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May 16 - June 15, 2019
British industrialists who specialized in manufacturing the ‘trade goods’ with which slaves were bought from Africans exported them to other Europeans who carried them to Africa.
Confident and pre-eminent, the Admiralty was finally willing to release more ships for the anti-slavery patrols, yet even with her enemies vanquished the navy never dispatched anything like the number of ships required to seriously take on the slave-traders.
an official document of 684 pages issued by the Admiralty in 1844.
until the ships of the West Africa Squadron were forced to return to Freetown for supplies; only then would they make for the open sea. Slave captains would wait for moonless nights, then race to the river mouths and silently slip past the British patrols in the inky darkness.
This inspired a brutal logic. When West Africa Squadron ships were sighted the captives were landed on the nearest shore, but if the slavers were pursued the commanders threw the slaves overboard. If they were searched their slave decks would be empty, leaving the navy with no legal cause to arrest the crew or confiscate the ship, which was free to seek a new cargo.
The Florentine slave-trader Theophilus Conneau noted that Freetown abounded with ‘prisoners from prizes [ships] and men of all nations’, gloating that he was free to gather together crews for slave-trading expeditions from the bars and the back streets.
She gained her formidable reputation in early 1829 after a thirty-one-hour, night-and-day pursuit of the Spanish slave ship the Almirante
That epic pursuit and victory against the odds, combined with the subsequent capture of three further slave ships and the liberation of over a thousand more Africans, made the Black Joke a legend, the subject of excited newspaper reports and admiring paintings. The
the mission to end slavery dovetailed with suspicious ease into British colonial expansion in Africa, allowing British power and trade to penetrate into the region in the second half of the nineteenth century.
divided between the two relevant states, the ships were sold to the highest bidder, and ships designed for slave-trading or adapted and fitted out for it inevitably attracted foreign slave-traders and their agents.
Parliamentary papers tell us, ‘194 of the unfortunate creatures’ she had been attempting to liberate had perished.
The high rates of death among the supposedly liberated slaves shocked the anti-slavery lobby in Britain
But they represented only around 6 per cent of the approximately 2.7 million Africans who were captured and put on slave ships bound for the Americas in the three decades after 1836.40
In its first decades of operation not only did the squadron fail to have a significant impact on the scale of the Atlantic trade, it watched impotently as the trade increased markedly.
This abandonment of diplomatic persuasion in favour of military force represented a flagrant violation of international law and Brazilian sovereignty. But by the end of the 1850s this aggressive policy had paid off and Brazil’s slave trade had been reduced to a trickle.
Between1808 and the 1860s around ninety thousand Africans from the intercepted slave ships were freed from slavery by the courts in Freetown.42 They were known as the Liberated Africans or the ‘Recaptives’ – as they had been captured by slave-traders and then recaptured by the navy.
to the King’s Yard and act as translators. The Registers of Liberated Africans are the result of these efforts. They begin in 1808 and run through to 1848 and contain 84,307 names.
The army approved of Bunce Island as a barracks as it was almost impossible for reluctant ‘recruits’ to escape. Both the Royal African Corps and the British West India Regiment have long and troubling histories, too complex to be explored here.
He noted that ‘any resident in the colony, of any colour, may enter the King’s Yard, select a girl or boy, and thereupon tie a string or a piece of tape around the neck as a mark of appropriation. He then pays ten shillings; and the passive child becomes his property, under the name of apprentice, for three years’.52
A new lingua franca developed, a hybrid, amalgam language known as Krio.
Dislocated and disorientated, the Recaptives were far more receptive to the Christian message than the tribes found inland.
A handful of them lived such extraordinary lives that they are worth getting to know in depth.
the ‘two persevering offenders the King of Dahomey and the Chief of Lagos’
The bombardment of the city was, like much of British policy on the slave coasts of Africa, motivated by the twin objectives of suppressing the slave trade and opening up the interior of Africa to ‘legitimate trade’,
knowing his audience, he dedicated a whole chapter to what he called the ‘Amazons of Dahomey’.
Can I, by signing . . . a treaty, change the sentiments of the whole people?’76
Queen was generally opposed to the racism of the mid-nineteenth century.
new ‘scientific’ racial theories and Victoria, like most Victorians, thought in terms of racial ‘types’, and may well have believed, to some extent, that the races of mankind possessed innate, inner characteristics.
it being generally and erroneously supposed that after a certain age the intellect becomes impaired, and the pursuit of knowledge impossible –– that though the negro child may be clever, the adult will be dull and stupid.’92
‘the ceremony will also tell our brethren on the other side of the Atlantic that British ladies and gentlemen consider it a pleasure and a privilege to do honour to those of the African race who will prove themselves capable of appreciating the advantages of a Liberal education’.95
doomed to a slow and inevitable decline, as it was gradually outmoded by the dynamism of free labour. Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin gave American cotton slavery a terrible second wind.
There were more millionaires in the Mississippi Valley in 1860 than anywhere else in the United States.
The rise of cotton had forged what one American journalist described as ‘a fusion of interests’ between ‘The planters of the United States . . . and the manufacturers of Great Britain’.12 The Cotton Kingdom and Cottonopolis lived in a state of economic co-dependency; disruption in one region risked bringing ruin upon the other.
‘As long as the English cotton manufacturers depended on slave-grown cotton,’ he wrote, ‘it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic’.
‘In all social systems’, Hammond explained, ‘there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigour, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society
None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.
Abolition of American slavery, Christy assured his readers, was an economic impossibility because, ‘Cotton IS King, and his enemies are vanquished’.
Among the many aspects of the system that were deeply resented was its inability to draw a distinction between respectable working men who found themselves unemployed due to no fault of their own, and the feckless and the drunkards.
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December 1862 at the very height of the cotton famine the Guardians who oversaw the Poor Law, along with the various relief committees, were between them supporting 485,434 people in Lancashire.
The mill workers of Lancashire and the slaves of the Mississippi Valley were unknowingly trapped within what historians call the First Age of Globalization – which began in the middle of the nineteenth century and was brought to an end by World War One and its isolationist aftermath.
The British officers, both Royal Navy and merchant, who ran the blockade tended to do so under noms de guerre. Some went on to have notable naval careers and were never censured for having contravened national policy and broken international law.
After the Civil War the United States government pursued legal claims against Britain demanding damages arising from the ships that the CSS Alabama had sunk during the war.
But it was not an isolated incident and Beecher came away convinced that all classes of Liverpudlians favoured the Confederacy.
In these ways and others, the wider British economy was able to make up for some of the losses suffered by the cotton industry.
many of them organized by the energetic members of the Union and Emancipation Society, but more voices were raised in support of the South and in favour of its recognition than in opposition to slavery and support of President Lincoln’s government.
The Lancashire towns from which unions and cooperative societies emerged were those that most firmly supported the North and its advocacy of free labour.
While some Britons remained loyal to the Confederacy right up until the final days of the war, the tide of popular opinion and political sympathy turned decisively in late 1862.
On 19 January 1863 Lincoln replied, in his address ‘To the Working men of Manchester’.
By the late 1850s it had become acceptable, if not exactly respectable, in Britain to openly and publicly question whether the abolition of British slavery had been a successful enterprise and the right decision.
new and highly virulent strains of ‘scientific racism’ were gaining ground.
