Sixteen years afterward Mr. De Wolf was elected a member of the United States Senate, where his large business experience and his special knowledge of industrial and commercial conditions gave him great influence. Like most of the Senators from the Northern States he opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave State. Public opinion in the North concerning slavery had greatly changed since 1808. In that year the African slave trade was prohibited by law, and very soon after all the leading nations of the world united in efforts to suppress it. But because it immediately became more profitable than ever before, men still continued to engage in it. Then came the “horrors of the Middle Passage” (i.e., the voyage from Africa to the West Indies) at which all the world shuddered. Those who had engaged in the earlier trade were covered with an obloquy which they did not deserve.
Public opinion concerning slavery as practiced in the South also changed, but not so quickly in South Carolina, the leading slave State, as elsewhere. There the planters who formed the governing class had only come to draw a distinction between the men who brought the slaves from Africa and the men who used them after they were landed in America. Even today, in the North as well as the South, the same subtle distinction is drawn. The fact that the men who brought slaves faced innumerable dangers in their voyages counted for nothing in the judgment of those who, in ease and safety, enjoyed the fruits of slave labor. Senator Smith of South Carolina was the exponent of the Southern idea. In an impassioned speech he reflected severely upon the bitterness the people of Rhode Island had lately shown against slaveholders, and especially against the admission of Missouri as a slave State. “This, however, he believed could not be the temper or opinion of the majority, from the late election of James De Wolf as a member of the Senate, as he had accumulated an immense fortune by the slave trade.” He went on to say that, of the two hundred and two vessels whose names he gave, “ten and their African cargoes belonged to Mr. De Wolf,” and he closed his speech with a recapitulation tabulating the facts given in the following paragraph:
From January 1, 1804, to December 31, 1807, inclusive, two hundred and two slave ships entered the port of Charleston. Seventy of these vessels were owned in Great Britain, three in France, one in Sweden, sixty-one in Charleston, fifty-nine in Rhode Island and eight in other American ports. Of the two hundred and two consignees ninety-one were natives of Great Britain, eighty-eight of Rhode Island, thirteen of Charleston and ten of France. Altogether, 39,075 slaves were brought in. More than half of them, 19,949, came under the British flag. French ships brought 1,078. The fifty-nine vessels hailing from Rhode Island brought in 8,238, as follows: Bristol ships, 3,914, Newport 3,488, Providence 556, Warren 280. As is evident from the cargoes the American vessels engaged in the trade were much smaller than the foreign craft. The seventy British slavers averaged almost two hundred and eighty-five slaves each. The French average was three hundred and fifty-nine plus, while the fifty-nine Rhode Islanders averaged not quite one hundred thirty-nine and a half. The foreign vessels were probably full rigged ships, while the Narragansett Bay craft were for the most part brigs and schooners of two hundred tons or less. Even so they were larger than the Newport slavers captured by the enemy in the early years of the “Old French and Indian War,” a part of the Seven Years War in Europe, 1756-1763. Those vessels had “live cargoes” varying from forty-three to one hundred and thirty head. The Caesar of Newport, a full rigged ship, carried only one hundred and sixteen. Of the vessels mentioned in these Tales the Yankee’s tonnage was one hundred and sixty tons. The Juno was a full rigged ship of two hundred and fifty tons, one of the finest vessels sailing from Bristol in her time. The cargo of twenty Junos could easily be stowed in the holds of one of the five masted schooners that bring coal into the port of Providence today. The tonnage of the Prince Charles of Lorraine is not known.
Study of the statistical tables on which Senator Smith based his remarks[40] shows that Mr. De Wolf was interested in four other Rhode Island ships besides the ten credited to him by the Senator from South Carolina. These hailed from Rhode Island and were consigned to Christian & De Wolf. He may also have been the owner of three other Rhode Islanders which on their first voyage were not consigned to him. The statistics show that the voyage to Africa and return must ordinarily have taken more than a year. During the year 1804 but three Rhode Island slave ships entered the port of Charleston, and the total number of slavers was twenty, of which seven hailed from Charleston itself. The next year the number of arrivals had increased to thirty, six of which were owned in Rhode Island and five in South Carolina. In 1806 the number of arrivals was fifty-six, thirteen being Rhode Island vessels, and the same number hailing from Charleston. In the last open year, 1807, the arrivals leaped to ninety-six, thirty-seven of them belonging in Rhode Island and thirty-three in South Carolina. Of the Rhode Island vessels, two, the Neptune and the Hiram, made three round trips each, while ten others brought in two cargoes. Two of the sixty-one Charleston ships made three voyages, and five accomplished two. Nine of the vessels of Great Britain made two voyages each; no British vessel made three. The four big Frenchmen entered the harbor but once. Apparently small, swift ships were more profitable than large ones. Necessarily a large part of the trip was consumed in securing a cargo, and the dangers of the “coast fever” were greatest in the case of a large ship.
The African trade was but one of the commercial avenues in which Mr. De Wolf’s ships sailed. His larger vessels had already visited Chinese ports when the smaller craft turned their prows toward Africa. While the little Hiram was gathering cargoes of naked negroes, the full rigged ship Juno was filling its hold with the furs of the frozen “Northwest Coast.” How exceedingly profitable that venture was we have already learned from the account of “Norwest John.” Until the year 1812 the chief obstacle to the development of American commerce was the constant interference of British warships and their illegal impressment of American sailors on the pretence that the men impressed were not Americans but Englishmen, and therefore subject to the British Crown. As a large ship owner Mr. De Wolf had suffered great losses. Of these he had kept a careful account and he longed for the day of retaliation to come. To most of the New Englanders of that day the act passed on June 18, 1812, declaring war between the United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland seemed the death blow to their commercial prosperity. Not so did it seem to James De Wolf. He saw in it the opportunity to regain from captured merchantmen all that he had lost at the hands of British men-of-war. Not for personal reasons alone did he rejoice at the commencement of hostilities. He believed that the interests of the whole country demanded it; all his sympathies were enlisted in it; all his resources he confidently staked upon the final issue of the struggle. He caused the banks in which he owned a controlling interest to invest all their available capital in United States bonds, and when the national credit was lowest he advanced from his own purse money to build a sloop of war.[41] Mr. De Wolf early grasped the fact that the only vulnerable part of Great Britain, as far as the United States was concerned, was its merchant marine. He foresaw that the American privateers would drive the English commerce from the ocean and he at once proceeded to perform his part in accomplishing that result. Not the United States war vessels, marvellous though their achievements were, but the privateers that sailed out from Bristol and Baltimore and many ports of New England, brought the War of 1812 to an end.
Besides the Yankee Mr. De Wolf was the principal owner of three other privateers, the Water Witch, the Blockade and the Macdonough. The Water Witch was the only one of these to send a prize into Bristol harbor. She was a little coasting schooner of more than ordinary speed. Her owners procured for her a privateer’s license that she might seize the slower craft that furnished the British fleet with supplies. Her one prize was a flour laden schooner which netted a profit to its owners of about $5,000, a sum which paid for the Water Witch several times over. The Blockade sailed from Bristol on a four months cruise November 19, 1812. It had been planned that she should sail in company with the Yankee but that little hermaphrodite brig[42] was too fast for her. She took a dozen or more vessels, but all her prizes were recaptured and she proved to be only a bill of expense to her owners. From the Macdonough great things were hoped. She was much the largest and fastest of the Bristol ships but she entered the contest too late. She found an ocean swarming with the sails of warships when she sailed out from Narragansett Bay. Her wonderful speed prevented her capture and she was able to take many prizes but all her prizes were retaken. Oliver Wilson, successful captain of the Yankee on two of her cruises, was her commander on her one cruise, so it goes without saying that she was well handled, but she proved to be a losing investment. She was built by Captain Carr at Warren in the last year of the war, and after the struggle was ended was placed in the Cuban trade. Once she made the voyage from Havana to Bristol in six days notwithstanding the fact that she was lying becalmed for a whole day. After the slave trade had been declared illegal and hence required the very swiftest vessels for its service, she was sold to Cuban parties who fitted her for a slaver. Her career as such was not long. Having a cargo of slaves on board she was chased one day by a warship, and, running for shelter into the harbor of Matanzas, struck upon a reef on which she was soon pounded to pieces. Her crew were saved to a man. Not so the slaves; they all perished.
Eleven days after the Declaration of War was proclaimed Mr. De Wolf sent to the Secretary of War this letter:
Bristol, R.I., June 30, 1812.
The Honorable William Eustis,
Secretary of War:—