Opposing the Slavers

The Royal Navy's Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade

Peter Grindal

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857739384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Much is known about Britain's role in the Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century but few are aware of the sustained campaign against slaving conducted by the Royal Navy after the passing of the Slave Trade Abolition Act of 1807. Peter Grindal provides the definitive account of this little known yet important part of the British, European and American history. Drawing on original sources to provide a comprehensive and engaging narrative of the naval operations against slavers of all nations - in particular Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and Brazil, he describes how illegal traders sought to evade treaty obligations, reveals the obduracy of the USA that prolonged the slave trade, and shows how, despite inadequate resources, the Royal navy's sixty-year campaign forced slavers to expend ever greater sums top conduct their business and confront the losses inflicted by capture and condemnation. A work that will transform our understanding of the Royal Navy's campaign against the Atlantic slave trade.

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‌Prologue

The Beginning of a Great Matter

O Lord, when thou givest to thy servants to endeavour in any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished that yieldeth the true glory.

Sir Francis Drake

A bill calling for the prohibition of “all manner of dealing and trading in the purchase, sale, barter or transfer of slaves […] on, in, at, to or from any part of the coast of Africa” was introduced in January 1807 in the House of Lords by the Prime Minister, Lord Grenville. The bill declared that the Atlantic slave trade, in which the British had been leading exponents for the past century, was “contrary to the principles of justice, humanity and sound policy”. For good measure, Grenville added his opinion that the Trade was not only detestable but also criminal.

Having been passed by the Lords, not without opposition from some of those who owed their seats to the slave trade, the bill went to the Commons, where there also remained an element of trenchant resistance. Nevertheless, in the early hours of 24 February, the abolitionists gained a crushing victory, and, on the announcement of the result, the entire House rose to applaud William Wilberforce. A month later King George III gave his assent to the bill, and on 1 May 1807 the African slave trade became illegal in the British Empire, with a penalty of a £100 fine for every slave found and confiscation of any vessel concerned.

The Act (47 Geo. III, c. 36) was indeed a triumph for Wilberforce, who had led the long struggle of the abolitionist cause in Parliament, stoutly supported by William Pitt as Prime Minister, who did not live to see its success. However, richly deserving though he was of applause, Wilberforce was by no means the only man worthy of praise for this immense achievement.

There had been occasional criticism of slavery by English Protestants since the beginning of serious English participation in the Trade late in the seventeenth century, notably by the Puritan Richard Baxter. However, the first figure to make a significant impact on British public consciousness of the evils of slavery was the Englishwoman Aphra Behn who, in her 1688 book Oroonoko; or the Royal Slave, wrote of a slave from the Gold Coast killed after leading a failed slave rebellion in the Dutch colony of Surinam. Her novel was dramatised by Thomas Southern in 1696, and his play was performed to great effect before audiences in England and France for much of the following century. Aphra Behn’s powerful influence was particularly apparent in the work of the poets and authors of the early eighteenth century: James Thomson (author of “Rule, Britannia!”), Daniel Defoe, Richard Savage, William Shenstone, Alexander Pope, Sir Richard Steele and Laurence Sterne all condemned slavery on humanitarian grounds. These writers helped to create a reaction against the Trade in England, the European country with the strongest instinct for freedom as well as the leading slave-trading nation for most of the eighteenth century.

The Vatican occasionally spoke out against slave trading, but to little apparent effect, and it was among the Quakers of English America that hostility to slavery was being more frequently and forcefully voiced. In 1676, William Edmundson, an associate of the founder of the Society of Friends, wrote from Newport, Rhode Island, that slavery should be unacceptable to a Christian, and in 1688 a group of German Quakers in Philadelphia signed a petition against the concept of slavery. This was a hesitant beginning to a Quaker movement against the slave trade which took more than half a century to reach any coherence, and it was a Presbyterian judge in Boston, Massachusetts, Samuel Sewall, who wrote the first reasoned criticism of the Trade and of the institution of slavery. At last, in 1754, the annual meeting of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia published an open letter which declared that “to live in ease and plenty by the toil of those whom violence and cruelty have put in our power” was inconsistent with Christianity and common justice, and urged Quakers to make the cause of the Africans their own. Thanks largely to years of devoted work by John Woolman, the 1758 Quaker meeting in Philadelphia agreed an even stronger condemnation of slavery. Also in that year the Quaker meeting in London adopted the same theme with equal determination, and the London meeting of 1761 declared that the Society would disown Quakers who would not desist from the traffic in slaves.

Meanwhile, a quite different abolitionist influence was growing in British North America. There was concern that skilled slaves were taking work needed by white tradesmen, and a more powerful fear that an excessive number of African slaves in the colonies would lead to revolts of the kind experienced in Jamaica. This fear equalled philanthropy as the motivation of the American abolitionist movement in the late eighteenth century, and caused prohibitive duties to be imposed on slave imports in several colonies and an outright ban on the traffic in Rhode Island.

Slower to gain hold was the humanitarian concern which was later to become the mainspring of abolitionism. There were isolated statements by European writers such as the Portuguese Frei Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha who, in a book published in 1758, demanded an end to the slave trade, which he regarded as illegal, and which “ought to be condemned as a deadly crime against Christian charity and common justice”, a denunciation far in advance of anything written in Britain or British America. Such statements brought no evident benefit, however, and even the powerful intellects of the French Enlightenment, all hostile to slavery, had no idea what might usefully be done in practice. Marivaux, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau either denounced or mocked slavery, but mistakenly assumed that they had merely to launch ideas and governments would then take action. Nevertheless, anti-slavery took a place in French radical thinking, and, coincidentally, this aligned with the views of the Roman Catholic Church, which had prohibited slavery in a declaration by Pope Benedict XIV in 1741. None of this discouraged the slave traders.

In England and North America, however, popular poetry and the journalism of the periodical press was, by the middle of the eighteenth century, having an effect on cultivated opinion regarding slavery. It was the existence of a free press and the relative ease of correspondence which largely explain why the abolitionist cause gained ground and became a political issue in these two countries before any other. The Gentleman’s Magazine, the Weekly Miscellany and the London Magazine all played an influential part in England, but the debate was not yet general, and it would be some time before any parliamentarian became involved. Indeed, as Horace Walpole wrote to a friend in 1750, “We, the temple of liberty, and bulwark of Protestant Christianity, have this fortnight been [in Parliament] pondering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling Negroes.” Critical comments in Walpole’s correspondence demonstrated, however, that educated Englishmen were now discussing the morality of slavery and the legal aspects of freedom.

The argument was developing in Scotland too. In A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow, concluded that “all men [without exception] have strong desires of liberty and property” and that “no damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right”. Adam Smith, one of Hutcheson’s former pupils, wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), “There is not a Negro from the coast of Africa who does not […] possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is scarce capable of conceiving.” Such views were readily absorbed by the students of these two professors, and the cause was taken up by other intellectuals, including the lawyer George Wallace, who was influenced by Montesquieu, and Adam Ferguson, Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh.

In 1765, the judge Sir William Blackstone published Commentaries on the Laws of England in which he stated the case against slavery and declared that the law of England “abhors and will not endure the state of slavery within this nation”. Subsequent editions of this work were more equivocal, probably owing to intervention by Blackstone’s benefactor Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of England, but Blackstone’s Commentaries were, nevertheless, successful and influential.

The Quakers then began to carry the abolitionist argument beyond their own movement, chiefly through the work of Anthony Benezet of Philadelphia. He, with the dedicated John Woolman, had greatly influenced the earlier anti-slavery decisions of the Philadelphia Quakers, but he was now reaching out to the rest of North America, and to England. In his writing he quoted material from Montesquieu, Hutcheson and Wallace, used first-hand accounts of African slaving, and in his 1767 edition of A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and the Colonies he quoted a comment of a West Indies visitor:

it is a matter of astonishment how a people [the English] who, as a nation, are looked upon as generous and humane […] can live in the practice of such extreme oppression and inhumanity without seeing the inconsistency of such conduct.

In his campaign of conversion, Benezet wrote not only to fellow Quakers but also to Edmund Burke, John Wesley and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he encouraged the Presbyterian Dr Benjamin Rush to form, in Philadelphia, the first abolition society.

At this stage the interest of English abolitionists was focused on the legal rather than the religious aspects of the issue. The law was confused concerning the status of slavery in England, and a number of cases in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century had produced conflicting judgments. An opinion was given in 1729 by Walpole’s Attorney-General, Sir Philip Yorke, that a slave in England was not automatically free, nor did baptism “bestow freedom on him, nor make any alteration in his temporal condition in these kingdoms”, and this was given credence for a period of over forty years until it was challenged in court by Granville Sharp. Sharp, a clerk in the Ordnance Office and grandson of the Archbishop of York, was an idealist who became a key figure in the English abolitionist movement. He initially came to attention by befriending three escaped slaves and resisting their repossession on the basis of the 1679 Act of Habeas Corpus. The first of Sharp’s cases, that of Jonathan Strong in 1765, was not pursued by the owners. Then, in 1771, the case of Thomas Lewis came to court, but ownership was not established and Lewis was freed. At last, in 1772, the question of the legal position on slavery was addressed in the case of James Somerset, tried in the Court of King’s Bench before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. After lengthy procrastination Mansfield decided that, in the absence of positive law on the subject, slavery was so odious that nothing should be done to support it, and Somerset was released. Nevertheless this judgment established only that “the master had no right to compel the slave to go into a foreign country.”

Lord Mansfield’s judgment did, however, sway public opinion, and the case brought Sharp and Benezet into correspondence with each other, strengthening the transatlantic dimension of abolitionism. It was Benezet who inspired John Wesley to publish his Thoughts upon Slavery in 1774, the most serious attack to date on slavery and the slave trade, and, with Methodism gaining a wide appeal, a most influential one too. Dr Johnson, always an opponent of slavery, added his typically pungent comments to the controversy, and further criticism, on different lines, came from Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Summarising his views on slave labour, Smith wrote: “it appears […] from the experience of all ages and nations […] that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” Fallacious though this assertion might have been, it was temporarily influential.

Prompting by the Quakers led to the appointment in 1775 of a House of Commons commission to take evidence on the slave trade, and this led to a debate in the House on the motion that “the slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men”. This put slavery on Britain’s political agenda, but the 1776 Revolution delayed an equivalent debate in America. Slaves comprised 22 per cent of the population of the 13 colonies, and slavery and the slave trade were taken for granted by most of the American rebels. The irony of that acceptance was not lost on Dr Johnson: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Even Benjamin Franklin, although critical of slavery, was cautious on the issue of abolition, and the Quakers were discredited for a time because they refused to support armed resistance against the English. There was some talk of the slave trade in discussions leading to the Declaration of Independence, but it came to nothing, although slave trading with Britain, together with other commerce with the mother country, was banned by the colonies at the beginning of the rebellion. With the resumption of peace, however, the Quakers regained their standing and immediately initiated public discussion of the slavery issue.

In 1779 in Liverpool, the last public sale of a black slave in England took place, but humanitarian opinion was generally not that slavery or the Trade should be abolished. Instead, the view was that they should be made less cruel, although thinking in Scotland was more aligned with abolition. Then, in 1781, a scandalous incident concerning the Liverpool slaver Zong, and the court cases which followed, illustrated for the general public some of the horrors of the Trade and the state of the law concerning slaves, giving a boost to the abolitionist cause in England. Zong had sailed for the Caribbean with a cargo of 442 slaves from the West African island of St Thomas, and had become lost. With water running short and many slaves dead or sick, her master had ordered 133 of the survivors to be thrown overboard on the pretext that if they were to die of natural causes the loss would be to the shipowners, but if, for reasons affecting the safety of the crew, they were to be thrown alive into the sea, the underwriters would carry the loss. The insurers refused to pay, and the owners sued them, with the backing of the King’s Bench. Then the underwriters petitioned the Court of Exchequer. In a second trial allowed by Lord Mansfield, the owners’ counsel argued successfully that: “So far from a charge of murder lying against these people, there is not the least imputation – of cruelty, I will not say – but of impropriety.” When Granville Sharp then tried without success to bring a charge of murder before the Court of Admiralty, the Solicitor-General declared that a vessel’s master could drown slaves without “a surmise of impropriety”.

Thanks largely to his correspondence with Benezet, Sharp now enjoyed the support of most of the English bishops, and after the Zong trial the abolitionist case was articulated with ever-increasing effectiveness, aided by contact between the various opponents of slavery. In 1783 a bill was introduced in the House of Commons to prevent officials of the Royal African Company from selling slaves, and that encouraged the Society of Friends to appeal for a total ban on the Trade. The following year the town of Bridgwater, the first to do so, petitioned the Commons for an end to the Trade. These attempts were unsuccessful, but were valuable achievements in that they generated debate in Parliament.

At the same time, a Scottish retired Royal Navy Surgeon, Dr James Ramsay, published two anti-slaving pamphlets and became an abolitionist supporter of importance on two counts: first, he had, unlike Benezet and Sharp, first-hand experience of the West Indies, and second, he knew the abolitionist Captain Sir Charles Middleton, Controller of the Navy and the future Lord Barham, who had once been his Commanding Officer at sea. Another pamphlet, The Case of Our Fellow Creatures, the Oppressed...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations • (All figures © National Maritime Museum, unless otherwise indicated)
• Prologue • The Beginning of a Great Matter
• Chapter 1 • Three Centuries of Transatlantic Slaving
• Chapter 2 • The Realities of the Trade
• Chapter 3 • The Slave Coasts and Seas
• Chapter 4 • Confused First Steps, 1807–11
• Chapter 5 • The Tip of the Iceberg, 1811–15
• Chapter 6 • Into a Legal Minefield, 1815–20
• Chapter 7 • The Most Evident Falsehoods, 1820–4
• Chapter 8 • A Lonely Furrow: Eastern Seas, 1824–8
• Chapter 9 • Tenders and Tablecloths: Eastern Seas, 1828–31
• Chapter 10 • Gallant Pinpricks: Western Seas, 1824–31
• Chapter 11 • To the Cape Station: Eastern Seas, 1831–5
• Chapter 12 • An Uncertain Sound: Western Seas, 1831–5
• Chapter 13 • The Spanish Equipment Clause: Eastern Seas, 1835–8
• Chapter 14 • Obduracy and Obfuscation: Western Seas, 1835–8
• Chapter 15 • High-Handed Action: Eastern Seas, 1838–9
• Chapter 16 • Forbearance Exhausted: Western Seas, 1838–9
• Summary • Taking Stock
• Epilogue • Until It Be Thoroughly Finished
• Appendix A • Suspected Slave Vessels Detained 1807–39 by Royal Navy Cruisers, Colonial Vessels and Letters of Marque Vessels
• Appendix B • Treaties, Conventions and Conferences Concerning Atlantic Slave-Trade Suppression, 1807–39
• Appendix C • Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council Relating to Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1807–40
• Appendix D • Commanders-in-Chief, Commodores and Senior Officers Appointed to Conduct Slave-Trade Suppression Operations, 1807–39
• Appendix E • The Equipment Clause: Criteria for Arrest under the Equipment Clause in Various Bilateral Treaties
• Appendix F • Declarations and Certificates: Forms Ordered to be Used by Captors on Detention of Suspected Slave Vessels
• Appendix G • Mortality in the West Africa Squadron, 1825–39
• Appendix H • Annual Imports of Slaves to Cuba and Brazil, 1807–39
• Appendix I • Comparative Values of Sterling, 1807–39
• Appendix J • Pivot-Gun Arrangement in HMS Lynx