Would Have to “See His Blood Flow”
Reopening the African Slave Trade
The quest to reopen the African slave trade caused vigorous debate among proslavery southerners in the 1850s. Some politicians were concerned that the reestablishment of the trade would create sectional tensions, perhaps even disunion. The states on the border of the slave South argued that the effects of an increase in the slave population would negatively influence the price for goods and slaves. The need for more labor and the perceived erosion of political power, however, inspired several southern men to call for the repeal of federal laws that prohibited them from purchasing slaves directly from Africa. Their argument was that since the nation upheld slavery morally and politically and recognized it socially as a domestic institution, legislation restricting the African slave trade was improper. What was the difference, they asked, between buying slaves in America versus buying them from Africa, Cuba, or Brazil?
Despite these assertions, many white southerners believed that the importation of slaves directly from Africa, rather than through other markets, would result in black and white violence and, inevitably, black or white extermination. Even though they remained unsure about their American-born slaves, white southerners nevertheless argued that new Africans would disrupt the institutional practices of paternalism and the master-Sambo relationship that they claimed existed.1 What the discussions over reopening the foreign slave trade reveal is that the idea of a war between the races was very much in play in the decades before the Civil War commenced, and these visions of violence would remain central to proslavery and antiblack ideology. These debates were also of great concern to African Americans, and they deliberately taunted Anglo-Americans by encouraging white fear of a race war.2 Thus, Anglo-American fears of the enslaved and newly imported African slaves must be added to the list of factors for why the foreign slave trade movement ultimately failed.
Those who supported reopening the African slave trade understood that in reality the slave trade had never ended. Practically every European nation was searching for a cheap, exploitable, and disposable labor force, and the foreign African slave trade continued to fulfill that need throughout the antebellum era and beyond.3 Southerners, well aware of the reemergence of an international trend that championed the exploitation of Africans and other peoples of color for their labor, believed that reopening the slave trade would be good for Africans and, with proper oversight, good for the nation. The brutality and cruelty and the substantive increase in African mortality from the illegal business of acquiring Africans for slaves encouraged southerners like Virginian George Fitzhugh to reason that “if it be right to prohibit the slave trade, it must be wrong to increase it, and aggravate its cruelties . . . worse, still . . . to multiply its horrors.”4
In light of the protracted participation of and fantastic wealth made by nations around the world from the continued commerce in African slaves, some southern men were serious about the viability of reopening the foreign slave trade in America.5 Former Alabama congressman William Yancey argued: “If it is right to raise slaves for sale, is it not right to import them? . . . If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa and carry them there? . . . If it is not wrong to hold slaves, and to buy them and sell them, it is right in morals, and under the Constitution which guarantees the institution, that we should buy them in whatever place we may choose to select.” Yancey concluded by questioning why anyone would want to pay $1,500 for a slave when he could purchase him for $600 in Cuba or go to Africa and pay $60.6
Some southerners felt sure that they had support for reopening the foreign slave trade in the North because it would be especially good for those involved in the manufacturing and mercantile industries.7 Virginian George Fitzhugh understood that white northerners also benefited from the cotton produced from slave labor in the South. Slaves provided the factors of production that drove the New England economy, which in turn supplied the markets of the world. The slave trade would also benefit northern white wage laborers. Recent reports about the conditions in Africa and Europe indicated that people were “starving for want of food, employment, and a market.” The rising demand for products made from slave labor would increase production and reduce prices. Increased production would occur through the employment of white laborers, who would then benefit from cheaper manufactured goods. Fitzhugh went on to say, “But were the slave trade renewed, there is no doubt that the North would on the whole reap much the larger share of advantages and profit. This trade would render the Union indissoluble.”8
An age-old idea that continued to have currency among white southerners for or against the trade was that slavery actually benefited African people as well. No one could dispute that in Africa “slavery is the common condition of that country,” South Carolinian lawyer and newspaper editor Leonidas Spratt and others harangued, and “to the captive of the savage there are no alternatives but death or slavery.” From his perspective, slavery and the reopening of the slave trade “save[d] to life and usefulness” the African from “the barbarities of savage warfare.”9 Proslavery South Carolinian Edward Bryan stated that indeed the slave trade elevated the African, which justified whatever cruelties existed. Of course, cruelty “abounds in every human institution,” but those opposed to the importation of new Africans, Bryan argued, should reflect on the fact that there had been less cruelty in the slave trade before its legal abolition. Bryan believed the inhumanity of the Middle Passage could simply be alleviated with care. In any case, the harshness of the current trafficking in African slaves “should not condemn uses, they rather should be reformed by a good regulation of the uses” of slave labor.10 The faulty reasoning of Spratt and Bryan and the sophistry of George Fitzhugh that northern abolitionist William Seward and his cohorts should consider “whether this memorable, universal, and time-honored trade, be not an operation enjoined and demanded by the higher law” were deceptive arguments used by many southerners.11
Nevertheless, it was no secret that those involved in the illegal slave trade inflicted the most inhumane and barbarous cruelties upon their African captives. Slave traders, concerned with getting as many Africans on board ship as they possibly could, anticipated that roughly one-third of their cargo would die as they crossed the Atlantic and another one-t hird would die after arrival.12 Unlike the days before abolition, where the mortality rate was approximately 14 percent, traders packed their ships with Africans, sometimes with as many as 750 in a vessel only one hundred feet long. Captives would have to sleep in spoon-like fashion, and the ships reeked with the stench and filth of death and disease.13 The slaves, who were mostly male and now, in large part, children between the ages of ten and fifteen, arrived dazed and emaciated. They were dehydrated to the point that, according to Dr. Jose E. Cliffe, an American citizen who participated in the African slave trade, they appeared to be mere skin and bone, with “eyes like boiled eye of a fish.” Two other English women witnessed nearly the same atrocities on a captured slaver in Kingston, Jamaica.14 When reaching deck to disembark “they all rushed, like maniacs for water, as if they grew rabid at the sight of it.”15 Another informant noted in 1829 that generally slaves were unable to stand up straight after being confined in a space that for adults averaged five feet, six inches long, sixteen inches across, and two feet high during the long voyage across the ocean. Children, it was believed, withstood the torturous journey better than adults, and traders especially favored boys between the ages of eight and twelve.16 Their smaller stature enabled more bodies to be committed to the ever-diminishing space allowed.17 Yet these children, with their stomachs distended from starvation, suffered as much as adults, which the nearly 150 percent mortality rate—from seizure to Middle Passage to landing—indicates. As John Leighton Wilson estimated, in order for slaveholders to have 100,000 African slaves available for purchase, slave traders needed to start with 250,000 captives.18
At times, the enslaved were deliberately killed during this illegal period of the transatlantic slave trade. It was not uncommon for slaves to be cast overboard if slavers thought that their law-breaking activity had been detected. They sometimes threw away as many as five hundred at one time, whereupon, as a commander of a British cruiser observed, sharks, which Herman Melville called the “invariable outriders of all slave-ships,” proceeded to eat the still “shackled negroes.”19 If the Africans were believed to be too sick to survive reaching the “fattening pens,” many of them were cast overboard. Traders did so in order to avoid the ten-dollar import duty that the Brazilian government, for example, charged ships for entering and landing slaves at its ports.20 At a slave depot called Gallineos, two thousand slaves were reportedly murdered because English cruisers blocked the ability of African traders to get them aboard the awaiting slave ships. Finding “it impossible to embark them,” they “beheaded the whole number, placing their heads on poles stuck in the beach saying—’If you will not allow us to make profit of prisoners we take in war, we will kill all.’”21
Nor was it unusual for large numbers of Africans to die on recaptured vessels. According to the “Sierra Leone Report,” issued by a committee in 1830 at the behest of the House of Commons in London, one-sixth to one-half of all the captives on board slave ships taken by cruisers of any nation died before ever landing due to the additional five weeks that it took for them to reach Sierra Leone in West Africa.22 In these “floating pest-houses,” the death toll skyrocketed. Over 13.4 percent, or 6,700 of 50,000, African captives died on their way to Sierra Leone by 1830. In the case of the recaptured Portuguese vessel Progresso, 39 percent of those on board ship died before landing in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1843.23 The large number of deaths led some observers to believe that from a “humane point of view” the recaptured African was “infinitely worse off than if permitted to pursue his original destination.”24 The statistics above, however, do not take into account the starvation and often reenslavement that recaptured Africans experienced once returned to their “homeland.” In American naval officer Robert Schufeldt’s opinion, as benevolent as the intentions of the American Colonization Society might have been, landing recaptured Africans in Liberia often meant either certain death or reenslavement.25 Unfortunately, the recaptured slaves generally belonged to various tribes that differed in language and custom and with whom they might have been enemies. From Rev. Pascoe G. Hill’s perspective, “the capture” of a slave ship was “an event far more disastrous to the slave than to the slave dealer,” as it was an “unintentional aggravator of their miseries.”26
Violence, or what abolitionist Sir Thomas Buxton called the “whole sale murder” of Africans, reached its highest level when the enslaved attempted insurrections. According to the deposition of one crewmember aboard the American vessel Kentucky, an attempted slave rebellion resulted in forty-six men and one woman out of five hundred slaves suffering gross mutilation. They were hung high in the air by their necks and then shot, after which “the legs of about a dozen were chopped off” to save the loss of the irons around their ankles. When some of “the feet fell on deck,” great “sport” was made. The woman was shot and thrown overboard still alive, whereby she “was seen to struggle some time.” After this, twenty more men and six women were severely flogged. All of the women died, and the men, suffering the rest of the passage, would “groan and sob with the most intense agony,” the skin “where they were flogged, putrified.”27 Thus, the illegal continuation of the African slave trade facilitated the death of hundreds of thousands of Africans, making a mockery of the much-celebrated laws to end the trade by the Revolutionary generation in 1808. Southerners used these facts to support their paternalist argument that legalizing the African slave trade would save African lives and reduce the brutality that currently existed because it operated without formal regulation.
The revival of the slave trade, some southerners argued, would also serve as an instrument for positive good by enabling the expansion of slavery and by protecting black Americans from a race war and extermination. A Dr. Van Evne wrote in 1853 on what he described as “the mighty negro question,” the “greatest question of modern times.” He concluded that the expansion of slavery was essential to the survival of the southern way of life and that the enslavement of Africans was “a normal or natural condition, and it must therefore always exist so long as the white and black races are in contact.” The “Negro,” as “a drug in the labor market,” had always been a necessity until blacks had to compete with white immigrants. The superiority of white labor benefited the North and those regions where black labor was unprofitable, yet the South provided the necessary safety valve for blacks in America. The extension of slavery ensured the well-being of blacks because of virulent racial prejudice in “free” society. If slavery was not able to expand, the pressures of survival would lead whites to destroy black populations wherever limited opportunities for their employment existed. The British writers and northerners who argued that slavery was an evil did not understand that freedom, because of “the physical necessities, the absolute overwhelming pressure of hunger,” would “impel them [blacks] to crime, robbery, insurrections, to violence and blood.” Freedom, in Van Evne’s view, was “certain to end in [their] complete and total destruction. There can be, or there need be no doubt or uncertainty on this point. . . . [T]he cry of no more slave States, or no more extension of slavery is tantamount to no more room of the blacks, and death to the negro.” Van Evne concluded, “The deluded fanatic, when . . . opposing slavery extension, is not only warring against the higher law, but doing all he can to exterminate the very race that he professes to labor for.”28 Leonidas Spratt affirmed these sentiments in his proposal for reopening the foreign slave trade at the Southern Convention in Vicksburg, Tennessee. He claimed that if the South failed in asserting its power and the socioeconomic order of its section, and “if we bend . . . to the requisitions of another people . . . [then] with subjugation comes a war of races, hand to hand, that will not end while a remnant of the weaker race remains.”29
Many white southerners believed that Britain’s real intent was to cause a servile war in the country’s relentless push to end the foreign slave trade. In southerners’ view, Britain’s efforts to enforce the laws against slave trading were contorted by a larger vision to end slavery in America. Abolition was a “well-conceived scheme of self-aggrandizement” to create “the same failure in Brazil, Cuba and the U.S. and the reduction in productive capacity” as currently existed in England. By creating a trade equilibrium among competing nations, England would be able to regain its market share of the world’s commercial trade that it held before emancipating its own slaves. Accordingly, Governor James H. Adams of South Carolina reasoned that England’s secret intention was “to sow further dissensions between the Northern and Southern sections of the Union, with the hope of dissolving their compact under circumstances calculated to ensure a series of civil and servile wars.”30
Southerners remained certain that if emancipation did occur in America as it had in the British Commonwealth in 1832, it would be a disaster leading to black annihilation. Blacks would return to “savageism and negroism.” The “abolition of slavery and the total extinction of the negro, is the same thing in fact,” Van Evne argued.31 Slaveholder James Henry Hammond of South Carolina had already formalized these ideas in 1845. Historicizing the mechanisms in place that ensured control over the African race, Hammond prognosticated: “Let the story of our British ancestors and the aborigines of this country tell the sequel. Far more rapid . . . would be the catastrophe. . . . [T]he African race would be exterminated or reduced again to slavery.”32 An article in the Staunton Vindicator confirms that these ideas remained salient by proffering that emancipation would be disastrous because it would undermine the sociopolitical function that African labor provided: “If African labor is evil, the North and the civilized world have extracted an immense and incalculable good out of it. This may be said not only of the whites, but of the blacks also. . . . Emancipation is not only the destruction of African labor, but the extermination of the Negroes themselves.”33 The idea of freedom for black Americans was equally troubling to southerner W. W. Wright, who argued that if abolitionists incited an insurrection, it would end in the “bloodshed and probable extermination” of those enslaved.34 Slavery and the African slave trade stymied both international and national aggression; but without the economic benefits derived from this form of labor, people of African descent would become valueless to the nation and therefore inexorably dispensable.
Pro—slave trade advocates had clear ideas about how to maintain control over an enlarged slave population, however, and they dismissed concerns that reopening the slave trade would dangerously affect white people in the South. Southerners had no intention of allowing the black population in the South to increase disproportionately, nor did they believe those who argued that if more Africans were brought to America, “our institutions will therefore languish, and a contest of some sort [would] spring up between . . . [Africans] and the white race.”35 Instead, Leonidas Spratt envisioned that slaves would extend beyond the present boundaries of the South into “the whole broad plain from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Nor even without this, do we see the reason to dread a density of population. Slaves can be as dense as freemen; the discipline will be greater; the order will be greater; the economy of resources will be greater.”36 Unlike the colonies of Britain and France, where absentee ownership of plantations still prevailed, African Americans lived alongside their masters, a situation that most Europeans and northern Americans eschewed. Spratt, like most southerners, however, believed that “while so unequal, there is no reason why these races may not come together . . . unless it can be inferred that the stronger was intended to exterminate the weaker, as it has crushed out the Indian on this continent.”37 Mississippian Henry Hughes, in taking up this question, argued: “The African slave trade can, by no possibility realize in the South an over powering disproportion of blacks to whites.”38 Hughes also envisioned a racial hierarchy that would regulate the expansion and racial composition of those enslaved:
If the African slave trade shall be reopened, all Mexico, all Central and South America may be reckoned as wild land. Nor is that all; they may be esteemed not only uncultivated but unpeopled lands. For their population is either pure blood or mixed. But if mixed blood, extinction by degeneration or sagacious and benevolent extermination for the purity of races is a certainty and perhaps an ethnical duty. But if pure blood, they are either Caucasians, Africans, or Indians. As to Caucasians, there are virtually none. As to Africans, they will be elevated into slavery to prevent, amongst other atrocities, that of sexual amalgamation. And as to pure blooded Indians, they will not be civilized, and therefore must, directly or indirectly, be benignly slaughtered.39
In the debates about reopening the slave trade, some southerners ultimately counseled patience, since “the whole civilized world was discussing the question” of how to exploit African labor in new ways.40 According to Wright, who did not support reopening the African slave trade, Europeans made claims of African wage labor being superior to slave labor, but often wage labor only escaped the responsibility and name of slavery. Indeed, civilized nations, Wright observed, “are exterminating the human race . . . in most cases literally kidnapping or purchasing those whom they transport as free. In the case of the African negro emigrants this is now universally acknowledged.”41 While the American South was able to increase its slave population ten to one, all the other nations around the world were “destroying the lives of negroes, Coolies, Chinese, and Portuguese with frightful rapidity.”42 Thus, at the Southern Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, Mr. Preston of Virginia proffered that perhaps it was impolitic for southerners to create divisions among themselves when “England and France were endeavoring to establish systems of labor like our own, differing only in name[.] Let us rather wait.”43 Southerners knew that England was making apprentices out of Africans seized from slave ships, and this fact was proof to some of them that the slave trade needed to be “renewed legally and actively.” According to Wright, England imported to its colonies 14,784 immigrants from Africa between 1848 and 1855.44 The accounts of Rev. Hill verify that it was Britain’s “authorized practice to apprentice negroes brought to the Cape in prizes [recaptured slave ships], as servants or farm-labourers, for the term of six or seven years, according to their age.”45 In light of this practice, Roger Pryor of the Virginia House of Delegates argued, the South should be strategic in taking up this question, as “England with her coolies, and France with her apprentices . . . [show] gradual amelioration in sentiment upon this subject. We should bide our time, and not, by this public action, give our institution an irretrievable recoil. . . . Allow things to go along smoothly.”46 From the African American perspective, southerners were right to feel confident, as in their view, “the proposition to reopen the African slave trade [was] daily growing in popularity in the South,” while at the same time northern and southern “opposition . . . [was] becoming feebler every day.”47
Southern opposition to the slave trade movement resonated not only with fears of a growing African and African American population but also with the same anxiety about slave rebellions that had plagued whites in the past. Slave owners argued that although they had complete mastery over their American slaves, newly imported Africans would resist enslavement and therefore disrupt the slave South, making violence again necessary. Some southerners believed that increasing the numbers of African slaves would make their states more susceptible to northern abolitionist interference. Nevertheless, whether advocating for or against reopening the foreign slave trade, many slave owners confidently concluded that they could control inferior people with superior force, or if compelled, they would get rid of them entirely. African Americans were presciently aware of the seriousness of the debates over whether to reopen the foreign slave trade, no doubt because the ideas of a race war and black extermination permeated the discourse. Black leaders also understood that many whites feared a violent confrontation between the races. African Americans used what Frederick Douglass claimed became part of a broader strategy for black liberation, namely, scare tactics: “Now the next best thing, if we cannot make them love us, is to make them fear us.”48 Thus, to heighten white fear of servile unrest, many African Americans wrote and published predictions that violence would indeed ensue with the importation of more African slaves, as the greater numbers of people of African descent would facilitate a successful servile war. They also intentionally stoked white fears in the hopes of protecting Africans within Africa from becoming the victims of an increased trade in African slaves.
Many white southerners were against reopening the African slave trade because they feared American blacks and African slaves would wage a servile war against them. To bring in new Africans, “a teeming population of barbarians,” Henry Washington Hilliard of Alabama believed, would make the South the slave market of the world, and a disproportionate number of Africans to whites could only lead to cataclysmic events like those in “St. Domingo and Hayti.”49 Moreover, an enlarged population of African slaves, Roger Pryor argued at the Southern Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, would make slave owners become cruel: “It would create a new grade of slavery and create in the slaves we already have a feeling of superiority that we should avoid.”50 The South would be overrun by savages “who have yet to learn that treachery and bloodshed are wrong” when directed toward their masters. Similarly, legislator James Johnston Pettigrew of North Carolina stated that if the South were to “reopen this floodgate of impurity . . . all that we have accomplished in a half century would be lost . . . and a new night would descend; the very ignorance by which they would be incapacitated for a grand scheme, would urge them to outrages . . . for an unknown tongue would afford convenient means of concealment.”51 Slaveholders had not forgotten that African slaves came with a military past, and they were not keen on perpetuating the cycle of bloodshed and fear that marked the colonial period.
That was not to say that the domestic slave population was ignorant of their strength, Pettigrew argued, but that they had been educated to fear white power. The black slave saw in the white sheriff “not an individual man, not the leader of an armed posse, but the representative of the latent force of a whole society.”52 Mississippian Walter Brookes and others at the Southern Convention in Vicksburg, Mississippi, agreed with Pettigrew that the present population of slaves had attained a certain level of education, that “spirit-of-obedience which rendered them so peculiarly fitted for a state of slavery.” However, if the slave trade were to be reopened, Brookes argued, “the condition of the slaves would be put back two hundred years, and the condition of white men would be put back too. Every semblance of humanity would have to be blotted out from the statute-books, and the slaveholder . . . [would become] a bloody, brutal, and trembling tyrant.” Brookes also believed that if the price of slaves were to become nominal, as envisioned, planters would find it “profitable to work their slaves to death, because they could replace them by others.”53
Some southerners opposed reopening the slave trade because they knew that it would not be easy to impress their brutal system of control upon Africans who were accustomed to personal freedom. The African, Pettigrew argued, “whose ancestors have delighted his youth with tales of war and resistance to control, [who grew] up with this sentiment strong in his breast,” would not easily accept white mastery.54 The presence of these Africans would force the institution of slavery into a backward trend of “visible exhibitions of power,” because Africans would never peaceably submit to the commands of their owners. Violence would become necessary: the African would have to “see his blood flow” before the South would be secure again from insurrection and a race war. From “a mere military point of view,” Pettigrew argued, it would be a serious mistake to reopen the slave trade.55
Although slaveholders were concerned about the influence of African military traditions, they acknowledged that they remained fearful of American blacks as well. According to one columnist in the Franklin Repository, the real danger that “fire-eaters,” or extremist proslavery politicians, ignored was the complete Africanization of the southern states if the tables should be turned: “Is it not astonishing that the simpletons who urge so strongly the propriety of repealing the laws of Congress which pronounce the Slave-trade piracy, cannot see that they are preparing for themselves the most horrible doom imaginable? The slave-holders of the South are now almost afraid to go to bed without a revolver under their pillows for fear their darkeys will rise in the night and inflict retaliatory vengeance upon their self constituted owners—their unfeeling task-masters. Then why do they insist upon increasing the danger?” The article goes on to say that “the only way that slavery is upheld now, or ever was, is by brute force—the law of might,” exposing that the paternalistic vision of peace and tranquility between master and slave, of patriarch and “Sambo,” was never more than an illusion.56
Slave-owning men understood that newly imported Africans could become a problem to the South, but clearly blacks in America remained a problem to whites’ security despite the rhetoric. Virginia slaveholder Edmund Ruffin acknowledged that northern abolitionists, especially those like John Brown, martyred at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, had effectively reached the slave masses, causing discontent; and Ruffin admitted, “Negro slaves probably would generally rebel, and free themselves and seize on their masters’ property, if perfectly assured of success.” Ruffin was adamant, however, that a successful insurrection could never happen again, and even if it were initially successful in execution, like Nat Turner’s rebellion, it would be suppressed quickly. From “a military aspect,” Ruffin said, “nothing could be more fruitless, feeble or contemptible than a negro insurrection, even with all the aid . . . by northern philanthropy. These general truths are recognized by every southerner. Yet, when an alarm of insurrection comes, with all the usual uncertainty, every head of a family at once thinks of the possibility of the near vicinity of the outbreak, and of all that are precious to him being the victims.”57 Southern whites remained haunted by the possibilities of slave unrest. Validating what Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in 1787, they wondered “whether the slave may not as justifiably . . . slay one who would slay him?”58
Many southerners were not as confident as Ruffin: they remained fearful that by reopening the African slave trade they would only increase the ever-present potential of a slave rebellion and the possibility of white defeat.59 Although the author of an article signed “A Florida Farmer” recognized that Africans “would produce dangerous discontent,” he was also concerned that abolitionists would intentionally import large numbers of African slaves, train them to “render the slaves we have dissatisfied,” and then send them down south to be sold. These same northerners would also aid the slaves in a “general insurrection and massacre. The white people would be butchered, as they were in St. Domingo.”60 Senator H. S. Foote of Tennessee agreed that the potential for northern involvement was problematic, especially if an antislavery Republican won the next presidential election, and then “we shall have enough to do to take care of what slaves we have, without importing a horde of wild Africans to corrupt them, and thereby add to our domestic troubles.” Foote projected what would happen if new states admitted to the Union created a majority in Congress with enough votes to legislate against slavery: “Will not ourselves and our children have sufficient trouble to manage the native population, without sending for thousands, and perhaps, millions, of Africans to add to our cares? If we repeal the laws, as asked for, the North will enjoy the exclusive benefit, while we shall have to bear its burdens. . . . [T]he proposition is too monstrous to be mentioned for a moment.”61
The South’s preoccupation with the possibility of servile war was based on real fears, but it also was supported by a pervasive acceptance of violence as a core social experience. In the 1850s southerners vehemently denied that slavery was a military liability or a problem to the white community. By 1860 the South viewed itself as the “fountainhead of martial spirit” in America, perhaps in response to taunts from abolitionists that slavery weakened southerners militarily and regionally. Historian John Hope Franklin argued that white southerners believed in their ability to win any battle, and they “were not being merely theatrical, although they had their moments of sheer acting.” Ultimately, however, southerners knew that they still had not oppressed their current slave population completely, and subjugation was a synonym for what Franklin calls the “violence [that] was inextricably woven into the most fundamental aspects of life in the South and [that] constituted an important phase of the total experience of its people,” especially after the Mexican-American War.62
Thus, the opposition’s arguments that reopening the slave trade would jeopardize the “entire security and harmony” of the South was loudly and confidently proclaimed as absurd by many of its supporters by the end of the 1850s. Untruthfully, Leonidas Spratt claimed that the slaves that first came to America were not an “explosive mixture,” and there were fewer whites then than now and far greater opportunities for disorder and plunder. Therefore, “we see no reason for believing the negroes would be more savage now than they were at the earlier period,” but even if this were so, “there are securities of order here which exist in no other form of society.” By that, Spratt meant that the slave owner was the conservator of his own power, giving him the authority to punish without restraint. It was legally permissible for slave owners “to crush the germ of insurrection,” making it impossible for slaves to successfully rise against their masters.63 Even Pettigrew, who did not support reopening the trade, admitted, “We Suck in rebellion or obedience with our mother’s milk. . . . Perhaps no nation on the globe is more highly tempered, restless, excitable and violent in resistance to illegitimate authority, than the inhabitants of these Southern States.”64 And Henry Hughes argued, “Even if the servile population should have the desire and knowledge for a rebellion, they would not have the ability. Ability to rebel is nothing more than war ability. Arms, ammunition, provisions and discipline are powers of war, and the negro race want and must want all these. But if they had the ability to rebel, their subjugation and entire extermination would be but a day’s bloody toil.”65
In light of these views, paternalism and the “doctrine of reciprocity” were never palpable factors in the slaveholding South. Clearly, white southerners understood that native-born African Americans and African-born slaves had not accepted their condition of servitude. Indeed, American liberal-republican ideology, which concluded that slaves did not want freedom, that they chose their condition of enslavement by not rebelling, is fallacious.66 Threats of death and the possible extermination of black men, women, and children were always present. It is fair to say that throughout the African diaspora, the ownership and purchasing of slaves never elided with the supposed paternalist spirit of “love” for “those who[m] they made to suffer.” Nor did “slaveholders display all the qualities of ordinary humanity” toward those enslaved. Indeed, in the case of a war between the races, Africans in America had no reciprocal rights to accept or expect from the slaveholding South or the nation.67
Yet the very idea of a bloody confrontation is what African Americans used in their attempts to hopefully unsettle and dismantle the proposition to reopen the African slave trade. African Americans knew that despite the rhetoric, many antebellum slave owners remained fearful of their slave population, and these fears significantly shaped their opposition to reopening the foreign trade in slaves. Of course, with the power of the federal government behind them, slave owners in the South were prepared to act if necessary to protect their property and to defend their families. But black leaders did their best to convince white southerners that the importation of new African slaves was a dangerous idea.
African Americans were well aware that the illegal trade in foreign slaves continued in Africa and America with impunity. Black abolitionist John B. Russwurm reported from Liberia that although it was thought that the slave trade had ended in 1808, “nothing is more erroneous, as the trade was never carried on with more vessels nor with greater vigour than it has been for the last two years. Even now [1830], as I am writing, slavers are within forty-four miles of the colony at Cape Mount.”68 Black editor and scholar Martin R. Delany wrote in 1849 that Cuba was the “great channel through which slaves are imported annually into the United States. . . . Into this island are there annually imported more than fifty thousand slaves, expressly for the human market, and being contiguous to the United States, vessels from Baltimore, Washington city, Richmond, and other American slave-markets . . . sail to the isle of Cuba under the pretext of touching by Havana for trade.” The traders then “purchase a full cargo of slaves, sail to New Orleans where they are sold out to the highest bidder, at the slave market there, from whence they are taken to all parts of the South.”69 An illiterate yet highly intelligent fugitive slave named John Brown recalled that he was “quite sure” that even in 1855, “the slave trade [was] carried on between the Coast of Africa and the Slave States of the American Union.” Brown knew of at least five hundred “Saltbacks,” or slaves directly from Africa, who lived on Zachariah Le Mar’s Savannah plantation sometime between 1830 and 1834 and that “new ones were constantly brought in.” These Africans, who lived in Georgia with Brown, could not speak English that well, yet they were very much a visible part of his community.70 Formerly enslaved Charley Barber stated that both his parents were from Africa, where
they was ’ticed on a ship, fetch ’cross de ocean to Virginny, fetch to Winnebora by a slave driver, and sold to my marster’s father. Dat what they tell me. When they was sailin’ over, dere was five or six hundred others all together down under de first deck, of de ship, where they was locked in. They never did talk lak de other slaves, could just say a few words. . . . It was ’ginst de law to bring them over here when they did, I learn since. But what is de law now and what was de law then, when bright shinny money was in sight? . . . Yes, sir, my pappy and mammy, was just smuggled in dis part of de world.71
Ex-slave Paul Singleton recounted how the brutality and murder of African slaves by American slave traders became folkloric among African Americans living along the Altamaha River in Darien, Georgia: “Lots uh time he [his father] tell me annuddah story bout a slabe ship bout tuh be caught by revenoo boat. Duh slabe ship slip tru back ribbuh intuh creek. Deah wuz bout fifty slabes on bode. Duh slabe runnahs tie rocks roun duh slabes’ necks and tro um ovuhbode tuh drown. Dey say yuh kin heah um moanin an groanin in duh creek ef yuf goes deah tuh-day.”72
Thus in the decade between 1850 and 1860, many African Americans believed that if they did not respond aggressively to the call to reopen the African slave trade by stoking white fear, all would be lost, and the enslaved would face interminable bondage. The possibility of the United States increasing the slave population with newly imported African slaves was a serious step backward for blacks in America, and readers of the Provincial Freeman, the black newspaper in Canada, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, the Liberator, and the National Era noted that the idea was growing in popularity in the South. Initially, African American leaders did not take the movement seriously. They believed that “the idea of reviving the slave trade . . . [was] very silly . . . that . . . no candid mind will believe that it is seriously entertained in the South.”73 Yet there was concern, as abolitionists noted at a meeting of the Western Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Ohio, in 1854, about the “repeated avowals in leading Southern newspapers of a design to reopen the inhuman traffic.” And they asked “every friend of freedom” to renew their efforts to persevere on behalf of the antislavery movement.74 By 1857 the Provincial Freeman reported that should any “conflict of State and Federal authorities arise” over the importation of African slaves, “it cannot be doubted that it will be decided in favor of the South, and that the slave trade would be formally established under the principles of the Dred Scott decision.”75 Finally, in a call to action, one anonymous source noted, “The myriads of our fellow-men in Africa, marked as future victims of a hellish trade, are voiceless. Who, then, standing up before this nation and the whole civilized world, shall protest, in the name of God, and in behalf of our common humanity, against the consummation of this astounding crime? Who, but we, the free colored inhabitants of these United States?”76
Determined to protect Africa from further European exploitation, many black leaders did their best to encourage whites to remain fearful of increasing the African population in America by predicting that blacks would win in an internecine war between the races. Black abolitionist Dr. James McCune Smith, in a provocative essay, has his fictional character Fly envision that if southern whites did reopen the African slave trade, the Congo war cry, Canga li, used during the Haitian Revolution, which “transformed indifferent and heedless slaves into furious masses [would] . . . ring in the interior of Africa.”77 Fly further taunted southern slaveholders that this Haitian model of resistance against enslavement as a result of reopening the slave trade would occur in America as well: “I go in for extending the area of Slavery, for the renewal of the African slave-trade. Let them import a million a year; then in six years . . . these six millions of ‘children of the sun,’ restless under the lash, and uncontaminated, unenfeebled by American Christianity, may hear in their midst ‘Canga li,’ and the affrighted slave owners, not stopping to count their ‘people,’ will rush away North faster than they did from St. Domingo.”78 In another article, an unknown author prophesied that reopening the African slave trade would force poor whites to leave the South out of fear that the renewed trade would “precipitate the horrors of a negro insurrection.” States like South Carolina would became “Africanized.” The author warned that “agitators of that measure” would be “wise to read the handwriting on the wall before it is too late.”79
Although black abolitionist William Wilson believed that “this reopening of the African slave trade has . . . become a fixed fact,” he was confident that it would ultimately bring “great numerical and physical strength . . . to Anglo-Africans from this source” and therefore the success of a servile war in securing black freedom. Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym Ethiop, hoped to arouse white fear by further arguing that African Americans should not “wear sad faces at the prospect of this reopening of the slave-trade; but as load after load, and gang after gang, fresh turned loose, go clanking their chains through the land. Let us listen,” as the increased numbers would facilitate black success in “a hand-to-hand struggle.” And there would be no turning back, Ethiop taunted, “when the final day does come, as come it must. . . . [I]t may then be with the Anglo-African a question of numbers on this continent. . . . [I]t may be with him [the enslaved] . . . not merely the question of his liberty, but entire indemnity for the past, full security for the future, and the most perfect and fullest equality for all time to come.” Despite slave owner claims that Africans were only “fit for slaves,” Wilson reminded both whites and African Americans that Africans had also “been shown fit for good soldiers in any hour of need.”80 In an editorial in 1860, black abolitionist Thomas Hamilton warned that although secession would mean that nothing stood in the way of southerners reopening the African slave trade, the result of South Carolina seceding from the Union and the “renewal of the African slave trade” was that an “insurrection of the slaves must follow,” because now the “slaves, knowing or believing that no Northern army will come down to interfere, will raise the arm of rebellion.”81
Black leaders may have seen advantages to an increased population of newly imported African slaves, but in reality, their biggest concern was that reopening the slave trade would mean that slavery was more secure than ever. Moreover, despite the arguments made for forceful resistance by some black leaders, most black abolitionists remained presciently aware of the danger of such actions. Nevertheless, African Americans used fear to taunt slaveholders into rejecting reopening the African slave trade, hoping in the midst of hopelessness to render the idea of greater numbers of African slaves—of black warriors—too frightening a proposition to ever make real.
Although the slave trade ended officially in the United States in 1808, most Americans knew that the trade in African slaves continued and that it was perpetrated in the most barbarous manner and with little regard for the lives and the simple humanity of those Africans held as captives. Ultimately, the rally around the importation of African slave labor set the stage for future ideas about black labor and black disposability. Yet fears of a race war and black or white extermination if whites brought in newly imported Africans also concerned many slave owners. White southerners certainly had misgivings about importing large numbers of Africans, but they were also anxious about the growing population of American blacks, who, in whites’ minds, threatened their self-induced sense of security. African Americans, well aware of the debate over whether to reopen the slave trade in America, did their best to stoke white fear. Although both African Americans and southerners used fear to influence the outcome of the debate, only one side espoused the kind of violence that specifically included extermination—to envision the possible necessity of killing not only men but also women and children. Despite their apprehensions that victory in such an event would not come without cost, pro—slave trade southerners continued to embrace their vision of maintaining black labor in bondage. Southerners continued to believe that blacks in freedom would create a race war and violence, while blacks in bondage would not. These ideas would be tested, however, by the efforts of white abolitionists like John Brown, who invaded Harpers Ferry in the belief that the black community should wage war upon slavery.