The American Empire

by Scott Nearing

3. The Slave Trade

With the pressing demand from the Americas for a generous supply of black slaves, the business of securing them became one of the chief commercial activities of the time. "The trade bulked so large in the world's commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that every important maritime community on the Atlantic sought a share, generally with the sanction and often with the active assistance of its respective sovereign."[16]

The catching, holding and shipping of Negroes on the African coast was the means by which the demand for slaves was met. With a few minor exceptions, the whites did not engage directly in slave catching. In most instances they bought their slaves from native brokers who lived in the coast towns. The brokers, in turn, received their slaves from the interior, where they were captured during wars, by professional raiding parties, well supplied with arms and ammunition. Slave-catching, begun as a kidnaping of individuals, developed into a large-scale traffic that provided the revenue of the more war-like natives. Villages were attacked and burned, and whole tribes were destroyed or driven off to the slave-pens on the coast. After 1750, for nearly a hundred years, the demand for slaves was so great and the profits were so large that no pains were spared to secure them.

The Slave Coast native was compelled to choose between being a slave-catcher or a slave. As a slave-catcher he spread terror and destruction among his fellows, seized them and sold them to white men. As a slave he made the long journey across the Atlantic.

The number of slaves carried away from Africa is variously estimated. Claridge states that "the Guinea Coast as a whole supplied as many as from 70,000 to 100,000 yearly" in 1700.[17] Bogart estimates the number of slaves secured as 2,500 per year in 1700; 15,000 to 20,000 per year from 1713 to 1753; in 1771, 47,000 carried by British ships alone; and in 1768 the slaves shipped from the African coast numbered 97,000.[18] Add to these numbers those who were killed in the raids; those who died in the camps, where the mortality was very high, and those who committed suicide. The total represents the disturbing influence that the slave trade introduced into the native African civilization.

In the early years of the trade the ships were small and carried only a few hundred Negroes at most. As the trade grew, larger and faster ships were built with galleries between the decks. On these galleries the blacks were forced to lie with their feet outboard—ironed together, two and two, with the chains fastened to staples in the deck. "They were squeezed so tightly together that the average space allowed to each one was but 16 inches by five and a half feet."[19] The galleries were frequently made of rough lumber, not tightly joined. Later, when the trade was outlawed, the slaves were stowed away out of sight on loose shelves over the cargo. "Where the 'tween decks space was two feet high or more, the slaves were stowed sitting up in rows, one crowded into the lap of another, and with legs on legs, like rider on a crowded toboggan." (Spears, p. 71.) There they stayed for the weeks or the months of the voyage. "In storms the sailors had to put on the hatches and seal tight the openings into the infernal cesspool." (Spears, p. 71.) The odor of a slaver was often unmistakable at a distance of five miles down wind.

The terrible revolt of the slaves in the West Indies, beginning in 1781, gave the growing anti-slavery sentiment an immense impetus. It also gave the slave owners pause. The cotton-gin had not yet been invented. Slavery was on a shifty economic basis in the South. Great Britain passed the first law to limit the slave trade in 1788; the United States outlawed the trade in 1794. In 1824 Great Britain declared the slave trade piracy. During these years, and during the years that followed, until the last slaver left New York Harbor in 1863, the trade continued under the American flag, in swift, specially constructed American-built ships.

As the restrictions upon the trade became more severe in the face of an increasing demand for slaves, "the fitting out of slavers developed into a flourishing business in the United States, and centered in New York City." The New York Journal of Commerce notes in 1857 that "down-town merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying and selling African Negroes, and have been, with comparatively little interruption for an indefinite number of years." A writer in the Continental Monthly for January, 1862, says:—"The city of New York has been until of late the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Boston and Portland, are only second to her in distinction." During the years 1859-1860 eighty-five slavers are reported to have fitted out in New York Harbor and these ships alone had a capacity to transport from 30,000 to 60,000 slaves a year.[20]