The Jews in America Trilogy (85 page)

It took Einglish eighty-five days, in heavy weather most of the way, to make the westward journey across the Atlantic to Jamaica. Once there he was forced to report that he had had “the misfortune of burying six slaves on my passage,” five of them from the regular cargo and one of the group marked “0”—probably by branding—on the right thigh. Of the remainder, he commented that they were “for the great part in good health and well liked by the gentleman who intends to purchase.… By what I can learn from several gentlemen that has seen the slaves they will sell to good advantage—the 13th Inst. is the Day for Sale.” A few weeks later, however, the captain's report from Jamaica indicated that he had been somewhat optimistic in his earlier letter, as to both the state of the slaves' health and that of the market. A disorder which Einglish characterizes only as “swelling,” and which was probably a form of scurvy or food poisoning, had afflicted many of his cargo during the crossing, and now Einglish wrote: “Gentlemen, I buried one man slave since my last, and the Swelling began to range so violent among the slaves that nine of them was sold for a mere trifle … when I arrived, there was but two slaves that had the least sign of swelling. This disorder first begun in their feet and worked upward … when got as far as their stomach they died in a few hours.” He added gloomily that “There has been three ships'
cargoes of slaves sold since my arrival, and none of their averages exceeded [ours] not five shillings in a slave. Therefor I do not think that this market is as good as the Merchants here says it ought to be.”

Still, Captain Einglish was, according to the accounting he submitted, able to sell his remaining slaves for £3,620. Expenses amounted to £1,399, which meant a tidy profit of £1,259, or about 90 percent. He sailed from Jamaica in December and, after a brief stop at Môle Saint Nicolas, on the northwestern tip of Haiti, where he loaded the
Ann
with sugar, he headed home to Newport.

*
Slavery was brought to the colonies by the English. England did get around to abolishing slavery somewhat before the United States did, in 1807. Denmark was the first nation to abolish slavery, in 1792. The northern American states, meanwhile, starting with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New Jersey in 1804, all had adopted state abolition laws before Great Britain did.

*
Undoubtedly to thin it with water.

*
There was an ancient Talmudic principle involved here. For centuries the rabbinate decreed that when a Jew was involved in the human slave trade, he could not go below certain standards of humanity and decency. The Jew could deal in slaves as a business—as everyone else did—but he could not be involved in their punishment or torture. In the tenth century, for instance, there was a great vogue for blond eunuch slaves. They were used in harems and for homosexual purposes. The Jews of the Orient and Middle East were disturbed by this trade, and went to their rabbis for guidance. They were advised that it was permissible for them to buy and sell eunuchs, but that they were under no circumstances to be involved with the performance of castrations. The rabbis told them, “Let the guy do that.”

9

ALLARUMS AND RAVAGES

Aaron Lopez' ships made yearly visits to Africa in this fashion and, from his modest beginning with the
Ann,
his fleet grew to the point where, at the height of his career, just before the first guns of the American Revolution, he owned, or partly owned, more than thirty vessels in what was called the “African Trade,” or, more euphemistically, the “West Indian Trade.”

As his fortune grew, so did the size of his family. He seems to have been cut out to be a patriarch on the grandest scale, and doubtless envisioned each new son as a future asset to his business. His first wife, Anna, bore him eight children before she died—in childbirth—in 1762. She, of
course, had been Aaron's cousin, and Aaron next married another cousin, Sally Rivera, some sixteen years his junior, the daughter of his business associate, Jacob Rodriguez Rivera. Thus his partner became his father-in-law.

Aaron's second wife proceeded to present him with nine children and when, one by one, the members of this voluminous family reached marriageable age, suitable partners had to be found among the Sephardim of Newport and New York, who, at this point, were nearly all relatives already. The web of intramural marriage drew even tighter. One Lopez daughter married a Touro, and two of Aaron's daughters married Gomez boys—who were each other's first cousins, and both nephews of Daniel Gomez—and another married a Hendricks (who were already related to Gomezes) and still another became Rachel Lopez-Lopez when she married her own first cousin. Two other Lopez girls married the same man, Jacob Levy. This happened when Mr. Levy, widowed by one Lopez girl, married her younger sister. This marriage was not so much dynastic as dizzying in the extent to which it crossed up various Levys. Since Levy had children by both his wives, his marriages made his various children first cousins. To further confuse the tangled Lopez-Gomez-Rivera bloodline, one of Aaron Lopez' daughters, Hannah, married her uncle. With this union, Aaron's brother-in-law became his son-in-law as well, and Hannah Lopez became her mother's sister-in-law.

An inevitable result of these marriages was that the two family heads, Aaron Lopez and Daniel Gomez, had close ties—family as well as business—even though they did not see eye to eye on pre-Revolutionary politics. Over the years, the two men corresponded between New York and Newport, and much of this correspondence survives. Though Daniel was more than thirty years older than Aaron, the two had much in common. Each wrote to the other in a formal, courtly style, the older man addressing his younger
Newport friend as “your grace,” referring to “the lady your wife,” and extending best wishes to others of “your noble house.”

Both Gomez and Lopez liked to gamble, and much of their correspondence concerned Gomez' purchase of lottery tickets in New York for Lopez. Neither man had much luck. In August, 1753, Gomez wrote Lopez: “According to your order, I bought in your name two lottery tickets, Nos. 1190 and 1192, which may please God to be venturous and that by that way you may obtain something of consequence. I have charged to you their cost which is £3. Your Grace orders me to send you the tickets, but I do not see fit to do it until a second order arrives because in case they are lost Your Grace will lose what they provide.” Alas, a few weeks later, Daniel Gomez advised: “I sent my son to find out about the lottery tickets, but because of our sins both your tickets and mine came out blank.… I assure Your Grace that I am sorry that they have had such little fortune. God may please to give us a better one.” Their prayers, however, seem to have gone unanswered. Years later, Gomez was writing: “According to your request I have bought, in your name, a Lottery ticket number 77 which will please Your Grace to be fortunate.” And, a short while later, he was advising: “Enclosed is your lottery ticket which I am sorry to say came out blank. God may give you a better fortune next time.” Gomez' system seems to have been to buy tickets containing double numbers—1190, 77, 881, 544, 311, 2200, etc. It was as good a system as any.

The two kept each other posted on family news. When Daniel's young wife, who had been ill for many months, died, he wrote to his friend movingly: “I cannot express in words the great grief and sorrow that accompanies me as Our Lord has served to free from my company, and from this to a better life, my esteemed and loving wife, who offered her soul to the Creator on the 31st of May.… May
the Great Majesty receive her soul with kindness and place her with the just and good … and that she is enjoying eternal Glory as her good heart and her being a good Jew confirm me in that certainty.” And learning of the death, in infancy, of one of Aaron Lopez' children, Daniel wrote to him: “You stated your hopes that your little angel would improve in health, but [I have been informed] that God has received him and I assure you that we are in grief as if he were of our own, and I send Your Grace, the lady your wife, and the rest of the family, our sympathy, and pray to God that the life the little innocent lacked will be increased in yours.”

For all his deferential manner toward Aaron Lopez, Daniel Gomez was not hesitant to give him business advice when he felt this was in order. He had little use for Lopez' candle business, which was something of a sideline, and told him: “I am sorry there is no better way in which Your Grace may occupy himself other than by making candles. My brother David invested £240 last year in green wax and tallow, his negroes made candles which he sent to all the islands, and there they stand, with no sales, and at a very low price. All of this I inform Your Grace of.… You will suffer great losses and if you could sell the candles I advise you to proceed.” Either Lopez failed to receive this letter or he simply ignored Gomez' advice because, a few weeks later, Gomez complained because Lopez had sent them on to New York for Gomez to sell instead of selling the candles in Newport. He wrote testily: “acknowledging six boxes of spermaceti and candles which you have sent me by Captain Morrow's schooner, which I received, and am sorry you sent such merchandise to be sold here, and to exchange for tallow, when you know and everybody knows that it is very difficult to sell here and that tallow is cash money. I would appreciate your ordering me to return them to you, as I offered them to different merchants and not one
is interested. I am willing to serve you in what I can, but I cannot do the impossible.” His anger was quickly spent, however, for a few paragraphs later in the same letter he wrote: “Today is the last day for the Lottery.… I wish God is willing to give you some prize.…”

At the same time, the labyrinthine bloodlines that bound the Sephardim of both Newport and New York together were capable of producing weighty problems. When people are tied together by blood as well as money, the two elements fuse and cross in ways that can be painful, and already the Sephardim were showing signs of the strain. There were whole branches of certain families which—often for the most trifling reasons—no longer spoke to other branches, and the little band of Jews, who had first approached the vicissitudes of the new world with a certain unity of purpose, had spread and dispersed into touchy factions. Nearly always it was money—what some relative had done with his money, which displeased some other relative—that lay at the heart of the dispute. The more relatives there were, the more complex were the relationships.

Not only each new son, but each new son-in-law, had to be given some sort of position in the interconnected family enterprises. And, alas, not all these sons and sons-in-law possessed the talents the older generations might have wished. Both Daniel Gomez and Aaron Lopez faced this problem. Daniel's son Moses married Daniel's brother's daughter, Esther—first cousins again—but neither of their two sons (two others died in infancy) displayed any ability in the fur trade. Isaac, Jr., was always getting “stung” by the Indians. “Stung again!” he would write the patriarch, almost gaily, each time it happened. There is a suggestion that Isaac had taken to imbibing some of the firewater used in the Indian trade, a practice his grandfather had abstemiously avoided. Isaac married one of the Lopez girls.

An even more ticklish situation existed in Aaron Lopez'
family. Aaron's oldest daughter, Sally, had married a young man named Abraham Pereira Mendes, a member of an old and distinguished Sephardic family that had settled in Jamaica. At the time of the engagement, Abraham Mendes' elder brother wrote to Aaron Lopez: “The choice of my brother Abraham to your daughter Miss Salle, for his consort, has merited much our Abrobation [
sic
], as also that of my honoured Mother. The Amiableness of your daughter, the Bright Character and honour of your family's, as much in these parts, as those of ancient, in Portugal, cannot but give us in general the greatest satisfaction.… From my brother repeated expressions of their reciprocal love must make them happy, and pleasing to you, and beg leave to return my congratulating you and all your good family, on this joyfull occasion, wishing them all the Happiness they can wish for, and pray the Almighty may crown them with his Blessings.…” There were other reasons for rejoicing. Sally Lopez was a rich man's eldest daughter, and the Mendeses of Jamaica, though they bore an ancient name, were sorely in need of an infusion of money. Leah Mendes, Abraham's mother, had been widowed with several children, and was described by her son as being “reduced very low, owing to the great Losses she has met with … the condition I found her in shocked me to the highest degree.”

Abraham's brother added that he was sure Aaron had found in Abraham “such Bright Qualitys which few of his age are endowed with.” He added that while Abraham's education might leave something to be desired, considering the sort of formal education available in those days on the West Indian island, his intellectual abilities were “those of Nature.” He was sure, he said, that “with cultivating in your good Advice must make him a Bright Man.” This, however, turned out to be wishful thinking.

Aaron decided that his new son-in-law's acquaintance
with the island would make him an excellent candidate for the job of overseer of the Lopez enterprises in Jamaica, a task that up to then had been performed by a series of non-family firms. From the very beginning there were difficulties. For one thing, Abraham Pereira Mendes appears to have enjoyed poor health. A great deal of the business correspondence between father and son-in-law concerns the state of the latter's stomach, feet, or head. Abraham and Sally were married in Newport, and soon after their return to Kingston, to take up his duties, Abraham was writing Aaron: “I must now acquaint you of my safe arrival in the place.… I can't say agreeable being sick all the passage, and was reduced very low. At my landing I could hardly keep my legs.…” A few days later he was no better, writing: “My hands with weakness tremble in such a manner I can hardly write.” The next year, he was complaining of “A surfeit and a fit of the Gout, which has laid me up three weeks and am now in a most deplorable condition and cannot mount my horse, which has put my business backward.”