43 43Labor to supply the demands of the South can be obtained only from Africa; and the laws of this country prevent the Southern people from obtaining this labor, branding those engaged in furnishing it with the opprobrious epithet of “pirates,” and inflicting on them the punishment due to those guilty of the crime of piracy!
THE COMING OF RAILROADS ushered in a new era of capitalism on a scale impossible in the days when markets were linked only by water. Railroads required enormous sums of money to create, with a national organization that functioned simultaneously everywhere. But Dred Scott threw western expansion plans into chaos, railroad bonds dropped in price, and there was a Panic.
The Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed in August 1857, raising fears of a bank run. Then the SS Central America, which sailed from Panamá via Havana for New York, sank on September 12 in a hurricane 160 miles off the coast of Charleston. Down with the ship went 425 people (153 more were saved) and a double-digit number, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, tons of gold from California that was headed for the New York banks.* Paper money could be replaced in the system, but not metal money; the loss was by one estimate equivalent to about 20 percent of the nation’s gold reserves. In what has been remembered as the Panic of 1857, credit contracted sharply, and the banks stopped specie payments for three months or so.
The panic originated in New York in part as a consequence of the local shortage of coin and in part as a consequence of excessive speculation, with the buying of stocks to sell rather than hold having become a common financial activity. It was worsened by the credit contraction that banks imposed in response. The commercial crisis was strongly felt in the North, while the South to some degree escaped it. Unfortunately, this led some to believe that the South could go it alone. Certainly, some Southerners were ruined when cotton prices dipped that year, and the disruption of commerce from New York occasioned the loss of money by many planters. A German observer wrote:
In 1857, the year of the commercial crisis in America, many planters were compelled to sell a portion of their slaves in order to raise ready money, which at that time was not to be had on the best security even at 50 per cent. interest; and I saw a planter bring a hundred slaves to market at one time, who certainly after that sale must have been obliged to leave half his plantation uncultivated. 1
When a planter had a debt crisis, his captives were dispersed. As failures became larger, hundreds of people were occasionally sold at once, fragmenting an entire community each time. James Gadsden, of Gadsden Purchase fame, bought the Cooper River plantation of Pimlico in 1852; after his death six years later, his 235 slaves “accustomed to the culture of Rice and Provisions” were sold to thirty different buyers in a sale advertised throughout the South, all the way to Texas.
The Panic of 1857 was strongly felt in the West, leading New York businessmen to focus their commerce even more closely on the cotton-producing South, offering long credit terms, even as leading Southerners focused on finding ways to become economically independent from New York.2 Slave prices dipped in 1857, but slaves held their value better than cotton, and prices quickly recovered and climbed with yet another bumper crop. As the economy rebounded, slave prices reached new highs, raising the entry barrier to planter status yet further.
There could be no quicker way to get the price of slaves down than to reopen the African slave trade, which would create enormous profits for Charleston slave merchants while investing a new generation of purchasers in the slavery system. An article in DeBow’s Review pitched the idea as a solution to the problem of white social inequality in the South:
At present prices, it is almost impossible that the mere laborer can ever [own slaves]…. However much he may wish a share in that desirable commodity of slave labor, it is done up in packages too large for common use … The foreign slave trade will bring slaves enough for all, and at prices which poorer men may purchase…. it will thus bring all the ruling race to the same social stand point; it will thus reintegrate and erect our social system; it will abolish the odious distinctions between slave owners and non-slave owners; it will increase the laboring element of our population; it will thus extend our capacity for production, and, in doing all this, will give the promise of a more abundant wealth, and open the prospect to a broader and a brighter future than was ever yet expanded to the eye of man.3
Though Virginians, needless to say, opposed reopening the African trade, it was an editorial priority of the Charleston papers, beginning about 1853. As South Carolina systematically attempted to expand its influence, measures promoting the importation of African labor appeared in the legislatures of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—none of which succeeded, perhaps because they would have been in overt defiance of federal law. It was not a popular notion among the mass of Southern whites, who did not want new Africans complicating their society, nor even for all slaveowners, but for some, it would have been a bonanza, and it was a useful political cudgel. Though the trade was not reopened, the initiative was not without effect, as W. E. B. DuBois pointed out: “The agitation did succeed in sweeping away nearly all theoretical opposition to the trade, and left the majority of Southern people in an attitude which regarded the reopening of the African slave-trade as merely a question of expediency.”4
In South Carolina, where reopening the African slave trade at critical moments was a political and commercial tradition dating back to colonial days, agitating to reopen the foreign trade was a way of putting pressure on Virginia. There was a tactical problem that went back to the negotiations over the Constitution: an independent Southern confederacy would need Virginia’s heft, strategic location, and money, but reopening the foreign slave trade was a deal-breaker that would have devalued the Virginians’ slave property.
Outside the cotton belt, there was always substantial political will to keep the African trade closed. The specter of a reopened African slave trade appeared in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, when the two men were contending for the position of senator from Illinois. Though neither of the two men was in favor of reopening the African trade, Lincoln went on the offensive. Stephen Douglas advocated “popular sovereignty” regarding slavery, which meant that each state was free to make its own determination about the institution.5 In what became known as the “house divided” speech, Lincoln argued that the logical consequence of this would be the reopening of the trade: “For years he [Douglas] has labored to prove it a sacred right of white men to take negro slaves into the new territories. Can he possibly show that it is less a sacred right to buy them where they can be bought cheapest? And, unquestionably they can be bought cheaper in Africa than in Virginia.”6
In spite of bumper crops, the overheating slave market was threatening agricultural prosperity. The Mobile Daily Register warned of dangerous levels of credit exposure:
[January 19, 1859.] High Prices for Negroes. — Our exchanges from all parts of the South and West, are teeming with notices of the extraordinary high prices at which negroes are now selling, either on the block or at private sale, and the question naturally presents itself, what is the cause of it? Can the present high price of cotton be the cause?
If so, a return in the value of the product of the negro, sufficient to justify a purchase, at the prices now ruling cannot be the case, and all reasoning based on the proposition, proves ephemeral, for the influx of slaves this season into the cotton and sugar growing States is enormous. It is supposed that from Augusta, Ga., alone, for the last three months, that the shipments South and West, by the trains, average 200, daily, while the tide of emigration by way of other points is proportionately as great. Some estimate the import of negroes into the cotton growing States alone, will increase the next crop 200,000 bales.
The present amount of home slave labor should be sufficient to till the lands now open and under cultivation, but with this large increase of laborers, new lands must be opened and cultivated, and their yield [must be on sale] in the market next season. Now will the demand for cotton be equal to the supply? …
If the negroes have been purchased on time, and we are satisfied that such is the case with a large portion of them, a decline of a few cents in cotton would produce a reaction that must, necessarily seriously embarrass the planting interest, that have purchased on these terms. It is too much the custom for planters to anticipate their crops in dollars and cents, and shape their liabilities accordingly.
The demand for laborers is good, but we do not think that it justifies the exorbitant and high rates which prevail, although the South was never more solvent than now.7 (paragraphing added)
Capital for a new African slave trade would have been easily available in New York, where businessmen were still financing an African trade to Cuba. At least 350,000 Africans were carried to Brazil in the 1840s, and, writes Don E. Fehrenbacher, “at least half of those importations were achieved with American help of some kind.”8 But the British navy, which had been actively pursuing slave traders for thirty years, cut off the Brazilian trade sharply in 1850, finishing it entirely by 1852. Besides British coercion, there was a familiar economic logic to the shutdown: the established Brazilian planters had imported so many that they had more than enough for their needs. Now, as new plantations were carved out of the forest in southern Brazil, a domestic slave trade began from the old slave area to the new one, as a forced north-to-south migration began in Brazil.* Similar to the United States’s interstate trade, this interprovincial trade was the only other sizable such trade in the hemisphere.9
After 1850, only Cuba was left importing Africans. It was done with extensive connivance from within the United States, whose ships were by treaty immune from belowdecks search by British cruisers. Slaving above the Bight of Benin had largely been stopped, but whole villages were still being ripped out of Yorubaland by Dahomeyan slave raiders and carried off to sugar mills in the area of Matanzas, Havana, and elsewhere, and the Central African ports continued selling slaves.
“We don’t care for the English squadron,” boasted an imprisoned slave ship captain in New York in an 1855 interview published in the antislavery New York Evangelist and reprinted in the pro-slavery DeBow’s Review. “We run up the American flag, and if they come on board all we have to do is show our American papers, and they have no right to search us.” The captain estimated that his brig had cost $13,000 to outfit and brought in $220,000 on one run to Cuba—a rate of return from which one successful venture could absorb the costs of several failed ones. Affirming that New York was the king of the trade, the captain was asked how he outfitted his ships:
I can go down to South street, and go into a number of houses that help to fit out ships for the business. I don’t know how far they own the vessels or receive the profits of the cargoes. I had rather not have American owners; I prefer Spaniards or Portuguese. But these houses know all about it. They know me. They see me sail out of port with a ship, and come back a passenger … They know [that] … when a cargo of slaves is landed, the vessel is often destroyed, not to be a witness against her officers and crew.10
The colonial-era delay of months on the African coast while assembling a cargo piecemeal was a thing of the past. The African side of the business had gotten steadily more industrial, so slavers in the 1850s were frequently able to pull up to their African destination port and choose a cargo of as many as twelve hundred people from among those held captive in what amounted to a wholesale warehouse maintained by factors. The captain continued:
The boys and women we kept on the upper deck. But all the strong men—those giant Africans that might make us trouble—we put below on the slave deck.
Did you chain them or put on handcuffs?
No, never; they would die. We let them move about.
Are you very severe with them?
We have to be pretty strict at first—for a week or so—to make them feel that we are masters. Then we lighten up for the rest of the voyage.
How do you pack them at night?
They lay down upon the deck, on their sides, body to body. There would not be room enough for all to lie on their backs.
Did many die on the passage?
Yes, I lost a good many the last cruise—more than ever before. Sometimes we find them dead when we go below in the morning. Then we throw them overboard.
Mortality was decreasing on the voyages, because steam vessels now made the cruise from Africa to Cuba in as little as eighteen days. The year-end 1859 British report from Havana to Her Majesty’s commissioners on the slave trade noted that Madagascar had become a new staging ground for East African Arab traders selling people principally from Mozambique (referring to Mozambique Island, off the coast of the present-day country of Mozambique), to slavers bound for Cuba:
Such expeditions not unfrequently originate in the United States of America, from whence they take their departure; and there are at present here, we understand, agents from Boston and from New Orleans, who are engaged in completing the subscriptions for shares, which have been already in part filled up by American capitalists. One of these schemes is, for a ship of 900 tons to bring 2,000 slaves, under charge of an experienced slaver, who has made no less than thirteen successful voyages.
It seems that negroes are to be had on the East Coast of Africa for about 28 dollars each; and even so, they are paid for in goods, upon which there is at the least 100 per cent. of profit.
We learn that the ships to be employed in this unholy Traffic, with their goods for barter on board, and prepared with sufficient iron-fitting tanks for a supply of water, proceed from the United States, under American colours, to a port in Madagascar; there the slave-deck is laid in safety and without hindrance, and there they take in their cargoes of human misery, the victims being brought over from the opposite Coast of Africa in Arab vessels: and we have been told that such are the facilities and arrangements that a very large cargo of slaves can be completed in two or three days.11
The commissioners accounted for 12,744 Africans introduced illegally into Cuba in 1858; of the twenty voyages that brought them, eleven were in American vessels. Certain that there was more traffic than they knew about, the commissioners rounded their estimate up by a third, to almost seventeen thousand.12
With Africans selling in Havana at $1,000 or more, the profits on such voyages were immense; a merchant could afford to pay out bribes, and even burn the ship if necessary. New York merchants especially were involved in the financing, but a wide variety of US maritime centers participated in the trade, including Baltimore and New Orleans. W. E. B. Dubois’s list, compiled from congressional documents, shows vessels from Portland, Maine; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Boston; Rhode Island; Mystic, Connecticut; and Philadelphia.13
The Echo, a brig carrying 475 slaves (out of about 625 it had started with), was captured by the US Navy off the coast of Cuba in August 1858, and though the captain and crew were found not guilty at their trials, the captives were sent to Africa—not back to their homes, but to Monrovia, Liberia, where, inevitably, a new composite culture was developing among people from various parts of Africa who had been left there.
The American ship Haidee, which had left Kilongo on the Angolan coast with 1,145 captives, brought the 903 of them who were still alive into the Cuban port of Cárdenas on September 8, 1859. Julián Zulueta, the enormously wealthy Basque trader who had commissioned the voyage together with partners, took them to an “estate” with “an escort of about 200 armed men. The bribes on this scandalous occasion are said to have amounted to about 200,000 dollars.”14 By the end of 1859, reported the British judge in Havana: “We have had information of the introduction of no less than thirty-nine cargoes, with 22,855 negroes; add to which one-third, as usual, and we have the enormous number of 30,473 landed here in this year.”15 Reporting from Luanda, where more than three centuries of the slave trade had depopulated the countryside, Her Majesty’s acting commissioner wrote: “It is obvious that the only flag which the guilty adventurers in the Slave Trade now assume to cover their crime is the American.”16
The slaveowners of the Lowcountry saw all this as another instance of Northern hypocrisy: Americans in free-soil states were building fortunes illegally in the foreign slave trade. But since none of the slaves came to the United States, Carolina planters were denied the use of cheap African labor, while they continued paying a protectionist markup on slaves to Virginia’s benefit, and Carolina merchants were denied the use of their harbor as a slave depot.
Despite all the illegal African slave trading, with the exception of the well-known cases of the Wanderer in 1858 and the Clotilda in 1860, and perhaps a few others that left little trace, Africans were not imported directly into the American South. When in late 1859 President Buchanan sent a secret agent, Benjamin F. Slocumb, to travel from North Carolina to Texas as a potential slave buyer with a mission of looking for evidence of African slave vessels arriving, Slocumb found that “reports concerning the landing of Africans, except in the case of the yacht ‘Wanderer,’ were unreliable, in fact mere fabrications.”17 Joseph Bruin, the large New Orleans slave trader, told Slocumb there were none in town, as it was not a “Safe business,” but that “about 100 [Africans] had been sold in and about New Orleans last Spring, and hurried away.”18 Some historians believe that some or many clandestine shipments of Africans came to the Gulf Coast from Havana, while others say that cargoes were smuggled along the Georgia coastline. It is certainly possible, but there is no direct documentation—there wouldn’t be—and, moreover, there is no trace of them in documentation about the markets, where Africans did not, as far as we know, turn up. If such shipments did come, they presumably went directly to large plantations under high secrecy, but high secrecy was not all that easy in polemical, newspaper-heavy, nineteenth-century America. Africans for sale in the open market would have been news, and would certainly have been mentioned in slaveowners’ and traders’ letters. For the labor networks of the South to have been supplied with African bodies in any more substantial way would have had to have left traces that do not exist. Whether some Africans came in clandestinely via Havana or not, the slave-breeding industry remained well-protected.
The two African slave ships that we do know of were highly conspicuous. The Wanderer was outfitted by Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, a loose-cannon financier and speedboater from Savannah. Lamar was the son of New York bank president G. B. Lamar, who would shortly be part of a cockamamie plan, supported by pro-Confederate New York City mayor Fernando Wood, to have the city secede in sympathy with the South.19 His voyage was an open secret, intended in rebuke and defiance of the federal ban. Lamar’s investors included several major slave traders, who were all taking a considerable risk since they were committing a capital crime. One was Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose business by this time reached from Texas to Georgia, and who bragged about his “interest” in the Wanderer expedition to a newspaper reporter in 1869.20 Savannah historians Sheehy et al. write that Lamar “calculated that if he could maneuver this confrontation into his own back yard of Savannah, he could win. This victory would in turn undermine the federal law banning the importation of African slaves.” Win or lose, “he hoped the importation of Africans would drive a wedge between the North and South and elect a Republican Party president—something he was sure would trigger secession.”21
At the Angolan slave port of Benguela, 487 people were densely packed onto Lamar’s Wanderer, a small, fast-sailing vessel built as a pleasure craft that flew the flag of the New York Yacht Club. They were young, in keeping with market requirements, and many were children. About 409 of them were still alive when the Wanderer came ashore on Jekyll Island, a little south of Savannah, on November 28, 1858. The crew was arrested immediately, but Lamar got the ship back and quickly disposed of the slaves. One African boy, the only remaining witness, was abducted at gunpoint from jail and never seen again.22 The crew members were put on trial and acquitted. Secret agent Slocumb’s previously mentioned report to President Buchanan contains some information about what happened to the Wanderer’s captives: none of them went to Charleston, he reported from that city; some had passed through Mobile on the way to Louisiana; thirty were sold in Vicksburg by Nathan Bedford Forrest; and seven in Memphis, also by Forrest. Some wound up in Texas.23
Lamar, also a horse racer, owned the Ten Broeck Race Course in Savannah, where on March 2 and 3, 1859—a little more than three months after the Wanderer arrived—Georgia’s all-time biggest slave auction was held to pay down the debts Pierce Mease Butler had incurred speculating in the stock market. The broker conducting the sale, Joseph Bryan, owned the largest slave jail in town, on Bryan Street facing Johnson Square, but even so, he couldn’t manage an inhouse sale of that size, so he moved it to Ten Broeck.24 The people to be sold were housed in the stables.
A Northern newspaper reporter attempting to take notes at the sale would have been ejected if not violently abused, so Mortimer Thomson, writing for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, went incognito, posing as a buyer. When his article, “Great Auction Sale of Slaves at Savannah, Georgia, March 2d and 3d, 1859,” was published on March 9, it caused an international sensation and was a public relations disaster for Savannah. Writing under the name Q. K. Philander Doesticks, Thomson reported hearing at the auction strong sentiments in favor of reopening the African slave trade, and described the scene:
For several days before the sale every hotel in Savannah was crowded with negro speculators from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, who had been attracted hither by the prospects of making good bargains. Nothing was heard for days, in the bar-rooms and public rooms, but talk of the great sale.
The community on Butler’s Sea Island plantations numbered about nine hundred. Half of them were owned by the estate of Butler’s deceased brother John, but Butler’s 436 went to the auction block, there to be sold by what Southerners reckoned a “humane” method, in families, though of course such sales still broke family ties. So half the community would remain, and half would disappear. The auction realized $303,850 (about $8.7 million in 2014 dollars). The sale was particularly painful, since this community was so deeply rooted. “None of the Butler slaves have ever been sold before, but have been on these two plantations since they were born,” wrote Thomson. “Who can tell how closely intertwined are the affections of a little band of four hundred persons, living isolated from all the world beside, from birth to middle age? Do they not naturally become one great family, each man a brother unto each?”25
Thomson reported as a conversation whose “sentiment” was “more than once repeated” a negative response by a prospective purchaser when asked if he would be buying a woman named Sally: “Well, Major, I think not. Sally’s a good, big, strapping gal, and can do a heap o’ work; but it’s five years since she had any children. She’s done breeding, I reckon.”26 (emphasis in original)
The Ten Broeck sale is popularly remembered by the phrase “the weeping time,” which also refers to the weather; four straight days of rain stopped when the sale ended. The auction was up in the grandstand, a room about a hundred feet long, where they lined up and waited their turn to go on the block. Thomson tells us that as “the wind howled outside, and through the open side of the building the driving rain came pouring in,” auctioneer Thomas J. Walsh announced the terms: “one-third cash, the remainder payable in two equal annual instalments, bearing interest from the day of sale, to be secured by approved mortgage and personal security, or approved acceptances in Savannah, Ga., or Charleston, S.C. Purchasers to pay for papers.”27
As the sale wound down, Pierce Butler moved among his former slaves carrying canvas bags from which he sorrowfully handed to each one of them four gleaming new twenty-five cent pieces, fresh from the mint, a dollar apiece, as if to say, it wasn’t my fault. But when the sale was concluded, Butler’s debts were paid, and he was a rich man again. He celebrated by going on an extended trip to the Mediterranean.28
Though Butler experienced the auction as a terrible humiliation, it turned out in the long run to have been a good business move: he cashed out his slave-holdings while they were still worth something. While it was not hard to tell in 1859 that war was coming, there was no reason for planters to believe the end of chattel slavery was around corner. Quite the contrary; it was a time-honored institution that had never been stronger. There were more slaves than ever; the cash value of the approximately four million people then enslaved in the United States embodied a phenomenal sum of money.
Though the Ten Broeck race course no longer exists as such, a historical marker was placed in a small commemorative area on the former site on March 2, 2008—another spot of sacred ground marked and acknowledged.
It was about the same time as the Ten Broeck sale—sometime in early 1859—that a “castle” of the Knights of the Golden Circle opened in Baltimore. Founded in 1854, and based in the free territory of Cincinatti, Ohio, the KGC was a pro-slavery secret society that had consolidated with the Order of the Lone Star, which had been somewhat directionless after the death of John Quitman in July 1858.* The KGC wanted to secede from the United States and take over Mexico.29
In Virginia, the cherished diffusionist notion that the slave population would be eliminated by selloff had not become reality. Four and a half decades after the Battle of New Orleans, Virginia was still exporting slaves to the Deep South. Although planters had been living for generations off the earnings of slave-breeding, exactly as abolitionists charged, Virginia’s slave population had increased by 1860 to 490,865, even though Maryland’s and Delaware’s had diminished.30
An editorial in the Richmond Enquirer of May 25, 1858, made clear the extent to which the Virginia economy still depended on the export to the South and West of domestically raised African Americans, as well as how alarming the loss of its protected status to a reopened trade would be:
“If a dissolution of the Union is to be followed by the revival of the [African] slave trade, Virginia had better consider whether the South of the Northern Confederacy would not be far more preferable for her than the North of a Southern Confederacy. In the Northern Confederacy Virginia would derive a large amount from the sale of her slaves to the South, and gain the increased value of her lands from Northern emigration – while in the Southern Confederacy, with the African slave trade revived, she would lose two-thirds of the value of her slave property, and derive no additional increase to the value of her lands.31
The South Carolinians would make sure that the Virginia slave-breeders would not be able to sit their war out.
John Brown’s attempt to ignite a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, began on October 16, 1859, and was suppressed two days later by Lt. J. E. B. Stuart under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee.
Frederick Douglass was one of perhaps eighty people who knew about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in advance. Though he tried to talk Brown out of the suicidal act that lit the match for war, he didn’t inform on him, which was enough to make him a conspirator. Douglass fled the country to Canada and on to London, returning home the following year.
Robert E. Lee’s report, filed on October 19, described Brown’s action not as Northern aggression, but as “the attempt of a fanatic or madman, who could only end in failure.”32 But Brown’s attempt to start a slave rebellion galvanized the South, where it was seen by the political and intellectual class as proof of what the “Black Republicans”—a contemptuous name for the party of Chase and Seward—had in store for them. The Charleston Mercury noted on October 20 that three New York newspapers with different political affiliations
all concur in opinion as to the desperate condition of the democratic party throughout the North, and the imminent prospect of a Black Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives and President of the United States being lifted to power. Let none, however, expect Seward to be the candidate of that party. We, at least, have never thought so; but we are confident some one less committed, yet equally Black Republican—such as [Salmon P.] Chase or [Supreme Court] Judge [John] McLean—would be put forward…. But whether Seward, or Chase, or McLean, to the South the difference is small. It is the candidate of a hostile sectional party, whose success must put the South, as unprotected tributaries, at the feet of inimical rulers.
It wasn’t just about Lincoln. In the eyes of the Mercury, any “Black Republican” president would have been cause for war. The number of Southern vigilance committees grew.
John Brown wasn’t hanged until December 2, and that wasn’t soon enough for slaveholders, because he didn’t stop talking until he was hanged, and never strayed from his calm, righteous tone. Brown’s execution (witnessed by the wealthy, successful, well-connected, radical young actor John Wilkes Booth, a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle) elevated him to the status of martyr.33 In his memory, new lyrics were put to an old campfire meeting song with the stirring chorus of “Glory, Hallejulah” to make the great song of the military campaign that ended slavery: John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave …
After the Wanderer, only one more slave ship containing Africans is known to have arrived in the United States. On an unknown date in the summer of 1860, the Clotilda brought to Magazine Point on Mobile Bay 110 captives from Ouidah, in the Fon-speaking state of Dahomey. “Ouidah was a more cosmopolitan city than Mobile,” notes Sylviane Diouf in her study of the Clotilda shipmates, which tells us that most of the captives were the people now called Yoruba (though that ethnonym was not yet in general use), practitioners of the orisha religion.34 The Clotilda’s captives had been taken by the Dahomeyan king Glèlè; some were from Atakora, in what is now northwest Benin; others were Fon speakers from Dahomey; still others were Muslim.35 One, Gumpa, who became known as Peter Lee, was a Dahomeyan nobleman who practiced vodun.36 This ship, which could as easily have gone to Havana or Matanzas, was more or less representative of the dramatic, high-volume African cultural transplantation to Cuba that was by then in its final days and would prove highly consequential for twentieth-century Afro-Cuban culture.
One survivor of the Clotilda, Cudjoe Lewis, lived until 1935. One of the relatively few Yoruba to be brought to United States territory,* he described the slave raid in which he was captured, recalling that the warriors who killed the unsalable people and kidnapped the remainder were women—the Dahomeyan kings favored the use of female soldiers—and that as they took him to Abomey, they wore hanging from their belts the severed heads of the captives’ unfortunate family members who had been slaughtered in the raid. After three days, the heads were decomposing, so the coffle stopped along the way for nine days as the soldiers smoked the heads over a fire to preserve them. The heads, along with the live slaves, were to be ceremonially sold to the king of Dahomey, a state organized for the purpose of slave-raiding.37
Most of the Clotilda captives remained enslaved in the Mobile area. With the end of slavery, many of them reassembled; in 1866, they established their community under Gumpa’s leadership as African Town, which he led for thirty years or so. After Gumpa’s son with his shipmate Josephina was born, writes Diouf, they had the baby tattooed on the chest with the image of a snake biting its own tail. Ultimately, as many vodouisants in Haiti have subsequently done, Gumpa became a Baptist.38 Descendants still live in the area.
By the time the Clotilda sailed, the African trade was already feeling the heat of President Buchanan’s program of stepped-up American anti-slave-trade enforcement off the African coast. But as we have previously emphasized, suppressing the slave trade was a different issue than abolishing slavery, which President Buchanan had no intention of doing. Many secessionists approved of his stopping the illegal African slave trade. They weren’t making any money from it, and harassing it kept the ships of the tiny US Navy busy—far, far away.
*There are different estimates of the amount of gold on board, but it was substantial. The wreck was found in 1988 and has not been completely excavated as we write. What has been brought to the surface so far includes 43 gold bars of up to 54 pounds, “1,302 $20 double-eagle gold coins, 37 $10 eagle gold coins, and 9,053 10-cent silver coins,” some of which dated back to 1823. Winter, Michael.
*Brazil was the last country in the hemisphere to end slavery, in 1888, developing a mass abolition movement in the final years; Cuba, still a colony of Spain, ended slavery in 1886 in the face of growing independentist sentiment.
*Quitman died of something later called “National Hotel Disease,” which he along with several hundred other people contracted attending the inauguration of James Buchanan.
*The bulk of Yoruba slaving happened after the fall of the Oyó empire to an Islamic jihad that began in the 1820s and culminated with the empire’s collapse in 1836. By this time, the United States no longer allowed the African slave trade, but Yoruba were taken in numbers to Cuba, Brazil, and, as indentured servants, to Trinidad.