[John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships offers a comprehensive
portrait of the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic, starting with the
last slave ships to dock in New York Harbor. ] [[link removed]]


NEW YORK CITY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE  
[[link removed]]


 

Gerald Horne
February 24, 2021
The Nation
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships offers a comprehensive
portrait of the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic, starting with the
last slave ships to dock in New York Harbor. _

JMW Turner, Slave Ship, detail of ship , profzucker CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

 

In the middle of 1856, the soon-to-be-celebrated poet Walt Whitman
visited an impounded slave ship in Brooklyn. The taking of the ship
was an unusual occurrence, as it was one of the few illegal slavers
seized by an otherwise lethargic Washington, D.C., and Whitman wanted
to give his readers a tour of the vessel, which had been designed to
add even more enslaved laborers to the millions already ensnared in
this system of iniquity, including of its hold, where those victimized
were to be “laid together spoon-fashion.”

BOOKS IN REVIEW
THE LAST SLAVE SHIPS: NEW YORK AND THE END OF THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
By John Harris
Buy this book [[link removed]]

Whitman’s keen journalistic interest was a response to the feverish
political climate in his homeland, featuring ever more overwrought
cries demanding the relegalization and reopening of the Atlantic slave
trade. Officially, this branch of flesh peddling had been rendered
illegal by Britain in 1807 and by the United States in 1808, but it
had continued nonetheless, with boatloads of kidnapped Africans being
transported to the Americas, especially Brazil, Cuba, and the United
States. It was likely that some of Whitman’s readers in New York
City—the citadel of this illicit commerce—would have taken a
decided interest in his grim reportage.

John Harris’s _The Last Slave Ships_ offers a more comprehensive
portrait of the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic, starting with the
last slave ships to dock in New York Harbor. Mining the historical
archives in Spain, Portugal, Cuba, and the United States, Harris
demonstrates how, even as slavery was being abolished in the Northern
states, it continued to flourish, since the slave system was not
confined simply to below the Mason-Dixon Line. The financing of the
slave trade’s illegitimate commerce was sited heavily in Manhattan:
The ships passed through the waterways of the city’s harbor, and the
denizens of Gotham also enjoyed the profits of this odious system,
even as many of them publicly denounced it. After all, slave ships
required crews, not to mention the need to grease the palms of corrupt
officials at the harbor and elsewhere with attractive bribes. In sum,
the wealth produced by slave labor built not only a region but a
nation. Like Charleston, S.C., and Galveston, Tex., New York City
benefited from the trade in human souls—which, in a sense, continues
to undergird Wall Street.

Much of _The Last Slave Ships_ concerns itself with the years
immediately preceding the crushing of this ugly business as a
consequence of the Civil War, and the book chronicles how the
construction of swift ships was financed in New York, how the
audacious smuggling persisted as a result, and how the breathtaking
inhumanity that this smuggling created continues to bedevil this
country even though it ended many decades ago.

Indeed, it does not require acrobatically inclined inferences to
conclude that the vessel Whitman visited in the Brooklyn Navy Yard
symbolized far more than the attempted impounding of slavery itself,
which within five years was to ignite a bloody war. It also
represented a moral economy that eroded the most basic human empathy.
One might add that the story of how a slave ship wound up in New York
waters also sheds light on how a would-be Manhattan Mussolini received
74 million votes in the presidential election of 2020.

After the triumph of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, which saw the
successful overthrow of slavery by the enslaved themselves, the
British Empire sensed the imminent danger both to its investments and
to the lives of British settlers in the Caribbean, especially those
living in the cash cows of Jamaica and Barbados, so it chose to
curtail the country’s role in the African slave trade. In 1807, the
House of Commons passed the Slave Trade Act, which made illegal the
participation of British ships and citizens and ultimately helped to
extirpate this pestilence more generally. By 1808, London’s spawn on
the west bank of the Atlantic had moved similarly—at least on the
surface—with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which
outlawed US involvement in the non-domestic slave trade. Had these
laws been rigorously enforced, they would have spelled the beginning
of the end of the Atlantic slave trade.

But the monarchy and the newly independent republic once ruled by it
responded to these acts differently. The Royal Navy became the cop on
the beat chasing down scofflaws. Meanwhile, many of the scofflaws it
was chasing down were in US-built-and-flagged vessels that were
maintained, at times, by crews from the purported revolutionary
republic. Thus, in the first half of the 19th century, two parallel
developments played a role in the evolving drama: British ships hunted
down human traffickers, while US ships did their best to evade the
long arm of the law. Even though the Atlantic slave trade had been
officially outlawed in the United States, it persisted despite this
fact, which meant that millions of captives still departed Africa for
a hellish enslavement in the Americas. Indeed, Harris writes,
“almost four million captives left African shores between the
beginning of the century and the closure of the traffic in the 1860s,
around a third of all captives who ever crossed the Atlantic.”

A ray of sunshine in this cumulus of gloom came in the mid-19th
century. At least by some accounts, the bulk of this horrendous
merchandising of human souls reached a zenith in the 1840s in Brazil,
the largest market of all, and then began to slow. But even following
a military defeat of the enslavers in the United States in 1865, the
slave trade limped along in Brazil and Cuba until the 1880s. As Harris
shows, much of this bondage survived as a result of financial and
diplomatic support from the nation that had proclaimed itself a
“shining city upon a hill” and, in particular, from its shiniest
city: New York.

The obscenely profitable slave ships were financed in New York City,
and as Whitman discovered, the ships departed from there, too.
Moreover, when New Yorkers sipped their morning coffee or sweetened
their morning tea, it was often coffee that had been produced by slave
labor in Brazil and sugar produced by slave labor in Cuba. A number of
New York’s elected representatives may have been officially opposed
to the slave trade, but they nonetheless represented a city and a
state that profited from it immensely.

As Harris writes, during the Atlantic slave trade’s later stages,
slave ships embarked from many points along the Eastern Seaboard, but
New York City accounted for two out of every three departures.
Investors in the illegal trade were willing to assume the risk, since,
during this era, the average return on investment was an eye-watering
91 percent. Just as later generations of Wall Street wizards devised
collateralized debt obligations and other devious instruments designed
to maximize profit, their predecessors acted in a manner that
anticipated today’s financial engineering. Revealingly, Lehman
Brothers, the Wall Street firm whose 2008 bankruptcy was said to have
triggered a financial crisis that required massive bailouts and almost
brought capitalism to its knees, began by capitalizing lucratively on
the production of cotton picked by enslaved labor in Alabama.

Insurance companies also wallowed in the filthy lucre of this odious
business. Then as now, the financing and insuring taking place in New
York proved to be a transnational business. This unclean interchange
may have originated in Gotham, but it involved and benefited investors
in Western Europe (especially Portugal and Spain) and in Cuba and
Brazil. Also implicated were the ship-building industries of Maine and
Maryland, often kept afloat by Manhattan investors, along with many
other New Yorkers who lived in a city whose economy was still buoyed
by slavery.

While certain New Yorkers were diabolically investing in the illegal
slave trade, across the ocean in London, the British government began
to invest in spies in order to keep track of it, devising publications
to chart the movements of slave ships and subsidizing the Royal Navy,
which was authorized to halt their devilry.

The overly optimistic observer might have imagined that the United
States would move in a similar direction. Yet while London proved to
be an often fierce watchdog, Washington proved to be a toothless
terrier, protestations about an antislavery Constitution
notwithstanding. From 1851 to 1860, 159 individuals were prosecuted
under US slave trade laws in the republic; of these, 99 were
acquitted, encountered a deadlocked jury, or were otherwise ordered
released. Twelve were tried and convicted but endured only a slap on
the wrist, and nine managed to escape custody somehow. The outcomes
for the remainder are unclear, though it is fair to assume that they
too eluded punishment. Prosecutors failed to file charges against 21
others, because of the distinct possibility they would not be
convicted.

The Africa Squadron of the United States, ostensibly intended to quash
this illicit trading at the source, was hardly robust. Based in Cape
Verde, it was stationed far from the Congo-Angola region used by
enslavers—to say nothing of similarly hounded Mozambique, on the
opposite side of the sprawling continent. The Africa Squadron’s
placement was akin to basing the Los Angeles Police Department’s
anti-bank-robbery squad in Racine, Wis. The US Navy was incompetent,
typically dispatching fewer than five vessels to Africa, while London
posted about 30. Predictably, from 1843 to 1858, the US Navy captured
20 slavers, while during the same period the Royal Navy, based more
sensibly in Luanda, Angola, captured over 500. Perhaps worse, the
United States sought vigorously to bar the Royal Navy from searching
suspected slave ships bearing the Stars and Stripes.

The dictates of monograph writing—hard-pressed publishers seeking to
cut costs by shrinking page counts, assisted by hawkish peer reviewers
eager to insist that authors remain in their narrow lane—likely
helps to explain why Harris’s otherwise informative book does not
engage with the strategic reasons for this geopolitical fiasco. But
the United States’ slothfulness in responding to such rampant
illegality did serve to deliver an enormous gift to its monarchical
foe in the form of those African Americans willing to take their side.

The eminent Frederick Douglass was among the legions who expressed a
love for Britain at a time when the two powers were at each other’s
throats. But Douglass was hardly the first African American to do so:
Many of the republic’s enslaved people—the greater number of them
by far—backed the redcoats during the 1776 war for this very reason,
opposing the ultimately victorious rebels. During the War of 1812
between the United States and Britain, enslaved people also defected
en masse to the Union Jack, including during the sacking of Washington
in August 1814, when enslaved Africans fled on retreating British
vessels to Trinidad and Tobago, where they received land grants and
where their descendants continue to live.

Perhaps the Yankees realized that this pro-London stance was unlikely
to last forever and comforted themselves nervously with the thought.
Yet there was doubtless fear when Douglass announced that “in the
event of a British army landing in the States and offering liberty to
the slaves, [the enslaved] would rally round the British at the first
tap of the drum.”

In sum, the allegiances of the enslaved were situational. After all,
those with longer memories may have recalled the Stono Revolt in
colonial South Carolina in 1739, when the enslaved were assisted by
Spanish Florida in the bloodiest slave revolt of the colonial era in
British North America. Others may have recalled the time in the late
16th century when it was Spain’s turn to worry, as the maritime John
Brown—Jacques Sorie, a French corsair—terrorized Madrid’s
settlements from South America to the Florida Straits by offering
freedom to the enslaved. Or that just before the US takeover in
Florida 200 years ago, the British sponsored the well-armed Negro
Fort, staffed by Africans and their Indigenous comrades, which was the
beginning of several decades-long wars, some of the bloodiest fought
by the US military. Unsurprisingly, as the Stars and Stripes were
unfurled on the peninsula, a steady stream of ships overflowing with
Africans headed south to Cuba, unwilling to wager that the allegedly
antislavery US Constitution would—eventually—reveal itself.

Washington, D.C., had good reason to believe that London was
determined to harass its former colony and use the enslaved as a
bludgeon with which to accomplish this ambition, which is often what
London did. In 1858, it placed a “man of color,” Sir James
Douglas, as its chief executive in British Columbia, inducing many
Africans—enslaved and otherwise—to flee there and to other sites
along the elongated border with Canada just as Washington sought to
claim the vast Oregon Territory.

Hastening the scurrying of Texas into the Union was the fear that
Britain was determined to create yet another Haiti in the Lone Star
State, thus jeopardizing neighboring Louisiana and Arkansas and the
slave-holding South as a whole. Circling the wagons around fellow
republicans was thought by the US government to be a way to guarantee
this fate would not befall what became a xxxxxx of secession. It also
helped convince the otherwise audacious Texans that the better part of
wisdom was in joining the like-minded Yankees and liquidating their
own imperiled independence.

The British were hardly a pristine ally of the oppressed. At the same
time that the officialdom in Whitehall was denouncing republican
pretensions in the United States with full-throated fieriness,
redcoats were repressing South Asians as a result of the Sepoy Revolt
in 1857. But wrestling with this contradiction was hardly unique to
the enslaved and their allies. Strategic flexibility is almost always
an unavoidable reality when confronting humanity’s forms of
barbarism.

While Harris occasionally considers this strategic flexibility and the
countless heroic African Americans who were largely responsible for
sabotaging the republic’s—and New York City’s—dirty role in
sustaining this bondage, he could have written more about African
American resistance, especially in Manhattan itself. Consider, for
example, the heroic David Ruggles, who was a one-man battering ram
against actual and potential enslavers. Ruggles, a mariner—a labor
force that often included the most militant of proletarians—applied
the organizing acumen he learned at sea to the abolitionist movement,
which in turn embodied the truism that the working class as a whole
could not be liberated if African Americans in the republic were
branded with the indelible badge of inferiority. Unsurprisingly, the
mass struggle for an eight-hour workday, and the liftoff of unions
more generally, only occurred after the abolition of slavery.

Nevertheless, Harris does illuminate some of the dilemmas that today
face those seeking to resist the poisonous legacy of slavery. Though
dimly understood, even by those who consider themselves class
warriors, class struggle—often emblazoned in a blindingly fierce
anti-racism—has characterized the travails of enslaved Africans in
North America from the start of their resistance and was given even
fiercer determination as a result of the illegal slave trade. Perhaps
the harshest, most cruelly antagonistic and draconian of class
relationships is that between the enslaved and the slaveholder. As
such, the class struggle of the enslaved has shaped the contours of
this land, defining not only resistance to slavery but, ultimately,
the political configuration that continues to this very day.

When, in the 1520s, the Spanish dispatched a complement of the
enslaved from their perch in Santo Domingo to the region stretching
north from Florida, the enslaved had other plans: Recognizing their
common class interests with local Native groups, they revolted with
their Indigenous comrades and chased the would-be settlers back to the
Caribbean. When, by 1607, the English had established a foothold in
the land they called Virginia, the Spanish due south wanted to
intervene but were too busy fighting the Africans and their Indigenous
allies once again in Florida. In short, class struggle by the enslaved
helps to explain why today we are communicating in English.

Alternatively, settler colonialism—a phrase curiously missing from
the vocabularies of many of those who consider themselves radical in
the United States—was also a product of class collaboration from its
inception. At the behest of the English crown, small businessmen,
tailors, goldsmiths, teachers, and others arrived in the land to be
known as North Carolina in the 1580s. Sponsoring those who arrived in
1607 were grandees, including leaders of the East India
Company—London’s vector of exploitation in South Asia—and
various pillagers of West Africa.

This class collaboration between the grandees and the hoi polloi
reached its ultimate expression during the Civil War, when
nonslaveholders were the main fighting force for the so-called
Confederate States of America, which sought to destroy the republic in
order to maintain slavery. The shedding of their blood for enslavers
was not altogether an expression of misplaced class interest, since
many of the common soldiers sought to become enslavers or thought that
maintaining their castelike privilege was something worth defending.
Yet a victory would have meant a further downward pressure on wages
and working conditions driven by slavery. This dastardly display
illustrates that class collaboration can often take the form of the
highest stage of white supremacy, and vice versa. Correspondingly, no
more dramatic example of class struggle can be found than that of tens
of thousands of formerly enslaved people fighting with arms in hand in
order to terminate slavery and remain “forever free.”

Similarly, in New York City, as Harris suggests, during the heyday of
the illicit slave trade, the perpetrators relied heavily not only on
older mercantile interests but also on working-class Euro-Americans,
as evidenced by the racist “draft riots” of 1863, when a deadly
revolt unfolded, ostensibly against conscription, that amounted to a
bloody anti-Black pogrom.

Today, this supposed odd coupling of economic royalists and commoners
manifests itself in the remaining strongholds of conservatism in the
city’s five boroughs—from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to the
mostly red Staten Island. Unsurprisingly, campaign donations and foot
soldiers for Trumpism have emerged from these two areas. Equally
unsurprisingly, the vanguard of the US electorate—descendants of the
enslaved—emerges from those marinated in class struggle, who vote
against the right wing at rates as high as 9 to 1. Meanwhile, the
working class is split, as some persist in believing that the clock of
history can be put into reverse and that a system that once
expropriated the Indigenous of their land, frequently on behalf of
less affluent Euro-Americans, can be restored.

Not long after the guns of war roared at Fort Sumter, Nathaniel Gordon
of Maine was the first (and only) slave trader executed pursuant to US
law, and with the Civil War on, the Union finally moved to match
London with a treaty facilitating a further crackdown on this ugly
business, especially in New York, with Secretary of State (and former
New York governor) William Seward sagely informing Abraham Lincoln
that this was “the most important act of your life and of mine.”

Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the successful prosecution
of the Civil War necessarily vitiates this extraordinary claim, and
Harris’s smoothly written, well-researched book provides further
credence for the proposition, illuminating an often forgotten yet
crucially important chapter in US history in which the republic
continued to support and promote the Atlantic slave trade after it had
been declared illegal. But another important theme in this history
also emerges from his book: that a divided working class, fractured
along the lines of those involved in class struggle and those in class
collaboration, can hardly prosper, just as a nation can hardly exist
half slave and half free, as Lincoln once argued. Harris’s timely
tome helps clarify why this is so and helps remind us why, in
today’s republic, uplifting organized labor—especially those in
the ranks thought to bear the badges and indicia of
inferiority—remains a pressing priority.

_Gerald Horne [[link removed]] is
the author of books on slavery, socialism, popular culture, and Black
internationalism._

_Copyright c 2021 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
[[link removed]].
Distributed by PARS International Corp
[[link removed]]._

_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
[[link removed]]
to The Nation for just $12.00!    _

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]