Monthly Archives: April 2022

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eleven, Chapter Six: New York’s Slave Pirates, Part Two

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A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
SLAVE-Pict-GROUP-Chap-Six-p133 47K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Six. The picture come from page 133.

TYPICAL OF THE UTTER BRUTALITY of the New England and New York slave trade carried on under the same American flag Yankees carried in the War Between the States, was "a flotilla of illegal slave ships" from the North to Rio de Janeiro around 1843.

One ship:

[A] New York brig named the Kentucky, arrived in Brazil drenched in blood from one of the most gruesome revolts ever recorded.1

It started "when the Kentucky's accomplice ship, the Porpoise, sailed into Rio with two child slaves on board, both boys branded on the chest with the mark of their Brazilian owner."

The Porpoise "though registered in Maine, had been turned over to Maxwell, Wright & Company, U.S. coffee traders in Rio who chartered her out, though an English broker, to one of Rio's wealthiest slave merchants, Manoel Pinto da Fonseca."2

Fonseca got control of the Kentucky in January, 1844 and "sent it to the east coast of Africa to rendezvous with the Porpoise." The two ships demonstrate the "depth of U.S. involvement in the illegal slave trade."3

Both ships were trying to get a full cargo but slaves were in short supply right then so "Fonseca's agent settled for 500."4

The two crews "working quickly" began to "build a slave deck in the hold of the Kentucky" with the Porpoise next to her.

Boston's Thomas Boyle, "second mate of the Kentucky," testified that the Kentucky had been turned over to a Portuguese captain but its American captain, George Douglass of Philadelphia "purposely left the American colors behind [with the Portuguese captain] when the two ships left Africa."5 They had painted over "Kentucky of New York" and renamed it "Franklyn of Salem" in Rio.

The now-named Franklyn of Salem, with a Portuguese captain, delivered its slaves.

Later, that captain told Boyle there had been a slave revolt and 27 slaves were killed but that was a lie. A lot more had been killed, not in a revolt, but executed.

A revolt had taken place and nobody died, but in the days that followed, 47 of the rebellious slaves, "46 men and a woman had been strung from the yardarms, shot, and thrown overboard. If one of the rebels happened to be shackled to a slave whom the crew wanted to save, the execution was especially gruesome." This is the account of "William Page, an English sailor on the Kentucky" from a deposition:6

If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, a rope was put round his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck, beside the bulwarks, and his leg laid across the rail and chopped off, to save the irons and release him from his companion. . . . The bleeding negro was then drawn up, shot in the breast, and thrown overboard.

The legs of about one dozen were chopped off in this way. When the feet fell on deck, they were picked up by the Brazilian crew and thrown overboard, and sometimes at the body, while it still hung living; and all kinds of sport were made of the business. When two that were chained together were both to be hung, they were hung up together by their necks, shot and thrown overboard, irons and all.

When the woman was hung up and shot, the ball did not take effect and she was thrown overboard living, and was seen to struggle some in the water before she sunk.7

Page said there were horrible floggings ordered for other of the slaves that revolted. They were "stretched flat on the deck and tied hand and foot":

They were then whipped by two men at a time, by the one with a stick about two feet long, and with five or six strands of rawhide secured to the end of it . . . and by the other with a piece of hide . . . as thick as one's finger, or thicker, and hard as whalebone, but more flexible.8

The "20 men whipped survived in agony, but all 6 of the women who were whipped soon died."9

Page testified that the Philadelphian, Capt. Douglass, rushed from the Porpoise to the Kentucky when necessary to give the Kentucky the legitimacy of an American captain under the protection of the American flag:

Page said the American flags that Douglass left on the Kentucky [with the Portuguese captain] flew constantly. Such testimony prompted the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Henry Wise, to comment, 'Without the aid of our citizens and our flag, [the slave trade] could not be carried on with success at all.'10

NO Confederate battle flag every flew over a slave ship.

The Confederate battle flag was a soldier's flag used on some of the bloodiest battlefields in history by men defending their homes from a barbaric invasion.

The Confederate battle flag has more honor, valor and glory attached to it than most flags in history, and no flag has more.

That is the reason certain groups, which have no right to the Confederate battle flag, use it as their own. They want to be associated with the courage and honor the battle flag represents.

Most Yankees had great respect for the Confederate battle flag and said so constantly.

British diplomats in Rio:

noted that 43 vessels of various nations had brought 16,200 new slaves to Brazil, and that the most successful slave voyages were those of ships that flew the American flag.11

Slaves were needed in Brazil to satisfy the enormous worldwide demand for coffee.

The Mary E. Smith "began its voyage in Boston in August, 1855." A deputy U.S. marshal "tried to arrest its defiant owners, who gave him a choice: Get off the ship, or go to Africa. He got off the ship."12

The ship was later seized off the coast of Brazil with a cargo of "Africans dying of thirst and hunger" because the ship could find no safe place to land.13

Brazil cracked down on slave trading in the 1850s which sent New England and New York's slave traders, with others, to the sugar plantations of Cuba.

The Wanderer, "a racing yacht built on Long Island" was notorious. It was owned by "Southern members of the New York Yacht Club allied with Charles A. L. Lamar" of Georgia. It landed 400 slaves on a private island off the coast of Georgia around 1858.

Lamar and others were tried but there were no convictions. A "special prosecutor appointed to the cases later claimed the entire voyage was a conspiracy organized in New York."14

The Nightingale, "a yacht bigger and more exotic than the Wanderer" was seized by the U.S. Navy with "nearly 1,000 Africans on board and another 600 waiting on the beach" just days before the War Between the States began.15

The Nightingale was named for Swedish singer Jenny Lind and "had been built a decade before in Maine, across the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, New Hampshire." It had been sold in New York in January 1860 to Francis Bowen, "'the Prince of Slavers.'" 16

After it was seized, its third mate, "Minthorne Westervelt, a young man from one of New York's wealthiest families" was tried but the jury deadlocked.17

Authorities tried to catch the Ocilla out of Mystic, Connecticut but it got away with landing slaves in Cuba. It's crew were identified as Philadelphians.

The Huntress "of New York, owned by a New Yorker and a New Bedford, Massachusetts, native, was found burned after landing 500 slaves" in Cuba. A crew member said 250 other slaves had died of thirst and their bodies were thrown overboard.18

The illegal slave trade "catered to an international plantation economy."

W.E.B. Du Bois, whose book The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 is still authoritative, regretted he didn't look at the economics of the slave trade further: "Laws codify morality; economics ignore both."

That is a true statement as proven by the War Between the States that was fought because the Northern economy faced economic annihilation when the Southern states seceded and suddenly the North could not count on the rivers of cotton it had to have constantly.

Instead, Lincoln and the North would have to face the South as a powerful competitor with 100% control of King Cotton and a low 10% tariff viz-a-viz the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher.

The South, once military and trade alliances with Great Britain were signed, could not be beaten by the North in a war, and Lincoln knew it.

That's why Lincoln sent five hostile military missions into Southern waters in March and April, 1861.

He wanted the war started as quickly as he could so he could throw up his blockade and chill relations between the South and Great Britain.

Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Twelve
Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad
Part One

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Ten, Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates, Part One)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 128.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 129.

7 Ibid.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 130.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 131.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 132.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Chap-Six-NOTES-1-55K
Chap-Six-NOTES-2-74K
Chap-Six-NOTES-3-22K

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Ten, Chapter Six: New York’s Slave Pirates, Part One

Posted on by | 1 Comment
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part One
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
SLAVE-Pict-Beginning-of-Chap-Six p120 44K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Six. The picture come from page 120.

NEW YORK CITY was the slave trading capital of the planet along with Boston in the 1860s as the War Between the States raged.

New York was "the hub of an international illegal slave trade that, like the latter-day traffic in drugs, was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop."1

Slave ships were built, sold and outfitted in New York "with crates of shackles and the supersized water tanks needed for their human cargo." Officials

uncaring or bribed, look the other way as slave ships sailed from New York harbor under the flimsiest of disguises. The traffickers relied on fake owners, forged documents, and, most shamefully, the American flag's guarantee of immunity from seizure by foreign nations.2

The trade was so flagrant and accepted that "New York newspapers reported the names of ships leaving for slave voyages." The New York slave trade went on until the 1880s:

During the peak years in 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships left from New York every month, according to one cautions estimate. Most could hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves. So in each of those years, News York ships might have carried as many as 20,000 new Africans into bondage.3

As previously stated, slave traders were much more brutal than slave masters because slave traders did not have to live with their slaves. All they did was drop them off and collect their money.

Most of the illegal slave trading in the 1860s and beyond was with "Spanish-controlled Cuba, one of the last open slave markets in the Western Hemisphere."4

In August 1860, the U.S. Navy intercepted the Erie that was "sailing suspiciously close to the mouth of the Congo." It was flying an American flag but when boarded officers found "900 newly purchased Africans." Half were children already in bad shape and 30 would die in the next two weeks before they could be delivered to Liberia, "the sanctuary and dumping ground for slavery's refugees."5

The Erie and her crew were sent back to New York, where they had started, to face charges.

A second ship at the same time and place as the Erie, the Storm King, was seized with

620 Africans, half of them children. The next month the Cora loaded with 700 Africans, was captured. All three were New York ships.6

The Erie's captain was Nathaniel Gordon, "son of a Portland, Maine, sea captain and a seasoned slave trader."

Most slave ship captains "hailed from the North, especially New England, which had dominated American shipping since colonial times."7

In the 1850s, "the coffee plantations of Brazil were a market." U.S. diplomats "reported that Gordon had landed 500 slaves near Rio de Janeiro, then burned his ship to escape capture."

Most captains did not have as long a career as Gordon. Their biggest threats were the diseases of the African coast, and slave insurrection.

In 1820:

[T]rafficking in slaves was made an act of piracy and a capital crime for U.S. citizens, though the law was hardly a deterrent. For the next four decades, prosecutions for piracy were rare, and convictions were nonexistent.8

Gordon was prosecuted and it took two trials but he was convicted and hanged on February 21, 1862 "despite a petition for mercy signed by 11,000 sympathetic New Yorkers." He was "the first and only American ever executed for participating in the African slave trade."9

The illegal New York slave trade involved all kinds of subterfuge such as switching "from legitimate merchant vessel to slave ship and back again" as well as "duplicate sets of ownership papers, and even duplicate captains and crews---one American and one foreign."10

Illegal slave ships blended easily with New York's legitimate commerce, and "official indifference" encouraged it. A captain who was arrested then released in New York to go to Rio "to gather information for his defense" never returned and bragged "'You don't have to worry about facing trial in New York City. . . . I can get any man off in New York for $1,000.'"11

The British were the most determined to stop illegal slave trading --- probably because of their enormous guilt in establishing the slave trade worldwide and carrying it on for over a century and a half --- but American slave ships were protected from the Brits. The British were not allowed to board ships flying the American flag.

Funny how New York and New England liberals hate the Confederate battle flag but it never flew over slave ships like the American flag did.

The American flag flew over New York and New England slave ships for over 200 years.

The Confederate battle flag was always a soldiers flag carried on some of the bloodiest battlefields in history by hungry, often barefoot Confederate boys defending their homes from the Northern invasion.

In truth, the Confederate battle flag is one of the greatest symbols of valor and virtue in all of history. The victories achieved under it against a more numerous, better armed enemy make it as glorious as any great flag in the annals of war.

Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833 then "begun to negotiate treaties that gave its vaunted navy the right to police the slave trade. By the 1850s, the only holdout that mattered was the United States," which did not allow the Brits to detain American ships. Only the American navy could do that.12

The U.S. Navy did assign a squadron that was never any larger than five ships to patrol thousands of miles of African coast:

In the two decades before the Erie was seized, the U.S. Africa squadron had caught exactly two ships actually loaded with slaves. British commanders complained that their U.S. counterparts let blatant slave ships pass unchallenged.13

In 1862, Lincoln signed a treaty that was approved by the Senate in secret because of fear of a backlash. It allowed the Brits to board and search American ships.

American diplomats did complain about Britain because it "allowed its own merchants to export goods to Africa that they knew supported the slave economy."14

Britain's behavior was worse than that.

It appears they were running a con game that allowed them to continue slave trading at least to a degree:

[W]hen its navy captured slave ships, Britain didn't always return the "liberated" slaves to Africa. Often it delivered them to years of indentured labor on plantations in its Caribbean colonies.15

Slave traders went to New York when they couldn't get away with slave trading in other places:

In June, 1860, one of [John Albert] Machado's whalers, the Thomas Watson, aroused such suspicion while outfitting for an African voyage in new London, Connecticut, that customs officials there denied it clearance. So the Thomas Watson sailed to New York and left from there. Months later it landed 800 slaves in Cuba.16

There was an entire industry that supported the illegal slave trade in New York in the 1860s:

It included ship fitters, suppliers, recruiters of crews, and bribed marshals and customs agents. Ship owners and captains accused of violating slave trade laws often were defended by Beebe, Dean & Donohue, leading admiralty lawyers with offices at 76 Wall Street.17

Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune in June, 1861, two months into the War Between the States, complained that "'the slave-traders in this city have matured their arrangements so thoroughly that they almost invariably manage to elude the meshes of the law. Now they bribe a jury, another time their counsel or agents spirit away a vital witness. . . . Fortunately, however, a new class of men [Lincoln appointees] now have direction of affairs, and a stop will be put to this iniquitous complicity with crime. . . . To effect this it will be necessary to purge the courts and offices of these pimps of piracy, who are well known, and at the proper time will receive their desserts.'"18

Greeley was a virtue signaling hypocrite who shows that the press in 1860 in New York was as big a fraud as it is today.

During President Trump's administration the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the Russia Hoax which turned out to be a lie paid for by the Democrat Party and its operatives.

The racist New York Times birthed another fraud, the 1619 Project, with its primary theme that the American Revolution was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery.

There is no evidence whatsoever for that absurd claim. Not a letter, statement, document, speech, nothing. The American Revolution was fought because the colonies were fed up with being controlled and taxed by Great Britain like Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence.

It was worse for the South in 1860. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes while 80% of the tax money was being spent in the North.19 South Carolinians stated in one of their documents:

The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern States that the Colonies did toward Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British Parliament.20

That address ends with "No man can, for a moment, believe that our ancestors intended to establish over their posterity, exactly the same sort of Government they had overthrown."

The hypocrite Greeley in slave-trading New York published a long emotional editorial entitled "The Right of Secession" on December 17, 1860, the day South Carolina's secession convention convened. Greeley was known for saying that our "erring sisters should be allowed to depart in peace."

This was before he realized that an independent South with 100% control of King Cotton and committed to free trade would bury the North economically.

In "The Right of Secession," Greeley writes:

--- We have repeatedly asked those who dissent from our view of this matter to tell us frankly whether they do or do not assent to Mr. Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed: and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government," &c., &c. We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood. And, if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why? . . . ---we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred, even when invoked in behalf of those who deny it to others . . . if ever 'seven or eight States' send agents to Washington to say 'We want to get out of the Union,' we shall feel constrained by our devotion to Human Liberty to say Let Them Go! And we do not see how we could take the other side without coming in direct conflict with those Rights of Man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements, however convenient and advantageous.21

Horace Greeley and those like him are cowardly dishonorable men.

Three months after writing this, with the Northern economy collapsing all around him, he wanted war like the rest of the North.

So much for his preventing the "shedding of seas of human blood." Greeley got 750,000 dead and a million wounded and he didn't care a damn.

The slave trade in 1861 in New York "had grown so brazen that anyone who read a New York newspaper would have known how it worked."22

New York ships "sailed to Rio de Janeiro or, later, Havana, where they might take aboard a second captain and crew" whom they would list as passengers.

When on the African coast "came a sudden switch in nationality. Just before or even while slaves were being loaded, the foreigners would declare themselves owners and commanders of what---moments before---had been a U.S. vessel."

The American crew "made the return voyage as working passengers on the now-foreign slave ship" or they returned on a ship that "was the slave ship's accomplice."23

Abolition "threatened entire national economies that were still dependent on slave labor." At this point "the illegal slave trade became more profitable and, if possible, more horrific" because ships "grew larger, able to stow close to 1,000 Africans chained in pairs between their narrow decks."24

Some slave traders built steam ships but "those new vessels led to new kinds of suffering on the centuries-old Middle Passage. The hot boilers could cause skin ulcers. Water-distilling machines that malfunctioned could poison an entire cargo of slaves."25

Wooden vessels became disposable and would often be destroyed so there was no evidence.

The profits were enormous:

In 1861, a British diplomat estimated that a single successful voyage might yield a 250 percent profit to the owners of an average slave ship. The asking price for slaves in Africa at that point was about $50, while the selling price in Cuba was more than $1,000. The diplomat's calculations included deductions for bribes fixed at $120 per slave, $25,000 for the vessel, and $30,000 for the crew. Captains were probably paid close to $4,000, enough to make a man rich.26

Slave traders counted on 10% of the slaves dying though that number could be higher:

On its way to Cuba in 1857, one of the largest New York slave ships, the Haidee, lost 200 of its 1,100 slaves.27

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Eleven
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates
Part Two
(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:
Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two)
NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 121.

2 Ibid.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 122.

4 Ibid.

5 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 121.

6 Ibid.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 122.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 123.

9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 123-124.

10 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 124.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 125.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 125-126.

19 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 111.

20 The Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States, December, 1860.

21 "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860 in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.

22 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126-127.

 

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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Chap-Six-NOTES-2-74K
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Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Nine, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part Two

Posted on by | No Comments
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
BRANDING-a-Negress-p100-51K
MAIN-3-slave-coffle-4-7-22 59K
MAIN-4-slave-ad-4-7-22-89K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Five. The three pictures come from Pages 100, 107 and 99.

THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION ban on the slave trade went into effect January 1, 1808 and at that point, Bristol, Rhode Island had "outstripped Newport" as Rhode Island's slave trading capital.1

Of course, that ban was on the previously legal slave trade. Illegal slave trading would continue.

Many New England ports along with New York traded in African slaves most of the nineteenth century, which included the War Between the States and afterward. As W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870,2 Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the war.

John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, and Captain James DeWolf of Bristol are "two of America's most audacious slave merchants."3

Brown entered Congress in 1799, a few years after he became the first American indicted for violating the federal government's earliest attempt to restrict the slave trade. DeWolf served a term in the Senate, even though, during his years as a slave ship captain, he had been accused of drowning a female slave infected with smallpox.4

Breaking slave trading laws was routine. They were viewed as "annoyances made to be broken."

Captains routinely ordered sick slaves thrown overboard, almost as a matter of hygiene, to keep them from contaminating the whole ship.5

It was rumored that one of DeWolf's captains "cut off the hands of two sick slaves who were clinging to his ship's railing."6

John Brown, who was also a fiery Revolutionary War patriot, founded Brown University with his brothers:

John himself laid the cornerstone of its first building. His still-standing home on the Brown campus in Providence was once described as 'the most magnificent and elegant private mansion' in America.7

The patriot Brown "led one of the first violent acts of rebellion, the 1772 attack on the British customs schooner Gaspee that patrolled Narragansett Bay."8

Slave trading was full of risk and many traders went out of business.

A Brown ship, the Sally, left behind the fullest records of any American slave ship from her voyage of "September 1764 to October 1765."

For that voyage, the Browns had chosen Esek Hopkins as captain. Hopkins would later command, for a while, "the Continental Navy, flying a 'Don't Tread on Me' flag as his ensign. Before the war, he commanded privateers...".9

The Sally was "loaded with 17,000 gallons of rum" and "goods to barter, including crates of spermaceti candles; a small armory of muskets and cutlasses; and 40 sets of manacles and shackles." She needed to return with 140 slaves to make a profit.10

Hopkins worked on commission like many captains. As captain of the Sally:

The Browns promised he could have 10 'privilege' slaves to sell himself, 4 more slaves for every 100 he delivered to market, and 5 percent of the gross sales. . . .

The Browns also ordered Hopkins to set aside, if available, 4 healthy young slaves 'about 15 years old' for their own use.11

Rhode Island slave ships were smaller than European ships but they "poked into river villages and shopped at the slave 'factories,' or warehouses, strung along nearly 2,000 miles of coast. At each stop, bribes or gifts had to be dispensed before the real bargaining for slaves could begin."12

Hopkins got to Africa in mid-November 1764 and immediately had trouble. Slave captains try to get away from the African coast and the high risk of disease but:

Hopkins lingered. On May 1, he recorded the first death of a slave, a boy. A few weeks later, a woman slave hanged herself below deck. Another 20 slaves died, presumably of natural causes, before Hopkins finally escaped the coast in late August with a cargo of about 170 Africans.13

A few days later the slaves revolted despite Hopkins and all captains knowing "from experience that the danger of revolt was greatest when the ship was close to the coast and slaves still hoped they could regain their homeland."14

Hopkins wrote:

Slaves rose on us was obliged [to] fire on them and destroyed 8 and several more wounded badly 1 thye & ones ribs broke."15

In October, "Hopkins landed at Antigua after stopping at Barbados" and reported that "half his slaves had died." Some had drowned themselves and others starved themselves. The 90 survivors were in a "'very sickly & disordered manner.'"

The voyage lost a fortune. One friend "wrote that the voyage was the most disastrous he'd every heard of by a Providence vessel."16

Insurance policies covered some things: "A policy written for a DeWolf ship covered losses from 'risks of the Seas, Men or War, Fires, Enemies, Pirates, Rovers, Thieves, Jettisons . . . Captures at Sea by American cruisers and Insurrection of slaves but not of common mortality.'17

Loading a slave ship was dangerous:

[S]hips waited at anchor for small boats to ferry their cargoes from shore. The loading process could be brutal and dangerous. Africans who balked on the beach might be whipped. Slaves and captors alike drowned in heavy surf that capsized their ferries.18

On board, slaves might be stripped and branded but:

They had to be brought above deck to eat . . . . Meals were cooked in enormous vats that fueled a common African fear: many had heard that white people were cannibals.19

The African coast was called "'the White Man's Grave'" because of "smallpox, dysentery, malaria, ophthalmia (an infection that caused blindness)" and other diseases.20

Slaves became depressed and "had to be forced to exercise and sometimes even to eat. Their aerobics in chains became a ritual 'dance' practiced to the very end of the slave trade."21

A slave attempting to starve himself might be "force-fed, their mouths pried open with a speculum oris---a plierslike instrument."

These things prove the greater brutality of the slave trader who, unlike the master, did not have to live with his slaves but just deliver them and collect his profits.

Thomas Jefferson in a draft of the Declaration of Independence had protested the slave trade and stated that King George III had forced it on the colonies. Jefferson wrote that the English king had:

'waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's [sic] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.'22

That language was not in the final rendition of the Declaration of Independence "in deference to proponents of slavery" such as New England and New York slave traders, and those who wanted to buy slaves for labor.23

John Brown testified in Congress that Americans should not leave the enormous profits from slave trading to Europeans:

'Mr. B said our distilleries and manufactories were all lying idle for want of extended commerce. He had been well-informed that on those [African] coasts New England rum was much preferred to the best Jamaica spirits, and would fetch a better price. Whey then should it not be sent there, and a profitable return be made?'24

Brown had famously said:

'there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.'25

The premier historian of the Rhode Island slave merchants wrote that "'in the annals of the American slave trade, the deWolfs are without peer."

The DeWolfs launches 88 slave voyages between 1784 and 1807, four times more than  their closest Rhode Island rivals. DeWolfs personally commanded many of these voyages. Captain James DeWolf is supposed to have made a farewell voyage in 1807 aboard the Andromache, the pride of the DeWolf fleet.26

The DeWolfs "ran an integrated business, shipping molasses from their Cuban sugar plantations to their distilleries in Bristol." They founded a bank and insurance company to support their slave trading.27

They set up an office in Charleston in 1804 with a young DeWolf running it. When Congress voted to end the slave trade:

the DeWolfs rushed 18 ships filled with Africans to South Carolina alone in just seven months. The Traffic became so heavy that Charleston newspapers ran articles worrying about the health threat from dead slaves floating in the harbor.28

Rhode Island and New England hypocrisy was on full display in 1820 when they opposed admitting Missouri as a slave state. James DeWolf was then "newly elected to the Senate" and had to listen to South Carolina Senator William Smith confront him and set the record straight:

'The people of Rhode Island have lately shown bitterness against slaveholders, and especially against the admission of Missouri . . . This, however, cannot, I believe, be the temper or opinion of the majority, from the late election of James deWolf as a member of this house, as he has accumulated an immense fortune in the slave trade.'29

Smith went on:

[I] would show the Senate that those people who most deprecate the evils of slavery and traffic in human flesh, when a profitable market can be found, can sell human flesh with as easy a conscience as they sell other articles.'30

Today, New England's massive participation in the slave trade is deliberately hidden so they can falsely claim to be the heroes of American history, though so much of their history is a lie.

Senator Smith, when he exposed New England hypocrisy in the United States Senate, also

submitted records he'd collected from the Charleston customshouse for the years 1804 to 1808. The 'black catalog,' as he called it, showed that of 12,000 slaves imported on U.S. ships, nearly 8,000 were shipped on Rhode Island vessels.31

Southerners in antebellum times correctly pointed out that the British, then Northerners, especially New Englanders and New Yorkers, had forced slavery on the South.

DeWolf helped with a treaty that "allowed the British and U.S. navies to jointly patrol the African coast for illegal slave ships." It also forbid the British from searching American ships so, by 1860, the year before the war:

the fact that the British could not board U.S. ships helped give New York City the freedom to become the criminal headquarters of a massive illegal slave trade to markets in Brazil and Cuba.32

It was not just New York but also Boston and other New England ports that W. E. B. DuBois said, in 1862, were the largest slave trading ports on the planet.

New Englanders were always clever slave traders and smugglers from the colonial era on but "Rhode Islanders were masters." They

anticipated many of the illegal slave traders' methods. They disguised their ships with foreign flags and landed illicit cargoes in remote coves. They bought back confiscated ships for a fraction of their value.33

The slave trade made the DeWolfs, New England and New York rich and powerful but in 1820 "Congress passed a law mandating the death penalty for those trafficking in African slaves."

As a result, by 1825, George DeWolf went bankrupt as did the economy of Bristol, Rhode Island, itself.

Newport, Rhode Island followed.

Slave trading with its enormous profits was in the blood of New Englanders. As customs collector and signer of the Declaration of Independence, William Ellery, wrote:

'An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be induced to change so lucrative a trade.'34

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Ten
Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eight, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part One)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 100-101.

2 W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 178-80.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101.

4 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101-102.

5 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 102.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 101.

9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 104.

10 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 103.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 105.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 105-106.

19 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 106-107.

20 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 107.

21 Ibid.

22 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 108-109.

23 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 109.

24 Ibid.

25 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 110.

26 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 111.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 112.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 112-113.

34 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 113.

 

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eight, Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves, Part One

Posted on by | 1 Comment
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Eight
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part One
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
MAIN-2-inside-slave-ship-4-7-22 78K
Chap-8-Main-1-map-4-7-22-87K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Five. The two pictures come from Pages 96 and 106.

RHODE ISLAND DOMINATED SLAVE TRADING more than any other of the thirteen original American states:

In the century before Congress voted to ban the slave trade beginning in 1808, Rhode Island launched nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa, carrying at least 100,000 slaves back across the Atlantic.1

Despite the enthusiastic slave trading of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and other Northern ports, it was small compared to Europeans who "transported nearly all the estimated 11.5 million Africans sold over three centuries into New World slavery, including the approximately 645,000 sent to the American colonies."2

Rhode Island was also one of three states to reserve the Right of Secession before acceding to the Constitution. The other two were New York and Virginia.

That is extremely important because it, alone, proves the right of secession. There is much other irrefutable evidence of the right of secession but the reserved right of secession demanded by Rhode Island, New York and Virginia, was granted by all the other states, which means they had it too because all states entered the Union as exact equals.

Rhode Island's slave trading was so aggressive and successful they competed "with European powers."3 It brought great wealth into the state and often was a family affair:

The reputation of Aaron Lopez and his father-in-law Jacob Rodriguez Rivera as wealthy and supremely honorable Jewish businessmen spread far beyond Rhode Island. Lopez, a 'merchant prince' who prospered in the Triangle Trade, was a founder of Touro Synagogue in Newport, the oldest synagogue in America and a site on the National Historic Register. The Wanton family produced  four colonial governors and also launched slave voyages. Two of Newport's most active traders, the Vernon brothers, Samuel and William, found a steady customer in Henry Laurens, the leading slave merchant in Charleston, South Carolina. During the Revolution, Laurens was a president of the Continental Congress.4

Most of the Newport slave traders were not captains. They financed voyages or owned slave ships.

They branched out too and became known as "rum-men" to the black tribal chieftains who took their captives to the 40 or so slave forts and castles along the African coast:

When the Newport trade first reached a peak just before the Revolution, its vessels were carrying 200,000 gallons a year to Africa, where ship captains bartered for slaves by the barrel. An African man in his prime could be bought for about 150 gallons.5

As stated many times in the past, slave trading via the Triangle Trade financed much of the infrastructure of the Old North:

Two dozen distilleries operated in Newport alone. In 1772, merchants who owned slaving vessels, who traded in molasses and rum, or who operated distilleries occupied 8 of the top 10 positions on Newport's tax rolls.6

This was true not only in Rhode Island but also in Massachusetts, Connecticut and other places.

All of this slave trading wealth "ushered the town into its first golden age. The rich and famous from distant colonies spent summers there. Prosperous ship captains formed the charitable Fellowship Club that had rules against cursing, gambling, and drunkenness."7 Many slave trading captains attended Trinity Church.

Those people who demand the public pay them reparations for slavery should go to Newport, Boston, New York and the other Northern slave trading ports and get them to pay it since they brought so many of the slaves here.

Perhaps they should get guilty Europeans, the British, Spanish, Portuguese and other slave traders as well to pay.

Of course, the good folks alive today in Newport, Boston, New York and in Europe, never owned a slave or supported slavery in any way. Most are undoubtedly appalled by slavery. They have no debt to anybody alive today for things some people's ancestors did hundreds of years ago.

Everybody's ancestors went through some kind of hell in those times whether it was women dying in child birth, thousands killed by diseases we cure easily today, Southerners who died fighting for their homes and families when the South was invaded by murdering, raping incendiaries for wanting to govern themselves as the Declaration of Independence guaranteed.

The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year before Southern states started seceding came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

If you must make somebody pay reparations today then make those whose ancestors are most responsible: The descendants of African tribal chieftains who captured other Africans and sold them into slavery.

Of course, even those folks owe nothing to people alive today. Many of them probably wish their ancestors had bequeathed American citizenship to them.

Orders given by Jacob Rivera and Aaron Lopez in 1772 to one of their slave ship captains make their barbaric trade sound like business as usual:

'Lying any considerable time on the [African] coast is not only attended with very heavy expense, but also great risk of the slaves you have on board. We therefore would recommend to you dispatch, even if you are obliged to give a few gallons more or less on each slave.'8

They wanted the captain to brand a group of 40 slaves they already had and keep them separate from new purchases:

'To these slaves we desire you'll put some particular mark that may distinguish them from those of the cargo, so that their sales in the West Indies may be kept by itself, for the insurance on these is not blended with the cargo.'9

Rhode Island's Reverend Samuel Hopkins preached against slave trading after the Revolution:

'The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share of this traffic, of all these United States. This trade in human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended.'10

Newport was occupied by the British in the Revolution which lulled its slave trading but once the Revolution was one, Newport started back with a vengeance. Before the Revolution they had traded mostly with the West Indies sugar islands but after the Revolution it was the Deep South.

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Nine
Chapter Five: Newport Rum, African Slaves
Part Two

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Seven, Chapter Four: Rebellion in Manhattan)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 95.

2 Ibid.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 95-97.

4 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 98.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 98-99.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99-100.

 

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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