CHAPTER 5
Picking Winners
IN 1814, in a very public attack in the London press, Freetown’s former chief justice, Robert Thorpe, accused Macaulay & Babington of being a “virtual monopoly” in Sierra Leone. “Monopoly” was a particularly loaded term. By the end of the eighteenth century, the old colonial system, with its guaranteed monopolies on metropolitan consumer markets had been thoroughly denounced by economic thinkers around the Atlantic. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s critique of monopolies suggests that they undermined industrial development, distorted capital investment, and kept consumer prices high, among other things.1 While monopolies were acknowledged to be good for producers, merchants, and manufacturers, it was their cost to consumers that made them a useful enemy for writers of free-trade pamphlets. In fact, slave traders had been among the first to make the public case against monopoly by using consumer prices as supporting evidence, and had successfully taken down the Royal Africa Company.2
As merchants rushed to capitalize on newly opened markets, newly emerging technologies, and a proliferation of government contracts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the thought that someone was cornering a market unfairly, through undue government influence, rankled. Macaulay responded to Thorpe’s attacks: “I positively affirm, that no step was ever taken by any one individual member of the Board of Directors, either of the Sierra Leone Company or of the African Institution, or by either of these Boards in their collective capacity, or by both jointly, either directly or indirectly, to secure to me the trade of the Colony, or even to increase my share of that trade in any way.”3 He pointed out, “seventy-eight vessels which entered the harbour of Sierra Leone between the month of May 1812, and the month of June 1814 … only six of which had any goods of mine been shipped” while “forty-one vessels which exported produce from the Colony during that time … only three of which I had any concern.” But while he may have had to compete with other traders, Macaulay’s defense was weak: he pointed out that a committee was responsible for approving all trading plans for the Colony—but then noted (apparently obliviously) that he had appointed the committee. He also claimed that his involvement in the African Institution “hindered” his Sierra Leone trade because his responsibilities as secretary distracted from his business.4 The Chinese wall between his two responsibilities was pretty flimsy, however: one letter from Clarkson to Macaulay begins, “The first part of my Letter will be to you as a member of the African Institution.” The second part concerned the investment of the Haitian king Henri Christophe’s family money, and the sale of Irving & Company’s sugar.5
Macaulay’s overlapping interests opened his firm up to critique. More problematically for abolitionists, Macaulay and his sometime business partner James Cropper were easy targets for pro-slavery arguments suggesting that abolitionists were insincere in their beliefs and were just promoting their own business interests. Attention was repeatedly drawn to the relationship between “interested parties” and imperial economic policies, at least in part because of the animosity between the West India lobby and the antislavery activists, as well as in response to the aftermath of the East India Company scandals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and as a reflection of the growing concern over the escalating public debt associated with the French wars.
Macaulay’s business raised concerns about the role of government regulation in picking winners in the new economy. Not only did abolitionist business interests want governments to ban the slave trade and, eventually, enslaved labor, but they also hoped to use their moral arguments to convince governments at home and abroad to implement market policies that would help nudge consumers and producers toward ethical behaviors. In these ways, there were inherent tensions in antislavery liberalism, which promoted free trade in arguments against the monopolies and protections through tariffs that governments had long afforded slave-labor industries like sugar and cotton production, but which also sought out government support for new commercial schemes, credit protection, monopsony and monopoly in legitimate commerce, and government contracts. And as they negotiated these positions, people like Zachary Macaulay transformed and honed their arguments about who would benefit from ethical commerce. Increasingly, it became clear that choices would need to be made about which Africans would benefit from abolition and emancipation policies. As Macaulay began to translate his experiences in West Africa to wider imperial political economy, his arguments reflected this emerging understanding of the consumer as both the “prime mover” of the moral economy and also its prime beneficiary.
Legitimate Commercial Agriculture
In 1812 Macaulay & Babington was awarded a silver plate worth 50 guineas by the African Institution for importing the largest quantity of white rice from West Africa to England: one hundred tons.6 The prize in 1812 was worth about 3 percent of the value of the rice itself. But the prize was worth ten percent of the whole value of the 720 hundredweights (36 tons) of rice imported into Britain from Africa in 1814, and 35 percent of the value of African rice imported in 1815.7 The awarding of the silver plate by the institution of which Macaulay was secretary was intended to demonstrate the profitability of African alternatives to West Indian slave production. Instead it caused a controversy in Britain, as Macaulay was accused of using his connections to award himself the silver.
To encourage cultivation in African colonies, prizes like that awarded to Macaulay & Babington were fairly common practice. An important component of the legitimate-commerce argument was an argument for the production of plantation goods—sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo—in West Africa. By demonstrating that these could be produced in Africa without the need for the slave trade, it was hoped that Caribbean plantations could be undermined completely. Both British and French merchants saw potential in West Africa. While there had been a preexisting imperial argument for planting tropical crops in Africa in order to cut out the expense, risk, and competition of the slave trade, this was developed further by Macaulay and his abolitionist allies in Britain and America.8 Thomas Clarkson was particularly interested in the development of African sugar, which he believed would have “a competitive advantage over the East Indies and cultivation by free men would bring substantial labour savings compared with West Indies sugar.”9 The French, meanwhile, returned to West Africa after the Napoleonic Wars determined to make plantation agriculture work to produce cotton or sugar for their home market.10 In Senegal, Governor Roger used prizes and premiums between 1823 and 1826 to encourage planters to grow rice, as well as indigo, sugar, and cotton, and to raise cattle.11 And the American Colonization Society similarly proposed commercial agriculture in Liberia as a means of undermining the slave trade and promoting civilization.
Sierra Leone was chosen as the location for Granville Sharp’s settlement of free black Britons in 1787 in part because it was believed to have particularly fertile soil for the production of tropical staples, and repeated efforts there to grow coffee, cotton, and sugar were intended to demonstrate that free African labor could produce these goods more cheaply than enslaved Caribbean laborers could. Between 1808 and 1815, when Zachary’s cousin Kenneth was both the agent for Macaulay & Babington and the manager of the Liberated African Department in Freetown, he also owned a plantation in the colony where he could experiment with different types of crops, as Zachary had before him. Kenneth was also a member of the agricultural committee, on which Sierra Leone’s Governor McCarthy, Chief Justice Fitzgerald, and several ministers and aldermen served. The committee offered “premiums of one pound sterling agreed for the best fields of cassava, arrow root, onions, large Fowls, Cotton (of not less than 50lbs)” to try to stimulate local production for consumption by the colony as well as for export.12
Despite Clarkson’s emphasis on sugar, it was rice that best represented the hopes of some abolitionist businessmen that they could export preexisting tropical plantation commodities from West Africa, in part because it was the least disruptive export to pursue.13 Rice production already existed, at scale, and was part of an existing commerce between Europeans and Africans because of its role in provisioning slave ships. It did not require Europeans to undertake new forms of land ownership in West Africa because it was grown and processed locally. The African partners who had provided rice and captives for sale to Europeans could seamlessly incorporate those captives as laborers on rice plantations. And there was already a market for rice around the Atlantic. In 1792, African rice imports to Britain equaled only 17 percent of Asian rice imports by volume, and 0.05 percent of American rice imports into Britain.14 But because it was already grown in the region, and because the Sierra Leone Company was on the lookout for legitimate-commerce products, it was seen as an important place to invest the Company’s resources. Settlers were also encouraged to grow rice, and Macaulay reported that already in the autumn of 1793 “there are three or four of our settlers now settled in the Rokelle and who have large plantations of Rice there, so large as to astonish the natives. They have had their land given them gratis.”15 The Sierra Leone Company, under Macaulay’s direction, secured contracts for rice from producers around the Freetown peninsula, in an attempt to both support the colony of freed slaves and trade in legitimate goods with their neighbors, thereby reducing African traders’ dependency on the slave trade for income and European merchandise.16
As has been noted by historians, the pragmatism of Sierra Leone Company governors in negotiating with the existing commercial and moral milieu was not always to the benefit of the enslaved, and could come across as hypocrisy—noted even at the time by critics such as the first governor of the Crown Colony, Thomas Perronet Thompson.17 Governors relied on European, Euro-African, and African slave traders’ existing trade networks, as well as on enslaved labor employed by African rulers, to source the legitimate-commerce products necessary to the Company’s balance sheet, but also the foodstuffs to sustain the colony. So from his experience on the ground, Macaulay seems to have decided that securing a rice supply was one of the most important ways to undermine the slave traders. If slave traders could instead turn to producing rice for consumption by the colony at Freetown, they wouldn’t have to sell slaves to get goods. And if they sold existing rice supplies to the colony, instead of to slave traders, they would make life for slave traders very difficult, both as residents of the coast and for the provisioning of their slave ships.
The rice trade also provided a way for the black settler population of Freetown to make a living through trade. In 1796 Macaulay wrote, “The Settlers continue by means of their Boats to supply the Colony with Cattle, small stock, and Rice, and also to bring in a little Camwood and Ivory.” In the region surrounding Freetown, a ton of rice, in 1794, cost 100 bars. Macaulay recorded that the best assortment for buying rice was 12 manchester bafts, 8 niccanees, 8 romals, 8 cushtoes, 4 photaes, 40 cloths, 100 pounds of tobacco, 5 iron bars, 1 hundredweight of iron pots, 54 trade knives, and earthen and glassware, beads, caps, hats.18 In 1803 the price of rice per quart was 10 cents, and “all the Rice which has been sold of late by the Quart has been brought from the neighbouring Rivers by Settlers in small trading Boats.”19 The settlers could then sell the rice to the Sierra Leone Company, and later to the private merchant houses operating in the colony, in exchange for credit (or debt) towards the many imported goods advertised as being on hand, stimulating industrious consumption.
Commerce, that great civilizing force, could provide rice without the expense of running, subsidizing, and defending West Indian plantation colonies. Free trade with African rice producers would undercut their reliance on the slave trade, redirect African labor to “productive” agricultural pursuits, ensure that African consumers continued to have the means to buy European manufactures, all while undermining the West Indian and Carolina plantation owners and what abolitionists argued was their bloated, inefficient slave-based production system. Macaulay reported to the government after his return from Sierra Leone, “Rice may be had from the Natives at from 7 to 8 shillings Per Ton. The Quantities grown in the Mandingo Country, where they are more industrious, is greater in proportion than what is found in any of the neighbouring States … The Expense of clearing the Land is, upon an Average, about three shillings Per Acre; the usual Crop of Rice per Acre is about Half a Ton.”20 With the Sierra Leone Company selling rice at 72 Sierra Leone dollars per ton, this was a profit of (very) approximately £15 per ton.
Macaulay could easily imagine the potential in other markets. In responding to the high rice prices brought about by the War of 1812, he instructed his agent in Freetown, “If you could contract with persons at Sierra Leone to furnish you with certain quantities of rice in casks, at certain prices, the rice being ascertained to be clean and dry … This plan would give a spur to the industry both of the colonists and the natives: and of course, if the plan should answer, it would not be confined to one cargo, but might be extended to any quantity which the wants of this country, or of the West Indies, might demand. We are persuaded that such a plan, steadily and judiciously pursued, would answer well for us, and would answer still better for Africa.”21 Macaulay wrote to his agents with the prices of Carolina rice, and pointed out that the wartime conditions would make any rice import extremely valuable, not only for his profits, but for proving the case for legitimate commerce, even if he, somewhat ironically, had to sell his rice to planters in the West Indies to prove his point.
Macaulay’s agent on the ground, Kenneth Macaulay, responded quickly, sending rice he had collected as payment for goods on sale in the company’s Water Street premises. Kenneth had plenty of experience gathering rice. He regularly answered tenders placed in the Sierra Leone Gazette and Royal Advertiser, the colony’s newspaper, most often searching for red rice to supply the Liberated Africans who began arriving in 1808 as part of the British Navy’s campaign against the slave trade. Captured slave ships would arrive in Freetown to be adjudicated, from which point until six months after their release, the variously named “Liberated Africans,” “captured Negros,” or “recaptives” were given a daily allowance of rice and palm oil. This was sourced through contracts for fixed amounts of rice, ranging from 6 to 100 tons, with various merchants and “small traders” of the colony, and payable by cash or treasury bills on delivery. In order to equitably distribute the colony’s resources, “the Superintendent (in order to accommodate the small Traders of the colony as well as the Merchants) will receive Tenders each for the supply of not less then [sic] 6 or more then 100 Tons.”22 Kenneth secured government contracts for the provision of rice in Freetown, amounting to around 10 percent of the contracts for rice between 1817 and 1825, and about 35 percent of the total by volume contracted. These contracts were valued at over £9,000.23
That rice then made its way, through local government contracts, to the Liberated African Department, or through international commercial channels to the West Indies or England. Red rice was the locally grown variety, eaten in the region as well as sold to provision slave ships. Red rice sold by the settlers in the colony was most often used to fulfill these Liberated African Department contracts. Kenneth Macaulay issued contracts for red rice amounting to £390 while acting governor in 1811.24 But it was white rice that the European market wanted. In 1821, 42.5 tons of white rice were exported from Sierra Leone.25 In 1822 the Sir Charles MacCarthy sailed from Freetown to the West Indies “fully laden with White Rice.” The editors of the Sierra Leone Gazette believed this was “the most considerable speculation in that article,” which they hoped would encourage further production, especially as “we have seen letters from several of the islands stating, that it had become in great request, as well for the planters as the slaves, and that, owing to its sweetness and highly nutritious properties, it had already obtained a decided preference over the rice of any other country.”26
In 1823 rice contracts in the colony suddenly shifted to white rice, sourced from African producers, which colonial officials and the African Institution hoped would also expand production for Atlantic markets.27 But African producers complained, in a letter to the Sierra Leone Gazette, “Red rice is of no use except at Sierra Leone; the merchants cannot send it away because people will not buy it in England or other countries. Baft, guns, powder, cloth, rum and other things we want, do not grow in Sierra Leone, and if we do not give the merchants something they can send to pay for those things, they cannot bring them out to sell. We must, therefore, give them white rice, and if we find it troublesome to beat out this year, we must plant white the next.”28
Undue Influence
As their experience in rice contracts for the Liberated African Department shows, the bulk of Macaulay & Babington’s money was made, despite Macaulay’s protestations otherwise, through government contracts as well as by acting as prize agents for condemned slave ships, as Padraic Scanlan has argued.29 In the colony, Macaulay & Babington also accrued property, which they leased to traders and the government of Sierra Leone. In his summary of the company’s accounts in 1830, Zachary’s son, Henry Macaulay, included “the deed by which we receive annually from Government the Rent of the Bananas [Islands], amounting to $250, or £54 / 3 / 4.”30 The fiasco that ultimately caused the collapse of Macaulay & Babington was Kenneth’s securing of the contract to build new premises for the Naval Victualling Department. The premises would be built on some of Kenneth’s land and leased at £600 per year. But the building costs went wildly over budget and government policy changed in the intervening period, leaving the firm out of pocket and unable to collect on outstanding commercial debts.31
Macaulay was not alone in using the influence of his abolitionist friends to try to secure government contracts. Anna Maria Falconbridge believed that the goods sent out to the colony by the Sierra Leone Company’s court of directors in London were selected by “the benevolent gentleman, who purchased them with a double purpose in view”: to aid the colony and “to serve his sister from whom he bought them.”32 As Macaulay & Babington lost their influence over the government of Sierra Leone after the death of Kenneth in 1830, and correspondingly began to lose government contracts, Sierra Leoneans and Euro-African traders took over, turning local profits into capital for pursuing larger projects, and turning regional knowledge and networks into lucrative government contracts. Betsey Carew, a Hausa recaptive based in the colony, and her husband, a licensed butcher, took over Macaulay & Babington’s contract supplying meat to the army.33 In the 1831 census, Thomas and Betsey were both listed as “colonial residents and free born blacks”; her occupation is listed as “butcheress,” and his, as “trader.”34 In fact, despite these humble descriptions, they were so successful that they turned the capital earned through the government contracts into a wider importing and retailing operation.35
Legitimate commerce merchants in the Gambia also pulled the strings of government contracts and philanthropic connections. William Forster, the prolific Gambia trader whose firm (discussed in Chapter 4) owned most of the trading debt in that river, also served on the board of the African Institution.36 And in 1823 a trader called James Hook proposed establishing legitimate trade in mahogany from the Gambia River to Britain. He wrote to William Allen, a member of the African Institution who had his own ties with Atlantic African trade, including with African American trader and early colonizationist Paul Cuffe. Hook’s proposal was to seek out a tender from the Navy to provide 1,000 to 2,000 tons of mahogany, but he believed that in order to secure the tender, “it is of the utmost importance that I obtain a recommendation from the African Institution and which I now beg through your assistance.” Having imported 300 tons into a weak London market already, Hook complained that Spanish mahogany from Honduras was being promoted by merchants at the expense of trade from “our African settlements.” Explaining that “our wood has been examined by first rate judges, who have all pronounced it at least equal to any Honduras Mahogany,” Hook sent samples and pointed Allen to a chest of drawers that “has also been made of the same wood, and lies for inspection at Mr. Ellis’s, Cabinet Maker, Fenchurch Street.” Explaining that he was basing his ideas on the success of both the Sierra Leone timber trade and the French gum trade, he noted that this was a commodity the British did not want to lose to the French, who also operated in the Gambia River. To buttress his proposal, Hook relied on the arguments made by the African Institution in support of legitimate commerce, pointing out that in order to fulfill a Navy requisition for the 1,000 to 2,000 tons he proposed, “many hundreds of Natives and Black Settlers would be advantageously employed who are now in great distress. This new source of commerce gives our Government an opportunity of convincing the natives that though Great Britain is determined to accomplish the final abolishing of the Slave trade, yet she is also doing all she can to give them honourable commerce in its stead.”37 Hook knew that a recommendation was necessary to win the contract, but he also framed his argument in terms of the benefits to the nation in supporting British traders, based in British settlements in Africa.
The French also saw companies established in order to take advantage of the government presence on the African coast. With the memory of Haiti haunting the French colonial project, plantations in Senegal offered an alternative colonial future.38 The Société coloniale philanthropique, established in 1816, wanted to send out white settlers to Cap Vert (modern Dakar) in Senegal to set up plantations for export. These plantations would rely on African laborers who had been freed from slavery and indentured to the settlers. The proprietors of this society, though, thought that their own financial interest in the agricultural colony should indicate to potential investors their trustworthiness, not their unreliability, as was suggested of Macaulay & Babington. Jenna Nigro writes, “Sévigny insisted that the Société’s interest in the success of the colony was proven by their own investment—they had given their own money, and two of the commission’s leaders, Scellier and Brichambeau, had even sent three of their sons to the colony and thus had a stake in it.”39 A good relationship with the government acted as a guarantee for investors. The most promising ways of ensuring a profit in speculative legitimate-commerce ventures was in securing government contracts, using government connections to promote schemes, and using the presence of colonial and military establishments to guarantee markets and infrastructure and, if needed, to supply legal and military support.40 But this was controversial, as Thorpe’s public challenge of Macaulay and the African Institution attests.
Thorpe’s wider critique of the African Institution was published in A Letter to William Wilberforce, to which the African Institution issued a detailed reply. Thorpe wrote, accurately, that the African Institution was formed so they could keep their hand in running the colony. The Institution replied that “in truth, the only Directors of that Company whose names are to be found in the list of the Directors of the African Institution, besides those of the ever-to-be-lamented Mr Henry Thornton and Mr Granville Sharp, are, Lord Teignmouth, Mr Charles Grant, Mr Wilberforce, Mr Babington, Mr T. F. Forster, and Mr Clarkson … but these persons formed only a small proportion of the managing body, which consists of a President, twenty-two Vice-Presidents, a Treasurer, and thirty-six Directors.” Of course, they neglected to mention other obvious connections, like Macaulay’s role in both organizations, or the African Institution’s influence in advising the government on whom to appoint as colony governor, or in granting recommendations for government contractors.
But Thorpe did not neglect these issues, so the African Institution was required to deal with the allegations that they were “securing the trade of the Colony to their managing Secretary.” The Institution argued that they did not provide Macaulay with “any facilities beyond what his own knowledge of the trade of Africa and of the Colony gave him.”41 But Thorpe was making the point that Macaulay’s knowledge was used to exclude others. For instance, “Macaulay had not only induced the Board of Trade to control the quantity of gunpowder shipped to Africa but also to give him the contract to supply it.” Apparently responding to growing abolitionist concerns about the relationship between the slave trade and access to guns, the Board of Trade had limited imports to one barrel of gunpowder per ton of shipping to Africa. Macaulay himself was shipping it.42
Whether they were deliberately missing the point of Thorpe’s accusations or not, the African Institution failed to address the more fundamental problem posed by Macaulay’s business interests and their philanthropic mission. The controversies emerged because Macaulay was a businessman, but also because many of the arguments put forward by promoters of ethical-commerce alternatives to the slave trade were commercial and economic. The African Institution didn’t simply want people to do good things for enslaved people; they wanted people to see that the plantation system was economically irrational as well as cruel because efficient markets were also the just markets that made life better for everyone.
Macaulay dealt with Thorpe’s accusation of using undue influence to benefit his own firm, writing, “My communications with his Majesty’s Government have been almost exclusively on public questions … when I say almost exclusively, I make this exception merely because I did on one occasion apply to Lord Bathurst on the subject of the colonial duties [tariffs], a matter in which I had some interest. His Lordship decided the point contrary to my wishes.”43 Kenneth Macaulay had been pressing Governor Maxwell on the same point, which finally provided a way for the African Institution to deal with the accusations. William Allen, the African Institution member contact by James Hook, sided with Thorpe when it came to the Macaulays. He believed that Kenneth had overstepped his bounds in influencing the government, and failed to do the job he was contracted for; Kenneth was subsequently removed from his post as Liberated African Department manager.44
Tariffs in West Africa
Macaulay’s pressure on Maxwell suggests the other way in which influence over government officials was used to make legitimate commerce profitable. Merchants regularly used their connections to government and their influence in the public sphere to argue against the tariffs that often priced their imports out of home markets. In 1819 the tariffs on articles of African produce were amended in a consolidation bill. While tariffs on hides, ivory, and all varieties of gum went up, tariffs on palm oil and rice both significantly decreased, reflecting the changing markets for African produce in Britain.45 Kenneth Macaulay—in his role on the Sierra Leone Council—succeeded in getting an ordinance passed in Sierra Leone that put extra tariffs on imports consigned to persons not resident in the colony for two years or more, which gave the firm a distinct advantage in the import (if not export) trade in the colony.46 But the export trade advantage was partially contained within that import trade rule, because Macaulay was hoping to extend credit through the sale of imports that would be paid for in commodities his firm would set the prices for (as was the case for the ill-fated Brown & Ives run-in with the firm). In waving away the accusations of being a monopoly exporter in Sierra Leone, Macaulay sidestepped the question of his firm’s concerted effort to monopolize the trade into the colony, to West African consumers themselves, through his family’s influence over much of the governance of the colony.
In West Africa, it was the West African governments’ control of trade which gave rise to European and American traders’ accusations of corruption, monopoly, and the unfairness of tariffs. In the continental kingdoms to the interior of Senegambia and Sierra Leone, control of riverine trade in the slave-trade era operated through tributary states that acted as middlemen between the coasts and the political and economic centers in places like Galam (Gajaaga) and Futa Jallon, which in turn controlled access to slaves traded to them from the east and north. These states built their power over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by consolidating control over these trades through military-fiscal expansion and the creation of a new elite, in part through their control of tariffs.
African states had been applying tariffs since the beginning of the slave trade. Referred to as “customary payments” or customs, traders had to factor these into every trade. The French slave trader Jean Barbot reported that in the Kingdom of Ardra (modern Benin) in the early eighteenth century, “tis usual for Europeans to give the king the value of fifty slaves in goods, for his permission to trade, and customs, for each ship; and to the king’s son the value of two slaves, for the privilege of watering; and of four slaves for wooding … The factor or super-cargo, having finished his sale, is to present the king again with two muskets, twenty-five lbs of powder, and the value of nine slaves in other goods.”47
But increasingly, the development of free-trade language and the abolitionist arguments against the slave trade started to shape perceptions of these payments as corrupt bribes rather than standardized tariffs. As Governor McCarthy reported from the Gambia, “Since the Gum Trade has been established for a century or more, a system of fraud and deception has been carried on, by the Sellers, and Buyers, and thus destroyed that confidence so necessary to carry on Trade.”48 This assessment of tariff payments aligned with anti-tariff arguments among liberals, but it also demonstrates the ways in which free-trade policy could have contradictory ethical impacts within West Africa. Macaulay objected to “presents” of guns and alcohol to Freetown’s neighboring kings, insisting that they trade at the colony on the same terms as everyone else. This was in vain at first, but with the increasing British antislavery naval presence on the coast, cutting down on the number of slave traders in the vicinity, these leaders were deprived of options. Almaami Amara Touré, from Moria, complained in 1814 that although legitimate commerce had been beneficial to begin with, “to day White people come to take the country away from us & to make Slaves of us in return. Nor will they suffer any person to come near us except as they like.”49 Exclusive trade was deemed monopolistic if it caused Britons to subsidize unprofitable enterprises. But binding Moria’s trade to the Sierra Leone Company would drive down the prime cost of the trading voyages by reducing the amount of tariffs (customary payments) for doing business—leaders would be dependent on only one source of those payments, rather than having European and American traders competing with each other to offer African leaders the highest customary payments to access the trade.
The pressure of legitimate commerce on the slave trade was slow, but it hit hardest in the African states’ ability to collect “presents” and monopolize trade out of West Africa. This was achieved through the establishment of regular markets and new trading zones to entice legitimate-commerce producers to exchange directly with European traders. Macaulay wrote in 1793 that “we wish to encourage as much as possible the natives themselves to bring their stock etc to market. It will save us much trouble, and increase the intercourse of the natives with the people of this place which is desireable on many accounts.”50 From 1818 through 1821, Governor McCarthy advertised in the Sierra Leone Gazette a monthly fair “for the buying, selling, bartering, and trafficking in [every] article of the manufacture, growth, or production of the Western Coast of Africa.”51 Tying legitimate commerce to debt in these markets was extremely effective in generating an explosion in the production of rice, groundnuts, and other commodities for export, as discussed in Chapter 4. Putting pressure on African leaders’ monopoly of trade did effectively, in Western Guinea at least, lead to the end of the slave trade into the Atlantic and the establishment of an alternative source of supply, through a combination of free “peasant” labor and enslaved labor. Peanut cultivation, a shift in Atlantic commerce, and the influence of spreading Muslim revivals posed a threat to the ability of the rulers of these states to enforce their power in relation to the French or British traders, who were often pushing their own governments toward formal territorial expansion through the extension of protectorates in exchange for exclusive trading rights—and reduced tariff payments. The Bordeaux firm Maurel et Prom, for instance, pushed for the acquisition of territory on the Senegal River in the 1850s in order to maintain their advantage over their Marseille rivals, whose arguments for free trade on the river were gaining traction in government. But the establishment of French markets at their new concession territories on the Senegal River disrupted the Trarza and Brakna Moors’ control of the gum trade and its accompanying customary payments.52
In 1852, Sierra Leone’s governor, Arthur Kennedy, proposed a new system of payments to replace the “inferior quality of goods” being given as annual presents to kings who had signed commercial treaties with the colony. Because the presents had been given based on an estimated value of bars, the colonial government had been able to pay significantly less by offering substandard goods. Kennedy complained that “when the Government intend to give a number of Bars of goods equal to £10, the recipient generally receives an amount and quality of goods, which, if re-sold (as they frequently are) would not realize £5.” This was a problem because “the Governor and the Colonial Secretary know that a fraud is committed; and the native Chief goes away with the belief that the Government is dishonest, and as devoid of principle as himself.” Kennedy proposed a system of cash payments, which would have the added bonus of tying the chiefs’ future commerce to the colony, which would give “an increased an wholesome stimulus … to trade generally.”53 The policy was approved.
The shift to legitimate commerce in groundnuts, palm oil, and other commodities did not immediately destabilize trade relationships, in part because the goal of legitimate commerce was precisely to maintain that continuity.54 But a state like Futa Jallon, to the north of Freetown, rose to power in part through control of the interior slave supply and the tributary relationships Futa Jallon had with the middlemen operating in the slave trade in the Rio Nunez and Rio Pongo at the coast. The shift to legitimate commerce was slow in this region because of the ease of trading slaves illicitly on the rivers, but by the middle of the century, French demand for groundnuts and the pull of legitimate trade at both Bathurst and Freetown had shifted the commercial power of the region closer to the coast, where the groundnuts and rice were grown, and away from Futa Jallon itself. Conflicts between the Nalu and the Landumans for control of trade in the Rio Nunez led the French and British regional governors to take sides, in exchange for exclusive trading rights and an elimination of ad valorem customary payments which were the responsibility of the merchants, in favor of annualized stipends paid by the colonial government. Futa Jallon was effectively cut off from expanding its control toward its Western coast.55
Masina and Gajaaga were other former slave-trading polities that began to hemorrhage power as people moved towards the groundnut producing regions. Fulas from Masina and Gajaaga moved into the Wolof territory of Kaabu.56 An oral history of Kaabu records that, for the leader, “His people were his strength because he collected tax from them from Kaatong to Kunjuur.”57 But the Fulas who arrived encountered the declining Kaabu state, “impoverished by the loss of income from the slave trade, and by the new commitment of peasant and Muslim communities to export agriculture” in the form of groundnuts.58 Niumi, along the Gambia River, a smaller polity politically related to the Kaabu, was also facing challenges from the loss of their tariff base with the rise of groundnut production. The British at Bathurst had forcibly ended the slave trade on the Gambia River over the 1820s, and by the 1830s the elite, secularized, military Soninke rulers of Niumi, like those in Kaabu, were increasingly extracting higher taxes from their own subjects to make up the difference.59 Oral tradition records that Alfa Molo, the Fula son of a slave, built up a following of free and enslaved Fulas to challenge Kaabu and ultimately became leader of some former provinces of Kaabu.60
More dramatic was Al Hajj Umar Tal’s jihad against lapsed-Muslim military elites, which began in 1852 and established a formidable empire along the middle Niger. He was inspired by his origins in Futa Toro, his time in Futa Jallon, and his personal connections (through marriage to Uthman dan Fodio’s granddaughter) to the Sokoto Caliphate, and like his predecessors, he banned alcohol, as well as tobacco, dancing, enslavement of “true” Muslims, and illegitimate taxation practices.61 The new Umarian state, like Sokoto and Futa Toro, did not give up the practice of slavery, continuing to enslave “apostates” for sale into the Saharan networks. Umar positioned his state as a new middleman between the demands for gum by coastal merchants and for guinée cloths in the Sahara, and the demand for millet and other grain from both.62
As legitimate commerce put pressure on the old regimes’ ability to collect taxes and hold onto authority, challengers like Umar Tal and Alfa Molo arose to take advantage of the new trading paradigm. The disruption and destabilization of the eighteenth century trading structures gave an advantage to more than just potential political challengers, though: in negotiating with newly formed states, European and Euro-African legitimate traders could press their advantage by offering political (and sometimes military) support of the new regime in exchange for an elimination of tariffs, or an exclusive trading agreement, both of which offered advantages to home consumers through lower costs (and a bigger profit margin for the legitimate traders). By 1861, a British treaty with the King of Baddibu on the River Gambia specified at the end of a series of debilitating wars that “the King shall receive an annual payment of 600 dollars from the local Government in lieu of all customs and charges on French and British traders.”63 This new system of payments was then further disrupted by another series of religious revolts led by marabouts as the new King of Baddibu was unable to effectively assert his authority in his new alliance with the British.
Intercultural trade made it clear that helping enslaved Africans was not the same thing as benefiting African traders, nor was it the same thing as aiding the states that had prospered from the slave trade. The practicalities of trade in West Africa, of promoting legitimate agricultural development, and of favoring some types of production over others raised questions about who was meant to benefit from ethical commerce. If the purpose of such commerce was continuity and convincing slave traders and slave-trading governments that they could be as well off after abolition, that led legitimate traders to extend credit while searching for new African export products; if the purpose was to improve the lives of the enslaved themselves, that led to legal changes and support for revolutionary governments and fugitive slaves; and if Atlantic consumers needed to be convinced that acting in their self-interest could promote ethical commerce, then the approaches taken by commercially oriented abolitionists had to focus on lowering prices and reducing the tariffs that had helped to maintain trading continuity. The ability of European and American traders in West Africa to seize on these existing political tensions as well as foster others, intentionally or accidentally—by preferring different forms of legitimate commerce—eroded the price of commodities purchased from West African producers and helped make the argument that free labor could be cheaper than enslaved labor if only export tariffs were managed to the advantage of the legitimate-commerce cause.
American Views of the Tariff Debate
American legitimate-commerce firms also resorted to government lobbying to reduce tariff rates. As Martin Benson alerted his employers, Brown & Ives, the rates of duty paid on various African products was also crucial to making a profit. When Gideon Young returned from trading in Sierra Leone in 1816, trouble began for the firm almost immediately after he arrived at the customs house. Young’s custom tariffs were paid on the value he expected them to achieve in the US market: $37,258.63. This didn’t matter much for camwood and hides, which were imported tariff free (and often sent directly on to Britain). But other goods were subject to high import tariffs. Specifically, ivory and palm oil imported on Brown & Ives’s account were subject to 25 percent and 30 percent ad valorem tariffs, which made an expected sale valuation, rather than a “prime” valuation, extremely costly for the firm. They owed $5,500 for ivory, and $1,650 for palm oil. In three installments, between September 1816 and March 1817, they were expected to pay $8,970.95 in tariffs. After the fact, Brown & Ives gathered intelligence in support of their case against the customs officials, which stated that the common practice was to enter the value of the goods at the prime cost “at the place of exportation.”64
Import tariffs were a constant concern for those engaging in the Africa trade. As late as 1853, American Free Produce merchant George W. Taylor wrote to his contact in the American Colonization Society that African imported goods were being incorrectly taxed: “I see the Cassada was … duty [tariff] paid under the name of ‘arrow root’ that caused the duty to be higher than it should be, as arrow root is worth much more. The cassava is not worth more here than 8 or 10 cents at the outside. Please have that rectified at 6 per cent.”65 Recording the wrong valuation, or a wrong product name, could erase all profit from legitimate trade. Martin Benson regularly recorded prices at far below market value on his return invoices. Although he knew how much ivory was worth in Europe, for instance, he recorded it at a fifth of the price in his voyage invoices.66 Gideon Young had been completely unaware of the import rates on his squills speculation, (discussed in Chapter 4), which made them entirely too expensive to actually enter into the country for sale. Young had accepted them in payment at their expected value on the US market, and had recorded their value at that level in his logbook. Unfortunately, they were actually worth nothing. Worse than that, they were charged at 30 percent ad valorem, which meant that the firm owed nearly $600 to import them.
Using all of their political leverage, Brown & Ives pursued their claim against the customs house all the way to Congress. The evidence they submitted from other Africa traders included a note that Paul Cuffe had imported 12 elephant’s teeth valued at $12, and subject to a 25 percent duty.67 Jacob Babbitt, a Bristol, Rhode Island trader, wrote to them that one of his recent ships “had no Invoice of the Cargo, as the nature of the trade would hardly admit of fixing a proper valuation to it. The whole was appraised here by two merchants appointed by the Collector and myself, one of which was formerly a ship master and well acquainted with the trade of Africa. They appraised the Prime Ivory a 30 cents per pound, small Ivory at 15 cents per lb, and Palm Oil at 20 cents per gallon, as being the actual value thereof at the place of exportation, and the duties were calculated by the collector according to the appraisment.”68
In 1819 the US Senate’s Committee of Commerce and Manufactures issued a report agreeing with the trading firm that ad valorem tariffs on African imports did have the potential to lead to fraud. It noted, “The honest merchant, who makes true entries upon true invoices, may well feel distress and indignation, when he sees the fruits of his industry wrested from him, by an unprincipled competition who makes false entries upon false invoices. Yet, it is not supposed, that the proper remedy for such frauds, is to repay from the Treasury, to the honest merchant the excess of duties paid by him, over those paid by the rogue.” The committee statement concluded, however, that “whether therefore, the lower duties paid by other importers of ivory and palm oil, have resulted from their frauds upon their revenues or from the better fortune of their importers, who may have purchased these articles at lower rate, and may have entered them fairly; it is not perceived, that either the one or the other of these facts, imposes an obligation upon the government, to refund to the memorialists, any part of the duties which they have paid.”69
Tariffs may have been unpopular among legitimate-commerce trading firms, like Brown & Ives. But the free-trade arguments also found an awkward home in American abolitionist literature. As Marc-William Palen has argued, “leading American economic nationalists viewed the free-trading plantation South and Free Trade England as respective enslavers of blacks and American manufacturers.”70 British free-traders in the Anti-Corn Law League also corresponded with some proslavery American southerners on the issue of tariffs, which gave pause to some Garrisonian immediatist abolitionists who supported the Anti-Corn Law League.71 The Philadelphia Quaker committee on requited labor in the United States backhandedly complimented the British free-labor East India project, acknowledging that even if their motives were suspect, it would have a beneficial effect on American slave labor: “However much we may be disposed to suspect the genuineness of British philanthropy, however much we may be willing to [assign] to her a character for inconsistency and hypocrisy, which she justly deserves as a nation: still, let us rejoice that her policy teaches her to lean toward the side of ruined and robbed humanity; and that if there be not disinterestedness of purpose and a virtuous honesty in her zeal; let us try to overlook this error in considering the good that may be done to her suffering colonists, to our slaves, and to our Country.”72 American abolitionists were wary about the motives underlying British economic policy, which made a unified transatlantic approach to these issues unlikely.73
Free trade was supported by the southern plantocracy of the US, represented by people such as John Calhoun, because they were buying and selling from a global market.74 Protectionist tariffs were important for supporting northern manufacturers, but, ironically, they also made it possible for slaveholders to avoid discussion of direct taxation of enslaved laborers.75 For American abolitionists involved with legitimate commerce, however, sometimes free labor and free trade could be ideologically aligned, as Brown & Ives or George W. Taylor would attest. The ability to freely source British East India or, after 1838, West India free-labor sugar, in preference to Louisiana sugar, was certainly a case for free trade. Free trade in global tropical commodities would bring free-labor goods into competition with goods produced by slaves in the southern United States. And reducing the tariffs owed to West African polities lowered the cost of legitimate produce for merchants and their markets at home. Abolitionists may have doubted the benefits of free trade, but for the legitimate-commerce movement, those benefits were clear.76
The Tropical Free-Sugar Company
In 1823 Macaulay, alongside political economist David Ricardo and seven other proprietors of East India stock, met to request that the General Quarterly Court of the East India Company specifically discuss the East India sugar trade. At the heart of this campaigning by Macaulay and the other abolitionist businessmen was the role of the tariff in creating a protective monopoly for the West Indian planters that did not allow the “invisible hand” of moral commerce to operate. The public would not buy East India goods in preference to West Indian because East India goods had too large a tariff on them, making them too expensive. At its highest point by the early 1820s, East India sugar accounted for only 9.3 percent of the total volume of West India sugar imports (at the height of the 1790s boycott), but was only 3 percent for home consumption at its peak between the abolition of the slave trade and the flurry of pamphleteering in the 1820s. On average between 1813 and 1820, East India sugar importation was around 1 percent of West India sugar’s volume, having risen from less than 1 percent before the abolition of the slave trade.77 But this, Macaulay and his allies believed, belied the true potential of East India’s free-labor sugar, which they argued would be cheaper, and therefore in greater demand, without the West India monopoly.
East India rice and indigo pointed the way forward: Already by 1829, Britain was importing sixteen times as much rice from the East Indies as from America, reversing the figures from the 1790s. Peter Coclanis has identified that “as early as the 1820s, there are scattered references to the fact that ‘East Indian’ rice was selling almost everywhere in the West at considerably lower prices than US rice, generally 20–25 percent lower or even more.”78 Rice was already demonstrating the kind of switch to free labor that would benefit consumers. This was partially because it was produced around the world already, and, as people like Macaulay identified, it could easily be brought into competition with slave-produced rice by simply connecting producers with new consumers. It could be that this fact shaped Macaulay’s thinking in terms of how East Indian sugar production would also be brought into competition with West Indian, slave-produced sugar. He wrote in a pamphlet on East Indian sugar production, “The business of cultivation will thus still remain in the hands of the natives, and the process of manufacturing the cane into Sugar will alone be undertaken by Europeans.”79 If it worked for rice, then perhaps it could work for sugar.
As the campaign against slavery heated up again in the early 1820s, Macaulay was not alone in pursuing plans to seek new sources of ethical revenue in the wider empire, and new sources of cheap labor. In January 1825, during a visit to the Quaker philanthropist James Cropper in Liverpool, Macaulay and other abolitionists devised a free-produce company to trade in sugar and cotton from India and Africa. As reported by Macaulay’s son, Henry, who was training in Cropper’s counting house, “After dinner James read some calculations which he had been making of the probable gains of a Company (should such be established) for the cultivation of sugar by free labour. The plan was approved, and in ten minutes shares were disposed of to the amount of £175,000. The capital is to be 2,500,000. The next morning (Tuesday) Papa prepared a prospectus which has since been lithographed.”80
The “Free-Sugar Company,” as it was dubbed, took off quickly, being considered before Parliament under the old model of incorporation in March, April, and May (the Bubble Act, which had regulated the formation of businesses in the eighteenth century, would be abolished in June of that year, which would have made it possible to incorporate the company without a Royal Charter). As Clarkson described to his correspondent in Philadelphia, the joint stock company had been proposed with “a capital of 4 millions sterling, by which we hope to undersell slavery—the Bill has been read twice in the House of Commons.”81 Prospectuses extolled the commercial value of the company and pointed interested readers to other publications promoting the antislavery nature of the scheme. Nontransferable shares were issued, and capital was raised—all privately, and largely through the evangelical and philanthropic business networks of the vice presidents and committee. The vice presidents included the famous abolitionists Wilberforce, Thomas Babington, Henry Brougham, Thomas Fowell Buxton, Stephen Lushington, and James Stephen. Macaulay sat on the provisional committee, alongside his nephew and business partner, and James Cropper, Henry Drummond, and other notable antislavery activists. The company’s banker was the firm of founding member of the Sierra Leone committee, Henry Thornton. The company’s secretary was based at Thornton’s firm as well.82
In addition to the particulars of the company’s management and share issuance, the prospectus for the company also outlined the rationale for its formation. The company was not intended to establish plantations or manufacturing, but to “encourage the cultivation and manufacture of that article by individuals on their own account, to whom it will make such advances” to aid in the production of sugar. The idea was that the independent, free-labor sugar producers would then consign their sugar to the company for sale at the end of the year, which would repay the advances and generate the profits needed to pay dividends on the shares.83 Although the company alerted potential shareholders that they were interested in schemes in Africa, America, and the West Indies, the obvious and first place of interest was the East Indies, largely as a result of Cropper and Macaulay’s personal connections to that market. Cropper was the proprietor of the largest East India warehouse in Liverpool—Cropper, Benson, & Co. (no relation to the Rhode Island Bensons or the Liberia Bensons). And Macaulay had already been a long-standing shareholder in the East India Company, both for himself and for his clients. He also had personal connections in Calcutta: his brother, Colin, was there, and two of his children were soon to follow. In June 1824 he was already known to be involved in importing “free labor” Mauritius sugar (though questions were raised about the use of enslaved labor on the island), which was also granted favorable import tariffs, as reported in the newspaper John Bull.84
In a pamphlet he published in 1824, Macaulay had outlined what he believed were the technological barriers to more efficient free-labor sugar cultivation. His detailed outline of the system of sugar cultivation in India focused on fixed capital costs: in the West Indies, “a planter must expend a large capital in the purchase of land, slaves and cattle, and in the erection of works,” whereas “the expense of the first three items is wholly saved to the East Indian Sugar manufacturer,” which he believed could net an investor in Calcutta sugar manufacturing a profit of nearly £3,000 for 250 tons of sugar.85 He calculated that the fixed capital needed for East Indies sugar cultivation “would not exceed £800,” while the same enterprise would require £45,000 of fixed capital in the West Indies. Unlike the West Indies, where the whole enterprise had to be capitalized by Europeans, Macaulay thought the opportunity presented by the East Indies was as a more efficient manufacturer of cane, using improved technology, and leaving the actual growing costs to the Indian peasantry.86
Macaulay’s pamphlet describes exactly how he believed the business would run. He argued that the existing system of advancing loans to growers of sugar cane allowed for sufficient return on investment (and secure systems of collateral). Drawing on his experience in African legitimate commerce, he promoted a plan of lending to agents on the ground, rather than investing too much in the establishment of agricultural plantations, which had failed before.87 Credit advanced for a crop in June or July could expect to yield 10 to 12 percent. Lenders were allowed “the same power of summary recovery which the law vests in the landlord,” and debts could be carried into subsequent years. Macaulay calculated that the amount of credit that a hopeful sugar manufacturer would need to invest amounted to 12 shillings 3½ pence per hundredweight.88 The plan for this Tropical Free-Sugar Company was basically the same as what he was promoting in Sierra Leone at this point: monopsony through debt, which would give the company the power to set local prices and thereby fulfill the obligation of ethical commerce to promote consumer value, demonstrating to British consumers that free labor could be cheaper than enslaved labor.
In promoting their East India sugar plan, there were several different arguments put forward by Macaulay, Cropper, and others against the West India protective tariff. First of all, they claimed, “The West Indians seem to rest their claim to protection from the competition of the East Indians, on the grounds, first, that the cost of producing sugar is less in the East than in the West Indies.” This reasoning supported the abolitionists’ arguments that free labor was cheaper than enslaved labor, and therefore more efficient. Cheaper labor would mean more profit for producers and merchants, and lower prices for consumers, they argued. This was based on speculative calculations that “its necessary price in the London market would be about 30s per cwt. [hundredweight]; which is about 10s per cwt below the price at which the West Indians say they can afford to sell sugar of a very inferior quality.” This was supposed to support the argument that by removing the protective tariff on West Indian sugar, or by equalizing the East and West Indian tariffs, it would become clear that free labor produced cheaper sugar. Slavery would be undercut by price-conscious consumers switching to free-labor sugar, and therefore free labor would drive slave labor out of existence. “There is, in fact, but one way to put down West India slavery,” they reasoned, “and that is, by allowing the produce raised by comparatively cheap free labour to come into competition with that raised by slaves.”89
In 1827 a full list of the costs per ton was printed in the Genius of Universal Emancipation in the United States in support of British abolitionists’ arguments. By their reckoning, a ton of East India sugar cost £10 more; a ton of East India coffee and cocoa both cost £28 more; a gallon of East India rum cost 11 shillings and six pence more; and East India cotton wool was charged a £6 percent ad valorem tariff, “while West India is admitted free of duty.”90 An 1829 pamphlet arguing in favor of reducing East India tariffs pointed out that India produced almost everything the United States did, and therefore British consumers could avoid both supporting slavery and supporting the United States more generally by switching to East Indian rice, among other goods listed.91 Thomas Clarkson believed, in a popularly quoted statistic, that the English people would not allow themselves to be “taxed annually to the amount of a million sterling to support West Indian slavery!!”92 Elizabeth Heyrick, the author of the extremely popular tract that kicked off the second sugar boycott, noted, “That abstinence from West Indian sugar alone would sign the death-warrant of West Indian slavery, is morally certain. The gratuity of two millions annually, is acknowledged by the planters to be insufficient to bolster up their tottering system,—and they scruple not to declare to Parliament, that they must be ruined if the protecting duties against East India competition be not augmented.”93
For these commercial abolitionists, government lobbying was simply an attempt to bring consumers the better-value free-labor produce, which would be competitively priced. Any plan that promoted consumer value was an argument against monopoly, but it was not necessarily an argument against monopsony, and so Macaulay & Babington and other legitimate-commerce businesses argued against tariffs for their products, and against protection of the sugar planters, while also trying to use government influence to corner the market in various free-labor alternatives to drive down the price for home consumers (while still remaining profitable) and thus chase out of business the producers who relied on enslaved labor.
This was the claim made by Thorpe’s accusations, and the growing pushback from proslavery lobbyists like Joseph Marryat and John Gladstone: Macaulay, Cropper, and their abolition cronies were simply trying to use the publicity and opportunity of antislavery arguments to dupe a naive and trusting humanitarian market segment into buying their stuff. In a series of well-publicized letters published in the Liverpool papers, the Courier and Mercury, in 1823, Cropper’s motives were “exposed” by John Gladstone, who at this point was the MP for Woodstock, as well as a West Indian absentee planter, owner of more than 1,600 enslaved people, and father of the future prime minister William Gladstone. Styling himself “Mercator,” John Gladstone commented that he was “amused by the sly, yet earnest manner in which, with the aid of his map, the interests of the East India Sugar-growers are put forward, and by his endeavours to persuade our manufactures, that it is their interest and duty to prefer it to the produce of the West; whilst he leniently lets off, and not without comparatively indirect praise, his slave-owning connexions in the United States, who consign their cotton, the produce of the labor of Slaves, to his house in Liverpool for sale.”94 Cropper could be as earnest as he wanted to be in promoting ethical sugar; his business as a whole was unethical, Gladstone argued, because he was happy to sell slave-produced cotton. His inconsistency made him hypocritical.
Fig 5.1 “JOHN BULL taking a Clear View of the Negro Slavery Question!!,” R. Cruikshank, 1826. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
The parliamentary bill to sanction the Free-Sugar Company was defeated and a charter was ultimately refused, so in 1826, at the same time that the print of the cartoon “John Bull taking a clear view of the slavery question” appeared, the committee abandoned its plans and sought to return some money to investors. They were unable to return all of it immediately, in part because, following Macaulay’s plan, £638.6.11 had been used to purchase machinery for a sugar manufactory in India. However, the committee was hopeful that the machinery would be sold at full price and the proceeds remitted eventually.95 But Macaulay and Cropper both continued to be involved in Indian sugar throughout the late 1820s. The failure of the Tropical Free-Sugar Company didn’t end attempts to source free-labor sugar. In 1827 Macaulay received a letter from James Stephen, another abolitionist. In it, Stephen commented, “Along with [the enclosed letter] came a parcel of seeds addressed to you … I congratulate you on this new plan for putting an end to slavery. Between Botany & Political oeconomy we shall do … Chemistry too it seems is turning out for us. My paper says the French Chemists have found a way to make beetroot yield as fine and cheap sugar as the cane.”96
Subsidies for Free Labor
After the abolition of enslaved labor in the British Empire in 1834, free-labor sugar could be found more readily in the global market. But this did not necessarily signal the end of the debates over the value of free labor. For those involved in promoting ethical commerce, making these economic arguments was one thing, but convincing the transatlantic public of their truth was another. And one of the problems they faced, which became increasingly obvious as emancipations took effect, was that they were trying to make two simultaneous economic arguments: on the one hand, that those who had been using enslaved labor would find that free labor was more profitable in the production of tropical commodities like rice, sugar, indigo, and cotton. This argument was supposed to convince people to invest in nonslave schemes like Macaulay and Cropper’s Tropical Free-Sugar Company. It was also supposed to point out that using slaves was economically backward and thereby convince the pro-slavery lobby that they could make more money by abandoning the slave trade and enslaved labor.
Their other economic argument was that consumers would find that having access to free-labor products would bring down the costs of consumption because the increased supply and the reduction of tariffs would bring down prices. Enslaved people, who really ought to have been at the heart of the argument, were entirely absent from the debate among these commercial abolitionists because their “interest” in emancipation was taken for granted. Profit, cost, and price were the precise terms the abolitionists used in amorphous and contrary ways, making slippery and possibly even deliberately confusing arguments about who exactly would benefit from a shift to East Indian or African production of tropical staples. There was no clear definition of “better,” and so an argument that free-labor production would be “better”—for slaves, for Indians, for home and overseas consumers, and for merchants and producers in Britain and the British Empire—was an attempt to ignore the reality that change would produce some winners and some losers. It was an attempt to imagine a market system without negative externalities.
The tensions of these competing arguments were revealed after British emancipation fully took effect in 1838, ending the West Indian apprenticeship system for former slaves. The ultimate settlement of British slaveholders’ claims to compensation cost the British taxpayer £20 million; this sizable subsidy, which was intended to offset the impact of the abolition of enslaved labor, filtered through the domestic and imperial economy but did not extend to African slaveholders.97 In contrast, French abolition in 1848 did provide some measure of compensation for the value of enslaved labor lost to habitants and important African allies in the colonies of Senegal.98 This subsidy was an attempt to mitigate the impact of the loss of the financial and labor power provided by enslaved workers in the production of commodities and services, and to address the important role enslaved labor had played in the development of capitalist institutions and national wealth throughout the British and French empires. Theoretically, it should have offset the “damage” of emancipation to businesses that had used enslaved labor, as their compensation could have been reinvested in wages for free laborers, demonstrating the strength of the abolitionists’ claims about free labor’s value.
But abolitionists split in the 1840s over the issue of tariff reduction.99 Emancipation meant that West Indian as well as East Indian sugar supplies were “free labor.” And now the West Indian preferential tariff rates were protecting free laborers from competition with cheaper, slave-produced sugars from Brazil and Cuba. Finally, the logic of price and cost began to catch up with them. Although abolitionists mobilized against the introduction of free trade in 1841, by 1846 the Sugar Duties Act had eliminated preferential treatment for British free-labor sugar. A summary of the evidence published in 1848 outlined, “Sugars may be sold at equal prices in the same market; but one may be at a loss and the other at a profit. It does not therefore follow that because Cuba and Java sell at similar prices in similar markets, they sell at equal profits.”100 A table listed the amounts of sugar produced in various countries, alongside the cost to produce it in those countries, broken down for comparison into the cost per hundredweight. Sugars produced with free labor cost an average of 21 shillings 7 pence, whereas slave-produced sugar cost 9 shillings and 9 pence.101 For those buying the “brand” of abolitionism, the extra cost of free-labor sugar had been conspicuously consumed for decades. And emancipation was a boon to the free-produce movements in both Britain and the United States, where the price of free-labor sugar actually became much more palatable because of the (marginally) lower costs associated with sourcing British West Indian sugar. But the pamphlets produced by Macaulay, Cropper, and other East India sugar proponents had been making more than a moral case for using free produce: they were also claiming it was cheaper. When that proved not to be the case, they found it much harder to convince the public to pay more to protect sugar produced with expensive free labor from competition with cheaper, slave-produced sugar from Brazil and Cuba.
Like the arguments for supporting African slave traders in the transition to legitimate commerce, abolitionists supportive of the West India sugar tariff argued that a transition period was necessary so that plantation owners could make adjustments. Samuel Wilberforce published a pamphlet of his speech in support of the West India protective tariffs, which included an appendix of supporting information. He cited the governors of Barbados and Antigua, reporting that “the cost of making sugar, by free labour, is greatly beyond the cost of making it by slave labor,” and “for obvious reasons, free-grown sugar can never yield so lucrative a return as that produced by the labour of foreign slaves.” The governor of Barbados at least held out some hope that it was just a matter of time: “My opinion is that sugar cultivated by free labour, cannot yet compete on equal terms with slave labour, and that freedom should be nursed by protection for a considerable time to come.”102 Should Britain protect the produce of the newly emancipated colonial slaves, or adhere to free-trade principles that lined up ideologically with free-labor principles?103
The shift in abolitionists’ position during the 1840s debates was not lost on their opponents. Richard Cobden and John Bright, both of whom supported free trade for the benefit of British consumers, lambasted the Quaker abolitionist, peace advocate, free-produce proponent, and son-in-law of James Cropper, Joseph Sturge, for supporting monopoly and the welfare of West India producers over the interests of British consumers at home.104 But the new tariff debates brought into focus again the awkward relationship between the abolition movement and businessmen like Cropper and Macaulay, who were seen to be peddling lies about slave labor and free labor and the role of tariffs just to promote their own business interests. Although Macaulay died in 1838, and Cropper in 1840, the criticisms of abolitionist economic interventions in the 1840s picked up on the accusations of shady dealings in their efforts to combine abolitionism and business opportunities. Their intentions were good, but their means of achieving them were ethically dubious. They used government connections, imperial lobbying, and shareholder power in attempts to sell an economic argument that abolition would benefit everyone (even slaveholders, once they came around to a free-labor position). But it was too easy for opponents to point out how they specifically would benefit, particularly when the arguments made by their friends and allies in the movement dramatically changed in the 1840s.
This posed a problem for people like Macaulay and his successors. They were trying to argue that it was profitable to conduct business in a way that promoted the abolitionist cause. And when it came to switching from Carolina rice to African and Indian rice, that argument proved true, largely because free trade in this staple did allow merchants to find the cheapest existing supplies and to pass on the savings to their customers while still making a profit. They were not attempting to set up new rice plantations or invest capital in agricultural development; they were relying on existing producers. As soon as they got involved with sugar, that changed, despite Macaulay’s best attempts to keep the Tropical Free-Sugar Company’s involvement limited to agency and credit. But as Macaulay also knew, tariffs and prizes and government contracts and monopolies were all part of making a profit in global commerce, in ways that made it impossible for abolitionist businesses to present a simple and consistent argument for free trade. Because they were presented as philanthropic enterprises, there was concern that these abolitionist businesses were profiting from promoting abolition. In an era before “nonprofit” status was a recognized and regulated standard, the businesses that promoted abolitionist schemes—legitimate commerce or free produce or free labor—had to manage queries about transparency. Their ethical ends were not always able to justify questionable business practices.
THE DESIRE TO CREATE DEMAND for legitimate commerce drove businessmen like Zachary Macaulay and James Cropper into contradictory positions. Using their government connections and their public profiles—gained through participation in the abolition movement—they both supported government intervention and subsidy, and supported tariff-free trade. Government monopolies—whether British or West African—were unpopular, but as a frustrated Macaulay grumbled, it didn’t seem fair that legitimate production of goods like rice in West Africa had to go without the support that slave traders from the region had been granted for over a century. In order to level the playing field, promoters of legitimate commerce hoped both to benefit from government largesse and to lobby those same governments to cut back on the preferential tariffs that supported production of colonial goods in some colonies but not in others. Moral commerce could be profitable in the same ways ordinary trade could be: by taking advantage of information asymmetries and network advantages.
Tariffs were controversial because they undermined the ability of consumers to determine what the most efficient form of labor was, making it seem like the self-interested consumer should support slavery. But free labor, Adam Smith and the abolitionists misguidedly argued, was more efficient than enslaved labor. This meant that they believed plantations run with slave labor would naturally cease production once free labor demonstrated its commercial superiority. But with tariffs, the whole market was distorted. Tariffs created a government-sanctioned monopoly for the West Indies and empowered slave-trading states in West Africa. If the market was skewed by colonial preference and government support of the institution of slavery, though, then surely abolitionist businessmen should take as much advantage as they could of those same policies to favor their own businesses. If there wasn’t equal footing in the free market, then the only way to find it was to create as much of a lobby for their legitimate produce as there was for the West Indian planters’. In particular, Macaulay built on his firm’s experience of attempting to create a (debt-based) monopsony for rice in Sierra Leone to create a plan for cheap, free-labor sugar production in India.
But the businesses that pushed back against the West Indian sugar lobby also experienced public skepticism regarding their true motives. Were they just using the antislavery movement to whitewash their own business practices, as Cruikshank’s cartoon suggested? Or were they showing that God favored moral commerce by bestowing long-term profitability? Macaulay and Cropper argued that the West India sugar monopoly unfairly taxed consumers to support an unethical form of labor. But in formulating their argument, and coming up with alternative business proposals, they drew attention to some of the inconsistencies in the arguments of ethical businesses. As long as making a profit was an acceptable part of the ethical capitalism model, there would be concerns about the nature of that profit and at whose expense it was made, especially once it became clear there would be new winners and losers as abolition took effect, and that choices would need to be made about whom ethical commerce was meant to benefit.