Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XX

Remarkable in itself are the sheer numbers of DeWolf voyages. They launched 88 slave voyagers between 1784 and 1807, four times more than their closest Rhode Island rivals. DeWolfs personally commanded many of these voyages, while Capt. James DeWolf is supposed to have made his farewell voyage in 1807 aboard the Andromache, the pride of their entire fleet.

Moreover, the DeWolfs ran an integrated business: shipping molasses from their Cuban sugar plantations to their distilleries in Bristol. They even established a bank and an insurance company dedicated to supporting the Bristol trade.

When the Charleston slave market reopened in 1804, they sent a young DeWolf to set up an office there. After Congress voted to close the trade, the DeWolf family rushed 18 ships filled with Africans to South Carolina alone in barely 7 months. Traffic became so heavy that Charleston newspapers ran articles worrying about the health threat from dead slaves floating in the harbor. (Slave shipments to S.C.: McMillin, Final Victims, pp. 180-181, 215.)

The DeWolf shipments, added in with those of other Bristol and Newport slave merchants, would haunt the North in the coming national fight over slavery.

The slave trade, having been illegal for more than ten years, when, in 1820 Senator William Smith of South Carolina had the opportunity to "gig" Senator James DeWolf.

Missouri's admission to the Union was being debated when DeWolf was forced to listen to Senator Smith mock him in a speech attacking Northern hypocrisy. "The people of Rhode Island have lately shown bitterness against slaveholders, and especially against the admission of Missouri," said Sen. Smith. "This, however, cannot, I believe be the temper or opinion of the majority, from the late election of James DeWolf as a member of this house, as he has accumulated an immense fortune in the slave trade." (Senator William Smith, quoted in Howe, Mount Hope, p. 190.)

There seems to be an unspoken law against impugning a Senator by name and Smith was reprimanded for it; however this merely caused Sen. Smith to make a more thinly disguised accusation: " I dare not ask whether citizens of Rhode Island have trafficked in slaves since such traffic became illegal---that were indeed out of order but would show the Senate that those people who most deprecate the evils of slavery and traffic in human flesh, when a profitable market can be found, can sell human flesh with as easy a conscience as they sell other articles."

Smith also introduced records he'd got from the Charleston customhouse for the years 1804-08; the "black catalog", as he called it showed of 12,000 slaves imported on U.S. ships, almost 8,000 were shipped on R.I. vessels. A secessionist theme would later follow DeWolf's themes involving New England, Great Britain and finally the South.

By far DeWolf's most important senatorial act was in amending a new treaty that allowed the British and U.S. navies to jointly patrol the African coast for illegal slave ships. His amendment denied British the right to board American vessels, but 1860 would prove a turning point. This vastly helped give New York City the freedom to become the criminal headquarters of a massive illegal slave trade to markets in Brazil and Cuba.  One can easily see that New York City merely shifted their slave trade from one point to another: to markets outside the states and kept making their profits.  This is sheer hypocrisy.  Why aren't these matters ever discussed while we're busily carving up the South's reputation?

Even though the South was looked down on for slavery it's no secret that in the colonial era even the most respectable New England merchants were prolific smugglers; they ignored the very loosely enforced British trade rules and Rhode Islanders were adept. Ignoring early federal laws later that prohibited U.S. citizens from transporting slaves to foreign countries, they looked ahead and saw many of the the illegal slave traders' methods; so they disguised their ships with foreign flags , landed their illicit cargoes in remote coves, and brought back confiscated ships for a fraction of their value. Simeon Potter, suggested (as an old privateer) that his nephew James could bypass federal laws by landing slaves in Georgia , then smuggle them to Cuba, where they'd be sold for a higher price. "This is my advice, you can take or leave as you please, but it must be kept a profound secret," Simeon Potter wrote. (quoted in Howe, Mount Hope, p.94.)

And although Senator Smith of South Carolina was correct when he said that Rhode Island kept up the trade after it became illegal in 1808, James DeWolfe still insisted that he'd retired after it became illegal in 1808.

But, he sold 3, at least, of his slave ships, to his nephew George DeWolf . 1810 shows George could afford a $60,000 mansion in Bristol and he also kept "Noah's Ark", a name he gave his Cuban plantation. It's assumed he also smuggled surplus slaves from Noah's Ark to the South. (Howe, Mount Hope, pp. 230-233.) But this slave trade was nearing its end, in 1820 when Sen. Smith reproached the town; within the same year Congress passed a law mandating the death penalty for those trafficiking in African slaves, so in 1825 George DeWolfe suddenly went bankrupt.

Newport, like Bristol, had failed to come to terms with the end of the slave trade; and in earlier years customs collector Ellery had written to Moses Brown, "An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be enduced to change so lucrative a trade."(Howe, Mount Hope, pp. 230-233.)

 I have suggested on several boards that more effort should have been made to buy out the Southerners over the matter of their slaves. After all, this is a huge anachronism: Slavery kept the cotton coming in huge supplies, and the Northern cotton textile industries wanted more and more cotton. Meanwhile the abolitionists, in their righteous indignation demanded that the South get rid of slavey: just like that. Take away the way money was made in this agriculural area, with absolutely no offers as to "how" this could be done without wiping out the livelihood of an entire region of the country.

We are NOT just talking talking about the plantation owners, but the farmers who depended on the cotton crop (and as a reminder, most of them owned NO slaves!)

Upon further reading, I have come upon this. In 1860 ships destined to carry slaves were built and sold in New York. August, 1860 found a U.S. Navy steamer patrolling the African coast where it intercepted a ship that was sailing close to the mouth of the Congo. The Erie was flying an American flag ad proof of her nationality and innocence. But when naval officers boarded her, they found her crammed with nearly 900 newly purchased Africans. (Erie capture: Rawley,"Captain Nathaniel Gordon", p. 216.)

Their "middle passage" had just begun, but they already stank with their own filth, had running sores eating at their flesh; stripped naked and packed like cattle, the Africans almost stampeded when their rescuers tried to give them water. Even with the care of the U.S. Navy, 30 would die in the 15 days it took to deliver them to Liberia, sanctuary and dumping ground for slavery's refugees.

The Erie, her crew were sent to N.Y. City, where their voyage had begun, and where ships like theirs were well known. New York, by 1860 was notorious as the hub of an international slave trade that, like the drug traffic of later days, was just too lucrative and too corrupt to stop!

These New York ships were built & sold, outfitted for their African voyages , sometimes complete with shackles and the supersized water tanks needed for their human cargo right there in N.Y.; customs agents, either uncaring or bribed, looked away as slave ships sailed out of N.Y. harbor under the flimsiest of disguises. Traffickers relied on fake owners, forged documents, and, the American flag's guarantee of immunity from seizure by foreign nations.

The illegal slave trade was carried on out in the open: New York newspapers reported the names of ships leaving for slave voyages. The barely clandestine trade flourished for 20 years. And, during peak years, 1859 and 1860, at least 2 slave ships left from N.Y. every month, according to one low estimate. Most could hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves. So in each of those years, New York ships might have carried as many as 20,000 new Africans into bondage.

These were not going South. At one point, most were sold in Spanish-controlled Cuba, one of the last open slave markets in the Western Hemisphere. In summer, 1860, the African slave traffic was so heavy that the U.S. Navy literally seized a 2nd slave ship in sight of the Erie.

The Storm King carried around 620 Africans, half of them children and the following month, the Cora, loaded with 700 Africans, was captured; all 3 were New York ships; and the slave ship captains usually hailed from the North, especially New England, which had dominated American shipping since colonial times. The Erie's captain, Nathaniel Gordon, was the son of a Portland, Maine, sea captain and a seasoned slave trader. (New York slave trade volume: Howard, American Slavers, pp. 56-65.)

(I wish I knew how to show pictures here.) There is one, in 1894, when Century magazine ran this illustration of a U.S. Navy vessel chasing the slave ship Cora toward the horizon, the slave trade was remembered with the gloss of adventure. But only on the verge of the Civil War did the U.S. Navy's Africa squadron begin to pursue illegal slavers aggressively. Century A Popular Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1, May 1894, Capture of the Slave-Ship "Cora" by Wilburn Hall, p. 115. (Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection.))

Another picture I wish you could see : "The hanging of Captain Nathaniel Gordon on February 21, 1862,marked the end of an era in which New York City was home port to illegal slave ships. His ship, the Erie, was captured in August 1860 loaded with nearly 900 slaves. Illustrations from Harper's Weekly, March 8, 1862. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

I wish to point out that all this was going on in the middle of the Civil War and the South had absolutely nothing to do with this at all.  Yet, when slavery is discussed in any classroom in these United States or I would go further and say, possibly, anywhere in the world, the South is chastised again and again for slavery, while New York, Rhode Island and all of New England remains lily-white (yes, that was a pun!) in the eyes of the world.

(These pictures courtesy of COMPLICITY, Farrow, Lang, and Frank, Ballantine Books, New York, copyright 2005, are shown in this book on pages 122 and 123)

I submit that this continued persecution of the South should stop and the whole truth should be told to the world.  History deserves better than it has been shown to our school children who look at the South and think they were the only guilty parties. 

I also would like to know why, if my fellow amateur historians on these boards have known about these slave ships that continued their journeys on Northern ships well into the Civil War, why have they not come forward on their own and told this part of history?  I can only hope that I have introduced material that they were unaware of.  Otherwise the thought sickens me that the truth was just left covered.

It is much too easy to blame the South and allow the world to think that Abraham Lincoln and the North were the "grand saviors" of these United States. But much of it has been a lie.  Wasn't the North interested at all in slavery anywhere else?  After all, these were Northern ships.