In
the post-Revolution era, African slavery was waning as cotton production
was a laborious task and not worth cultivating on a large scale until
Eli Whitney of Massachusetts revolutionized the industry in 1793.
Thereafter, New England mills could not live without raw slave-produced
cotton, Manhattan lenders ensured plantation owners that money was
available for plantation expansion, and New England slavers continued to
import the labor supply.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
New York’s Notorious Slave Ships
“In
the decade 1850-1860 Great Britain maintained consulates in six
Southern ports: Norfolk, -- changed to Richmond in 1856 – Charleston,
Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans and Galveston.
[Consul
G.P.R.] James [in Norfolk and Richmond] . . . considered that
Virginians were very kind to their slaves and that slavery was an injury
to masters rather than Negroes. One of the proprietors of the Richmond
“slave warehouse” was, wrote his son Charles later, an “unmistakable
Yankee,” said to be very humane to his charges, “but the business was
regarded as infamous. I heard a respectable man denounced for accepting
his hospitality.”
At
Niagara Falls, James saw a runaway Negro belonging to one of his
Norfolk neighbors; he had found it difficult to make a living and was
cold and he begged the consul to ask his owner to take him back.
[Consul]
Henry G. Kuper of Baltimore gave assurance that the slave trade was
being extensively carried on by many American citizens, especially in
New York . . . with the connivance of Spanish authorities in Cuba where
most of the cargoes were conveyed . . . Consul Edward W. Mark wrote from
Baltimore that at any moment twenty vessels might be found under
construction at that port, admirably adapted for the slave trade. Some
were built expressly for the trade by “respectable houses,” which would
not enter the trade themselves but merely executed the orders they
received.
Mark
believed, however, that in Baltimore little countenance was given to
the trade. It was carried on rather “from New York and the eastern parts
of the Union . . . and generally by New England and foreign firms.”
[In
1858 Consul] Molyneaux of Savannah told the story of a Charleston
mercantile house . . . which proposed to send the ship Richard Cobden . .
. on a [suspicious] voyage to Africa to bring “free emigrants” to a
United States port. The collector of the port appealed to United States
Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb who pronounced the proposal
illegal.
About
the same time the Lydia Gibbs, a vessel of one-hundred and fourteen
tons of Northern build, sailed from Charleston under one Watson, a
Scotchman naturalized in the United States. He took it to Havana where
it was sold to unknown persons for $12,000. Watson was to receive
$6,000 more if he escaped detection, and in addition a certain
percentage of the slaves he should succeed in landing in Cuba.
[In
July 1858 Charleston Consul Robert Bunch] wrote that the brig Frances
Ellen had cleared from Charleston for Africa, supposedly to engage in
the slave trade; that the firm of Ponjand and Lalas, two Spaniards,
which sent it out, was believed to be regularly engaged in this traffic
[and] intended to land five or six cargoes in Texas . . .
In
December, 1859, the South Carolina legislature received from the New
York assembly a set of resolutions passed by the latter body, condemning
the slave trade and urging the Southern States not to connive at or
encourage the odious traffic. South Carolina returned the resolutions
to the senders without comment and Bunch, though agreeing with the New
York sentiments, dryly noted that the action was not “happily received,”
“as it is notorious that, during the present year, at least ten slavers
have been fitted out in New York for one in the entire South.”
(The
South in the 1850’s as Seen by British Consuls, Laura A. White, The
Journal of Southern History, February 1935, excerpts, pp. 29, 31, 36-41)
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