The Slave Ship (50 page)

By using the
Brooks
and every other means of agitation and persuasion at their disposal, abolitionists in both Britain and America eventually forced national reckonings on the slave trade. These unfolded in different ways on each side of the Atlantic during roughly the same years, 1787-1808. They involved significant transatlantic collaboration and cooperation among activists on means and ends, and they resulted in both cases in formal abolition. Ships like the
Brooks
would no longer be legally allowed to sail from British or American ports to gather slaves in Africa and carry them to the plantation societies of the Americas.

An intense agitation of less than five years came to a climax on April 2, 1792, in an all-night parliamentary debate that featured some of the highest oratory that chamber had ever heard. The result was a compromise, offered by the savvy Scot Henry Dundas, to abolish the slave trade “gradually.” Soon after, the international context of abolition changed as revolutions in France and St. Domingue exploded into new phases and domestic radicalism emerged in England to send ruling elites into a terror of their own. The gradual abolition bill that passed in the House of Commons met sustained resistance in the House of Lords. When war with France broke out in February 1793, the questions of national and imperial interest trumped everything else, forcing abolitionists and their cause into the background for years. Clarkson, on the edge of collapse, retired from public life in 1794. Small victories nonetheless continued to accumulate to the cause—for example, the Slave Carrying Bill of 1799, which expanded restrictions first established under the Dolben Act of 1788. In 1806 abolitionist activity began to revive, and in that year Parliament passed the Foreign Slave Trade Bill, banning British trade to Spanish and Dutch New World colonies. This prepared the way for formal abolition, which was declared on May 1, 1807.
⁵⁶

Abolition happened differently in the United States, where the primary issue was not shipment by merchants but rather importation and purchase by planters. Quakers like Anthony Benezet waged a struggle against the slave trade during the 1770s as the American movement for independence from Britain fashioned an ideology of liberty. The Continental Congress declared itself in 1774 to be against British imports, including slaves. Abolitionists discovered unlikely allies in Chesapeake slave owners such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, whose slaves reproduced themselves and made regional importation by slave ship not only unnecessary but frankly uneconomic. Jefferson soon excoriated King George III for his conduct of the slave trade in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, but the passage offended patriots from South Carolina and Georgia, who craved slave labor. A compromise would be reached in the constitutional debates of 1787: Article I, Section 9 would allow the slave trade to go on until 1808. But abolitionists continued to work at the state level, and in 1788-89 they managed to pass laws limiting the trade in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Delaware. They simultaneously expanded cooperation with activists in England and began to petition Congress in 1790. In 1791 revolution exploded in St. Domingue, causing fearful American masters to close their ports to slave ships. After long political infighting, an abolition act was passed on March 2, 1807, to take final effect on January 1, 1808. The act was almost toothless, which meant that illegal trading would continue for decades, but a victory had been won.
⁵⁷

Through it all—acrimonious debates, world-shaking revolutions in France and Haiti, and domestic upheaval and reaction in Britain, America, and around the Atlantic—the
Brooks
kept sailing. The vessel made seven more terror-filled voyages to Africa, beginning in 1791, 1792, 1796, 1797, 1799, 1800, and finally in May 1804, all from its lifelong home port, Liverpool. On the last of these, Captain William Murdock sailed to the Kongo-Angola coast with a crew of 54 to gather 322 captives. After a Middle Passage into the South Atlantic, in which only 2 Africans and 2 sailors died, the
Brooks
sailed to Montevideo on the Rio de la Plata, where it disgorged 320 souls. The ship had sailed its last. Already old for a slaver and no doubt decayed in the hull after having spent so much time in tropical waters over twenty-three years, the storied ship was condemned and presumably destroyed late in the year. The entire trade would be dismantled only three years later. The vessel that had played such a role in the slave trade and in the struggle against it came to a quiet, rotten end far from the eyes of both merchants and abolitionists. Yet its image sailed on, around the Atlantic, for decades to come, epitomizing the horrors of the trade and helping to advance a worldwide struggle against slavery.
⁵⁸

EPILOGUE

Endless Passage

Captain James D’Wolf, a member of New England’s most powerful slave-trading family, had just returned to Newport, Rhode Island, after a voyage to the Gold Coast in the
Polly,
a smallish two-masted slaver. He had gathered 142 Coromantee captives and delivered 121 of them alive to Havana, Cuba. One of his sailors, John Cranston, appeared before a federal grand jury on June 15, 1791, to testify about “a Negro Woman . . . thrown over Board the said Vessel, while living.” Had Captain D’Wolf committed murder?
¹

The woman, Cranston stated, was

 
Captain D’Wolf was not only afraid of losing his human property, he was apparently afraid to touch the sick woman, which is why he used a chair to hoist and lower her to the deck. At this point another sailor, Henry Clannen, joined in to help lift her overboard and drop her into the water. As the captain engineered the woman’s death, Cranston and other sailors “went right forward & left them.”
²

Cranston had seen the woman alive in the maintop (high up the mainmast) about two minutes before she was hoisted down to the main deck.

 
Cranston concluded by saying that neither he nor the rest of the crew was afraid of the smallpox and that they actually wished for exposure to it, to develop immunity.
³

The port and region buzzed about the scandal. No fewer than five newspapers reported the incident, and a public clamor arose. This was expressed most forcefully in early July when the grand jury indicted Captain James D’Wolf for murder.
⁴

Yet the wily Captain D’Wolf was a step ahead of his sailors, the abolitionists, and the authorities. He had seen the charges coming and quickly left Newport on another voyage to the Gold Coast. He wanted to let the agitation subside. In October 1794—more than three years after the event in question—he arranged for two other members of the crew of the
Polly,
Isaac Stockman and Henry Clannen, to give depositions, not in Rhode Island but in St. Eustatius, a slave-trading port in the West Indies.
⁵

Stockman and Clannen confirmed most of what Cranston had said about the event but emphasized that they had no choice except to do what they did. The woman posed a danger because, had a number of the crew sickened and died, they would have been unable to control their large and unruly cargo of Coromantee captives, as they were “a Nation famed for Insurrection.” These potentially deadly circumstances “compelled them to adopt this disagreeable alternative, being the only one from which, in this Situation, they could obtain the necessary relief.”
⁶

In any case the “Situation” of the crew of the
Polly
was one largely of D’Wolf’s making. As shipowner and captain, it had been his decision to maximize profits by taking a small crew and no surgeon. It had been his decision to buy members of “a Nation famed for Insurrection.” He was the one who had signed an insurance policy that would reimburse him only for the death of more than 20 percent of the enslaved, thereby creating a material incentive to kill one, save many, and profit.
⁷

Other aspects of the situation were decidedly
not
of D’Wolf’s making, and these suggest the imminent demise of the slave ship as an organizing institution of Atlantic capitalism. A first line of force emanated from the Gold Coast. The captain and crew of the
Polly
feared the Coromantee captives because these very people had a long history of leading revolts—on slave ships and in the slave societies of the New World. (A generation earlier they had led Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica, one of the Atlantic’s bloodiest slave uprisings.) Another line stretched from abolitionist circles in Britain and America to the ship. In the aftermath of the
Zong
incident, when Captain Luke Collingwood in 1781 commanded his sailors to throw 122 captives overboard, opponents of the slave trade raised the cry of murder and insisted that slave-ship captains did not have the right to kill African captives with impunity. John Cranston’s brave appearance before the grand jury—during the peak years of abolitionist agitation, 1788-92—suggests that the ideas of the abolitionist movement were now gaining currency among sailors, the people on whom the slave trade depended. Here, on the
Polly,
and in the Rhode Island courtroom in 1790-91, was the embryonic alliance that would in time destroy the slave trade: rebellious Africans and dissident sailors, in league with middle-class metropolitan antislavery activists. They combined to change the Atlantic field of force and to limit the power of the slave-ship captain.
⁸

They were not yet strong enough: Captain D’Wolf beat the murder charges. The testimony of Stockman and Clannen helped, as did a ruling by a judge in St. Thomas in April 1795 that D’Wolf was innocent of the murder charges—this at a hearing in which there was no one present to testify against him. Just as important was the immense power of his family, several members of which would have been working behind the scenes. For years after the grand jury returned its murder charge, the marshal of Bristol, Rhode Island, population 1,406, seemed to have a lot of trouble finding James D’Wolf—a prominent member of an eminent and highly visible family—in order to arrest him. Surely he did not try very hard, and after five years he stopped trying altogether. The American charges were never formally dropped, but the issue itself was. The powerful D’Wolf clan had triumphed.
⁹

The fates of the three principal actors in the drama underline the divergent experiences of the slave trade. John Cranston disappeared into the waterfront. The enslaved woman, whose name is forever lost, drowned, no doubt struggling against the lashings that bound her to the chair of which Captain D’Wolf was so fond. Her Coromantee shipmates were delivered in Havana, Cuba, in early 1791. They likely spent their numbered days cultivating sugar, which, the abolitionist movement was busy explaining, was made with blood. Some of them may have ended up on one of the three plantations Captain D’Wolf eventually bought on the island. They would have carried on their tradition of resistance.
¹⁰

Captain James D’Wolf prospered in the heart of darkness, gathering immense riches in the slave trade. He financed and profited from another twenty-five voyages as sole or primary merchant and shipowner, and he also invested in numerous other voyages, usually in partnership with his brother John. He became not only the wealthiest member of the elite D’Wolf family but the wealthiest man in the state, if not the entire region. From his riches—denounced by an abolitionist as “the gains of oppression”—he built Mount Hope, one of the most sumptuous mansions in all of New England. He eventually became a United States senator.
¹¹

By the time Great Britain and the United States abolished the slave trade in 1807-8, what had the slave ship wrought? It had already carried 9 million people out of Africa to the New World. (Another 3 million were yet to come.) British and American slave ships alone had carried 3 million during the long eighteenth century. The human costs of the traffic were staggering: around 5 million died in Africa, on the ships, and in the first year of labor in the New World. For the period 1700-1808, some 500,000 perished on the way to the ships, another 400,000 on board, and yet another quarter million or so not long after the ships docked. By the time of abolition, roughly 3.3 million slaves were working in the Atlantic “plantation complex,” for American, British, Danish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish masters. Approximately 1.2 million of these labored in the United States, another 700,000 in the British Caribbean colonies. Their production was staggering. In 1807 alone, Britain imported for domestic consumption 297.9 million pounds of sugar and 3.77 million gallons of rum, all of it slave-produced, as well as 16.4 million pounds of tobacco and 72.74 million pounds of cotton, almost all of it slave-produced. In 1810 the enslaved population of the United States produced 93 million pounds of cotton and most of 84 million pounds of tobacco; they were themselves, as property, worth $316 million. Robin Blackburn has estimated that by 1800 the slave-based production of the New World “had cost the slaves 2,500,000,000 hours of toil” and sold for “a gross sum that could not have been much less than £35,000,000,” or 3.3 billion 2007 dollars.
¹²