Bittersweet (16 page)

Daniel Young,
Young's Demonstrative Translation
of Scientific Secrets
, Toronto, 1861

8
THE END OF
SLAVERY IN THE
AMERICAS

I
t is estimated that between 1450 and 1900 around 11.7 million slaves were exported from Africa, their destination the Americas. Only 9.8 million reached the other side of the Atlantic, however, the difference representing the numbers who died in the Middle Passage. To that we must add those killed or maimed in slave-taking raids, those who died while waiting to be brought to the coast, those who died while waiting to be sold, and the children who died because their parents were taken. If we then add to that figure the numbers who died as an indirect result of the slave trade, the victims must surely have numbered close to 20 million. The vast majority were put to work growing sugar, by far the worst of the operations a slave might be engaged in, once the Spanish mines stopped yielding riches.

In the eighteenth century, the mills were able to extract only about half the juice from the cane, which meant a plantation had to produce 20 tons of cane to obtain one ton of sugar. As well, it was necessary to haul away the bagasse (cane waste), fetch firewood, at the rate of five tons per ton of sugar, and take down the vanes on the windmills in the hurricane months. Across the world it was considered a fact that white men could not work at physical tasks in those conditions where sugar cane thrived. Black people were needed for that—slaves, in other words. Names, though, were clearly important, as ‘No Planter' made clear in a letter to the
Gentleman's Magazine
in 1789:

The vulgar are influenced by names and titles. Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS, and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave-trade by pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and short-sighted politicians.

‘No Planter' meant the common herd when he referred to the ‘vulgar', but most of those in the sugar islands were vulgar adventurers. Planters went to the colonies only for the time it took to make their fortune—as Richard Ligon noted during his tour of Barbados: ‘Colonel Thomas Modyford has often told me that he had taken a Resolution to himselfe, not to set his face for England till he made his voyage and employment there worth him a hundred thousand pounds Sterling, and all by this sugar plant.'

In fact Modiford, to give him his more usual spelling, became Governor of Jamaica in 1664, where he and the planters who accompanied him from Barbados introduced sugar cultivation. Modiford was recalled to Britain after he and Morgan declared war on the Spanish, and committed to the Tower of London, but in 1675 he was allowed to return to Jamaica and died there in 1679. That was not part of his original plan.

TRADE AND WELLBEING

The simple fact was that sugar and slavery had served too well the needs of those who made the decisions and wrote the rules, and that made slavery hard to bring to an end. In 1689, Edward Littleton published a pamphlet entitled
The Groans of the Plantations
. From the title this might have been assumed to be about the plight of the slaves; instead, it dealt with the needs of the poor, suffering planters, complaining that a wicked, plundering, profiteering company stood between them and buying slaves cheaply on the Guinea coast.

Of all things we have occasion for,
Negroes
are the most necessary and the most valuable. And therefore to have them under a Company, and under a Monopoly, whereby their Prices are doubled; cannot be but most grievous to us . . .

In
Barbados
, we can get but little by making Sugar (though it had none of these Burdens) except we improve it: that is, purge it and give it a Colour. Others can live by making plain Sugar: We must live by the improved . . . But the Duties fall so terribly upon our improved Sugars, that it doth quite discourage and confound us.

But it would be wrong to think that Littleton did not care for the needs of the slaves as well:

In the mean time our poor Slaves bear us Company in our Moans and groan under the burden of these heavy Impositions. They know that by reason of them, they must fare and work the harder. And that their Masters cannot now allow them, and provide for them, as they should and would . . .

We must have yearly some hundred pairs of Sugar-Pots and Jars. Every hundred pair doth cost near ten pound; and we must fetch them several Miles upon
Negroes
heads.

In other words, if you care about the poor black slave, afford the master the opportunity to make more money and all will be well for the slave. The outcry against taxes revealed the nature of the tensions in the colonies, with the home government assuming that the colonies, founded with capital provided by the home nation, should exist only to enrich those at home and the home government. The fear of a slave revolt also grew as the slaves began to outnumber whites. In the later eighteenth century, the Jamaican House of Assembly wanted to reduce the number of slaves coming in by imposing a duty, but this was refused in 1774, and when they protested were told from England: ‘We cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation.'

This attitude to the colonies lasted: indeed, it was the main factor in alienating the thirteen American colonies. It was not peculiar to England, however—the home governments made the rules, and they all made the rules to favour the trade and well-being of the home nation, no matter which nation it was—or which party was in power. An Act of the English Parliament placed a high import tax on refined sugar in 1685, ending refining in the colonies. As the French had fewer refineries, they originally encouraged colonial refining in order to cut down on imports from the rest of Europe, but they barred colonial refining as soon as they had refineries of their own, thus transferring the profits from this activity to the home nation.

England's
Plantations Duties Act
of 1673 provided that goods taken from one colony to another would be charged the same duties they would have been charged coming into England, but that was only as effective as its enforcement, something Mitford Crowe, Governor of Barbados, knew when he wrote in 1707:

I must inform Your Lordships, it would be some help to this Island if the trade between New England and Surinam were obstructed, for if I bee rightly informed great quantity of Rum, Sugar and Molasses go in return for their horses, flower and provisions, and last week one Harrison, a Planter, being much in debt, run off in a sloop with sixty negroes leaving his land to his Creditors.

The slave traders could also make financial losses. The Middle Passage, the route from Africa to the Indies, was fraught with risk from storms and from attack on the African coast, and from the loss of slaves to disease or despair. However, the trade from the West Indies to Europe was generally profitable, and the European goods sold to the Africans were so cheap and shoddy that it was almost impossible to lose out. The poor quality of goods made for Africa was such that when Arthur Phillip wished to complain about the tools that had been supplied to his settlement at Botany Bay, he wrote: ‘I cannot help repeating that most of the tools were as bad as ever were sent out for barter on the coast of Guinea.'

Risky or not, the triangular trade made many people rich. Lewis Carroll, baptised Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, had a middle name that honoured his great-grandfather, a slave trader. Edward Gibbon could afford to write his histories because his grandfather had been a director of the South Sea Company, a slave carrier. The Vicomte de Chateaubriand's father was a slave captain, and later a slave merchant, but nobody thought the less of Chateaubriand as a liberal and a man of letters. John Locke, the philosopher, was a shareholder in the Royal African Company, another slaving concern, even though he wrote: ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable a state of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly possible that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.'

In Denmark, the dominant Schimmelmann family was also wealthy, thanks to slaving—and provided various governments with two ministers of finance. Members of the British Parliament represented the West Indies and sugar interests well, and sound men of trade, Lord Mayors of London among them, were all advantaged by the trade in human flesh.

THE
Z
ONG
CASE

Much evil took place in the slave trade, and the
Zong
case, often called, with reason, the
Zong
atrocity, is perhaps the best example of this. In November 1781, Luke Collingwood, master of the
Zong
, threw 132 slaves overboard to drown and then claimed insurance on them. He still had 440 slaves on board, and claimed that a lack of water had forced him to jettison and drown the others in order to save the ship, the remnant human cargo, and the crew.

Not surprisingly the insurance company objected—but not on humanitarian grounds. If the slaves had died natural deaths, the insurers argued, there could have been no claim. The abandoned ‘property' had been sick and dying, and this was an attempt to exploit a legal loophole. There was no shortage of water: neither crew nor slaves had been on short rations and the ship arrived at Jamaica on 22 December with 420 gallons of water remaining. In that case, the captain had not acted out of necessity, and could not claim £30 a head on the drowned slaves.

The Solicitor-General, John Lee, spoke for the owners and made the official and legal view of slaves clear, when he asked in court:

What is all this vast declamation of human people being thrown overboard? The question after all is, was it voluntary or an act of necessity? This is a case of chattels and goods. It is really so: it is the case of throwing over goods; for to this purpose, and to the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property: whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it.

The owners won their claim for insurance, but it was later overturned on appeal. The only clear loser was the slave trade, for this callous relegation of humans to the status of chattels ignited a fire that would not be easily extinguished. Collingwood and his men were never tried for murder, but the insurance trial sparked the first real calls for an end to the trade in human lives, whatever the effect that might have on the sugar trade—and that worried some people.

ABOLITION AND EMANCIPATION

The great British reformer William Wilberforce was barely into his teens when the cause of emancipation had a great victory. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield said in 1772: ‘The status of slavery is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.' Since there was no such law, he declared that a slave setting foot in England was thereby a free man or woman. All the same, a motion to oppose slavery was defeated in the House of Commons in 1776. While this remained the pattern for 30 years, emancipation slowly gained ground.

In May 1789, a year after Wilberforce entered Parliament, Richard Pennant told the House that if they passed the vote for abolition as proposed by Mr Wilberforce, ‘they actually struck at seventy millions of property, they ruined the colonies, and by destroying an essential nursery of seamen, gave up dominance of the sea at a single glance'. The opponents of slavery were no radicals, however, but men of serious demeanour and sound business principles.

There were other ways of training sailors than by sending them on slaving ships, and other ways of making money than by trading in slaves and slave goods. Many good men opposed emancipation in the name of profit, but that same wholesome pursuit of wealth brought some less than altruistic support for the emancipation movement from interests involved in the East Indies trade, which was by now producing sugar in India, with hired rather than slave labour. By 1792 the East India Company was claiming that the cost of a West Indies sugar slave's life was 450 pounds of sugar. It was said, in tones of moral outrage, that ‘a family that uses 5 pounds of sugar a week will kill a slave every 21 months'. To rub the message in, the company told consumers that eight such families, in just nineteen and a half years, would kill 100 slaves with their sugar consumption!

William Fox was the first to raise the spectre of dead slaves against West Indies sugar. Fox also knew how important rum was to the sugar industry, and in 1781 he was quite clear in calling for people to abstain from both rum and sugar:

. . . until our West Indian planters themselves have prohibited the importation of additional slaves, and commenced as speedy and effectual subversion of slavery in their islands as the circumstances and situation of the slaves will admit; or until we can obtain the produce of the sugar cane in some other method unconnected with slavery and unpolluted with blood . . . a family that uses 5 lb. of sugar per week with the proportion of rum will, by abstaining from the consumption for 21 months, prevent the slavery or murder of one fellow creature.

In other words, 450 pounds of sugar, and the amount of rum made from the molasses remaining after making that sugar, was the equivalent of the sugar produced by one slave over the 10-year life expectancy that a sugar slave had
after reaching the cane fields
. Other campaigners gave the weight of sugar as 405 pounds, but both sides were guilty of massaging their figures.

In fact, the ‘exchange rate' in the plantations was one ton of sugar per slave life in 1700, and two tons per slave life in 1800. The amount of sugar that today's average high school population in the developed world consumes in one week, as junk food, confectionery, ice cream and soft drinks, is enough to have killed a slave in 1800. The exchange rate was a very powerful statistic, capable of being tailored to almost any audience.

As part of its promotions, the East India Company distributed sugar bowls with the legend ‘East India Sugar not made by SLAVES'. Their advertising pamphlet used the same statistics on slave deaths, and East Indies sugar was sold at a considerable premium—while West Indies sugar sold from 70s. to 80s. per cwt around 1792, East India sugar was selling at 140s. The curious logic of the pamphleteers allowed the West Indies faction to use this to argue that there should be no excise break for East Indian slave-free sugar, since clearly people were willing to pay that sort of premium for slave-free sugar!