the blood of the
poor Africans'. Old Newport, with its steeply sloping streets of clapboard
houses, and its general air of having been designed by Grandma Moses, seems
today as difficult to associate with the slave-pens of Anamabu as the more
sophisticated mansions of the Battery, Charleston. But the connection is
memorable; and direct.

While clergymen like Dr Hopkins, and members of the Society of Friends,
preached and printed pamphlets and tried to get abolitionist articles
inserted in local newspapers, Moses Brown acted as an ardent but often
unsuccessful Fifth Column agent amongst the Rhode Island shipowners. Hearing,
for instance, in October 1783 that the firm of Clark and Nightingale 'had in
contemplation sending a vessel to Africa for the purpose of getting negroes
and selling them as slaves in the West Indies' he wrote an impassioned letter
of dissuasion, asserting that he had always been averse to the slave trade,
but had at first let himself be over-ruled by others, and by the
incontrovertible fact that he himself held slaves. He declared that the trade
was Can evil, which has given me the most uneasiness, and has left the
greatest impression and stain upon my own mind of any, if not all, my other
conduct in life'. This letter had no effect on Clark and Nightingale. Like
Moses Brown's campaign, that of Dr Samuel Hopkins was uphill work, for a
large part of his congregation were rich slave-traders. So entrenched was the
slaving interest in Rhode Island that the editor of the Newport Herald was
persuaded to refuse to print one of Hopkins' essays on the subject, although
he had previously promised to do so: 'He says he has consulted his friends
and they tell him it will greatly hurt his interest to do it; that there is
so large a number of his customers, either in the slave trade, or in such
connection with them, or so disposed with respect to it, to whom it will give
the greatest offence, that it is not prudent for him to do it.'

All the same, the devotion of the Quakers to the abolitionist cause, together
with the upsurge of liberal ideals during the War of Independence, did have
some legislative effect. By 1778 it had been forbidden by law to import
Negroes into Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, but by
1783, writes Sir Reginald Coupland, 'It was still legal ... for citizens of
New England or the Middle States to take a hand in importing slaves into the
plantation-states of the South where slavery was now as deeply rooted as in
any West Indian island.' At the Congress of Philadelphia in 1787 anti-slavery
clauses in the new American Constitution were deleted at the behest of the
delegates of South Carolina and Georgia, two states which insisted on
recognition of slavery as their condition for joining the Union. This
Southern blackmail injected fresh life into the slave trade, and ensured
another three generations of suffering to the African slaves.

During and after the War of Independence, there was a tendency in America to
blame the existence of slavery, and the conduct of the slave trade, on the
British. Writing in 1776 to his son John, old Henry Laurens of Charleston
(who was afterwards one of the American plenipotentiaries of the Paris peace
conference which ended the war) told him, as we have seen, that he abhorred
slavery:

I was born in a country where slavery was established by British Kings and
Parliaments as well as by the laws of that country ages before my existence
... not less than £20,000 sterling would all my negroes produce if sold at
public auction tomorrow. I am not the man who enslaves them, they are
indebted to English men for that favour, nevertheless I am devising means for
manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail of slavery — great
powers oppose me, the laws and customs of my country, my own and the avarice
of my countrymen — what will my children say if I deprive them of so much
estate? These are difficulties but not insuperable.

Laurens was particularly incensed by the way in which the British army and
navy raided the plantations of the South 'to steal those negroes from the
Americans to whom they had sold them, pretending to set the poor wretches
free, but basely trepan and sell them into ten fold worse slavery in the West
Indies, where probably they will become the property of Englishmen again and
of some who sit in Parliament; what meanness! what complicated wickedness
appears in this scene! 0, England, how changed! how fallen!' As a preface to
this eloquent piece of hysteria, Henry Laurens reminded his son of the
loyalty of their own Negroes: 'My negroes there [in Georgia] all to a man are
strongly attached to me, so are all mine in this country, hitherto not one of
them has attempted to desert.' Although he had grown wealthy by buying and
selling Africans, and owned large plantations where his slaves lived under
the inhuman Black Code of South Carolina, Laurens became emotional on
reading, in August 1776, that phrase in the Declaration of Independence which
declared that 'all men are created equal'. It was this phrase which persuaded
him to relinquish his ambivalent attitude to slavery, and to adopt the most
ungrateful role of abolitionist; for if all men were created equal, how could
any be a slave?

We know that Dr Johnson, in his arguments with Boswell, was quick to point
out the inconsistency of American complaints of British oppression with their
sanguinary tyranny over their own slaves. In 1775 Thomas Paine published in
Philadelphia a tract, African Slavery in America, in which he unwittingly
echoed Johnson's protest, asking Americans 'to consider with what consistency
or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them while they
hold so many hundred thousands in slavery'.

The long and noble history of the abolition of the slave trade belongs to
some other book than this; but a glance at that great, and finally
successful, movement initiated by Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce in
Great Britain will be relevant here, if only because of the cynical
opposition it aroused and because of the bloody doings which its
investigations uncovered and revealed.

pps.223-245
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End

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