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

Wise?

Wise? The illicit slave trade to Brazil did not easily coexist with simple notions of a rapacious Slave South hell-bent on dragging more Africans across the Atlantic into slavery and a pious abolitionist North determined to thwart their schemes. Such an analysis hardly explains the activities of the Virginian, Henry Wise, during his tenure as a U.S. diplomat in Brazil. Still, he was one of a number of U.S. nationals who resided in this South American nation during a time when enslaved Africans were arriving in enormous numbers and their reaction to this phenomenon inevitably had an impact on how the peculiar institution itself was received in the U.S. Henry A. Wise was no abolitionist—though he was influential, having considered a race for the presidency in 1856.1 As a Congressman, he avowed that if Washington “began to discuss ending slavery in the District [of Columbia] he would ‘go home . . . never to return.’” Slavery, he thought, was “‘interwoven with our very political existence, is guaranteed by our Constitution, and its consequences must be borne by our northern brethren as resulting from our system of government, and they cannot attack the system of slavery without attacking the institutions of our country, our safety and our welfare.’ ” John Quincy Adams was among the many northerners Wise despised, in this case because he felt this patrician was not sufficiently hostile to Haiti.2 He occasionally described Negroes as “‘wooly headed,’ ‘splay footed’ and ‘odiferous,’” while “his slaveholdings expanded during the 1840s.” He was a fervent advocate of the supposed benefits of slavery, declaring that “‘whenever black existed . . . there was found at least equality among the white population.’”3 If Wise is recalled at all today, it is as the man responsible, as Governor of Virginia, for executing John Brown in 1859, viewed widely among Euro-Americans as a criminal for leading a bloody revolt against 4 67 slavery at Harper’s Ferry. Wise was single-minded about what should befall the captured Brown, not least since he was gravely concerned about what signal to slavery his uprising wrought. “The very sympathy with John Brown,” exclaimed Governor Wise, “so general, so fanatical, so regardless of social safety, & so irreverent of the reign of law, demands his execution, if sentenced by the courts. The law he insulted & outraged are now protecting all his rights of defence and all his claims to mercy.” So moved, the last act of his administration was the hanging of Brown and his followers.4 Wise went on to join secession and become a “General in the Confederate army.”5 Unsurprisingly, this “swashbuckling defender of slavery’s interests” was “one of those present at Appomatox Courthouse when Lee surrendered to Grant.”6 Yet, scholar Mary Catherine Karasch is no doubt correct in suggesting that Wise’s “consular reports,” while serving as Minister to Brazil, “provide the best . . . descriptions”7 of slave trading to South America. Historian Don E. Fehrenbacher concurs, noting that Wise “antagonized . . . the American business community in Rio” with his fervor against the slave trade.8 His fiery denunciations of slavers could be seen as selfinterested , in that many in Virginia saw this state as a prime source for slave exporters to the point where his compatriot, Matthew Fontaine Maury, envisioned sending Afro-Virginians all the way down the river to settle and develop the Amazon region of Brazil. After all, there was an analytical distinction between slavery and the slave trade—the latter could in certain instances reduce the value of existing slaveholdings by increasing supply. It was Wise who deemed abolitionism to be “sedition” and agreed with placing “abolitionists in a position of embarrassment, from which they cannot easily escape.”9 It was Wise who in campaigning for James Buchanan in his race for the presidency chortled that in Virginia “we now get a thousand dollars for a sound slave” and “we would then have gotten from three to five thousand dollars for an operative in the gold mines of California.” “War” with Britain, he thought, would be “dangerous to the slave breeding states” of which his dominion was paramount, as it might disrupt this profitable business; “it would be an act of folly or crime, or a blunder worse than crime.” Thus, Buchanan was “the choice of the Virginia Slave Breeders,” whose champion Wise was.10 Nevertheless, it was Henry Wise who hailed from an affluent family—his father was a lawyer11 —that raised a clarion call...