American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 3: Richard Jobson, _The Golden Trade_ (London 1623,), pp. 29, 87,
quoted in James Bandinel, _Some Account of the Trade in Slaves from Africa_
(London, 1842), p. 43.]

Under Charles II activities were resumed vigorously by a company chartered
in 1662; but this promptly fell into such conflict with the Dutch that its
capital of L122,000 vanished. In a drastic reorganization its affairs were
taken over by a new corporation, the Royal African Company, chartered in
1672 with the Duke of York at its head and vested in its turn with monopoly
rights under the English flag from Sallee on the Moroccan coast to the Cape
of Good Hope.[4] For two decades this company prospered greatly, selling
some two thousand slaves a year in Jamaica alone, and paying large cash
dividends on its L100,000 capital and then a stock dividend of 300
per cent. But now came reverses through European war and through the
competition of English and Yankee private traders who shipped slaves
legitimately from Madagascar and illicitly from Guinea. Now came also a
clamor from the colonies, where the company was never popular, and from
England also where oppression and abuses were charged against it by
would-be free traders. After a parliamentary investigation an act of 1697
restricted the monopoly by empowering separate traders to traffic in Guinea
upon paying to the company for the maintenance of its forts ten per cent,
on the value of the cargoes they carried thither and a percentage on
certain minor exports carried thence.

[Footnote 4: The financial career of the company is described by W.R.
Scott, "The Constitution and Finances of the Royal African Company of
England till 1720," in the _American Historical Review_, VIII. 241-259.]

The company soon fell upon still more evil times, and met them by evil
practices. To increase its capital it offered new stock for sale at
reduced prices and borrowed money for dividends in order to encourage
subscriptions. The separate traders meanwhile were winning nearly all its
trade. In 1709-1710, for example, forty-four of their vessels made voyages
as compared with but three ships of the company, and Royal African stock
sold as low as 2-1/8 on the L100. A reorganization in 1712 however added
largely to the company's funds, and the treaty of Utrecht brought it new
prosperity. In 1730 at length Parliament relieved the separate traders
of all dues, substituting a public grant of L10,000 a year toward the
maintenance of the company's forts. For twenty years more the company,
managed in the early thirties by James Oglethorpe, kept up the unequal
contest until 1751 when it was dissolved.

The company regime under the several flags was particularly dominant on the
coasts most esteemed in the seventeenth century; and in that century they
reached a comity of their own on the basis of live and let live. The French
were secured in the Senegal sphere of influence and the English on the
Gambia, while on the Gold Coast the Dutch and English divided the trade
between them. Here the two headquarters were in forts lying within sight
of each other: El Mina of the Dutch, and Cape Coast Castle of the English.
Each was commanded by a governor and garrisoned by a score or two of
soldiers; and each with its outlying factories had a staff of perhaps a
dozen factors, as many sub-factors, twice as many assistants, and a few
bookkeepers and auditors, as well as a corps of white artisans and an
abundance of native interpreters, boatmen, carriers and domestic servants.
The Dutch and English stations alternated in a series east and west, often
standing no further than a cannon-shot apart. Here and there one of them
had acquired a slight domination which the other respected; but in the case
of the Coromantees (or Fantyns) William Bosman, a Dutch company factor
about 1700, wrote that both companies had "equal power, that is none at
all. For when these people are inclined to it they shut up the passes so
close that not one merchant can come from the inland country to trade with
us; and sometimes, not content with this, they prevent the bringing of
provisions to us till we have made peace with them." The tribe was in fact
able to exact heavy tribute from both companies; and to stretch the treaty
engagements at will to its own advantage.[5] Further eastward, on the
densely populated Slave Coast, the factories were few and the trade
virtually open to all comers. Here, as was common throughout Upper Guinea,
the traits and the trading practices of adjacent tribes were likely to
be in sharp contrast. The Popo (or Paw Paw) people, for example, were so
notorious for cheating and thieving that few traders would go thither
unless prepared to carry things with a strong hand. The Portuguese alone
bore their grievances without retaliation, Bosman said, because their goods
were too poor to find markets elsewhere.[6]But Fidah (Whydah), next door,
was in Bosman's esteem the most agreeable of all places to trade in. The
people were honest and polite, and the red-tape requirements definite and
reasonable. A ship captain after paying for a license and buying the king's
private stock of slaves at somewhat above the market price would have the
news of his arrival spread afar, and at a given time the trade would be
opened with prices fixed in advance and all the available slaves herded
in an open field. There the captain or factor, with the aid of a surgeon,
would select the young and healthy, who if the purchaser were the Dutch
company were promptly branded to prevent their being confused in the crowd
before being carried on shipboard. The Whydahs were so industrious in the
trade, with such far reaching interior connections, that they could deliver
a thousand slaves each month.[7]

[Footnote 5: Bosman's _Guinea_ (London, 1705), reprinted in Pinkerton's
_Voyages_, XVI, 363.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid_., XVI, 474-476.]

[Footnote 7: _Ibid_., XVI, 489-491.]

Of the operations on the Gambia an intimate view may be had from the
journal of Francis Moore, a factor of the Royal African Company from 1730
to 1735.[8] Here the Jolofs on the north and the Mandingoes on the south
and west were divided into tribes or kingdoms fronting from five
to twenty-five leagues on the river, while tributary villages of
Arabic-speaking Foulahs were scattered among them. In addition there was
a small independent population of mixed breed, with very slight European
infusion but styling themselves Portuguese and using a "bastard language"
known locally as Creole. Many of these last were busy in the slave trade.
The Royal African headquarters, with a garrison of thirty men, were on an
island in the river some thirty miles from its mouth, while its trading
stations dotted the shores for many leagues upstream, for no native king
was content without a factory near his "palace." The slaves bought were
partly of local origin but were mostly brought from long distances inland.
These came generally in strings or coffles of thirty or forty, tied with
leather thongs about their necks and laden with burdens of ivory and corn
on their heads. Mungo Park when exploring the hinterland of this coast
in 1795-1797, traveling incidentally with a slave coffle on part of
his journey, estimated that in the Niger Valley generally the slaves
outnumbered the free by three to one.[9] But as Moore observed, the
domestic slaves were rarely sold in the trade, mainly for fear it would
cause their fellows to run away. When captured by their master's enemies
however, they were likely to be sent to the coast, for they were seldom
ransomed.

[Footnote 8: Francis Moore, _Travels in Africa_ (London, 1738).]

[Footnote 9: Mungo Park, _Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa_ (4th
ed., London, 1800), pp. 287, 428.]

The diverse goods bartered for slaves were rated by units of value which
varied in the several trade centers. On the Gold Coast it was a certain
length of cowrie shells on a string; at Loango it was a "piece" which had
the value of a common gun or of twenty pounds of iron; at Kakongo it was
twelve- or fifteen-yard lengths of cotton cloth called "goods";[10] while
on the Gambia it was a bar of iron, apparently about forty pounds in
weight. But in the Gambia trade as Moore described it the unit or "bar"
in rum, cloth and most other things became depreciated until in some
commodities it was not above a shilling's value in English money. Iron
itself, on the other hand, and crystal beads, brass pans and spreadeagle
dollars appreciated in comparison. These accordingly became distinguished
as the "heads of goods," and the inclusion of three or four units of them
was required in the forty or fifty bars of miscellaneous goods making up
the price of a prime slave.[11] In previous years grown slaves alone had
brought standard prices; but in Moore's time a specially strong demand for
boys and girls in the markets of Cadiz and Lisbon had raised the prices of
these almost to a parity. All defects were of course discounted. Moore, for
example, in buying a slave with several teeth missing made the seller abate
a bar for each tooth. The company at one time forbade the purchase of
slaves from the self-styled Portuguese because they ran the prices up; but
the factors protested that these dealers would promptly carry their wares
to the separate traders, and the prohibition was at once withdrawn.

[Footnote 10: The Abbe Proyart, _History of Loango_ (1776), in Pinkerton's
_Voyages_, XVI, 584-587.]

[Footnote 11: Francis Moore, _Travels in Africa_, p.45.]

The company and the separate traders faced different problems. The latter
were less easily able to adjust their merchandise to the market. A Rhode
Island captain, for instance, wrote his owners from Anamabo in 1736, "heare
is 7 sails of us rume men, that we are ready to devour one another, for our
case is desprit"; while four years afterward another wrote after trading
at the same port, "I have repented a hundred times ye lying in of them dry
goods", which he had carried in place of the customary rum.[12] Again, a
veteran Rhode Islander wrote from Anamabo in 1752, "on the whole I never
had so much trouble in all my voiges", and particularized as follows: "I
have Gott on bord 61 Slaves and upards of thirty ounces of Goold, and have
Gott 13 or 14 hhds of Rum yet Left on bord, and God noes when I shall Gett
Clear of it ye trade is so very Dull it is actuly a noof to make a man
Creasey my Cheef mate after making foor or five Trips in the boat was taken
Sick and Remains very bad yett then I sent Mr. Taylor, and he got not well,
and three more of my men has [been] sick.... I should be Glad I coold Com
Rite home with my slaves, for my vesiel will not Last to proceed farr
we can see Day Lite al Roond her bow under Deck.... heare Lyes Captains
hamlet, James, Jepson, Carpenter, Butler, Lindsay; Gardner is Due; Ferguson
has Gone to Leward all these is Rum ships."[13]

[Footnote 12: _American Historical Record_, I (1872), 314, 317.]

[Footnote 13: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, LXIX, 59,
60.]

The separate traders also had more frequent quarrels with the natives.
In 1732 a Yankee captain was killed in a trade dispute and his crew set
adrift. Soon afterward certain Jolofs took another ship's officers captive
and required the value of twenty slaves as ransom. And in 1733 the natives
at Yamyamacunda, up the Gambia, sought revenge upon Captain Samuel Moore
for having paid them in pewter dollars on his previous voyage, and were
quieted through the good offices of a company factor.[14] The company
suffered far less from native disorders, for a threat of removing its
factory would bring any chief to terms. In 1731, however, the king of
Barsally brought a troop of his kinsmen and subjects to the Joar factory
where Moore was in charge, got drunk, seized the keys and rifled the
stores.[15] But the company's chief trouble was with its own factors.
The climate and conditions were so trying that illness was frequent and
insanity and suicide occasional; and the isolation encouraged fraudulent
practices. It was usually impossible to tell the false from the true in the
reports of the loss of goods by fire and flood, theft and rapine, mildew
and white ants, or the loss of slaves by death or mutiny. The expense
of the salary list, ship hire, provisions and merchandise was heavy and
continuous, while the returns were precarious to a degree. Not often did
such great wars occur as the Dahomey invasion of the Whidah country in
1726[16] and the general fighting of the Gambia peoples in 1733-1734[17] to
glut the outward bound ships with slave cargoes. As a rule the company's
advantage of steady markets and friendly native relations appears to have
been more than offset by the freedom of the separate traders from fixed
charges and the necessity of dependence upon lazy and unfaithful employees.

[Footnote 14: Moore, pp. 112, 164, 182.]

[Footnote 15: _Ibid_., p. 82.]

[Footnote 16: William Snelgrave, _A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and
the Slave Trade_ (London, 1734), pp. 8-32.]

[Footnote 17: Moore, p. 157.]

Instead of jogging along the coast, as many had been accustomed to do, and
casting anchor here and there upon sighting signal smokes raised by natives
who had slaves to sell,[18] the separate traders began before the close
of the colonial period to get their slaves from white factors at the
"castles," which were then a relic from the company regime. So advantageous
was this that in 1772 a Newport brig owned by Colonel Wanton cleared L500
on her voyage, and next year the sloop _Adventure_, also of Newport,
Christopher and George Champlin owners, made such speedy trade that after
losing by death one slave out of the ninety-five in her cargo she landed
the remainder in prime order at Barbados and sold them immediately in one
lot at L35 per head.[19]

[Footnote 18: Snelgrave, introduction.]

[Footnote 19: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, LXIX, 398,
429.]

In Lower Guinea the Portuguese held an advantage, partly through the
influence of the Catholic priests. The Capuchin missionary Merolla, for
example, relates that while he was in service at the mouth of the Congo in
1685 word came that the college of cardinals had commanded the missionaries
in Africa to combat the slave trade. Promptly deciding this to be a
hopeless project, Merolla and his colleagues compromised with their
instructions by attempting to restrict the trade to ships of Catholic
nations and to the Dutch who were then supplying Spain under the asiento.
No sooner had the chiefs in the district agreed to this than a Dutch
trading captain set things awry by spreading Protestant doctrine among the
natives, declaring baptism to be the only sacrament required for salvation,
and confession to be superfluous. The priests then put all the Dutch under
the ban, but the natives raised a tumult saying that the Portuguese, the
only Catholic traders available, not only paid low prices in poor goods but
also aspired to a political domination. The crisis was relieved by a timely
plague of small-pox which the priests declared and the natives agreed was a
divinely sent punishment for their contumacy,--and for the time at least,
the exclusion of heretical traders was made effective.[20] The English
appear never to have excelled the Portuguese on the Congo and southward
except perhaps about the close of the eighteenth century.

[Footnote 20: Jerom Merolla da Sorrente, _Voyage to Congo_ (translated from
the Italian), in Pinkerton's _Voyages_, XVI, 253-260.]

The markets most frequented by the English and American separate traders
lay on the great middle stretches of the coast--Sierra Leone, the Grain
Coast (Liberia), the Ivory, Gold and Slave Coasts, the Oil Rivers as the
Niger Delta was then called, Cameroon, Gaboon and Loango. The swarm of
their ships was particularly great in the Gulf of Guinea upon whose shores
the vast fan-shaped hinterland poured its exiles along converging lines.

The coffles came from distances ranging to a thousand miles or more, on
rivers and paths whose shore ends the European traders could see but
did not find inviting. These paths, always of single-file narrowness,
tortuously winding to avoid fallen trees and bad ground, never straightened
even when obstructions had rotted and gone, branching and crossing in
endless network, penetrating jungles and high-grass prairies, passing
villages that were and villages that had been, skirting the lairs of savage
beasts and the haunts of cannibal men, beset with drought and famine, storm
and flood, were threaded only by negroes, bearing arms or bearing burdens.
Many of the slaves fell exhausted on the paths and were cut out of the
coffles to die. The survivors were sorted by the purchasers on the coast
into the fit and the unfit, the latter to live in local slavery or to meet
either violent or lingering deaths, the former to be taken shackled on
board the strange vessels of the strange white men and carried to an
unknown fate. The only consolations were that the future could hardly be
worse than the recent past, that misery had plenty of company, and that
things were interesting by the way. The combination of resignation and
curiosity was most helpful.

It was reassuring to these victims to see an occasional American negro
serving in the crew of a slaver and to know that a few specially favored
tribesmen had returned home with vivid stories from across the sea. On the
Gambia for example there was Job Ben Solomon who during a brief slavery
in Maryland attracted James Oglethorpe's attention by a letter written in
Arabic, was bought from his master, carried to England, presented at court,
loaded with gifts and sent home as a freeman in 1734 in a Royal African
ship with credentials requiring the governor and factors to show him every
respect. Thereafter, a celebrity on the river, he spread among his fellow
Foulahs and the neighboring Jolofs and Mandingoes his cordial praises of
the English nation.[21] And on the Gold Coast there was Amissa to testify
to British justice, for he had shipped as a hired sailor on a Liverpool
slaver in 1774, had been kidnapped by his employer and sold as a slave in
Jamaica, but had been redeemed by the king of Anamaboe and brought home
with an award by Lord Mansfield's court in London of L500 damages collected
from the slaving captain who had wronged him.[22]

The bursting of the South Sea bubble in 1720 shifted the bulk of the
separate trading from London to the rival city of Bristol. But the removal
of the duties in 1730 brought the previously unimportant port of Liverpool
into the field with such vigor that ere long she had the larger half of
all the English slave trade. Her merchants prospered by their necessary
parsimony. The wages they paid were the lowest, and the commissions and
extra allowances they gave in their early years were nil.[23] By 1753 her
ships in the slave traffic numbered eighty-seven, totaling about eight
thousand tons burthen and rated to carry some twenty-five thousand slaves.
Eight of these vessels were trading on the Gambia, thirty-eight on the Gold
and Slave Coasts, five at Benin, three at New Calabar, twelve at Bonny,
eleven at Old Calabar, and ten in Angola.[24] For the year 1771 the number
of slavers bound from Liverpool was reported at one hundred and seven with
a capacity of 29,250 negroes, while fifty-eight went from London rated
to carry 8,136, twenty-five from Bristol to carry 8,810, and five from
Lancaster with room for 950. Of this total of 195 ships 43 traded in
Senegambia, 29 on the Gold Coast, 56 on the Slave Coast, 63 in the bights
of Benin and Biafra, and 4 in Angola. In addition there were sixty or
seventy slavers from North America and the West Indies, and these were
yearly increasing.[25] By 1801 the Liverpool ships had increased to 150,
with capacity for 52,557 slaves according to the reduced rating of five
slaves to three tons of burthen as required by the parliamentary act of
1788. About half of these traded in the Gulf of Guinea, and half in the
ports of Angola.[26] The trade in American vessels, particularly those of
New England, was also large. The career of the town of Newport in fact was
a small scale replied of Liverpool's. But acceptable statistics of the
American ships are lacking.

[Footnote 21: Francis Moore, _Travels in Africa_, pp. 69, 202-203.]

[Footnote 22: Gomer Williams, _History of the Liverpool Privateers, with an
Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade_ (London, 1897), pp. 563, 564.]

[Footnote 23: _Ibid_., p. 471, quoting _A General and Descriptive History
of Liverpool_ (1795).]

[Footnote 24: _Ibid_., p. 472 and appendix 7.]

[Footnote 25: Edward Long, _History of Jamaica_ (London, 1774), p. 492
note.]

[Footnote 26: Corner Williams, Appendix 13.]

The ship captains in addition to their salaries generally received
commissions of "4 in 104," on the gross sales, and also had the privilege
of buying, transporting and selling specified numbers of slaves on their
private account. When surgeons were carried they also were allowed
commissions and privileges at a smaller rate, and "privileges" were often
allowed the mates likewise. The captains generally carried more or less
definite instructions. Ambrose Lace, for example, master of the Liverpool
ship _Marquis of Granby_ bound in 1762 for Old Calabar, was ordered to
combine with any other ships on the river to keep down rates, to buy
550 young and healthy slaves and such ivory as his surplus cargo would
purchase, and to guard against fire, fever and attack. When laden he was
to carry the slaves to agents in the West Indies, and thence bring home
according to opportunity sugar, cotton, coffee, pimento, mahogany and rum,
and the balance of the slave cargo proceeds in bills of exchange.[27]
Simeon Potter, master of a Rhode Island slaver about the same time, was
instructed by his owners: "Make yr Cheaf Trade with The Blacks and little
or none with the white people if possible to be avoided. Worter yr Rum as
much as possible and sell as much by the short mesuer as you can." And
again: "Order them in the Bots to worter thear Rum, as the proof will Rise
by the Rum Standing in ye Son."[28] As to the care of the slave cargo a
Massachusetts captain was instructed in 1785 as follows: "No people require
more kind and tender treatment: to exhilarate their spirits than the
Africans; and while on the one hand you are attentive to this, remember
that on the other hand too much circumspection cannot be observed by
yourself and people to prevent their taking advantage of such treatment
by insurrection, etc. When you consider that on the health of your slaves
almost your whole voyage depends--for all other risques but mortality,
seizures and bad debts the underwriters are accountable for--you will
therefore particularly attend to smoking your vessel, washing her with
vinegar, to the clarifying your water with lime or brimstone, and to
cleanliness among your own people as well as among the slaves."[29]

[Footnote 27: Ibid., pp. 486-489.]

[Footnote 28: W.B. Weeden, _Economic and Social History of New England_
(Boston [1890]), II, 465.]

[Footnote 29: G.H. Moore, _Notes on the History of Slavery in
Massachusetts_ (New York, 1866), pp. 66, 67, citing J.O. Felt, _Annals of
Salem_, 2d ed., II, 289, 290.]

Ships were frequently delayed for many months on the pestilent coast, for
after buying their licenses in one kingdom and finding trade slack there
they could ill afford to sail for another on the uncertain chance of a more
speedy supply. Sometimes when weary of higgling the market, they tried
persuasion by force of arms; but in some instances as at Bonny, in
1757,[30] this resulted in the victory of the natives and the destruction
of the ships. In general the captains and their owners appreciated the
necessity of patience, expensive and even deadly as that might prove to be.

[Footnote 30: Gomer Williams, pp. 481, 482.]

The chiefs were eager to foster trade and cultivate good will, for it
brought them pompous trappings as well as useful goods. "Grandy King
George" of Old Calabar, for example, asked of his friend Captain Lace
a mirror six feet square, an arm chair "for my salf to sat in," a gold
mounted cane, a red and a blue coat with gold lace, a case of razors,
pewter plates, brass flagons, knives and forks, bullet and cannon-ball
molds, and sailcloth for his canoes, along with many other things for use
in trade.[31]

[Footnote 31: _Ibid_., pp. 545-547.]

The typical New England ship for the slave trade was a sloop, schooner or
barkentine of about fifty tons burthen, which when engaged in ordinary
freighting would have but a single deck. For a slaving voyage a second
flooring was laid some three feet below the regular deck, the space between
forming the slave quarters. Such a vessel was handled by a captain, two
mates, and from three to six men and boys. It is curious that a vessel of
this type, with capacity in the hold for from 100 to 120 hogsheads of rum
was reckoned by the Rhode Islanders to be "full bigg for dispatch,"[32]
while among the Liverpool slave traders such a ship when offered for
sale could not find a purchaser.[33] The reason seems to have been that
dry-goods and sundries required much more cargo space for the same value
than did rum.