The Empire of Necessity (61 page)

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Rufus Low, from the town of Gloucester, on Massachusetts’s Cape Ann, was, next to Delano, the
Perseverance
’s most experienced sailor. Low had been the captain of a merchant ship that made several voyages to India. In 1794, he was master of the schooner
Industry
, which was captured by first the British and then the French navy, before it was plundered by French colonial officials in Haiti. In 1800, he also served on the USS
Essex
, one of the modern U.S. Navy’s earliest ships, as sailing master, on a voyage where an exceptionally high number of floggings took place.

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These are the manuscripts that were recently threatened during Mali’s northern insurgency, many of which were saved, as they have been repeatedly over the centuries, by the heroic work of librarians and scholars. See Lydia Polgreen, “As Extremists Invaded, Timbuktu Hid Artifacts of a Golden Age,”
New York Times
, February 3, 2013.

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Among the most famous of West African philosophers was Ahmad Baba, born in Timbuktu in 1564 and enslaved himself by North Africans. He wrote an estimated forty books, including one of Islam’s most influential treatises on just and unjust slavery. The historian Paul Lovejoy argues that West African Muslims brought to America as slaves were aware of Baba’s writings, including his arguments against illegitimate enslavement.

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Other sea captains had fewer qualms in making insurance claims, and not just for lost anchors. The captain of the
Rôdeur
, as discussed earlier, jettisoned blind West Africans, since they were worth more dead as claim payouts than alive as sightless slaves. A more well-known case, mentioned earlier, is the
Zong
, whose owners filed a claim on 132 sick Africans, out of a shipment of 442, thrown overboard by Captain Luke Collingwood.

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When I was in Concepción, Chile, to research this book, I paid a visit to the city’s library, whose director, Alejandro Mihovilovich Gratz, is a local historian. From him I heard more of Rozas’s prominent role in Chilean history. Rozas was one of the most radical of Chile’s founding fathers and, Mihovilovich said, a fierce opponent of slavery. I asked if he thought it ironic that Rozas delivered such an unsparing judgment of the rebels for basically doing what he was conspiring to do at the time. Mihovilovich paused for a second and then asked, “You’re from the United States, no?” I answered yes and knew what was coming. “
Entonces
—well, then—how can you ask such a question?”

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The application of general average loss to slave insurrections raised a sticky philosophical problem, for in no other case of cargo loss was the loss caused by the will and actions of the cargo. This issue came to light in a case that reached the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1842, when lawyers for the Merchants’ Insurance Company, which had underwritten the slave ship
Creole
, argued that their clients weren’t liable to cover damages incurred on that ship as a result of a slave rebellion. Rebellions, they said, were caused not by “external accidents” but by the “inherent vices of the subject insured”—that is, the inherent tendency of slaves to rebel. One of the company’s lawyers, Judah Benjamin, who later would serve as attorney general for the Confederacy, based his argument on the fundamental humanity of slaves: “What is a slave? He is a human being. He has feelings and passions and intellect. His heart, like the white man’s, swells with love, burns with jealousy, aches with sorrow, pines under restraint and discomfort, boils with revenge, and ever cherishes the desire of liberty.” He “is prone to revolt in the very nature of things.… Will any one deny that the bloody and disastrous insurrection of the
Creole
was the result of the inherent qualities of the slaves themselves, roused, not only by their condition of servitude, but stimulated by the removal from their friends and homes … and encouraged by the lax discipline of the vessel, the numerical weakness of the whites, and the proximity of a British province?” According to the historian Tim Armstrong, Benjamin argued in another case that “rebellion is intrinsic to slavery” and that slavery is an “institution which has since Justinian been described as
contra naturam
, and a result of local conditions rather than of universal application.… The more general implication is that the slave’s situation is temporary and reversible. The slave can never definitively be treated as an owned thing.” Benjamin’s arguments, which won the case for the insurers, in a way parallel those of the Montevideo doctors who invoked the inner emotional lives of slaves to explain the epidemic that swept through the
Joaquín
, an example of how the horrors of slavery were helping to modernize medicine. Here, those horrors were forcing a modernization of law: humans were universal but slavery wasn’t, an interesting position for a man who would go on to be the chief lawyer for the Confederate States of America.

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Adams sent a diplomatic reply, appreciating the gift while avoiding the request for an endorsement: “I return to you my thanks for the favorable light in which you are disposed to view the opinion I shall no doubt form of this work from the perusal of it.”

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This is clearest in the section of his memoir when he is talking about his debt problems. Debt was a social scourge—Boston courts sent more than 1,442 debtors to its jail in 1820, some for owing a pittance. Some debtors were new risk takers, investing in various failed schemes. Others were wastrels, drinking themselves into penury. But many, like Delano old-time seamen and merchants who thought credit and debt were to be used to support the trade of merchandise, not a trade in and of itself, found themselves pulled down by uncontrollable market forces, including a series of bank failures that ran through New England in the 1810s. There is a suggestion, in a hard-to-read document in Lemuel Shaw’s papers, that Delano lost what little savings he had during one such collapse. Yet Delano said the solution to this problem was more personal responsibility. “It is a duty that every man owes himself to take care of his own earnings,” he wrote, “and not be outstripped under the operation of any of the foregoing principles.” “Never let an account lie open with friend or foe, although they may say, ‘let it all lie just as it does till your return,’” he counsels, for what one thinks will be the “fair balance” will never be enough to pay “the demand.” Delano doesn’t say who these friends or foes were, but it seems that men whom he trusted were quick to use the courts to multiply his woes. Any sailor who leaves himself open to such legal manipulation will, he writes, find himself “in his old age pennyless and without a friend.” It will “break his heart, more especially if he possesses a noble mind.”

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Red-Jacket provided a list of grievances against “white people”: “We gave them corn and meat; they gave us poison in return.… At length their numbers had greatly increased; they wanted more land; they wanted our country.” He went on: “We understand that your religion is written in a book; if it was intended for us as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit given it to us, and not only to us, but why did he not give to our forefathers the knowledge of that book, with the means of understanding it rightly? We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the white people? Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit; if there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book?” The speech continues to this day to be republished and taught in high schools and colleges. Curiously, Red-Jacket had earlier fought against Herman Melville’s maternal grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, during the American Revolution.

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Wordsworth composed a sonnet to Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture, who, like Lord Nelson, died at the moment of his triumph: taken prisoner by Napoleon’s troops, he perished in a cold French dungeon in the high windy Alps in April 1803, a few months before Haitians drove the French once and for all from their island. “There’s not a breathing of the common wind,” wrote Wordsworth, “that will forget thee.”