Smuggler Nation (23 page)

Given the context of a federal prohibition on alcohol sales to Indians, European visitors were also taken aback by the common practice of government officials providing alcohol to Indian leaders while negotiating treaties. The English traveler Charles Latrobe was startled to find that whisky was available at official negotiations, and he lamented that this tarnished the government’s image and the legitimacy of the treaties:

However anxious I and others might be to exculpate the United States Government from the charge of cold and selfish policy toward the remnants of the Indian tribes, and from that of resorting to unworthy and diabolical means in attaining possession of their lands,—as long as it can be said with truth, that the drunkenness was not guarded against, and that the means were furnished at the very time of the Treaty, and under the very nose of the Commissioners—how can it be expected but a stigma will attend every transaction of this kind.… Who will believe that any act, however formally executed by the chiefs, is valid, as long as it is known that whiskey was one of the parties to the Treaty.
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ILLICIT ALCOHOL WAS ONLY
one ingredient that fueled the motor of westward expansion. It played multiple roles in Indian relations: as a form of currency, high-value commodity, diplomatic tool in securing land concessions, and health hazard and community destabilizer.
Its potent effects should not be overstated or oversimplified, but they are an important and often untold part the story of America’s territorial enlargement. Commerce soaked in illicit alcohol went hand in hand with blood-soaked conquest, weakening native populations while enriching bootleggers and fur traders. But booze was not the only illicit trade that facilitated territorial expansion; as we will see next, the illicit trade in human cargo also played a crucial role.

8
Illicit Slavers and the Perpetuation of the Slave Trade

ADAM SMITH LONG AGO
noted that of all things that cross borders, people are the most cumbersome and difficult to transport. This is especially true of smuggled people, and even more so if done forcibly. Nevertheless, this did not impede the mass trafficking of African slaves to the Americas in the nineteenth century in defiance of prohibitions and policing campaigns. Our smuggling story therefore continues, but in this case what is being illicitly procured, transported, and sold is a shackled human being. In the face of a British-led international suppression effort, the African slave trade morphed into a vast transatlantic criminal enterprise. It was enabled by American merchant complicity—in violation of U.S. antislave-trade laws—and fueled by growing demand for slave labor in new world plantations economies, especially Cuba and Brazil. Only the abolition of slavery itself finally closed the darkest chapter of illicit trade in American history.

The United States was both an illicit import market for African slaves and a leading player in the trafficking of slaves to foreign ports. The smuggling of slaves into the United States was especially prevalent up to the 1820s. Illicit slavers brought their human cargoes through the porous southern borderlands to feed the rising demand for plantation workers in Louisiana and other frontier regions. These importations supplemented natural reproduction within the domestic slave population.
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More economically and demographically consequential was America’s role in the carrying trade to foreign ports such as Havana and Rio, which was especially significant after the 1830s. So even as imports into the United States declined sharply after an initial flurry of smuggling, American involvement in clandestinely transporting slaves to foreign ports greatly expanded. Indeed, in this particular illicit trade America shaped the trade as much as the trade shaped America. American complicity in illicit slave trafficking helped to perpetuate the institution of slavery, enriched slave traders, caused enormous human suffering, and revealed the hypocrisy of American rhetoric about freedom.

In this chapter we examine the dynamics of slave trafficking, its links to territorial expansion, and the nature and extent of American collusion. We also briefly look at reverse slave smuggling—the self-smuggling of fugitive slaves to northern states and to Canada and Mexico—and how the increasingly politicized fugitive slave issue not only strained relations with immediate neighbors but greatly amplified sectional divisions, fueling calls for abolition and stoking the flames of the secessionist movement.

Criminalizing and Policing the Foreign Slave Trade

The year 1808 is typically marked as the starting date of the federal prohibition on American involvement in the international slave trade. But this historic date was actually the culmination of a series of state and federal efforts to restrict U.S. participation in slave trafficking that began years earlier.
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Indeed, all states had imposed prohibitions on slave imports by 1798, and only South Carolina defected by reopening the trade from 1803 to 1808. In 1794 the first federal antislave-trade law made it illegal for Americans to participate in the trafficking of slaves to non-American ports, and in 1800 Congress expanded the ban to include the actions of investing in foreign slaving voyages and serving as a crewmember on a foreign slave ship. Penalties included steep fines, forfeiture of vessels, and imprisonment. Moreover, in 1803 Congress took its first action to restrict the importation of slaves, outlawing bringing “any negro, mulatto, or other person of colour” into a state that had banned such entry.
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The 1808 federal law imposed a total ban on American participation in the foreign slave trade. And in
1820 Congress passed the toughest antislave-trade law of any nation by classifying slave trading as the equivalent of piracy and punishable by death.

Although actual enforcement of these laws was another matter entirely, the act of a major slaveholding country criminalizing the slave trade begs for some explanation. The ban did not simply reflect humanitarian concern and abolitionist sentiment. Far from it. Fear and economic self-interest explains why southern slaveholding states were often the most vigorous promoters of antislave-trade legislation. The Haitian Revolution sent shock waves through American slaveholding communities, intensifying southern fears and anxieties that a further influx of African slaves and shift in the balance between white and black populations could provoke violent revolts. Established slaveholders also supported a ban on slave imports to prop up the market value of the slaves they already owned. In other words, the ban functioned as a de facto price support and form of protectionism for a thriving domestic slave market, much of it based on moving slaves from eastern seaboard states such as Virginia and North Carolina to the expanding plantations of the Deep South. Meanwhile, northern abolitionists enthusiastically lobbied for the end of the foreign slave trade even while realizing they were still too weak to make much headway in eliminating the institution of slavery. From their perspective, ending the slave trade was an important first step toward their ultimate goal of ending slavery itself. Support for criminalizing the foreign slave trade thus made for some strange bedfellows, to say the least.

However tortured the logic, American politicians were careful to distinguish between the evils of the foreign slave trade and the legitimacy of domestic slavery, arguing for suppression of the former while reaffirming support for the later. Despite all the lofty talk of liberty and freedom during America’s founding, in this case property rights—specifically the right to own slaves—clearly trumped.

Moreover, even though some of the country’s founders expected and hoped that slavery would simply wither away and die out on its own, the use of slave labor not only endured but became more economically entrenched. To a far greater extent than anyone could have imagined just a few decades earlier, the slave-based plantation economy was booming in the early nineteenth century, thanks to the invention of
the cotton gin in 1793 and the rapid spread of cotton cultivation in the South.
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North and South became more economically interdependent even while more politically divided: as northern entrepreneurs smuggled in British technologies and illicitly imported skilled British workers to set up the New England cotton mills that sparked the American industrial revolution, slave-based southern cotton plantations expanded to supply them. Northern shipbuilders and shipping companies similarly profited by keeping English textile factories supplied with southern cotton. In just a few decades, cotton became the country’s leading export by a considerable margin. Cotton production skyrocketed from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 178,000 in 1810, and it reached 732,000 bales in 1830.
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By 1850 cotton comprised two-thirds of American exports. New York’s rapid rise as a leading commercial center owed much of its success to the cotton trade—so much so that the city’s mayor, Fernando Wood, even proposed seceding from the Union.
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America’s antislave-trade laws coincided with Britain’s turn away from the slave trade early in the nineteenth century. But here the similarities ended. The United States lacked both the will and capacity to vigorously enforce its prohibitions, but Britain unleashed the Royal Navy to police slave ships on the high seas between West Africa and the slave markets in the Americas. The contrast between Washington’s lethargic approach to enforcement and London’s aggressive stance became a chronic diplomatic irritant, with frustrated British officials bitterly complaining that the United States was doing more to help than hinder slave trafficking. At the same time, American politicians and merchants alike greatly resented Britain’s self-appointment as policeman of the high seas.

Anglophobia long outlasted the War of 1812 and crippled cooperation in suppressing the slave trade. For instance, the U.S. Navy’s “Africa squadron” was deployed to patrol Africa’s west coast in 1843, but its priority mission was protecting U.S. commercial vessels from the British rather than policing slavers.
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The squadron, initially consisting of four vessels totaling eighty-four guns, failed to intercept a single slaver in its first two years of operation, and its crews seemed to spend as much time vacationing on Madeira Island as patrolling the far less hospitable African coast. Yet by deploying the squadron and going through the motions of carrying out patrols, Washington met the bare minimum obligations stipulated in the 1842 Webster-Ashburn treaty with Britain.
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In 1850 the navy reported that seven slave ships had been captured by the squadron in its first seven years. The British Navy, in contrast, made more than five hundred captures during the same period.
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Most importantly, it was not until June 1862—after the American Civil War had already begun—that the United States finally agreed to a right of mutual search with Britain.
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American sensitivities about boarding parties (especially British) dated back to the battles over neutral shipping in the late eighteenth century. When the British foreign secretary asked U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams if there was a greater evil than the slave trade, Adams responded, “Yes, admitting the right of search by foreign officers of our vessels upon the sea in time of peace, for that would be making slaves of ourselves.”
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Decades of Washington’s resistance to British wishes to search U.S.-flagged ships made the stars and stripes the favored flag of illicit slavers. The American flag became an especially favored shield for slave ships once other maritime powers, such as Spain and Portugal, caved in to British pressure to allow searches of their vessels. Consequently, as other nations became increasingly cooperative—even if not always willingly—in fighting the slave trade under British leadership, the United States continued to insist on going it alone. Traditional American anglophobia played right into the hands of slave traffickers. The Royal Navy’s inability to search American flagged vessels, regardless of whether they were actually American, until near the end of the transatlantic slave trade was the Achilles’ heel of its antislaving campaign.

On the rare occasion when an American-flagged slave ship was seized by a U.S. patrol, U.S. courts typically either failed to convict or handed out light sentences.
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The burden of proof was so stringent and the loopholes so great that slavers had little to fear from the legal system.
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For instance, even though certain types of supplies were a sure sign of intent to traffic in slaves, American courts were far less willing than the courts of other nations to consider this as evidence of a slaving voyage.
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Quite a few convicted slave traffickers received a presidential pardon after serving only a portion of their sentence, and President James Buchanan even publicly vowed that he would refuse to ever allow a slaver to be hanged.
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To make matters worse, slavers could sue naval officers for damages, which predictably had a chilling effect on enforcement.
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