The Negro slaves were “the strength and sinews of this westtern world.”1 Negro slavery demanded the Negro slave trade. Therefore the preservation and improvement of the trade to Africa was “a matter of very high importance to this kingdom and the plantations thereunto belonging.”2 And thus it remained, up to 1783, a cardinal object of British foreign policy.
The first English slave-trading expedition was that of Sir John Hawkins in 1562. Like so many Elizabethan ventures, it was a buccaneering expedition, encroaching on the papal arbitration of 1493 which made Africa a Portuguese monopoly. The slaves obtained were sold to the Spaniards in the West Indies. The English slave trade remained desultory and perfunctory in character until the establishment of British colonies in the Caribbean and the introduction of the sugar industry. When by 1660 the political and social upheavals of the Civil War period came to an end, England was ready to embark wholeheartedly on a branch of commerce whose importance to her sugar and her tobacco colonies in the New World was beginning to be fully appreciated.
In accordance with the economic policies of the Stuart monarchy, the slave trade was entrusted to a monopolistic company, the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa, incorporated in 1663 for a period of one thousand years. The Earl of Clarendon voiced the enthusiasm current at the time, that the company would “be found a model equally to advance the trade of England with that of any other company, even that of the East Indies.”3 The optimistic prediction was not realized, largely as a result of losses and dislocations caused by war with the Dutch, and in 1672 a new company, the Royal African Company, was created.
The policy of monopoly however remained unchanged and provoked determined resistance in two quarters—the merchants in the outports, struggling to break down the monopoly of the capital; and the planters in the colonies, demanding free trade in blacks as vociferously and with as much gusto as one hundred and fifty years later they opposed free trade in sugar. The mercantilist intelligentsia were divided on the question. Postlethwayt, most prolific of the mercantilist writers, wanted the company, the whole company and nothing but the company.4 Joshua Gee emphasized the frugality and good management of the private trader.5 Davenant, one of the ablest economists and financial experts of his day, at first opposed the monopoly,6 and then later changed his mind, arguing that other nations found organized companies necessary, and that the company would “stand in place of an academy, for training an indefinite number of people in the regular knowledge of all matters relating to the several branches of the African trade.”7
The case against monopoly was succinctly stated by the free traders—or interlopers as they were then called—to the Board of Trade in 1711. The monopoly meant that the purchase of British manufactures for sale on the coast of Africa, control of ships employed in the slave trade, sale of Negroes to the plantations, importation of plantation produce—“this great circle of trade and navigation,” on which the livelihood, direct and indirect, of many thousands depended, would be under the control of a single company.8 The planters in their turn complained of the quality, prices, and irregular deliveries, and refused to pay their debts to the company.9
There was nothing unique in this opposition to the monopoly of the slave trade. Monopoly was an ugly word, which conjured up memories of the political tyranny of Charles I, though no “free trader” of the time could have had the slightest idea of the still uglier visions the word would conjure up one hundred and fifty years later when it was associated with the economic tyranny of the West Indian sugar planter. But in the last decade of the seventeenth century the economic current was flowing definitely against monopoly. In 1672 the Baltic trade was thrown open and the monopoly of the Eastland Company overthrown. One of the most important consequences of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the expulsion of the Stuarts was the impetus it gave to the principle of free trade. In 1698 the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and the right of a free trade in slaves was recognized as a fundamental and natural right of Englishmen. In the same year the Merchant Adventurers of London were deprived of their monopoly of the export trade in cloth, and a year later the monopoly of the Muscovy Company was abrogated and trade to Russia made free. Only in one particular did the freedom accorded in the slave trade differ from the freedom accorded in other trades—the commodity involved was man.
The Royal African Company was powerless against the competition of the free traders. It soon went bankrupt and had to depend on parliamentary subsidy. In 1731 it abandoned the slave trade and confined itself to the trade in ivory and gold dust. In 1750 a new organization was established, called the Company of Merchants trading to Africa, with a board of nine directors, three each from London, Bristol and Liverpool. Of the slave traders listed in 1755, 237 belonged to Bristol, 147 to London, and 89 to Liverpool.10
With free trade and the increasing demands of the sugar plantations, the volume of the British slave trade rose enormously. The Royal African Company, between 1680 and 1686, transported an annual average of 5,000 slaves.11 In the first nine years of free trade Bristol alone shipped 160,950 Negroes to the sugar plantations.12 In 1760, 146 ships sailed from British ports for Africa, with a capacity for 36,000 slaves;13 in 1771, the number of ships had increased to 190 and the number of slaves to 47,000.14 The importation into Jamaica from 1700 to 1786 was 610,000, and it has been estimated that the total import of slaves into all the British colonies between 1680 and 1786 was over two million.15
But the slave trade was more than a means to an end, it was also an end in itself. The British slave traders provided the necessary laborers not only for their own plantations but for those of their rivals. The encouragement thereby given to foreigners was contrary not only to common sense but to strict mercantilism, but, in so far as this foreign slave trade meant the Spanish colonies, there was some defence for it. Spain was always, up to the nineteenth century, dependent on foreigners for her slaves, either because she adhered to the papal arbitration which excluded her from Africa, or because of a lack of capital and the necessary goods for the slave trade. The privilege of supplying these slaves to the Spanish colonies, called the Asiento, became one of the most highly coveted and bitterly contested plums of international diplomacy. British mercantilists defended the trade, legal or illegal, with the Spanish colonies, in Negroes and manufactured goods, as of distinct value in that the Spaniards paid in coin, and thus the supply of bullion in England was increased. The supply of slaves to the French colonies could plead no such justification. Here it was clearly a clash of interest between the British slave trader and the British sugar planter, as the trade in the export of British machinery after 1825 led to a clash of interests between British shippers and British producers.
The sugar planter was right and the slave trader wrong. But in the first half of the eighteenth century this was noticed only by the very discerning. Postlethwayt condemned the Asiento of 1713 as scandalous and ruinous, an exchange of the substance for the shadow: “a treaty could scarce have been contrived of so little benefit to the nation.”16 During the nine months of British occupation of Cuba in the Seven Years’ War, 10,700 slaves were introduced, over one-sixth of the importations from 1512 to 1763, over one-third of the importations from 1763 to 1789.17 Forty thousand Negroes were introduced into Guadeloupe by the British in three years during the same war.18 The Privy Council Committee of 1788 paid special attention to the fact that of the annual British export of slaves from Africa two-thirds were disposed of to foreigners.19 During the whole of the eighteenth century, according to Bryan Edwards, British slave traders furnished the sugar planters of France and Spain with half a million Negroes, justifying his doubts of “the wisdom and policy of this branch of the African commerce.”20 Britain was not only the foremost slave trading country in the world; she had become, in Ramsay’s phrase, the “honourable slave carriers” of her rivals.21
The story of this increase in the slave trade is mainly the story of the rise of Liverpool. Liverpool’s first slave trader, a modest vessel of thirty tons, sailed for Africa in 1709. This was the first step on a road which, by the end of the century, gained Liverpool the distinction of being the greatest slave trading port in the Old World. Progress at first was slow. The town was more interested in the smuggling trade to the Spanish colonies and the tobacco trade. But, according to a historian of the town, it soon forged ahead by its policy of cutting down expenses to a minimum, which enabled it to undersell its English and continental rivals. In 1730 it had fifteen ships in the slave trade; in 1771 seven times as many. The proportion of slave ships to the total shipping owned by the port was slightly over one in a hundred in 1709; in 1730 it was one-eleventh; in 1763, one-fourth; in 1771, one-third.22 In 1795 Liverpool had five-eighths of the British slave trade and three-sevenths of the whole European slave trade.23
The “horrors” of the Middle Passage have been exaggerated. For this the British abolitionists are in large part responsible. There is something that smacks of ignorance or hypocrisy or both in the invectives heaped by these men upon a traffic which had in their day become less profitable and less vital to England. A West Indian planter once reminded Parliament that it ill became the elected representative of a country which had pocketed the gains from the slave trade to stigmatize it as a crime.24 The age which had seen the mortality among indentured servants saw no reason for squeamishness about the mortality among slaves, nor did the exploitation of the slaves on the plantations differ fundamentally from the exploitation of the feudal peasant or the treatment of the poor in European cities.
Mutinies and suicides were obviously far more common on slave ships than on other vessels, and the brutal treatment and greater restrictions on the movements of the slaves would doubtless have tended to increase their mortality. But the fundamental causes of this high mortality on the slave ships, as on ships carrying indentured servants and even free passengers, must be found firstly in epidemics, the inevitable result of the long voyages and the difficulty of preserving food and water, and secondly in the practice of overcrowding the vessels. The sole aim of the slave merchants was to have their decks “well coverd with black ones.”25 It is not uncommon to read of a vessel of 90 tons carrying 390 slaves or one of 100 tons carrying 414.26 Clarkson’s investigations in Bristol revealed a sloop of twenty-five tons destined for seventy human beings, and another of a mere eleven tons for thirty slaves.27 The space allotted to each slave on the Atlantic crossing measured five and a half feet in length by sixteen inches in breadth. Packed like “rows of books on shelves,” as Clarkson said, chained two by two, right leg and left leg, right hand and left hand, each slave had less room than a man in a coffin. It was like the transportation of black cattle, and where sufficient Negroes were not available cattle were taken on.28 The slave trader’s aim was profit and not the comfort of his victims, and a modest measure in 1788 to regulate the transportation of the slaves in accordance with the capacity of the vessel evoked a loud howl from the slave traders. “If the alteration takes place,” wrote one to his agent, “it will hurt the trade, so hope you will make hay while the sun shines.”29
The journal of one slave dealer during his residence in Africa admits that he had “found no place in all these several countrys of England, Ireland, America, Portugall, the Caribes, the Cape de Verd, the Azores or all the places I have been in . . . where I can inlarge my fortune so soon as where I now live.” Money made the man. The prodigal who returned home empty-handed would have to be content with the common name of “the Mallato just come from Guinea.” If, however, he returned with his pockets well stuffed with gold, “that very perticular hides all other infirmities, then you have hapes of frinds of all kinds thronging and wateing for your commands. Then your known by the name of ‘the African gentleman’ at every great man’s house, and your discource is set down as perticular as Cristopher Culumbus’s expedition in America.”30
About 1730 in Bristol it was estimated that on a fortunate voyage the profit on a cargo of about 270 slaves reached £7,000 or £8,000, exclusive of the returns from ivory. In the same year the net return from an “indifferent” cargo which arrived in poor condition was over £5,700.31 Profits of 100 per cent were not uncommon in Liverpool, and one voyage netted a clear profit of at least 300 per cent. The Lively, fitted out in 1737 with a cargo worth £1,307, returned to Liverpool with colonial produce and bills of exchange totalling £3,080, in addition to cotton and sugar remitted later. The Ann, another Liverpool ship, sailed in 1751 with an outfit and a cargo costing £1,60$; altogether the voyage produced £3,287 net. A second voyage in 1753 produced £8,000 on a cargo and outfit amounting to £3,153.32
An eighteenth century writer has estimated the sterling value of the 303,737 slaves carried in 878 Liverpool ships between 1783 and 1793 at over fifteen million pounds. Deducting commissions and other charges and the cost of the outfit of the ships and maintenance of the slaves, he concluded that the average annual profit was over thirty per cent.33 Modern scholarship has tended to reproach contemporary observers with undue exaggeration. But even taking the reduced estimates of Professor Dumbell, the net profit of the Enterprise in 1803, estimated on cost of outfit and cost of cargo, was 38 per cent, while that of the Fortune in 1803, for a cargo of poor slaves, was over 16 per cent. Again with these reduced estimates the profit of the Lottery in 1802 was thirty-six pounds per slave, the Enterprise sixteen pounds, and the Fortune five.34 The slave trade on the whole was estimated to bring Liverpool alone in the eighties a clear profit of £300,000 a year; and it was a common saying in the town of the far less profitable West Indian trade that if one ship in three came in a man was no loser, while if two came in he was a good gainer. On an average only one ship in five miscarried.35
Such profits seem small and insignificant compared with the fabulous five thousand per cent the Dutch East India Company cleared at times in its history. It is even probable that the profits from the slave trade were smaller than those made by the British East India Company. Yet these trades were far less important than the slave trade. The explanation lies in the fact that from the mercantilist standpoint the India trade was a bad trade. It drained Britain of bullion to buy unnecessary wares, which led many at the time to think that “it were a happie thing for Christendome that the navigation to the East Indies, by way of the Cape of Good Hope, had never bene found out.”36 The slave trade, on the contrary, was ideal in that it was carried on by means of British manufactured goods and was, as far as the British colonies were concerned, inseparably connected with the plantation trade which rendered Britain independent of foreigners for her supply of tropical products. The enormous profits of the Dutch spice trade, moreover, were based on a severe restriction of production to ensure high prices, whereas the slave trade created British industry at home and tropical agriculture in the colonies.
The “attractive African meteor,”37 as a contemporary Liverpool historian called it, therefore became immensely popular. Though a large part of the Liverpool slave traffic was monopolized by about ten large firms, many of the small vessels in the trade were fitted out by attorneys, drapers, grocers, barbers and tailors. The shares in the ventures were subdivided, one having one-eighth, another one-fifteenth, a third one-thirty-second part of a share and so on. “Almost every man in Liverpool is a merchant, and he who cannot send a bale will send a band-box . . . almost every order of people is interested in a Guinea cargo, it is to this influenza that (there are) so many small ships.”38
The purchase of slaves called for a business sense and shrewd discrimination. An Angolan Negro was a proverb for worthlessness; Coromantines (Ashantis), from the Gold Coast, were good workers but too rebellious; Mandingoes (Senegal) were too prone to theft; the Eboes (Nigeria) were timid and despondent; the Pawpaws or Whydahs (Dahomey) were the most docile and best-disposed.39 The slaves were required for arduous field work, hence women and children were less valuable than robust males, the former because they were liable to interruptions from work through pregnancies, the latter because they required some attention until able to care for themselves. One Liverpool merchant cautioned his agents against buying ruptured slaves, idiots or any “old spider leged quality.”40 A West Indian poet advised the slave trader to see that the slave’s tongue was red, his chest broad and his belly not prominent.41 Buy them young, counselled one overseer from Nevis; “them full grown fellers think it hard to work never being brought up to it they take it to heart and dye or is never good for any thing....”42
But the slave trade was always a risky business. “The African Commerce,” it was written in 1795, “holds forward one constant train of uncertainty, the time of slaving is precarious, the length of the middle passage uncertain, a vessel may be in part, or wholly cut off, mortalities may be great, and various other incidents may arise impossible to be foreseen.”43 Sugar cultivation, moreover, was a lottery. The debts of the planters, their bankruptcies and demand for long credits gave the merchants many worries. “As you know,” wrote one of them, “quick dispatch is the life of trade, I have had many anxious hours this year, I wou’d not wish the same again for double the profits I may get if any.”44 From 1763 to 1778 the London merchants avoided all connection with the Liverpool slave traders, on the conviction that the slave trade was being conducted at a loss; between 1772 and 1778 the Liverpool merchants were alleged to have lost £700,000.45 Of thirty leading houses which dominated the slave trade from 1773, twelve had by 1788 gone bankrupt, while many others had sustained considerable losses.46 The American Revolution seriously interrupted the trade. “Our once extensive trade to Africa is at a stand,” lamented a Liverpool paper in 1775. Her “gallant ships laid up and useless,” Liverpool’s slave traders turned to privateering,47 anxiously awaiting the return of peace, with never a thought that they were witnessing the death rattles of an old epoch and the birth pangs of a new.
Prior to 1783, however, all classes in English society presented a united front with regard to the slave trade. The monarchy, the government, the church, public opinion in general, supported the slave trade. There were few protests, and those were ineffective.
The Spanish monarchy set the fashion which European royalty followed to the very last. The palace-fortresses of Madrid and Toledo were built out of the payment to the Spanish Crown for licences to transport Negroes. One meeting of the two sovereigns of Spain and Portugal was held in 1701 to discuss the arithmetical problem posed by a contract for ten thousand “tons” of Negroes granted the Portuguese.48 The Spanish queen, Christina, in the middle of the nineteenth century, openly participated in the slave trade to Cuba. The royal court of Portugal, when it moved to Brazil to avoid capture by Napoleon, did not find the slave atmosphere of its colonial territory uncongenial. Louis XIV fully appreciated the importance of the slave trade to metropolitan France and France overseas. The plans of the Great Elector for Prussian aggrandizement included the African slave trade.49
Hawkins’ slave trading expedition was launched under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth. She expressed the hope that the Negroes would not be carried off without their free consent, which “would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers.” But there was as much possibility that the transportation of the Negroes would be effected in democratic fashion as there was of collective bargaining. The Company of Royal Adventurers and the Royal African Company had, as their names imply, royal patronage and, not infrequently, investments by members of the royal family.50 According to Wilberforce, George III later opposed abolition,51 and great was the joy of the Liverpool slave traders and Jamaican sugar planters when the royal Duke of Clarence, the future William IV, “took up the cudgills” against abolition52 and attacked Wilberforce as either a fanatic or a hyprocrite.53
The British government, prior to 1783, was uniformly consistent in its encouragement of the slave trade. The first great rivals were the Dutch, who monopolized the carrying trade of the British colonies. The bitter commercial warfare of the second half of the seventeenth century between England and Holland represented an effort on the part of England to break the commercial net the Dutch had woven about England and her colonies. “What we want,” said Monk with military bluntness, “is more of the trade the Dutch now have.”54 Whether it was nominal peace or actual war, a sort of private war was maintained, for thirty years, between the Dutch West India Company and the Royal African Company.
England’s victory over Holland left her face to face with France. Anglo-French warfare, colonial and commercial, is the dominant theme in the history of the eighteenth century. It was a conflict of rival mercantilisms. The struggle was fought out in the Caribbean, Africa, India, Canada and on the banks of the Mississippi, for the privilege of looting India and for the control of certain vital and strategic commodities—Negroes; sugar and tobacco; fish; furs and naval stores.55 Of these areas the most important were the Caribbean and Africa; of these commodities the most important were Negroes and sugar. The outstanding single issue was the control of the Asiento. This privilege was conceded to England by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 as one result of her victory in the War of the Spanish Succession, and produced popular rejoicings in the country. It was the proud boast of Chatham that his war with France had given England almost the entire control of the African coast and of the slave trade.
Colonial assemblies frequently impeded the slave traders by imposing high duties on imported slaves, partly to raise revenue, partly out of their fear of the growing slave population. All such laws were frustrated by the home government, on the insistence of British merchants, who opposed taxes on British trade. The Board of Trade ruled in 1708 that it was “absolutely necessary that a trade so beneficial to the kingdom should be carried on to the greatest advantage. The well supplying of the plantations and colonies with a sufficient number of negroes at reasonable prices is in our opinion the chief point to be considered.”56 In 1773 the Jamaica Assembly, for the purpose of raising revenue and to reduce the fear of slave rebellions, imposed a duty on every Negro imported. The merchants of London, Liverpool and Bristol protested, and the Board of Trade condemned the law as unjustifiable, improper and prejudicial to British commerce. The governor was sharply reprimanded for his failure to stop efforts made to “check and discourage a traffic so beneficial to the nation.”57 As counsel for the sugar planters later argued: “in every variation of our administration of public affairs, in every variation of parties, the policy, in respect to that trade, has been the same.... In every period of our history, in almost every variation of our politics, each side and description of party men have, in terms, approved this very trade, voted its encouragement, and considered it as beneficial to the nation.”58
Parliament appreciated the importance of slavery and the slave trade to Britain and her plantations. In 1750 Horace Walpole wrote scornfully of “the British Senate, that temple of liberty, and bulwark of Protestant Christianity,... pondering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes.”59 Parliament heard many debates in its stately halls over abolition and emancipation, and its records show the doughty defenders the slave traders and slave owners possessed. Among them was Edmund Burke. The champion of conciliation of America was an accessory to the crucifixion of Africa. In 1772 a bill came before the House of Commons to prohibit the control of the African Committee by outsiders who were not engaged in the slave trade. Burke protested, not against the slave trade, however, but against depriving of the right to vote those who had legally purchased that right. Only a few, he argued, were so accused. “Ought we not rather to imitate the pattern set us in sacred writ, and if we find ten just persons among them, to spare the whole ? . . . Let us not then counteract the wisdom of our ancestors, who considered and reconsidered this subject, nor place upon the footing of a monopoly what was intended for a free trade.”60 Bristol could well afford to share in the general admiration of the great Liberal.
The Church also supported the slave trade. The Spaniards saw in it an opportunity of converting the heathen, and the Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans were heavily involved in sugar cultivation which meant slave-holding. The story is told of an old elder of the Church in Newport who would invariably, the Sunday following the arrival of a slaver from the coast, thank God that “another cargo of benighted beings had been brought to a land where they could have the benefit of a gospel dispensation.”61 But in general the British planters opposed Christianity for their slaves. It made them more perverse and intractable and therefore less valuable. It meant also instruction in the English language, which allowed diverse tribes to get together and plot sedition.62 There were more material reasons for this opposition. The governor of Barbados in 1695 attributed it to the planters’ refusal to give the slaves Sundays and feast days off,63 and as late as 1823 British public opinion was shocked by the planters’ rejection of a proposal to give the Negroes one day in the week in order to permit the abolition of the Negro Sunday market.64 The Church obediently toed the line. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel prohibited Christian instruction to its slaves in Barbados,65 and branded “Society” on its new slaves to distinguish them from those of the laity;66 the original slaves were the legacy of Christopher Codrington.67 Sherlock, later Bishop of London, assured the planters that “Christianity and the embracing of the Gospel does not make the least difference in civil property.”68 Neither did it impose any barriers to clerical activity; for his labors with regard to the Asiento, which he helped to draw up as a British plenipotentiary at Utrecht, Bishop Robinson of Bristol was promoted to the see of London.69 The bells of the Bristol churches pealed merrily on the news of the rejection by Parliament of Wilberforce’s bill for the abolition of the slave trade.70 The slave trader, John Newton, gave thanks in the Liverpool churches for the success of his last venture before his conversion and implored God’s blessing on his next. He established public worship twice every day on his slaver, officiating himself, and kept a day of fasting and prayer, not for the slaves but for the crew. “I never knew,” he confessed, “sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion than in the last two voyages to Guinea.”71 The famous Cardinal Manning of the nineteenth century was the son of a rich West Indian merchant dealing in slave-grown produce.72 Many missionaries found it profitable to drive out Beelzebub by Beelzebub. According to the most recent English writer on the slave trade, they “considered that the best way in which to remedy abuse of negro slaves was to set the plantation owners a good example by keeping slaves and estates themselves, accomplishing in this practical manner the salvation of the planters and the advancement of their foundations.”73 The Moravian missionaries in the islands held slaves without hesitation; the Baptists, one historian writes with charming delicacy, would not allow their earlier missionaries to deprecate ownership of slaves.74 To the very end the Bishop of Exeter retained his 655 slaves, for whom he received over £12,700 compensation in 1833.75
Church historians make awkward apologies, that conscience awoke very slowly to the appreciation of the wrongs inflicted by slavery and that the defence of slavery by churchmen “simply arose from want of delicacy of moral perception.”76 There is no need to make such apologies. The attitude of the churchman was the attitude of the layman. The eighteenth century, like any other century, could not rise above its economic limitations. As Whitefield argued in advocating the repeal of that article of the Georgia charter which forbade slavery, “it is plain to demonstration that hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes.”77
Quaker nonconformity did not extend to the slave trade. In 1756 there were eighty-four Quakers listed as members of the Company trading to Africa, among them the Barclay and Baring families.78 Slave dealing was one of the most lucrative investments of English as of American Quakers, and the name of a slaver, The Willing Quaker, reported from Boston at Sierra Leone in 1793,79 symbolizes the approval with which the slave trade was regarded in Quaker circles. The Quaker opposition to the slave trade came first and largely not from England but from America, and there from the small rural communities of the North, independent of slave labor. “It is difficult,” writes Dr. Gary, “to avoid the assumption that opposition to the slave system was at first confined to a group who gained no direct advantage from it, and consequently possessed an objective attitude.”80
The Navy was impressed with the value of the West Indian colonies and refused to hazard or jeopardize their security. The West Indian station was the “station for honour,” and many an admiral had been feted by the slave owners. Rodney opposed abolition.81 Earl St. Vincent pleaded that life on the plantations was for the Negro a veritable paradise as compared with his existence in Africa.82 Abolition was a “damned and cursed doctrine, held only by hypocrites.”83 The gallant admiral’s sentiments were not entirely divorced from more material considerations. He received over £6,000 compensation in 1837 for the ownership of 418 slaves in Jamaica.84 Nelson’s wife was a West Indian, and his views on the slave trade were unequivocal. “I was bred in the good old school, and taught to appreciate the value of our West Indian possessions, and neither in the field nor the Senate shall their just rights be infringed, while I have an arm to fight in their defence, or a tongue to launch my voice against the damnable doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.”85
Slavery existed under the very eyes of eighteenth century Englishmen. An English coin, the guinea, rare though it was and is, had its origin in the trade to Africa.86 A Westminster goldsmith made silver padlocks for blacks and dogs.87 Busts of blackamoors and elephants, emblematical of the slave trade, adorned the Liverpool Town Hall. The insignia and equipment of the slave traders were boldly exhibited for sale in the shops and advertised in the press. Slaves were sold openly at auction.88 Slaves being valuable property, with title recognized by law, the postmaster was the agent employed on occasions to recapture runaway slaves and advertisements were published in the official organ of the government.89 Negro servants were common. Little black boys were the appendages of slave captains, fashionable ladies or women of easy virtue. Hogarth’s heroine, in The Harlot’s Progress, is attended by a Negro boy, and Marguerite Steen’s Orabella Burmester typifies eighteenth century English opinion in her desire for a little black boy whom she could love as her long-haired kitten.90 Freed Negroes were conspicuous among London beggars and were known as St. Giles blackbirds. So numerous were they that a parliamentary committee was set up in 1786 for relieving the black poor.91
“Slaves cannot breathe in England,” wrote the poet Cowper. This was license of the poet. It was held in 1677 that “Negroes being usually bought and sold among merchants, so merchandise, and also being infidels, there might be a property in them.” In 1729 the Attorney General ruled that baptism did not bestow freedom or make any alteration in the temporal condition of the slave; in addition the slave did not become free by being brought to England, and once in England the owner could legally compel his return to the plantations.92 So eminent an authority as Sir William Blackstone held that “with respect to any right the master may have lawfully acquired to the perpetual service of John or Thomas, this will remain exactly in the same state of subjection for life,” in England or elsewhere.93
When, therefore, the assiduous zeal of Granville Sharp brought before Chief Justice Mansfield in 1772 the case of the Negro James Somersett who was about to be returned by his owner to Jamaica, there were abundant precedents to prove the impurity of the English air. Mansfield tried hard to evade the issue by suggesting manumission of the slave, and contented himself with the modest statement that the case was not “allowed or approved by the law of England” and the Negro must be discharged. Much has been made of this case, by people constantly seeking for triumphs of humanitarianism. Professor Coupland contends that behind the legal judgment lay the moral judgment and that the Somersett case marked the beginning of the end of slavery throughout the British Empire.94 This is merely poetic sentimentality translated into modern history. Benjamin Franklin pointed scornfully to “the hypoccrisy of this country, which encourages such a detestable commerce, while it piqued itself on its virtue, love of liberty, and the equity of its courts in setting free a single negro.”95 Two years after the Somersett case the British government disallowed the Jamaican Acts restricting the slave trade. In 1783 a Quaker petition for abolition was solemnly rejected by Parliament.
In 1783, moreover, the same Mansfield handed down a decision in the case of the ship Zong. Short of water, the captain had thrown 132 slaves overboard, and now the owners brought an action for insurance alleging that the loss of the slaves fell within the clause of the policy which insured against “perils of the sea.” In Mansfield’s view “the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.” Damages of thirty pounds were awarded for each slave, and the idea that the captain and crew should be prosecuted for mass homicide never entered into the head of any humanitarian. In 1785 another insurance case, involving a British ship and mutiny among the slaves, came before Mansfield. His Daniel judgment was that all the slaves who were killed in the mutiny or had died of their wounds and bruises were to be paid for by the underwriters; those who had died from jumping overboard or from swallowing water or from “chagrin” were not to be paid for on the ground that they had not died from injuries received in the mutiny; and the underwriters were not responsible for any depreciation in price which resulted to the survivors from the mutiny.96
The prosecution of the slave trade was not the work of the dregs of English society. The daughter of a slave trader has assured us that her father, though a slave captain and privateer, was a kind and just man, a good father, husband, and friend.97 This was probably true. The men most active in this traffic were worthy men, fathers of families and excellent citizens. The abolitionist Ramsay acknowledged this with real sorrow, but pleaded that “they had never examined the nature of this commerce and went into it, and acted as others had done before them in it, as a thing of course, for which no account was to be given in this world or the next.”98 The apology is unnecessary. The slave trade was a branch of trade and a very important branch. An officer in the trade once said that “one real view, one minute absolutely spent in the slave rooms on the middle passage would do more for the cause of humanity than the pen of a Robertson, or the whole collective eloquence of the British senate.”99 This is dubious. As it was argued later about the Cuban and Brazilian slave trade, it was no use saying it was an unholy or unchristian occupation. It was a lucrative trade, and that was enough.100 The slave trade has even been justified as a great education. “Think of the effect, the result of a slave voyage on a youngster starting in his teens. . . . 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.”101
The slave traders were among the leading humanitarians of their age. John Cary, advocate of the slave trade, was conspicuous for his integrity and humanity and was the founder of a society known as the “Incorporation of the Poor.”102 The Bristol slaver “Southwell” was named after a Bristol parliamentarian, whose monument depicts him as true to king and country and steady to what he thought right.103 Bryan Blundell of Liverpool, one of Liverpool’s most prosperous merchants, engaged in both the slave and West Indian trades, was for many years trustee, treasurer, chief patron and most active supporter of a charity school, the Blue Coat Hospital, founded in 1709.104 To this charity another Liverpool slave trader, Foster Cunliffe, contributed largely. He was a pioneer in the slave trade. He and his two sons are listed as members of the Liverpool Committee of Merchants trading to Africa in 1752. Together they had four ships capable of holding 1,120 slaves, the profits from which were sufficient to stock twelve vessels on the homeward journey with sugar and rum. An inscription to Foster Cunliffe in St. Peter’s Church describes him thus: “a Christian devout and exemplary in the exercise of every private and publick duty, friend to mercy, patron to distress, an enemy only to vice and sloth, he lived esteemed by all who knew him . . . and died lamented by the wise and good. . . .”105 Thomas Leyland, one of the largest slave traders of the same port, had, as mayor, no mercy for the engrosser, the forestaller, the regrater, and was a terror to evil doers.106 The Heywoods were slave traders and the first to import the slave-grown cotton of the United States. Arthur Heywood was treasurer of the Manchester Academy where his sons were educated. One son, Benjamin, was elected member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, and was admitted to the Billiard Club, the most recherché club Manchester has ever possessed, which admitted only the very best men as regards manners, position and attainments. To be admitted to the charmed circle of the Forty meant unimpeachable recognition as a gentleman. Later Benjamin Heywood organized the first of the Manchester exhibitions of works of art and industry.107
These slave traders held high office in England. The Royal Adventurers trading to Africa in 1667, a list headed by royalty, included two aldermen, three dukes, eight earls, seven lords, one countess, and twenty-seven knights.108 The signatures of the mayors of Liverpool and Bristol appear on a petition of the slave traders in 1739.109 The Bristol Committee set up in 1789 to oppose abolition of the slave trade included five aldermen, one an ex-captain of a slaver.110 Many a slave trader held Liverpool’s highest municipal dignity.111 The slave traders were firmly established in both houses of Parliament. Ellis Cunliffe represented Liverpool in Parliament from 1755 to 1767.112 The Tarleton family, prominent in the slave trade, voiced Liverpool’s opposition to abolition in Parliament.113 The House of Lords, traditionally conservative, was confirmed in its instinctive opposition to abolition by the presence of many ennobled slave traders. It gave sympathetic hearing to the Earl of Westmorland’s statement that many of them owed their seats in the Upper House to the slave trade,114 and that abolition was Jacobinism.115 No wonder Wilberforce feared the Upper Chamber.116 Not without confidence did the Assembly of Jamaica state categorically in 1792 that “the safety of the West Indies not only depends on the slave trade not being abolished, but on a speedy declaration of the House of Lords that they will not suffer the trade to be abolished.”117
Some protests were voiced by a few eighteenth century intellectuals and prelates. Defoe in his “Reformation of Manners,” condemned the slave trade. The poet Thomson, in his “Summer,” drew a lurid picture of the shark following in the wake of the slave ship. Cowper, after some hesitation, wrote his memorable lines in “The Task.” Blake wrote his beautiful poem on the “Little Black Boy.” Southey composed some poignant verses on the “Sailor who had served in the Slave Trade.” But much of this eighteenth century literature, as Professor Sypher has shown in an exhaustive analysis,118 concentrated on the “noble Negro,” the prince unjustly made captive, superior even in bondage to his captors. This sentimentality, typical of the eighteenth century in general, more often than not carried the vicious implication that the slavery of the ignoble Negro was justified. Boswell on the other hand stated emphatically that to abolish the slave trade was to shut the gates of mercy on mankind, and dubbed Wilberforce a “dwarf with big resounding name.”119
Two eighteenth century merchants, Bentley and Roscoe, opposed the slave trade before 1783; they were more than merchants, they were Liverpool merchants. Two eighteenth century economists condemned the expensiveness and inefficiency of slave labor—Dean Tucker and Adam Smith, the warning tocsin, the trumpeter of the new age. The discordant notes went unheeded. The eighteenth century endorsed the plea of Temple Luttrell: “Some gentlemen may, indeed, object to the slave trade as inhuman and impious; let us consider that if our colonies are to be maintained and cultivated, which can only be done by African negroes, it is surely better to supply ourselves with those labourers in British bottoms, than purchase them through the medium of French, Dutch, or Danish factors.”120
On one occasion a Mauritius gentleman, eager to convince the abolitionist Buxton that “the blacks were the happiest people in the world,” appealed to his wife to confirm his statement from her own impressions of the slaves she had seen. “Well, yes,” replied the good spouse, “they were very happy, I’m sure, only I used to think it so odd to see the black cooks chained to the fireplace.”121 Only a few Englishmen before 1783, like the good spouse, had any doubts about the morality of the slave trade. Those who had realized that objections, as Postlethwayt put it, would be of little weight with statesmen who saw the great national emoluments which accrued from the slave trade. “We shall take things as they are, and reason from them in their present state, and not from that wherein we could hope them to be. . . . We cannot think of giving up the slave-trade, notwithstanding my good wishes that it could be done.” Later, perhaps, some noble and benevolent Christian spirit might think of changing the system, “which, as things are now circumstanced, may not be so easily brought about.”122 Before the American Revolution English public opinion in general accepted the view of the slave trader: “Tho’ to traffic in human creatures, may at first sight appear barbarous, inhuman, and unnatural; yet the traders herein have as much to plead in their own excuse, as can be said for some other branches of trade, namely, the advantage of it. . . . In a word, from this trade proceed benefits, far outweighing all, either real or pretended mischiefs and inconveniencies.”123