Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

XXII

While I got side-tracked for a while I now wish to get back to what was happening with the illegal slave trade as we left off with the sea captain, Nathaniel Gordon, the seasoned slave trader who was finally hung for his misdeeds, becoming the first and only American ever executed for participating in the African slave trade.   

Earlier in his career, in 1853, U.S. diplomats had reported that Gordon landed 500 slaves near Rio de Janeiro and then burned his ship to escape capture.   (This was when the coffee plantations of Brazil were a market for slaves.)  Not many slave ship captains had such long careers as Gordon. Their biggest risk wasn't capture but dying from fever on the African coast or being killed in a slave revolt.  For the captives, captain, & crew , slave ships had an epithet that Brazilians had given them: tombeiros, which means "bearers to the tomb."

This Captain Gordon met a fate that neither he nor the New Yorkers of his day could have expected.  The federal government had passed the first law regulating the transatlantic slave trade even before it outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808.

In 1820 trafficking in slaves was made an act of piracy and a capital crime for U.S. citizens, though the law was hardly anything to stop them.  For the next four decades, prosecutions for piracy were rare, and convictions were nonexistent.

The good Captain Gordon almost got off himself.  His first trial ended with a split jury.  His 2nd trial, in November 1861, took place in a less forgiving atmosphere.  North and South were now at war and the new administration was less tolerant of slavery.  The Captain was convicted and sentenced to death; Abraham Lincoln twice refused to spare Gordon, even though a petition for mercy had been signed by 11,000 sympathetic New Yorkers.

Gordon tried to still rule his destiny at the end.  On the night of his scheduled hanging, Gordon tried to poison himself by smoking cigars laced with strychnine. This failed and on Feb. 21, 1862, while a U.S. Marine Guard stood by to prevent a rumored rescue, the Yankee sea captain finally met his end.

This mid-nineteenth century illegal New York slave trade was in essence an intercontinental shell game.  Here's how it worked: From voyage to voyage, a ship might switch from legitimate merchant vessel to slave ship and back again.  Carrying duplicate sets of ownership papers, duplicate captains and crews, one American and one foreign, these ships crossed the Atlantic. 

New York emerged as the hub of the illegal trade for two reasons: firstly, the slave ships blended easily with the port's huge fleet of legitimate merchant ships and secondly, because of official indifference.

Samuel Rossiter Betts, a longtime federal judge in N.Y. was later praised as the father of U.S. admiralty law.  He set a standard of proof so high that slave trade convictions were rare and severe punishment even rarer.  (Betts once ordered a slave ship captain released on bail so he could go to Rio to gather information for his defense.  The captain never returned and was said to have bragged to his friends, "You don't have to worry about facing trial in New York City...I can get any man off in N.Y. for $1,000.")

New York, no matter how much disguise or neglect, could have been made safe for slave traders, however, without the national complicity that protected slave ships flying the American flag from the British, since Britain was the world power most dedicated to stopping the slave traffic.

Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833 and began to negotiate treaties that gave its much heralded navy the right to police the slave trade.  By the 1850s, the only holdout that mattered was the United States.  The U.S. government, jealous of the sovereignty of its ships at sea, and resentful of Britain's former domination, insisted that only its navy could detain American ships.

Five ships, a squadron, was all the U.S. Navy could must to patrol hundreds of miles of African coastline, and in the 2 decades before the seizing of the Erie the U.S. Africa squadron had caught precisely two ships actually loaded with slaves.  British commanders complained that their U.S. counterparts let slave ships pass unchallenged blatantly.  The 2 navies didn't attempt to cooperate fully until 1862, when President Lincoln reluctantly signed a treaty permitting the British to board ships flying the American flag.  Fearing public backlash, the Senate approved the agreement in secret.

No nation could completely shed the slave trade's taint. In the 18th century, Britain itself was a major slave carrier.  The 19th century saw defensive U.S. diplomats complaining that Britain allowed its own merchants to export goods to Africa that they knew supported the slave economy.

Henry Wise, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil in the 1840s wrote, "It is worse than idle for Great Britain to reproach the United States for permitting their flag and their vessels to be common [slave] carriers, as long as British manufacturers, merchants, brokers, and capitalists are allowed to furnish the very pabulum of the slave trade."   (Howard,Warren S. American Slavers and the Federal Law 1837-1862.  Berkeley:University of California Press, 1963, p. 11

And the efforts to suppress the slave trade were not entirely humanitarian by the British.  The British gained leverage over the African kingdoms squeezing the slave pipeline also helped it regain the competitive balance it lost after abolishing slavery in its colonies.  Besides that, when Britain's navy captured slave ships, they didn't always return the "liberated" slaves to Africa.  Often it delivered them to years of indentured labor on plantations in its Caribbean colonies.   

When the illegal trade went mostly to Brazil in the 1840s, New Yorkers were front men for foreigners based in Manhattan.  An entity known as the Portuguese Company that arranged slave voyages kept some offices; one, for carrying on a legal wine-importing business.  Another, where the man in charge was John Albert Machado, a naturalized American citizen from the Azores whose fleet of illegal slavers included New England whaling ships.  But, in June 1860, a whaler belonging to Machado, the Thomas Watson, aroused some suspicion while outfitting for an African voyage in New London, Connecticut, that customs officials there denied it clearance.  The Thomas Watson sailed to N.Y. and left from there; a few months later it landed 800 slaves in Cuba.