The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade

Making the Slave Trade Legal?

Making the Slave Trade Legal? “‘It is truly lamentable,’” said Abraham Lincoln just before his election as President, “ ‘that Great Britain and the United States should be obliged to spend such a vast amount of blood and treasure for the suppression of the African slave trade.’”1 His words reflected a deepening reality: the trade to Brazil had slowed down considerably, not least because of external pressure from London; but, perhaps as a result of this pressure in or about Rio de Janeiro, as Lincoln’s victorious election approached, “just one British cruiser went on a slave trade patrol off the coast of Cuba in 1861.”2 This chapter concerns the spectacular rise in the illicit African Slave Trade in the late 1850s and how the apparent victory of those who profited from this commerce ironically sounded the tocsin for the institution of slavery, as emboldened fire-eaters from Dixie overplayed their hand and pushed the nation toward Civil War. Just as cracking down on the sale of illegal drugs in one neighborhood can serve to increase this traffic in adjacent areas, the pressure in the “Deepest South” was causing the illegal trade to grow in areas north of Brazil. Moreover, it seemed that “American traders were anxious to ship all the slaves they could before Lincoln’s known views could take effect.”3 At this moment, New York City “was gaining the dubious honor of being ‘the greatest slave-trading mart in the world’ ”; by 1857, this metropolis, perhaps more so than New Orleans, the logical contender for this title, was “‘the commercial center of the slave trade.’ During the months from January 1859 to August 1860, it was conservatively estimated , close to one hundred vessels left the city for the slave trade.”4 The trade in Africans had become so commonplace5 that the press in Gotham began to speak of various ethnic groups from this continent in the same way they might have discussed the merits of a Chablis versus a 7 128 Merlot.6 A formidable infrastructure for the slave trade had developed in this city that included ship fitters, suppliers, attorneys, recruiters of crews, and bribed marshals and custom agents. One longtime federal judge in New York, Samuel Rossiter Betts, later lauded as the father of U.S. maritime law, set a standard of proof so high that slave trade convictions were rare and severe punishment even rarer.7 This infrastructure also meant that it was a simpler matter to bring slaves to the U.S. itself.8 This brought the ugliness of the African Slave Trade that much closer to U.S. shores, thereby exacerbating tensions— and not just between North and South but, as well, between the Upper South of Wise’s Virginia, which remained hostile to the trade, and the Lower South. In addition, the prices of enslaved Africans were cheaper in Brazil than in the U.S., which was a further incentive to take the risk of bringing them to the Slave South, where prices were higher.9 In fact, as the pivotal decade of the 1850s was drawing to a close, the price of enslaved Africans was rising, giving more incentive to smugglers to tempt fate. One domestic trader’s books revealed that prices rose in 1855—generally—from $450 to $810 and a few years later by considerably more.10 Yet, as one reporter noted during this same period, “slaves of ten to twelve years of age up to an adult can be bought on the Congo River at $25 or $30 per head and landed in New Orleans or Texas for $30 more, making the cost $60; but call it $100.”11 The profits were too handsome to ignore easily. Thus, in the Deep South the African Slave Trade “cause was increasingly put forward as part and parcel of the southern nationalist agenda.” Some “Texas county conventions of the Democratic Party passed resolutions in favor of the slave trade, and Hardin R. Rummels, a secessionist and advocate of the African slave trade, defeated Sam Houston in the gubernatorial elections.”12 In the spring of 1857, the incendiary Southern nationalist, Edmund Ruffin, argued that reopening the slave trade was “obviously impossible so long as the present union with the northern states lasts”—which pointed to secession. “All the southern states suffer greatly from the scarcity & high price of labor ,” he complained, yet they could “obtain no supply from abroad.” Ruffin, who kept a close eye on...