The African Squadron
The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1920-1862
Calvin Lane
In April 1839, the Portuguese slave shipTeçora loaded 500 Africans
at Lomboko on Africa's Gallinas River, slipped past British Royal Navy ships blockading
the slave trade, and two months later disembarked its cargo of human misery at Havana,
Cuba, 200 of the Africans having died en route. Among those captured, 49 Mende tribesmen
and four children were then clandestinely shipped on the schooner Amistad to
be transported east to Puerto Principe, where they would be put to work on sugar
plantations. The rest is history, accurately recorded in Howard Jones's book Mutiny
on the Amistad and less accurately, if powerfully, in Stephen Spielberg's film
Amistad.
By 1820, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and the United States had all outlawed the
international slave trade. Why, then, did the trade persist until the middle of the
nineteenth century? In part, at least, the answer can be attributed to the largely
futile effort of the U.S. Navy from 1820 to 1862 to interdict slave traffic on the
transatlantic "Middle Passage," and to forces within and without the federal
government that hobbled the blockade.
Slavery and the slave trade had been an issue that concerned the framers of the U.S.
Constitution in 1787, but they dealt with it by postponing restrictions on the trade.
At the end of the 20-year interval specified in the Constitution, Congress passed
the Slave Importation Act of 1807, which declared further importation of slaves into
the United States to be illegal.
An even more stringent act passed by the British Parliament in the same year declared
the slave trade illegal, despite the fact that between 1801 and 1807 more than 200,000
slaves had been carried by the highly profitable British slaving business. Passage
of the act resulted from the long and untiring efforts of Thomas Clarkson and William
Wilberforce, and from the support of the Prime Minister, Lord Grenville, who stated
that the trade was "contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound
principle.''1
From the start, the Congressional act proved unenforceable, for President Thomas
Jefferson's opposition to naval shipbuilding denied the U.S. government any power
to halt the slave trade. At the same time, rising cotton production in the South,
and a huge increase in production of, and demand for, Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee
expanded the market for slave labor.
Nor were the U.S. and Great Britain ready to cooperate against the slave trade. The
perennially shorthanded British Royal Navy's custom of indiscriminately seizing British
or American sailors from U.S. merchant ships and impressing them into naval service
defied the sovereignty of U.S. vessels at sea. Then, in the midst of the Napoleonic
Wars, Britain's 1806 Orders in Council barring neutral trade with France and her
allies, except by payment of a tax at British ports, threatened U.S. maritime free
trade. These matters came to a head in June 1807, when HMS Leopard removed
several crew members from the USSChesapeake after battering it into submission
off the Virginia Capes. President Jefferson retaliated, or so he thought, with the
Embargo Act of December 1807, forbidding U.S. ships to trade with any foreign nation.
In practice, the yearlong ban only succeeded in crippling the nation's shipping trade,
especially in New England. 2
The Chesapeake affair precipitated a clamor for war with Britain, and the
conflict began in 1812. Although President James Madison's rallying cry of "Free
Trade and Rights of Sailors" seemed to favor the interests of coastal merchants,
the war appealed more to frontier settlers looking covetously at fertile land in
Ontario, and to Southern warhawks such as John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who
wanted to take over Florida from Spain, England's ally. Indeed, the conflict was
bitterly opposed by the New England states, whose nearly devastated economy brought
the region to the brink of secession by the time the war concluded at the end of
1814.
With this background, it was difficult for the United States to accept any form of
search or seizure by British forces, even in the effort to halt the slave trade.
Following the War of 1812, it was generally believed throughout the United States
that British continuance of the right of search thinly disguised obstruction of legitimate
trade with Africa and stood in the way of cooperation between United States and British
African squadrons from 1820 to 1862.
As early as 1811, Britain sent warships to patrol the African coast to demonstrate
its serious intent to live up to the 1807 Parliamentary act. Although sugar merchants,
owners of cotton mills, Liverpool slavers, and politicians resisted the campaign
to abolish the slave trade to the West Indies, the British public was solidly united
in support of the act. 3
In 1815 Britain used hard cash to persuade a reluctant Portugal to abolish the slave
trade north of the equator, to establish with Britain a mixed commission at Sierra
Leone to decide on the fate of captured or suspected slavers, and to permit the right
of search north of the equator. In 1817, Britain paid Spain to agree to similar terms.
However, because neither treaty specified what boarding officers were to look for
in searching a vessel suspected of being a slaver, British cruisers could not seize
empty Portuguese or Spanish ships. When chased by a Royal Navy ship, captains of
loaded Spanish or Portuguese slavers sometimes threw their human cargo overboard
to avoid capture. Finally, in 1835, this horror was eliminated by the inclusion of
an equipment clause to specify grounds for search. A vessel might be seized if it
contained hatches with open gratings, spare planks, shackles, water casks in great
number, boilers for cooking, and large quantities of rice and other food. Portugal
stubbornly refused to agree to the terms until forced to do so in 1842. France agreed
to the right of search without an equipment clause between 1833 and 1841, but terminated
the agreement because of suspicion over Great Britain's motives.4 Similar instructions were not issued to the U.S. Navy until
1849.
These treaties had an immediate effect on the nature of the trade. Heretofore, slavers
might pick up captured Africans assembled gradually in barracoons at numerous points
along a 3,000-mile stretch of the west coast of Africa from Gorée (Dakar)
in the north to Benguela in the south. Now the slavers were forced to act more speedily–get
in, load, and get out. According to Lieutenant Forbes of HMS Bonetta, "two
hours suffice to place four hundred human beings on board." The changed situation
also altered the blockading strategy of British Royal Navy ships, for officers preferred
to earn the bounty for liberating slaves on board rather than to take an empty ship
before it loaded. 5
In 1819, with Congressional passage of the Slave Trade Act, President James Monroe
was directed to use warships to suppress the trade and to establish Liberia as a
haven for freed slaves next to Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa. The next
year Congress passed an amendment declaring slave trading to be piracy punishable
by death. The act was weakened by Senator James DeWolfe, a former slave trader from
Rhode Island, who sponsored a measure forbidding the right of search. Even though
this amendment was tainted by the DeWolfe family's unsavory reputation, the legacy
of the War of 1812 meant that the U.S. could not accept an agreement containing the
right of search by a foreign power. The weakness of the American movement to abolish
slavery and the opposition of most Southern Congressmen to any legislation restricting
slavery also prevented the passage of such a measure. When asked by the British Foreign
Minister in 1822 if he could think of anything more atrocious than the slave trade,
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams retorted: "Yes. Admitting the right of
search by foreign officers of our vessels upon the seas in time of peace; for that
would be making slaves of ourselves." 6
President Monroe, minister to England when the Chesapeake-Leopard affair occurred,
understood the role the U.S. Navy might play in defending commerce and in limiting
the slave trade. When the act became law, he ordered the navy "to seize all
vessels navigated under our flag engaged in that trade."7
To that end, five navy vessels headed for Africa between January 1820 and August
1821, beginning with the frigate Cyane. She was followed by the brig Hornet,
frigate John Adams, and schooners Alligator and Shark, both
fast 200-ton Baltimore clipper types, 86 feet long, mounting 12 guns, with crews
of 70, which were well suited for running down slave ships.
Second in command of the Cyane was 24-year-old Lieutenant Matthew C. Perry,
who would become commander of the African Squadron in 1843. Perry's family had been
associated with the founders of the American Colonization Society, a movement established
in 1816 to resettle freed slaves in Africa. Perry requested duty on the Cyane,
whose primary mission was to escort the brig Elizabeth, which was carrying
the first group of settlers to the area of Liberia. The Cyane continued on
to intercept slavers, on 10 April 1820 bagging nine vessels suspected of slaving.
At least six were from Baltimore, Charleston, and New York, but they had changed
both names and colors to Spanish at sea. Writing to the secretary of the navy, the
Cyane's captain bitterly noted that, although the vessels were evidently owned
by Americans, they were so completely covered by Spanish documentation that is was
impossible to condemn them. He also estimated that "There are probably no less
than three hundred vessels engaged in the slave trade."8
In September 1820 theJohn Adams and Hornet joined the Cyane
and took four more slavers. The G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport contains
the manuscript journal of J.S. Cummings, who served on the Adams. The account
is a dry, day-to-day record of patrol duty on the coast near Sierra Leone, but it
clearly suggests the terrible conditions that hampered the squadron's activity. The
Cyane parted company with the Adams on 19 October to return to the
U.S. On 22 October the Adams was off the Pongas River, in present-day Guinea,
where slavers loaded in the many hidden creeks and mangrove islands that offered
sanctuary from the British cruisers. The Adams hoisted out the barge, and
the ship's officers and midshipmen "left the ship in company with Capt. Nash
of HBM brig Snapper in the boat for Rio Pongo," an instance of genuine
cooperation between British and American warships. The next day, with the temperature
hovering at 120 degrees on deck and 92 degrees below deck, "the American schooner
Exchange anchored near us, a prize. . . .She is a slave trader from Baltimore
via Havannah." The expedition returned from upriver the following day. "They
left their schooners nearly ready for taking on slaves but all under Spanish colors."
This fruitless chase foiled by flags of convenience had grim consequences for the
crew of the John Adams anchored just off the mosquito-ridden shore. In his
entry for 2 November, Cummings tersely recorded "10 down with a fever."
By the middle of November, three of the crew had been buried at sea. On 21 November
the ship sailed for duty in the Caribbean, having been on station for only three
months.9
When he left the Cyane, Lieutenant Perry requested another tour of duty off
Africa, mainly because of his interest in the American Colonization Society, and
was appointed commander of the schooner Shark in July 1821. He left the United
States with orders to convey the U.S. commissioner to Liberia. After landing the
commissioner near the site of the Liberian capital of Monrovia, a healthy location
suggested earlier by Perry when aboard the Cyane, he chased what proved to
be a French slaver laden with 133 slaves who resembled, in the words of Midshipman
William F. Lynch, "so many Egyptian mummies half-awakened into life." However,
because she was French, Perry had to let the vessel proceed despite the entreaty
of his officers to pay him for any court damages he might "sustain for illegal
capture.'' 10 In November 1821,
the Shark sailed for duty in the West Indies. This first limited effort by
the U.S. Navy to stop the slave trade had yielded meager results: from May 1818 to
November 1821 the squadron had taken 11 suspected slave ships and liberated 573 Africans.
For a brief period, from 1820 to 1824, an opportunity developed for closer cooperation
between British and U.S. warships. In 1821 a committee of the House of Representatives
reported that "a mutual right of search appears to be indispensable to the great
object of abolition.'' 11 This action
was not surprising, for the Missouri Compromise of 1821, which drew a firm line between
slave and free states, resulted from slowly increasing Northern resistance to the
spread of slavery. John Quincy Adams finally modified his views on the right of search,
but the resultant Anglo-American treaty became so watered down by U.S. Senate amendments
that the British would not agree to it and the opportunity passed.
To make matters worse, France and Spain protested so strongly over U.S. seizure of
French and Spanish vessels suspected of being slavers that Adams had to repudiate
"any intention to search French vessels in peacetime.''12 Withdrawn from the African coast in 1824, probably because
of these interrelated conditions, the U.S. Navy did not again appear in force off
Africa until 1843.
What followed in the next two decades was readily predictable. Because of the illegality
of the trade, slavers went to great lengths to hide the true ownership of their vessels.
American-built ships from Portland, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, operated in the
trade and flew the American flag, knowing that for the most part such display would
prevent British warships from stopping them. The determination of a vessel's identity
often involved highly elaborate efforts at disguise. If a U.S. Navy vessel chased
what seemed to be a slaver its ostensible "captain" would hoist the Spanish
flag, substitute Spanish registration papers, and might even carry a Spanish crew
hidden below decks. This stratagem would be exactly reversed if apprehended by a
British man of war.
In the 1830s, a brisk trade was carried on between Baltimore and Havana in the sale
of vessels built along the lines of the speedy and highly maneuverable Chesapeake
Bay model "Baltimore clippers" used as privateers during the war of 1812.
The clippers were publicly sold to Spanish or Portuguese slavers in Cuba who were
willing to pay high prices for the rakish craft. It was almost impossible to convict
Americans for selling the vessels because papers could never be found that the vessels
were intended to be employed in the slave business.13
Nicholas Trist of Virginia, the American consul in Havana in the 1830s, made things
easier for the fraudulent sale of American vessels by authenticating "the various
papers required for secretly selling an American vessel and clearing it out on a
slaving voyage in American guise." He claimed to be carrying out his consular
duties, but after an investigation by the U.S. government he was dismissed from his
post in 1841. Yet, under these conditions the trade flourished, with thousands of
Africans sold into bondage each year to Brazil and Cuba, and with an estimated 1,000
per year smuggled into the United States during the 54 years from 1807 to the Civil
War.14
Commercial ties between legitimate maritime trade and the slave trade further complicated
the problem. American merchant ships carried rum, tobacco, flour, and cloth to trade
along the bulge of Africa for palm oil, gum copal, ivory, gold dust, and peanuts.
Enoch Ware, trading agent aboard the Salem brig Northumberland, gloated over
his arriving on the coast ahead of his competitors:
Now if no envious competitor present himself the prospect could not be well better--that
is if my Sierra Leone tobacco will suit for the slave trade. No! What am I to know
for what purpose it is to be sold? I sell for produce or money. The use of it afterwards
certainly am not accountable for. . . . scarcely a hundred pounds of Tobacco or Powder
that is sold but what sooner or later is used for purchasing slaves though it may
go through half a dozen hands first." 15
Britain was not exactly guiltless in halting the slave trade either, for on occasion
her navy protected English merchant ships (called auxiliaries) carrying goods useful
in the trade. Even more reprehensible was the practice, when slavery became illegal
throughout the British Empire in 1833, of forcibly loading liberated Africans from
slave ships onto British ships as "emigrant laborers" and transporting
them to sugar plantations in the West Indies. Horatio Bridge, purser aboard the USS
Saratoga in the 1840s, wrote that "English philanthropy cuts a very suspicious
figure'' in using released slaves as pawns in the struggle for economic dominance
in the Indies. In opposing this view Lieutenant Forbes of HMS Bonetta held
that emigration was voluntary, and that one of the emigrant ships featured a surgeon
and a brass band. But he also noted that a salaried agent received "a guinea
a head for each emigrant! "16
Nevertheless, the Royal Navy increased its seizure of vessels believed to be operating
in the slave trade and in the absence of the U.S. Navy stepped up its boarding of
American merchant ships under the pretense of "right of visit," a watered-down
version of "right of search" suggested by Lord Palmerston, the abrasive
British foreign minister.
The American public did not make this nice semantic distinction, and was also angered
by disputes with Great Britain over the boundaries between the U.S. and Canada in
Maine and the Oregon Territory. The possibility of war appeared likely, and was not
lessened when the British armed cruiser Buzzard sailed into New York Harbor
in June 1839. (James Covey, a liberated slave who was soon to act as interpreter
for the Mende captives during the Amistad trial in New Haven, was a crew member.)
The Buzzard had crossed the Atlantic from Africa to escort, under guard, the
American brig Eagle and schooner Clara, both suspected slavers. The
British had little alternative, for there were no U.S. Navy ships patrolling the
African coast to whom the vessels might have been surrendered. To further complicate
the situation, the U.S. attorney general promptly released the Eagle and Clara
on the grounds they were "Spanish owned.''l7
Tensions still ran high in 1840 when Lieutenant Paine, commander of the 97-foot U.S.
Navy schooner Grampus was ordered to cruise against slavers off Africa. (In
an ironic turn, the Grampus had been sent to New Haven in January of 1840
in an abortive plan of the Van Buren administration to spirit away the Amistad
captives to certain execution or slavery in Cuba.) Paine and Commander Tucker of
the Royal Navy agreed to undertake joint cruising and to turn over to each other
the ships they seized, whether British or American. This eminently sensible agreement
was unfortunately rejected by Congress. The Paine Tucker arrangement formed the basis
of one of the provisions of the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which is remembered
today for the friendly accord reached by Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton in settling
the United States-Canada boundary dispute.
Article 8 of the treaty called for cooperative cruising between the two countries'
African squadrons, each country to supply a squadron of 80 guns, and stipulated that
no British ships were to search American shipping. The 80-gun requirement sounded
formidable, but it would be ineffective unless the 80 guns were distributed among
many patrolling vessels. Rather than a few heavily armed frigates or sloops of war,
the duty required fast, shallow-draft ships mounting only one or two guns, for the
slavers sacrificed everything to speed and rarely carried armament. But Perry's squadron--the
frigate Macedonian, sloops-of-war Saratoga and Decatur, and
10-gun brig Porpoise, accompanied by a storeship--was typical of the first
15 years of the African Squadron. 18
On 30 March 1843, Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur sent explicit instructions to
Perry: "You are charged with the protection of American Commerce. . . and with
suppression of the Slave Trade, so far as the same may be carried on by American
Citizens or under the American Flag." But, he added, "while the United
States sincerely desire the suppression of the slave trade. . . they do not regard
the success of their efforts as their paramount interest." He also suggested
to President John Tyler that the presence of the African Squadron would help American
traders obtain a share of the lucrative palm oil trade monopolized by the British
and the French.19
As ordered, Perry established his base at Porto Praia on the island of São
Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands, 300 miles west of Cape Verde, 1,500 miles from the
Gulf of Guinea, and 2,500 miles from mouth of the Congo River. It provided some protection
against rough weather but was fever-ridden in the summer months. Located about 3,000
miles from New York and frequently visited by whale ships, Porto Praia had an American
consul, and supplies could be landed there without payment of custom duties. Perry
would have preferred floating storehouses, but a miserly Congress never voted the
funds to implement his request.
Cruising under sail was difficult. The winds were usually light and variable, blowing
from west to southwest along the Guinea Coast. This factor, plus a current running
from west to east as far as the Congo River, made Africa a lee shore and required
a difficult beat back to Porto Praia. If Perry's ships were to keep to the schedule
he set for them, they had to keep well out to sea on the return voyage, making it
unlikely that they would cross the path of a slaver on the vast reaches of the Atlantic. 20
As directed by Upshur, Perry energetically protected American commerce. In punishment
for the murder of the crew of the American trading schooner Mary Carver by
African natives, he burned several villages and killed the ringleaders. He also used
the squadron to protect the Liberian settlement against hostile African neighbors.
With these duties, Perry's ships engaged in limited surveillance of the slave trade.
During the two years he commanded the African Squadron only one suspected slaver
was taken: the brigantineUncas captured by the USS Porpoise with no
slaves aboard. Prior to the Mary Carver incident Perry wrote to Upshur on
5 September 1843, "I cannot hear of any American vessels being engaged in the
slave trade nor do I believe that there has been one so engaged in years." Exasperated
British captains sent him documented correspondence on slavers flying the American
flag taken to date, but Perry would have none of it. Lieutenant Bridge claimed that,
because the death penalty specified by U.S. law was such a threat, all slavers would
be careful to fly the flags of Portugal, Spain, or Brazil to escape capture, and
that they would take pains to carry a double set of registration papers. He defended
Perry as "a gentleman of the highest professional character, persevering, sagacious,
and determined.'' 21
J.Y. Mason, Upshur's successor, blandly papered over Perry's inactivity in his annual
report to the president on 25 November 1844: "The operations of the squadron
have, it is believed, exercised a favorable influence in preventing the slave trade.
. . . [because of] the presence of our own naval forces, with authority to visit
all vessels under the American flag, it is not probable that our citizens will engage
in this disgraceful and perilous traffic, or our flag be used by others to any great
extent."22
The African Squadron appeared to be an opportunity to end the horrors of the slave
trade, but from its inception under Commodore Matthew Perry to its withdrawal in
1862, the treaty objective was compromised by successive secretaries of the navy
who emphasized the prevention of "all violations of the rights and laws of fair
trade" rather than the prevention of slaving. Of the nine secretaries of the
navy from 1842 to 1861, seven were Southerners, tacitly sympathetic to slavery; Connecticut-born
Isaac Toucey was pro slavery; and only George Bancroft was antislavery. In 1851 Secretary
William Graham would even suggest that the squadron could be disbanded, leaving the
Brazil Squadron and the Home Squadron to intercept slavers on the west side of the
Atlantic.23
As compared with the British efforts on the African coast, the effectiveness of the
U.S. Navy's African Squadron was limited. During its service, the African Squadron
usually numbered between three and five vessels. When the squadron included the USS
Constitution, or the former British frigates Macedonian and Cyane,
which had been captured by the U.S. during the War of 1812, the Royal Navy could
not help but notice the allusions to American naval success during that war. But
the aging, poorly maintained vessels spent most of their time in the long passage
to and from the slaving areas and were on station along the 3,000 miles of coast
only a few weeks of the year. Commander W.F. Lynch warned Secretary Dobbin in 1853
that the U.S. would be "perhaps justly accused, of observing the letter and
neglecting the spirit" of the treaty if small, fast steamships did not replace
the sailing vessels in the African Squadron. However, the British used steamships
in their patrolling ten years before the U.S. finally sent the steam sloop-of-war
San Jacinto and the steam patrol craft Sumpter and Alyatic to
the African Squadron in 1859. 24
Finally, in 1849 the secretary of the navy did issue explicit orders for the guidance
of officers boarding suspected slave ships flying the American flag. They were to
be on the lookout for the "presence of more Water Casks, Handcuffs and other
articles than the crew required," for anyone throwing papers overboard, and
for double sets of logbooks or vessel registration papers. They were to inspect consular
certificates carefully, for it was known that consular seals were sometimes forged
by embossing the document with the back of a half dollar. The boarding officer "must
not be too harsh on suspicion of being a slaver but if the captain acts in an insolent
manner to refuse compliance" he was to be put on board the cruiser. Acknowledging
that foreign slavers used the American flag as a shield against British cruisers,
Secretary Upshur warned that it should not be imagined that "the mere hoisting
of [the American] flag shall give immunity to those who have no right to use it."25
Not all Southerners winked at the slave trade. In a curious anomaly, a few slave
holders -- notably Henry A. Wise, U.S. minister to Brazil -- were adamantly opposed
to the trade. Wise wrote to the federal government on 18 February 1845, protesting
the sale of American vessels to Portuguese slavers at Rio de Janeiro: "I beseech
-- I implore the President of the United States to take a stand on this subject.
You have no conception of the bold effrontery and the flagrant outrages of the African
slave trade. . . . every patriot in our land would blush for our country, did he
know and see, as I do, how our own citizens sail and sell our flag to the uses and
abuses of that accursed traffic.''26
On his own initiative, Wise had seized a ship, correctly surmising that it carried
goods for use in the slave trade. The only reward for his bold action was to be reprimanded
by the U.S. government.
From 1840 to 1849, Britain gradually closed off the slave trade at embarkation points.
Royal Navy officers burned several barracoons, including those up the Gallinas River
from which the Amistad captives had been shipped. They then negotiated subsidized
treaties with native chiefs to force them out of the slave trade. This resulted in
a southward shift of the trade from the bulge of Africa, north of the Niger River
Delta, to the area of the Congo River mouth, 900 miles south of the Niger.27
Unhappily for U.S. naval officers, an incident in 1846 totally dampened their zeal
for blockading. The USS Boxer seized the Malaga, laden with slaving
goods under charter to a Brazilian slave trader, and sent it back to the United States.
There, a New England judge ruled that it was no crime to sell supplies to slave traders
and released the ship, which then went out on a genuine slaving voyage. Subsequently,
the vessel's owners had the gall to sue the captain of the Boxer for more
than $10,000 in damages. The laggard U.S. Navy Department finally got around to defending
the Boxer’s captain, but no more ships were seized for three years
until 1849, when a Pennsylvania judge overturned the earlier decision and rebuked
the owners of the Malaga. 28
In the early 1850s Lieutenant Andrew Hull Foote of Connecticut spent several years
with the African Squadron. His book, Africa and the American Flag, which circulated
widely in 1854, offered practical suggestions for improving the blockade and appealed
to the humanitarian instincts of the American public. Foote called for enforcing
the threat of execution for slaving, claiming it was contrary to "justice that
the perpetrators of such crimes have been dismissed with impunity when captured."
He also suggested that store ships for resupply would provide greater flexibility
of operation, that more ships be stationed near the Congo, and that the sale of American
vessels in Africa be banned. Foote vigorously affirmed "Every person interested
in upholding the rights of humanity . . . will sympathize with the capture and deliverance
of African slaves." Nevertheless, he like most officials and naval officers
from the president on down adhered to the decades old prejudice that "it is
contrary to national honor and national interests that the right of search should
be entrusted to the hands of any foreign authority."29
Foote's well-intended call for more efficient blockading went largely unheeded, except
for the establishment of supply ships near the equator. Beyond that, the navy's efforts
were hamstrung by the increasing polarization in the U.S. over slavery. In reaction
to Northern abolitionist pressure, and after the Compromise of 1850 extended the
slave territory in the west (while admitting California as a free state) and strengthened
the fugitive slave laws, Southern Congressmen in 1854 tried to repeal the slave-trading
prohibition of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Prominent Southern planters made a similar
call at a commercial convention at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1859. On the eve of
the Civil War, 4,500,000 bales of cotton were produced in the South, attended by
a sharp demand for more slaves needed to work the gang system of cotton growing.
Efforts to extend slave-holding into Kansas, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott
Decision seemed to extend the power of slaveholders and increase tension over
slavery in the nation.30
So it was not surprising that, in 1859, Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey sent instructions
to William Inman, the new commander of the African Squadron, that protection of American
commerce be given top priority, with the chasing of slavers of lesser importance.
Inman construed Toucey's instructions as permission to ignore the search for slavers,
and he proceeded on a leisurely cruise aboard the USS Constellation to Madeira,
off North Africa. A few months later he received an urgent message from Toucey, probably
at the instigation of President James Buchanan, directing him to "renew his
exertions," a code term for "get cracking!" Indeed, the African Squadron
had now been expanded to include six sailing sloops of war plus, at last, the powerful
steam sloop-of-war San Jacinto and two small, fast, lightly armed steamers,
the Sumpter and Mystic, which had originally been chartered by the
navy for service off Paraguay. Toucey also ordered that the squadron's supply base
be moved to St. Paul de Loando (Loango), which was close to the center of slaving
activity at the Congo River.31
Mystic Seaport's G.W. Blunt White Library contains an informal but highly valuable
record of the final years of the African Squadron in the journal kept by Henry Eason,
an enlisted man aboard the USS Marion. 32
This 20-year-old, 16-gun sloop of war with a crew of 150, commanded by Thomas Brent,
served in Inman's squadron from 1858 to 1860. Eason had had a widely varied seafaring
life, for he mentioned having sailed on the Great Lakes, rounded Cape Horn, and spent
"four years in a hot climate" during six years at sea. In his journal Eason
recorded shrewd insights into the problems and contradictions of blockading operations
in the U. S. Navy and vivid pictures of life under sail in the 1850s.
On being ordered to Africa, the Marion left Norfolk, Virginia, on 6 April
1858 for Porto Praia. On 8 May the Marion left Porto Praia, stopping at Monrovia,
Liberia, on 20 May to hire Krewmen. These members of a coastal tribe were skilled
watermen who handled large canoes through the heavy surf along the harborless shores
of equatorial West Africa. They hired out to both U.S. Navy ships and slavers alike.
"They do all the work in boats, the weather being too hot for white men,"
wrote Eason. Their names -- ”Tom Fryingpan, Jack Ropeyarn, Ben Bolt, Harry Bluff,
Jack Two Glass, Jack Half Dollar, Tom Stargazer" suggest a condescending distancing
of white mariners from the Krewmen, but the natives were proud of these names.33
After landing missionaries at Cape Palmas, the Marion arrived in the Bight
of Benin, where coastal marshes harbored swarms of malarial mosquitoes. There she
encountered the Royal Navy "steamer Sharpshooter. . . cruising for the
same purpose as ourselves . . . . In the afternoon we saw another Steamer, but did
not speak her. These waters are full of English steam gunboats, while we have only
five vessels on the station . . . . The English having so many vessels here, capture
3 slavers to our 1. . . they have also the advantage over us, in being Steamers,
while all ours are sailing vessels."
A few days later, the Marion again met theSharpshooter, which had been
chasing the schooner Blue Lightning of Baltimore, "but she always gave
them the slip." The schooner's name and rig suggest that it may have been a
Baltimore clipper, perhaps similar to the Amistad in design.
Other notorious slaving areas visited by the Clarion on her first cruise included
Whydah (Ouidah) and the Lagos River north of the Niger River Delta, and Loango, Cabinda,
and the Congo River to the south. After 14 weeks on the African coast she made the
four-week passage back to the Cape Verde Islands, where she arrived on 1 October.
The following, a detailed account of capturing the suspected slaver Brothers
of Charleston, South Carolina, off Mayumba on 8 September 1858, is typical of Eason's
power of observation:
On Wednesday the 8th at about 10 o'clock in the forenoon, our lookout man reported
a sail on the starboard bow. Twas a little cloudy & she was heading in for the
land; we make her out to be a Brigantine. When she saw us, she changed her course,
hauled up on a wind & tried to cross our bows. Making all sail, we chased him,
under no colours; she tried hard to give us the slip, but at 11 o'clock we came up
with her but she, showing no colours, we fired a shot cross her bows, & in a
twinkling of an eye, the Stars and Stripes were floating at her peak, no colours
have ever been hoisted faster than these were. She had evidently been waiting for
us to hoist our Ensign first so that she might hoist false ones & thus blindfold
us. She thought us to be an Englishman & hence her hoisting the American flag,
as if we had been what she expected, we could not have searched her. We sent a boat
after her with Lieut. Stone & then hoisted our colours, quickly showing her the
mistake she had made, in supposing us to be an Englishman. Lieut. Stone, shortly
returned from her, bringing with him a box of prime Havana Segars, as a present to
our Captain, which present that gentleman refused but immediately boarded her himself
taking with him, our Carpenter & Lieut. Stone. She was lying close to us &
we could see everything that took place aboard of her. I saw a friend of mine, named
Barnard Ford, with an axe in his hand, he had just broken open a large box, which
was found to contain slave boilers for cooking rice in for the slaves. "This
is the thing we want,” he cried, & our old Captain’s eyes looked as big as a
thirty two pound shot. Barney then dropped the axe, I went to the wheel, looking
as big as a Commodore on a ten years furlough. Her name was the Brothers of Charleston,
she was two months from Havana, her skipper said she had a general cargo. She had
100 barrels of bread, 5O barrels of rice, 40 water casks, 2 coppers [large pots]
for cooking, 15 sponges, 40 water pails, 650 wooden demons, lumber for slave deck,
medicines, plenty of good liquor & preserved meat, also 527 Spanish Doubloons.
Her crew were 1 American, 2 Spaniard, 1 Portuguese & a sick man in the Forecastle.
We took the money aboard our ship, her Captain looking hard at us, when he saw us
handling his gold. The day following we sent 1 Lieutenant, l Midshipman, 6 seamen,
& 3 Marines, who were to take her to the U.S. as a prize. In the evening the
got under weigh, we doing the same, she took the lead about three miles, but we came
up to her, & gave her three cheers, which they returned. All on board of her
looked happy excepting her own crew, who were “prisoners,” But such are the fortunes
of war.
Like all too many vessels seized by the African Squadron on suspicion of slaving,
the Brothers was returned to her owners. Against all the incriminating evidence
Eason described, Judge Magrath of Charleston dismissed the libel on the grounds that
there was nothing in the cargo "which of itself leads to a conclusion of a criminal
purpose or excludes the fact of such articles having been intended for a lawful purpose."34
On the Marion's second cruise, the seizure of the New York bark Orion
had an even more outrageous consequence than the taking of the Brothers. On
17 April 1859 British officers from HMSTriton informed the Marion that
they had detained the Orion up the Congo River as a suspected slaver. Captain
Brent searched the vessel and found "two sets of slave coppers [cooking pots],
a large quantity of medicine & about 15000 feet of lumber," plus firearms
and "large quantities of preserved meats." With a prize crew from the Marion,
the Orion was sent to New York for trial. On arrival in June 1859, the vessel
was held under bond. However, the bonding procedure allowed the owner to keep his
vessel in service until the court acted. The owner promptly sold the Orion
and she embarked on yet another slaving cruise! 35
On 29 December 1859, while patrolling off the Congo, the Clarion received
news of the Orion ‘s release. In his journal, Eason bluntly indicted the American
judicial system for failing to back the U.S. Navy in halting the slave trade in West
Africa:
We heard that our Slavers we sent home had been acquitted because the Jury could
not find substantial evidence to condemn them. The Orion came out on the coast as
a trader the second time & the consequence was that the American Commodore detained
her six days but could find nothing to condemn her & a short time after the English
steamer Pluto captured her with 808 slaves on board & took her to St. Helena.
This will make our people at home open their eyes at an American ship capturing slavers
& sending them home for triall [sic]& get honorably acquited then
come & load up with slaves three months after. The Orion had everything that
is needed on board of slavers.
The patrolling officers developed an intuitive sense of a vessel's guilt or innocence,
but sometimes they could not find enough incriminating evidence to warrant seizure.
An example was the case of the Mystic-built bark Ada Fish, which the Marion
encountered off the Congo River.36
"It falling a calm we sent a boat aboard of her. The Officer in charge of the
boat overhauled her papers and then returned again telling our Captain that looked
suspicious, being for the Congo river and belonging to the same owners as the Orion.."
Captain Brent himself then examined "her papers and cargo, but not finding sufficient
evidence to condemn her as a slaver. . . allowed her to proceed on her journey."
Captain Brent's suspicions of the ship were not entirely unfounded. After the trade
to Brazil was halted in the mid 1850s, the trade centered on Cuba and ownership of
slavers shifted to a cartel of Portuguese and American entrepreneurs in New York.
With a decline in maritime trade following the economic Panic of 1857, they were
able to acquire many conventional merchant vessels, like the Erie or Orion.
Some New England whale ships, with their large holds, and with try works that could
be converted to cooking rice, were quietly purchased for the trade as well.37
The immense profits made by successful slavers help explain why the trade persisted,
despite the risks, right up to the Civil War. The secretary of the navy suggested
that the only way to end the trade was for Britain to pressure Spain to live up to
its agreement to abolish the trade to Cuba, or--more provocatively--for the U.S.
to annex Cuba.38 Eason documented
the profits of the trade while cruising off Loango on 29 March 1859. "There
is a large barracoon here, owned by a Frenchman, in which were about 600 young Negroes,
of both sexes, who were to be sold for slaves, to any vessel who chose to come for
them. They can be bought for about $40 per head, in trade & they will fetch from
nine to twelve hundred in Cuba."
If enslaved Africans considered themselves fortunate in being freed by a British
or French warship hovering off the African coast, their future prospects were nearly
as bleak as being sold into slavery. Like Lieutenant Bridge 15 years earlier, Eason
condemned the long-standing practice of forcibly loading freed slaves onto warships
bound for the West Indies, where they would serve as plantation laborers or as soldiers.
"There is a French ship here, taking in 1500 Negroes. . . to transport to the
West Indies for apprentices," he wrote at Gabon in March 1859. "A nice
way of slaving, the French have."
Throughout his journal, Eason interspersed his reflections on the shortcomings of
the blockade with vivid sketches of daily life on a man of war. Gunnery practice
and sail-handling were regular parts of the routine, and Eason laconically mentioned
a shipmate who fell from aloft but landed safely in the hammock nettings on the Marion
‘s rail. Like a whaleship, the Maarion ‘s main deck was often "full of
pigs, fowls, goats and in fact anything that can be eaten." And apparently the
food was no better than that on a whaler: "Our bread was alive with worms and
small bugs," complained Eason. "I heard someone say they saw a bag of bread
walking up the fore royal back stay but I cannot vouch for its veracity."
Malaria and other fever-inducing diseases were the most dreaded afflictions aboard
ships sailing along the coast of equatorial Africa. No one knew that mosquitoes from
the coastal swamps transmitted disease, so ships' surgeons could only treat the symptoms.
Eason recorded his own plight near the Congo River on 16 March 1860: "This afternoon
five of our men were taken sick with the fever. I felt very bad all day and the next
morning I went to the Doctor. I had a burning fever every night and sometimes was
blind. The Doctor gave me a large quantity of Calomel and some pills."
Under such conditions, the normal two-year assignment to the African Squadron was
an ordeal. It is no wonder that, having attempted to enforce the blockade to the
best of their ability under trying circumstances, the crew cheered when the Clarion
received orders on 10 August 1860 to leave the African Squadron and sail for Portsmouth,
New Hampshire.
As the Marion departed, the African Squadron entered its most productive period.
On 8 August 1860 the steam sloops-of-war San Jacinto and Mohican took
the ship Erie with 897 slaves stowed below deck and the brig Storm King
with 619. The 1,483 survivors were delivered to Liberia, and the ships and crews
were sent to New York for trial. A month later theConstellation seized the
Cora with 705 slaves, and the steamer Mystic proved her utility by
capturing two slavers that year. Commodore Inman reported to Secretary of the Navy
Gideon Welles in 1861 that he had seized eleven ships and freed 2,793 slaves, "greater
in number and effect, than by the whole of the Squadrons that have preceded me."
Captain Gordon of the Erie would be hung in 1862, the only American citizen
to be executed under provisions of the 1820 Piracy Act.39
Despite Inman's belatedly valiant effort, soon after the Civil War started the U.S.
African Squadron was ordered home to help blockade Southern ports. Before departure,
the Constellation captured the brig Triton in the Congo River on 20
May 1861, perhaps the navy's last slave-ship capture on the West African coast. In
the emergency, President Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward, negotiated
a secret treaty with the British to assume the nation's share of the African blockade,
including the long-denied right of search of American-flag vessels by British warships.
For Hugh Thomas, a British historian, this was as if "Holy Writ had been denied."
Quickly adopted by Congressional vote, the treaty was never made public.40
Because the slave trade was a secret operation, historians can only approximate the
number of vessels involved, the number captured, the mortality rate, and the number
of slaves freed in the nineteenth century. During the entire nineteenth century,
about 7,750 slaving voyages were attempted, and 1,635--or 21 percent--of the vessels
were seized. Aboard the 79 percent of slave ships that evaded capture, the toll of
African captives was horrible. A survey of 17 vessels that carried Africans to Cuba
and Brazil between 1844 and 1860 suggests that 1,879 of the 10,744 captives died,
for a mortality rate of 17 percent. Although the U.S.was not a principal destination
for illegal slaving voyages, the last landing of slaves in the nation may have been
those delivered by the schooner Wanderer, which evaded the African Squadron
in 1858. The Confederate States of America also prohibited the slave trade, so there
were no known landings during the Civil War. The last verified landing of slaves
in Cuba was in January 1870, when 900 Africans were delivered.41
How successful were naval efforts? Estimates suggest that 2,000,000 Africans were
enslaved between 1800 and 1870, and 200,000, or 10 percent of them, were freed through
the efforts of naval patrols. Of the 200,000 liberated Africans, the Royal Navy's
West African Squadron accounted for approximately 160,000. From 1843 to 1857, the
U.S. Navy took only 19 slavers, six of which were actually condemned, while the Royal
Navy seized 600 vessels, 562 of which were condemned.42
Summed up, several factors contributed to the U.S. Navy's inability to stem the flow
of slave traffic from Africa to the Americas between 1820 and 1862. These included
the Navy Department's emphasis on protecting commerce rather than apprehending slavers,
the consequent inadequacy of the naval force assigned to the African Squadron, apathetic
support for the effort in Congress, Southern opposition in the 1850s to continuance
of the blockade, and the great profits that could be made by slavers throughout the
period.
All of these factors were significant, but the weight of evidence strongly suggests
that primary emphasis should be on two more fundamental issues. First, the U.S. government's
unbending refusal to accept the right of search of American-flag vessels by British
Royal Navy officers--a legacy of the first decade of the century that was strongly
backed by the chauvinistic American public--made the American flag a shield for slave
traders throughout the period. Without fear of interdiction by British cruisers,
and with slight chance of encountering a vessel from the U.S. Navy's small African
Squadron, slavers commonly adopted the American flag. An agreement with Great Britain
in 1842, or in any year before 1862, would have increased the capture of slavers
and suppressed the trade far more rapidly.
Second, the blindly legalistic judicial process, in both Southern and Northern courts,
more often than not resulted in release of suspected slavers captured by the African
Squadron, even in the face of compelling evidence. With the spirit of free trade
and personal property rights espoused so strongly, slavers faced little chance of
conviction in U.S. courts. Consequently, the trade continued with the tacit support
of the American people. Had these conditions been reversed by the mid-1830s, the
grim saga of the Amistad might never have unfolded.
Notes
1. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 547, 554.
2. See Benjamin W. Labaree, et al, America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic: Mystic Seaport, 1998), or any comprehensive text on American history, such as Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press 1965), 375.
3. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 583; Robert Vogel,Without Consent or Contract (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 20-32.
4. W.E.F. Ward,The Royal Navy and the Slavers (New York: Schoken Books, 1970), 121; see also Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass & Company 1968), 45-47.
5. Lieutenant Forbes, Six Months Service in the African Blockade (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), 94; George E. Brooks, Jr., Yankee Traders, Old Coasters and African Middlemen (Boston: Boston University Press, 1970), 113.
6. Brooks,Yankee Traders, 108; Alan R. Booth "The United States African Squadron, 1843-1861, " Boston University Papers in African History, vol. 1, Jeffrey Butler, ed. (Boston: Boston University Press, 1964), 81.
7. Kenneth J. Hagan,This People’s Navy: The Making of American Seapower (New York: Free Press, 1991), 93-94.
8. Booth, "The United States African Squadron," 83.
9. J.L. Cummings, Journal, U.S. frigate John Adams, 1820-22, Log 10, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport; Brooks, Yankee Trader, 200.
10. William E Lynch, Naval Life; or Observations Afloat and on Shore (New York: Charles Scribner, 1851), quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison,"Old Bruin,” Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 74.
11. Hugh G. Soulsby, The Right of Search and the Slave Trade in Anglo-American Relations, 1814-1862 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), 20.
12. Ibid., 23.
13. Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837-1862 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 30-32; see also Thomas,The Slave Trade, 642.
14. Howard, American Slavers, 33; Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 74-75.
15.New England Merchants in Africa: A History Through Documents, 1802 to 1865, Norman R. Bennett and George E. Brooks, Jr., eds. (Boston: Boston University Press, 1963), 319; see also Horatio Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. (New York: G.R Putnam, 1853), 112.
16. Howard, American Slaves, 4-8; Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, 551; Forbes, Six Months Service, 26.
17. Howard, American Slavery, 25.
18. J.C. Furnas, "Patrolling
the Middle Passage,” American Heritage 9 (October 1958):7.
19. William A. Graham, Report
of the Secretary of the Navy, 29 November l851 (Washington, D.C., 1852), 4-5.
20. Booth, "The United States
African Squadron," 89-90.
21. Ward, Royal Navy and the
Slavers, 46-47.
22. Donald R Wright, "Matthew
Perry and the African Squadron, "America Spreads Her Sails: US Seapower in
the Nineteenth Century (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1973), 93. In "Old
Bruin,” his highly readable biography of Perry, Samuel Eliot Morison insists
that "both the administration and Perry were sincere in their efforts to suppress
this abominable practice" (page 168), but he offers little evidence to support
his contention. In The Slave Trade, Hugh Thomas remarks, "Perry's enthusiasm
for putting down the slave trade was modest" (page 727). Perhaps contemporary
historians have made too much of the fact that Perry's brother Raymond married the
daughter of James DeWolfe in 1814 and that the Perry clan was on cordial terms with
their Bristol, Rhode Island, relatives. In Chronicles of the Frigate Macedonian
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 224, James Tertius DeKay proposes that Perry "was
a creature of his times. He saw what he wished to see, and overlooked those things
he found disagreeable."
23. J.Y. Mason, Report of the
Secretary of the Navy, 25 November 1844 (Washington, D.C., 1845), 514. The figures
listed by Mason and his successors are not always accurate. All ships in the squadron
were usually listed, whether on station or coming or going between the U.S. and Africa.
24. Howard, American Slavers,
280; William E. Lynch, "Report of Commander W.F. Lynch, in relation to his mission
to the coast of Africa," Appendix B to J.C. Dobbin, Report of the Secretary
of the Navy, December 1853 (Washington, D.C., 1854), 388-89; see also Pegram
Harrison, "A Blind Eye Toward the Slave Trade," Naval History (September/October
1996): 43-46.
25. "General Orders, USS Portsmouth,
Flag Ship of Commodore F.H. Gregory, Commander U.S. Naval Forces West Coast of Africa,"
1849, Misc. Vol. 397, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport.
26. Quoted in L.E Hill, Diplomatic
Relations Between the United Stales and Brazil (Durham, North Carolina: Duke
University Press, 1932), 127-28.
27. Thomas, The Slave Trade,
689-705.
28. Howard, American Slavers,
102-07.
29. Andrew Hull Foote, Africa
and the American Flag (1854: reprint, Folkestone and London: Dawsons of Pall
Mall, 1970), 258 and ff., 300, 387. Foote commanded the brig Perry in the
African Squadron in 1850-51. Born at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806, he had entered
the navy in 1822 and would serve in the West Indian, African, and Asian Squadrons
before commanding the Union gunboat flotilla on the western rivers early in the Civil
War. Wounded at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, he was promoted to rear admiral, but died
in June 1863 before taking command of the Union fleet off Charleston.
30. Morison, Oxford History of
the American People, 573; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil
War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 102-03.
31. Booth, "The United States
African Squadron," 108; Hagan,This People’s Navy, 154-55; see also Isaac
Toucey, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 2 December 1859 (Washington,
D.C., 1860), 1138-39.
32. Henry Eason, Journal, U.S. sloop-of-war
of Marion, 1858-60, Log 902, G.W. Blunt White
Library, Mystic Seaport.
33. According to William E Lynch,
"They seldom speak English well, and they understand it but imperfectly. They
are very fond of adopting what man-of-war sailors call 'pursers' names, such as 'pipe
of tobacco,' 'bottle of beer,' 'tin pot,' 'pea soup,' 'half dollar,' 'after breakfast,'
etc." Appendix B. J.C. Dobbin, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, December
1853, 369.
34. Howard, American Slavers,
96-97.
35. Ibid., 174.
36. William N. Peterson, Mystic
Built: Ships and Shipyards of the Mystic River, Connecticut, 1784-1919 (Mystic:
Mystic Seaport Museum, 1989), 165.
37. Kevin Reilly, "Slavers
in Disguise: American Whaling and the African Slave Trade, 1852-1862," American
Neptune 53:3 (Summer 1993): 177-89.
38. Isaac Toucey, Report of the
Secretary of the Navy, 1 December 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1861), 8-9.
39. Booth, "The United States
African Squadron," 110; James A. Rawley, "Captain Nathaniel Gordon, The
Only American Executed for Violating the Slave Trade Laws," Civil War History
39:3 (September 1993): 216-24.
40. Gideon Welles, Report of
the Secretary of the Navy, 2 December l861 (Washington, D.C., 1862), 5, 21.
41. Thomas, The Slave Trade,
784; Howard, American Slavers , Appendix D.
42. Varying interpretations for
the failure of the U.S. Navy's African Squadron to establish a successful blockade
of the slave trade may be read in Booth, "The United States African Squadron,"
and in John Davis, "How and Why the United States African Squadron Failed to
Suppress the Trans-Atantic Slave Trade," typescript, 1990, RF 532, G.W. Blunt
White Library, Mystic Seaport.
A U.S. Navy veteran of World War II, Calvin Lane is professor emeritus of English at the University of Hartford and a member of Mystic Seaport's interpretive staff.
