TheNation, MARCH 8/15, 2021, ISSUE
A Poisonous Legacy
New York City and the persistence of the Middle Passage.
By Gerald Horne
THE LAST SLAVE SHIPS: NEW YORK AND THE END OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
By John Harris
In the middle of 1856, the soon-to-be-celebrated poet Walt Whitman
visited an impounded slave ship in Brooklyn. The taking of the ship was
an unusual occurrence, as it was one of the few illegal slavers seized
by an otherwise lethargic Washington, D.C., and Whitman wanted to give
his readers a tour of the vessel, which had been designed to add even
more enslaved laborers to the millions already ensnared in this system
of iniquity, including of its hold, where those victimized were to be
“laid together spoon-fashion.”
Whitman’s keen journalistic interest was a response to the feverish
political climate in his homeland, featuring ever more overwrought cries
demanding the relegalization and reopening of the Atlantic slave trade.
Officially, this branch of flesh peddling had been rendered illegal by
Britain in 1807 and by the United States in 1808, but it had continued
nonetheless, with boatloads of kidnapped Africans being transported to
the Americas, especially Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. It was
likely that some of Whitman’s readers in New York City—the citadel of
this illicit commerce—would have taken a decided interest in his grim
reportage.
John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships offers a more comprehensive portrait
of the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic, starting with the last slave
ships to dock in New York Harbor. Mining the historical archives in
Spain, Portugal, Cuba, and the United States, Harris demonstrates how,
even as slavery was being abolished in the Northern states, it continued
to flourish, since the slave system was not confined simply to below the
Mason-Dixon Line. The financing of the slave trade’s illegitimate
commerce was sited heavily in Manhattan: The ships passed through the
waterways of the city’s harbor, and the denizens of Gotham also enjoyed
the profits of this odious system, even as many of them publicly
denounced it. After all, slave ships required crews, not to mention the
need to grease the palms of corrupt officials at the harbor and
elsewhere with attractive bribes. In sum, the wealth produced by slave
labor built not only a region but a nation. Like Charleston, S.C., and
Galveston, Tex., New York City benefited from the trade in human
souls—which, in a sense, continues to undergird Wall Street.
Much of The Last Slave Ships concerns itself with the years immediately
preceding the crushing of this ugly business as a consequence of the
Civil War, and the book chronicles how the construction of swift ships
was financed in New York, how the audacious smuggling persisted as a
result, and how the breathtaking inhumanity that this smuggling created
continues to bedevil this country even though it ended many decades ago.
Indeed, it does not require acrobatically inclined inferences to
conclude that the vessel Whitman visited in the Brooklyn Navy Yard
symbolized far more than the attempted impounding of slavery itself,
which within five years was to ignite a bloody war. It also represented
a moral economy that eroded the most basic human empathy. One might add
that the story of how a slave ship wound up in New York waters also
sheds light on how a would-be Manhattan Mussolini received 74 million
votes in the presidential election of 2020.
After the triumph of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, which saw the
successful overthrow of slavery by the enslaved themselves, the British
Empire sensed the imminent danger both to its investments and to the
lives of British settlers in the Caribbean, especially those living in
the cash cows of Jamaica and Barbados, so it chose to curtail the
country’s role in the African slave trade. In 1807, the House of Commons
passed the Slave Trade Act, which made illegal the participation of
British ships and citizens and ultimately helped to extirpate this
pestilence more generally. By 1808, London’s spawn on the west bank of
the Atlantic had moved similarly—at least on the surface—with the Act
Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which outlawed US involvement in the
non-domestic slave trade. Had these laws been rigorously enforced, they
would have spelled the beginning of the end of the Atlantic slave trade.
But the monarchy and the newly independent republic once ruled by it
responded to these acts differently. The Royal Navy became the cop on
the beat chasing down scofflaws. Meanwhile, many of the scofflaws it was
chasing down were in US-built-and-flagged vessels that were maintained,
at times, by crews from the purported revolutionary republic. Thus, in
the first half of the 19th century, two parallel developments played a
role in the evolving drama: British ships hunted down human traffickers,
while US ships did their best to evade the long arm of the law. Even
though the Atlantic slave trade had been officially outlawed in the
United States, it persisted despite this fact, which meant that millions
of captives still departed Africa for a hellish enslavement in the
Americas. Indeed, Harris writes, “almost four million captives left
African shores between the beginning of the century and the closure of
the traffic in the 1860s, around a third of all captives who ever
crossed the Atlantic.”
A ray of sunshine in this cumulus of gloom came in the mid-19th century.
At least by some accounts, the bulk of this horrendous merchandising of
human souls reached a zenith in the 1840s in Brazil, the largest market
of all, and then began to slow. But even following a military defeat of
the enslavers in the United States in 1865, the slave trade limped along
in Brazil and Cuba until the 1880s. As Harris shows, much of this
bondage survived as a result of financial and diplomatic support from
the nation that had proclaimed itself a “shining city upon a hill” and,
in particular, from its shiniest city: New York.
The obscenely profitable slave ships were financed in New York City, and
as Whitman discovered, the ships departed from there, too. Moreover,
when New Yorkers sipped their morning coffee or sweetened their morning
tea, it was often coffee that had been produced by slave labor in Brazil
and sugar produced by slave labor in Cuba. A number of New York’s
elected representatives may have been officially opposed to the slave
trade, but they nonetheless represented a city and a state that profited
from it immensely.
As Harris writes, during the Atlantic slave trade’s later stages, slave
ships embarked from many points along the Eastern Seaboard, but New York
City accounted for two out of every three departures. Investors in the
illegal trade were willing to assume the risk, since, during this era,
the average return on investment was an eye-watering 91 percent. Just as
later generations of Wall Street wizards devised collateralized debt
obligations and other devious instruments designed to maximize profit,
their predecessors acted in a manner that anticipated today’s financial
engineering. Revealingly, Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm whose
2008 bankruptcy was said to have triggered a financial crisis that
required massive bailouts and almost brought capitalism to its knees,
began by capitalizing lucratively on the production of cotton picked by
enslaved labor in Alabama.
Insurance companies also wallowed in the filthy lucre of this odious
business. Then as now, the financing and insuring taking place in New
York proved to be a transnational business. This unclean interchange may
have originated in Gotham, but it involved and benefited investors in
Western Europe (especially Portugal and Spain) and in Cuba and Brazil.
Also implicated were the ship-building industries of Maine and Maryland,
often kept afloat by Manhattan investors, along with many other New
Yorkers who lived in a city whose economy was still buoyed by slavery.
While certain New Yorkers were diabolically investing in the illegal
slave trade, across the ocean in London, the British government began to
invest in spies in order to keep track of it, devising publications to
chart the movements of slave ships and subsidizing the Royal Navy, which
was authorized to halt their devilry.
The overly optimistic observer might have imagined that the United
States would move in a similar direction. Yet while London proved to be
an often fierce watchdog, Washington proved to be a toothless terrier,
protestations about an antislavery Constitution notwithstanding. From
1851 to 1860, 159 individuals were prosecuted under US slave trade laws
in the republic; of these, 99 were acquitted, encountered a deadlocked
jury, or were otherwise ordered released. Twelve were tried and
convicted but endured only a slap on the wrist, and nine managed to
escape custody somehow. The outcomes for the remainder are unclear,
though it is fair to assume that they too eluded punishment. Prosecutors
failed to file charges against 21 others, because of the distinct
possibility they would not be convicted.
The Africa Squadron of the United States, ostensibly intended to quash
this illicit trading at the source, was hardly robust. Based in Cape
Verde, it was stationed far from the Congo-Angola region used by
enslavers—to say nothing of similarly hounded Mozambique, on the
opposite side of the sprawling continent. The Africa Squadron’s
placement was akin to basing the Los Angeles Police Department’s
anti-bank-robbery squad in Racine, Wis. The US Navy was incompetent,
typically dispatching fewer than five vessels to Africa, while London
posted about 30. Predictably, from 1843 to 1858, the US Navy captured 20
slavers, while during the same period the Royal Navy, based more
sensibly in Luanda, Angola, captured over 500. Perhaps worse, the United
States sought vigorously to bar the Royal Navy from searching suspected
slave ships bearing the Stars and Stripes.
The dictates of monograph writing—hard-pressed publishers seeking to cut
costs by shrinking page counts, assisted by hawkish peer reviewers eager
to insist that authors remain in their narrow lane—likely helps to
explain why Harris’s otherwise informative book does not engage with the
strategic reasons for this geopolitical fiasco. But the United States’
slothfulness in responding to such rampant illegality did serve to
deliver an enormous gift to its monarchical foe in the form of those
African Americans willing to take their side.
The eminent Frederick Douglass was among the legions who expressed a
love for Britain at a time when the two powers were at each other’s
throats. But Douglass was hardly the first African American to do so:
Many of the republic’s enslaved people—the greater number of them by
far—backed the redcoats during the 1776 war for this very reason,
opposing the ultimately victorious rebels. During the War of 1812
between the United States and Britain, enslaved people also defected en
masse to the Union Jack, including during the sacking of Washington in
August 1814, when enslaved Africans fled on retreating British vessels
to Trinidad and Tobago, where they received land grants and where their
descendants continue to live.
Perhaps the Yankees realized that this pro-London stance was unlikely to
last forever and comforted themselves nervously with the thought. Yet
there was doubtless fear when Douglass announced that “in the event of a
British army landing in the States and offering liberty to the slaves,
[the enslaved] would rally round the British at the first tap of the drum.”
In sum, the allegiances of the enslaved were situational. After all,
those with longer memories may have recalled the Stono Revolt in
colonial South Carolina in 1739, when the enslaved were assisted by
Spanish Florida in the bloodiest slave revolt of the colonial era in
British North America. Others may have recalled the time in the late
16th century when it was Spain’s turn to worry, as the maritime John
Brown—Jacques Sorie, a French corsair—terrorized Madrid’s settlements
from South America to the Florida Straits by offering freedom to the
enslaved. Or that just before the US takeover in Florida 200 years ago,
the British sponsored the well-armed Negro Fort, staffed by Africans and
their Indigenous comrades, which was the beginning of several
decades-long wars, some of the bloodiest fought by the US military.
Unsurprisingly, as the Stars and Stripes were unfurled on the peninsula,
a steady stream of ships overflowing with Africans headed south to Cuba,
unwilling to wager that the allegedly antislavery US Constitution
would—eventually—reveal itself.
Washington, D.C., had good reason to believe that London was determined
to harass its former colony and use the enslaved as a bludgeon with
which to accomplish this ambition, which is often what London did. In
1858, it placed a “man of color,” Sir James Douglas, as its chief
executive in British Columbia, inducing many Africans—enslaved and
otherwise—to flee there and to other sites along the elongated border
with Canada just as Washington sought to claim the vast Oregon Territory.
Hastening the scurrying of Texas into the Union was the fear that
Britain was determined to create yet another Haiti in the Lone Star
State, thus jeopardizing neighboring Louisiana and Arkansas and the
slave-holding South as a whole. Circling the wagons around fellow
republicans was thought by the US government to be a way to guarantee
this fate would not befall what became a bulwark of secession. It also
helped convince the otherwise audacious Texans that the better part of
wisdom was in joining the like-minded Yankees and liquidating their own
imperiled independence.
The British were hardly a pristine ally of the oppressed. At the same
time that the officialdom in Whitehall was denouncing republican
pretensions in the United States with full-throated fieriness, redcoats
were repressing South Asians as a result of the Sepoy Revolt in 1857.
But wrestling with this contradiction was hardly unique to the enslaved
and their allies. Strategic flexibility is almost always an unavoidable
reality when confronting humanity’s forms of barbarism.
While Harris occasionally considers this strategic flexibility and the
countless heroic African Americans who were largely responsible for
sabotaging the republic’s—and New York City’s—dirty role in sustaining
this bondage, he could have written more about African American
resistance, especially in Manhattan itself. Consider, for example, the
heroic David Ruggles, who was a one-man battering ram against actual and
potential enslavers. Ruggles, a mariner—a labor force that often
included the most militant of proletarians—applied the organizing acumen
he learned at sea to the abolitionist movement, which in turn embodied
the truism that the working class as a whole could not be liberated if
African Americans in the republic were branded with the indelible badge
of inferiority. Unsurprisingly, the mass struggle for an eight-hour
workday, and the liftoff of unions more generally, only occurred after
the abolition of slavery.
Nevertheless, Harris does illuminate some of the dilemmas that today
face those seeking to resist the poisonous legacy of slavery. Though
dimly understood, even by those who consider themselves class warriors,
class struggle—often emblazoned in a blindingly fierce anti-racism—has
characterized the travails of enslaved Africans in North America from
the start of their resistance and was given even fiercer determination
as a result of the illegal slave trade. Perhaps the harshest, most
cruelly antagonistic and draconian of class relationships is that
between the enslaved and the slaveholder. As such, the class struggle of
the enslaved has shaped the contours of this land, defining not only
resistance to slavery but, ultimately, the political configuration that
continues to this very day.
When, in the 1520s, the Spanish dispatched a complement of the enslaved
from their perch in Santo Domingo to the region stretching north from
Florida, the enslaved had other plans: Recognizing their common class
interests with local Native groups, they revolted with their Indigenous
comrades and chased the would-be settlers back to the Caribbean. When,
by 1607, the English had established a foothold in the land they called
Virginia, the Spanish due south wanted to intervene but were too busy
fighting the Africans and their Indigenous allies once again in Florida.
In short, class struggle by the enslaved helps to explain why today we
are communicating in English.
Alternatively, settler colonialism—a phrase curiously missing from the
vocabularies of many of those who consider themselves radical in the
United States—was also a product of class collaboration from its
inception. At the behest of the English crown, small businessmen,
tailors, goldsmiths, teachers, and others arrived in the land to be
known as North Carolina in the 1580s. Sponsoring those who arrived in
1607 were grandees, including leaders of the East India Company—London’s
vector of exploitation in South Asia—and various pillagers of West Africa.
This class collaboration between the grandees and the hoi polloi reached
its ultimate expression during the Civil War, when nonslaveholders were
the main fighting force for the so-called Confederate States of America,
which sought to destroy the republic in order to maintain slavery. The
shedding of their blood for enslavers was not altogether an expression
of misplaced class interest, since many of the common soldiers sought to
become enslavers or thought that maintaining their castelike privilege
was something worth defending. Yet a victory would have meant a further
downward pressure on wages and working conditions driven by slavery.
This dastardly display illustrates that class collaboration can often
take the form of the highest stage of white supremacy, and vice versa.
Correspondingly, no more dramatic example of class struggle can be found
than that of tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people fighting with
arms in hand in order to terminate slavery and remain “forever free.”
Similarly, in New York City, as Harris suggests, during the heyday of
the illicit slave trade, the perpetrators relied heavily not only on
older mercantile interests but also on working-class Euro-Americans, as
evidenced by the racist “draft riots” of 1863, when a deadly revolt
unfolded, ostensibly against conscription, that amounted to a bloody
anti-Black pogrom.
Today, this supposed odd coupling of economic royalists and commoners
manifests itself in the remaining strongholds of conservatism in the
city’s five boroughs—from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to the mostly
red Staten Island. Unsurprisingly, campaign donations and foot soldiers
for Trumpism have emerged from these two areas. Equally unsurprisingly,
the vanguard of the US electorate—descendants of the enslaved—emerges
from those marinated in class struggle, who vote against the right wing
at rates as high as 9 to 1. Meanwhile, the working class is split, as
some persist in believing that the clock of history can be put into
reverse and that a system that once expropriated the Indigenous of their
land, frequently on behalf of less affluent Euro-Americans, can be restored.
Not long after the guns of war roared at Fort Sumter, Nathaniel Gordon
of Maine was the first (and only) slave trader executed pursuant to US
law, and with the Civil War on, the Union finally moved to match London
with a treaty facilitating a further crackdown on this ugly business,
especially in New York, with Secretary of State (and former New York
governor) William Seward sagely informing Abraham Lincoln that this was
“the most important act of your life and of mine.”
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the successful prosecution of
the Civil War necessarily vitiates this extraordinary claim, and
Harris’s smoothly written, well-researched book provides further
credence for the proposition, illuminating an often forgotten yet
crucially important chapter in US history in which the republic
continued to support and promote the Atlantic slave trade after it had
been declared illegal. But another important theme in this history also
emerges from his book: that a divided working class, fractured along the
lines of those involved in class struggle and those in class
collaboration, can hardly prosper, just as a nation can hardly exist
half slave and half free, as Lincoln once argued. Harris’s timely tome
helps clarify why this is so and helps remind us why, in today’s
republic, uplifting organized labor—especially those in the ranks
thought to bear the badges and indicia of inferiority—remains a pressing
priority.
Gerald Horne is the author of books on slavery, socialism, popular
culture, and
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