Bound for Canaan (4 page)

The slave trade could be immensely profitable. One slave ship, the
Hawke
, carried three thousand British pounds of goods to West Africa in January 1779, where they were traded for an unspecified number of slaves, of whom 386 survived to be sold for more than seventeen thousand pounds in America, earning the owners a profit of more than seven thousand pounds. Massive profits from the slave trade fueled England's eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. An early economist described the trade as “the first principle and foundation of all the rest, mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion,” generating capital that its wealthy investors in turn reinvested in mills, foundries, coal mines, quarries, canals, and other innovations, including James Watt's first steam engine.

By the time of the American Revolution, about two thousand American and British ships were engaged in transporting between forty thou
sand and fifty thousand Africans to the Americas every year. Although Thomas Jefferson, in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, disingenuously blamed the slave trade on the king of England, the North American colonies were deeply implicated in it as well. Slave ships sailing from Charleston and Savannah, and from northern ports such as New York and Boston, generated huge profits trading cargoes of New England rum for slaves in Africa, typically at a rate of two hundred gallons per slave. Ships' captains were usually paid with a percentage of the cargo. “For every Hundred and four slaves In the West Indies or Where ever sold, you are to have four,” one Yankee skipper was informed by his employers. Profits from sale of the slaves would be invested partly in West Indian molasses, which would be carried back to New England, to be distilled into more rum. When Parliament attempted to tax imported molasses in 1763, outraged Massachusetts merchants protested that it would ruin the slave trade. Such “taxation without representation” fanned already smoldering colonial resentment toward the Crown, contributing to revolution little more than a decade later.

No colony, or state, surpassed Rhode Island in its involvement in the transatlantic trade. Between 1725 and 1807, more than nine hundred Rhode Island ships sailed to the west coast of Africa, to bring an estimated 106,000 slaves back across the ocean to the Americas. Ships owned by merchants in just the three towns of Providence, Newport, and Bristol accounted for more than 60 percent of slaving voyages during that period, earning profits for investors from all levels of society, including the Brown family of Providence, the founders of Brown University. (Brown was not alone in benefiting from the slave trade: Harvard Law School's first endowed professorship, the Isaac Royall Chair, was financed with money from Royall's slave plantation on the island of Antigua, while Yale's first endowed professorship honored Philip Livingston, a slave trader.) Yankee merchants treated it as a trade like any other. “We left Anamaboe ye 8th of May, with most of our people and slaves sick,” Captain George Scott wrote to his Newport investors, in 1740, from the coast of West Africa. “We have lost 29 slaves. Our purchase was 129. We have five that swell'd and how it will be with them I can't tell. We have one-third of dry cargo left and two hhds. rum. I have repented a hundred times ye buying of them dry goods. Had we laid out two thousand pound in rum, bread and flour, it would purchased more in value than all our dry goods.”

On board ship, slaves were essentially stowed like any other commodity. Even in the better ships, conditions were horrific. Slaves were typically packed together so tightly in the hold that they could not move. In the “best regulated” ships, a grown person was allowed sixteen inches in width, thirty-two inches in height, and five feet eleven inches in length, or as was often said, “not so much room as a man has in a coffin.” Men were generally confined two and two together either by the neck, leg, or arm, with iron fetters, sitting cross-legged in rows, back to back. In most ships, the slaves were crammed so tightly that it was impossible to walk among them without stepping on human flesh. The Reverend John Newton, a reformed slave captain—and composer of the hymn “Amazing Grace”—wrote that the slaves lay “close to each other, like books upon a shelf: I have known them so close that the shelf would not easily contain one more. The poor creatures, thus cramped, are likewise in irons for the most part which makes it difficult for them to turn or move or attempt to rise or lie down, without hurting themselves or each other.” In the daytime, they were usually brought up at least briefly for air. It was not uncommon, at such moments, for despairing slaves to jump overboard to their deaths, in shackled pairs.

Olaudah Equiano, who was transported to the West Indies after his kidnapping in West Africa, remembered the voyage as a weeks-long nightmare of unremitting terror and excruciating discomfort. The stench of the hold was almost unbearable. “The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died…This deplorable situation was aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.”

Normal mortality during voyages was often as high as 25 percent. A similar proportion commonly died from illness, exposure, and shock before they were actually brought to sale, or during the so-called seasoning process, by which slaves were acclimated to their life and work in America, so that the total loss from any given voyage approached 50 percent. If there
was an emergency at sea, slaves were simply “jettisoned” like any other cargo, that is, thrown alive into the sea to drown. In one case, in 1781, the British-owned
Zong
set sail with 440 slaves, and a crew of 17. After two and a half months at sea, during which both the slaves and crew were decimated by rampant dysentery, the captain explained that if the slaves died of thirst or illness, the loss would fall on the owners of the vessel, but if they were thrown into the sea, it would be a legal jettison, covered by insurance. One hundred and thirty-two slaves were deemed too sick and not likely to live and were simply swung into the sea by their handcuffs. The ship's owners later claimed thirty pounds of insurance money for each. (The underwriters refused to pay, and the suit went to court, where it went against the ship's owners; it was the first case in which an English court ruled that a cargo of slaves could not be treated simply as merchandise.)

During the entire span of the transatlantic slave trade, the vast majority of slaves, perhaps as much as 85 percent, were taken to Brazil, the various European colonies in the Caribbean, and Spanish South America. The British colonies of North America and the United States imported only about 6 percent of the between ten and eleven million slaves that were brought from Africa. More than 40 percent of all slaves sold in North America were imported through Charleston, South Carolina. New shipments were advertised like any other commodity. One poetically inclined auctioneer proclaimed in the
South Carolina State Gazette
, in September 1784:

Slave sales of course existed in every major city. William Wells Brown, who escaped to the North in 1834, worked for a time as an assistant to a slave speculator, or “soul driver,” who made periodic trips down the Mississippi River with consignments of slaves to sell in the markets of New Orleans. Part of Brown's job was to prepare old slaves for market by shaving the men's whiskers off and plucking out their gray hairs, or else blacking them with dye, a process that took ten or fifteen years off the slaves' apparent age. Before the customers arrived, they were dressed and driven out into the yard, where, often in tears, some were set to dancing, some to jumping, some to singing, and some to playing cards. “This was done to make them appear cheerful and happy,” Brown wrote.

When demand was high, buyers were sometimes swept with what planters called “Negro fever.” Mobs descended on newly arrived ships, snatching at the ravaged and bewildered Africans, peering into mouths and grabbing at limbs, and buying what they wanted on the spot. In small communities, slave sales often took on an atmosphere resembling a country fair. One auction in rural North Carolina was described by a visiting Yankee ship's captain who attended it to entertain himself while his ship was being unloaded. The auction, the anonymous seaman wrote in his journal, brought crowds of the country people to town “and by the middle of the afternoon the streets and stores are pretty well speckled with drunkards.”

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For most people, as for the Yankee skipper, slavery was simply part of the American landscape, sometimes a pleasantly picturesque one. George Whitfield, an early Georgia religious leader, asserted in 1737 that to invite
white settlers to the colony without making it possible for them to own slaves was “little better than tying their legs and bidding them to walk.” One planter wrote, a few years later, “It is as clear as light itself, that negroes are as essentially necessary to the cultivation of Georgia as axes, hoes, or any other utensil of agriculture.” The noted Philadelphia botanist William Bartram, who traveled through the Southern states in the 1770s, took what he saw of slavery at bemused face value. An unusually acute observer when it came to plants, he was charmed by the picturesque sight of a South Carolina timber crew “of a gigantic stature, fat and muscular,” hewing great pine and cypress trees: “Contented and joyful, the sooty sons of Afric forgetting their bondage, in chorus sung the virtues and beneficence of their master in songs of their own composition.” The sanitized image of simple, happy slaves would become a classic one in an ever-growing body of pro-slavery literature that would continue to flourish without interruption through the romantic twentieth-century hokum of
Gone With the Wind
.

The truth, of course, is that slavery never had any innocence to lose, and it was never simple except in the eye of the white beholder. In 1790, a year after Josiah Henson's birth, there were 697,647 slaves in the United States, about 17 percent of the total population of 3,929,827. Within the common denominator of lifetime bondage, their lives varied considerably. The vast majority, perhaps 90 percent, worked at some form of agricultural labor. Women as well as men were often assigned to the heaviest work, such as plowing. Many others were trained to specialized trades, as carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, teamsters, grooms, and not infrequently as overseers. Slaves also worked as valets and maidservants, nurses, cooks, and laundresses, and as servants in hotels and taverns. They crewed trading vessels that ranged along the inland rivers and the Atlantic coast. In the estuaries of Chesapeake Bay and coastal North Carolina, slave watermen harvested shad, oysters, and crabs, and piloted oceangoing vessels around hidden shoals. In every major port, slave artisans worked at caulking and refitting, and slave draymen and stevedores moved cargoes of cotton and rice, molasses, rum, and Yankee textiles. Hired-out slaves worked in coal mines, foundries, textile mills, brickyards, and cigar factories. As far north as New England, slaves tilled fields and tended herds; in some rural areas of New York state, they reached 20 percent of the local population. While most slaves worked directly for their masters, many others
were leased out like modern-day rental equipment. In the personal papers of slave owners, there are relatively few references to “negroes” or “slaves,” apart from an occasional runaway, or the death of an especially trusted retainer. But then why should there be? Slaves were a form of real estate, or human furniture, so to speak, whose personal life had no more intimate meaning than that of a cow, or a settee. Where they were considered human, the law allowed them no claim on their own families. It has been estimated that in the Upper South forcible separations probably destroyed one out of every three first marriages by slaves, and that a similar proportion of enslaved children were taken away from one or both parents to be sold.

Slaves might be property, but they were costly property, especially at the dawn of the nineteenth century, when the burgeoning cotton industry dramatically increased the demand for labor just as public opinion was pressing for an end to the transatlantic slave trade. “The time has been,” complained one planter, “that the farmer could kill up and wear out one Negro to buy another; but it is not so now. Negroes are too high in proportion to the price of cotton, and it behooves those who own them to make them last as long as possible.” To return maximum value to their owners, slaves, like any expensive tools, had to be properly maintained. They had to be fed, clothed, housed, and kept in work.

When they failed to perform, they had to be punished. Disciplining slaves posed certain problems. In contrast to free laborers, slaves could not be fired, and they could not be jailed without losing the value of their work. Nor could they be fined, since they had no money. What remained was physical punishment, which at least in theory was carefully calibrated so that it wouldn't permanently damage the “property.” In 1710 the Virginia planter William Byrd noted in his diary that “my wife against my will caused little Jenny to be burned with a hot iron, for which I quarreled with her.” Boston King, a slave apprenticed to a Charleston carpenter in the 1770s, was beaten severely on the head when any of the men in the workshop misplaced one of the master's tools. Olaudah Equiano was terrified by the sight of a female slave, a cook, who, for unexplained reasons, “was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head [an “iron muzzle”], which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink.” On a Georgia plantation, floggings were regulated so that field drivers could administer
only twelve lashes, the head driver thirty-six, and the overseer no more than fifty, a number that would leave the victim's flesh in ribbons. In the late 1770s William Dunbar, a sophisticated Mississippi settler who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, condemned two runaways to five hundred lashes each, spaced out over time, and to “carry a chain & log fixt to the ancle.” Flogging, it should be said, was also widely practiced in white American families upon their own members. As a small boy in the first decade of the nineteenth century, John Brown, who would end his life as the most famous of abolitionist martyrs, was savagely thrashed by his father for stealing three pins, and as a father himself, he applied the rod to his own children in accordance with a strictly enforced regime: eight lashes for disobedience to their mother, eight for telling a lie, three for “unfaithfulness at work,” and so on.