The African Squadron

The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1920-1862

Calvin Lane

In April 1839, the Portuguese slave shipTeçora loaded 500 Africans at Lomboko on Africa's Gallinas River, slipped past British Royal Navy ships blockading the slave trade, and two months later disembarked its cargo of human misery at Havana, Cuba, 200 of the Africans having died en route. Among those captured, 49 Mende tribesmen and four children were then clandestinely shipped on the schooner Amistad to be transported east to Puerto Principe, where they would be put to work on sugar plantations. The rest is history, accurately recorded in Howard Jones's book Mutiny on the Amistad and less accurately, if powerfully, in Stephen Spielberg's film Amistad.

By 1820, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and the United States had all outlawed the international slave trade. Why, then, did the trade persist until the middle of the nineteenth century? In part, at least, the answer can be attributed to the largely futile effort of the U.S. Navy from 1820 to 1862 to interdict slave traffic on the transatlantic "Middle Passage," and to forces within and without the federal government that hobbled the blockade.

Slavery and the slave trade had been an issue that concerned the framers of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, but they dealt with it by postponing restrictions on the trade. At the end of the 20-year interval specified in the Constitution, Congress passed the Slave Importation Act of 1807, which declared further importation of slaves into the United States to be illegal.

An even more stringent act passed by the British Parliament in the same year declared the slave trade illegal, despite the fact that between 1801 and 1807 more than 200,000 slaves had been carried by the highly profitable British slaving business. Passage of the act resulted from the long and untiring efforts of Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, and from the support of the Prime Minister, Lord Grenville, who stated that the trade was "contrary to the principles of justice, humanity, and sound principle.''1

From the start, the Congressional act proved unenforceable, for President Thomas Jefferson's opposition to naval shipbuilding denied the U.S. government any power to halt the slave trade. At the same time, rising cotton production in the South, and a huge increase in production of, and demand for, Cuban sugar and Brazilian coffee expanded the market for slave labor.

Nor were the U.S. and Great Britain ready to cooperate against the slave trade. The perennially shorthanded British Royal Navy's custom of indiscriminately seizing British or American sailors from U.S. merchant ships and impressing them into naval service defied the sovereignty of U.S. vessels at sea. Then, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain's 1806 Orders in Council barring neutral trade with France and her allies, except by payment of a tax at British ports, threatened U.S. maritime free trade. These matters came to a head in June 1807, when HMS Leopard removed several crew members from the USSChesapeake after battering it into submission off the Virginia Capes. President Jefferson retaliated, or so he thought, with the Embargo Act of December 1807, forbidding U.S. ships to trade with any foreign nation. In practice, the yearlong ban only succeeded in crippling the nation's shipping trade, especially in New England. 2

The Chesapeake affair precipitated a clamor for war with Britain, and the conflict began in 1812. Although President James Madison's rallying cry of "Free Trade and Rights of Sailors" seemed to favor the interests of coastal merchants, the war appealed more to frontier settlers looking covetously at fertile land in Ontario, and to Southern warhawks such as John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who wanted to take over Florida from Spain, England's ally. Indeed, the conflict was bitterly opposed by the New England states, whose nearly devastated economy brought the region to the brink of secession by the time the war concluded at the end of 1814.

With this background, it was difficult for the United States to accept any form of search or seizure by British forces, even in the effort to halt the slave trade. Following the War of 1812, it was generally believed throughout the United States that British continuance of the right of search thinly disguised obstruction of legitimate trade with Africa and stood in the way of cooperation between United States and British African squadrons from 1820 to 1862.

As early as 1811, Britain sent warships to patrol the African coast to demonstrate its serious intent to live up to the 1807 Parliamentary act. Although sugar merchants, owners of cotton mills, Liverpool slavers, and politicians resisted the campaign to abolish the slave trade to the West Indies, the British public was solidly united in support of the act. 3

In 1815 Britain used hard cash to persuade a reluctant Portugal to abolish the slave trade north of the equator, to establish with Britain a mixed commission at Sierra Leone to decide on the fate of captured or suspected slavers, and to permit the right of search north of the equator. In 1817, Britain paid Spain to agree to similar terms.

However, because neither treaty specified what boarding officers were to look for in searching a vessel suspected of being a slaver, British cruisers could not seize empty Portuguese or Spanish ships. When chased by a Royal Navy ship, captains of loaded Spanish or Portuguese slavers sometimes threw their human cargo overboard to avoid capture. Finally, in 1835, this horror was eliminated by the inclusion of an equipment clause to specify grounds for search. A vessel might be seized if it contained hatches with open gratings, spare planks, shackles, water casks in great number, boilers for cooking, and large quantities of rice and other food. Portugal stubbornly refused to agree to the terms until forced to do so in 1842. France agreed to the right of search without an equipment clause between 1833 and 1841, but terminated the agreement because of suspicion over Great Britain's motives.4 Similar instructions were not issued to the U.S. Navy until 1849.

These treaties had an immediate effect on the nature of the trade. Heretofore, slavers might pick up captured Africans assembled gradually in barracoons at numerous points along a 3,000-mile stretch of the west coast of Africa from Gorée ( Dakar) in the north to Benguela in the south. Now the slavers were forced to act more speedily–get in, load, and get out. According to Lieutenant Forbes of HMS Bonetta, "two hours suffice to place four hundred human beings on board." The changed situation also altered the blockading strategy of British Royal Navy ships, for officers preferred to earn the bounty for liberating slaves on board rather than to take an empty ship before it loaded. 5

In 1819, with Congressional passage of the Slave Trade Act, President James Monroe was directed to use warships to suppress the trade and to establish Liberia as a haven for freed slaves next to Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa. The next year Congress passed an amendment declaring slave trading to be piracy punishable by death. The act was weakened by Senator James DeWolfe, a former slave trader from Rhode Island, who sponsored a measure forbidding the right of search. Even though this amendment was tainted by the DeWolfe family's unsavory reputation, the legacy of the War of 1812 meant that the U.S. could not accept an agreement containing the right of search by a foreign power. The weakness of the American movement to abolish slavery and the opposition of most Southern Congressmen to any legislation restricting slavery also prevented the passage of such a measure. When asked by the British Foreign Minister in 1822 if he could think of anything more atrocious than the slave trade, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams retorted: "Yes. Admitting the right of search by foreign officers of our vessels upon the seas in time of peace; for that would be making slaves of ourselves." 6

President Monroe, minister to England when the Chesapeake-Leopard affair occurred, understood the role the U.S. Navy might play in defending commerce and in limiting the slave trade. When the act became law, he ordered the navy "to seize all vessels navigated under our flag engaged in that trade."7

To that end, five navy vessels headed for Africa between January 1820 and August 1821, beginning with the frigate Cyane. She was followed by the brig Hornet, frigate John Adams, and schooners Alligator and Shark, both fast 200-ton Baltimore clipper types, 86 feet long, mounting 12 guns, with crews of 70, which were well suited for running down slave ships.

Second in command of the Cyane was 24-year-old Lieutenant Matthew C. Perry, who would become commander of the African Squadron in 1843. Perry's family had been associated with the founders of the American Colonization Society, a movement established in 1816 to resettle freed slaves in Africa. Perry requested duty on the Cyane, whose primary mission was to escort the brig Elizabeth, which was carrying the first group of settlers to the area of Liberia. The Cyane continued on to intercept slavers, on 10 April 1820 bagging nine vessels suspected of slaving. At least six were from Baltimore, Charleston, and New York, but they had changed both names and colors to Spanish at sea. Writing to the secretary of the navy, the Cyane's captain bitterly noted that, although the vessels were evidently owned by Americans, they were so completely covered by Spanish documentation that is was impossible to condemn them. He also estimated that "There are probably no less than three hundred vessels engaged in the slave trade."8

In September 1820 theJohn Adams and Hornet joined the Cyane and took four more slavers. The G.W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport contains the manuscript journal of J.S. Cummings, who served on the Adams. The account is a dry, day-to-day record of patrol duty on the coast near Sierra Leone, but it clearly suggests the terrible conditions that hampered the squadron's activity. The Cyane parted company with the Adams on 19 October to return to the U.S. On 22 October the Adams was off the Pongas River, in present-day Guinea, where slavers loaded in the many hidden creeks and mangrove islands that offered sanctuary from the British cruisers. The Adams hoisted out the barge, and the ship's officers and midshipmen "left the ship in company with Capt. Nash of HBM brig Snapper in the boat for Rio Pongo," an instance of genuine cooperation between British and American warships. The next day, with the temperature hovering at 120 degrees on deck and 92 degrees below deck, "the American schooner Exchange anchored near us, a prize. . . .She is a slave trader from Baltimore via Havannah." The expedition returned from upriver the following day. "They left their schooners nearly ready for taking on slaves but all under Spanish colors." This fruitless chase foiled by flags of convenience had grim consequences for the crew of the John Adams anchored just off the mosquito-ridden shore. In his entry for 2 November, Cummings tersely recorded "10 down with a fever." By the middle of November, three of the crew had been buried at sea. On 21 November the ship sailed for duty in the Caribbean, having been on station for only three months.9

When he left the Cyane, Lieutenant Perry requested another tour of duty off Africa, mainly because of his interest in the American Colonization Society, and was appointed commander of the schooner Shark in July 1821. He left the United States with orders to convey the U.S. commissioner to Liberia. After landing the commissioner near the site of the Liberian capital of Monrovia, a healthy location suggested earlier by Perry when aboard the Cyane, he chased what proved to be a French slaver laden with 133 slaves who resembled, in the words of Midshipman William F. Lynch, "so many Egyptian mummies half-awakened into life." However, because she was French, Perry had to let the vessel proceed despite the entreaty of his officers to pay him for any court damages he might "sustain for illegal capture.'' 10 In November 1821, the Shark sailed for duty in the West Indies. This first limited effort by the U.S. Navy to stop the slave trade had yielded meager results: from May 1818 to November 1821 the squadron had taken 11 suspected slave ships and liberated 573 Africans.

For a brief period, from 1820 to 1824, an opportunity developed for closer cooperation between British and U.S. warships. In 1821 a committee of the House of Representatives reported that "a mutual right of search appears to be indispensable to the great object of abolition.'' 11 This action was not surprising, for the Missouri Compromise of 1821, which drew a firm line between slave and free states, resulted from slowly increasing Northern resistance to the spread of slavery. John Quincy Adams finally modified his views on the right of search, but the resultant Anglo-American treaty became so watered down by U.S. Senate amendments that the British would not agree to it and the opportunity passed.

To make matters worse, France and Spain protested so strongly over U.S. seizure of French and Spanish vessels suspected of being slavers that Adams had to repudiate "any intention to search French vessels in peacetime.''12 Withdrawn from the African coast in 1824, probably because of these interrelated conditions, the U.S. Navy did not again appear in force off Africa until 1843.

What followed in the next two decades was readily predictable. Because of the illegality of the trade, slavers went to great lengths to hide the true ownership of their vessels. American-built ships from Portland, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, operated in the trade and flew the American flag, knowing that for the most part such display would prevent British warships from stopping them. The determination of a vessel's identity often involved highly elaborate efforts at disguise. If a U.S. Navy vessel chased what seemed to be a slaver its ostensible "captain" would hoist the Spanish flag, substitute Spanish registration papers, and might even carry a Spanish crew hidden below decks. This stratagem would be exactly reversed if apprehended by a British man of war.

In the 1830s, a brisk trade was carried on between Baltimore and Havana in the sale of vessels built along the lines of the speedy and highly maneuverable Chesapeake Bay model "Baltimore clippers" used as privateers during the war of 1812. The clippers were publicly sold to Spanish or Portuguese slavers in Cuba who were willing to pay high prices for the rakish craft. It was almost impossible to convict Americans for selling the vessels because papers could never be found that the vessels were intended to be employed in the slave business.13

Nicholas Trist of Virginia, the American consul in Havana in the 1830s, made things easier for the fraudulent sale of American vessels by authenticating "the various papers required for secretly selling an American vessel and clearing it out on a slaving voyage in American guise." He claimed to be carrying out his consular duties, but after an investigation by the U.S. government he was dismissed from his post in 1841. Yet, under these conditions the trade flourished, with thousands of Africans sold into bondage each year to Brazil and Cuba, and with an estimated 1,000 per year smuggled into the United States during the 54 years from 1807 to the Civil War.14

Commercial ties between legitimate maritime trade and the slave trade further complicated the problem. American merchant ships carried rum, tobacco, flour, and cloth to trade along the bulge of Africa for palm oil, gum copal, ivory, gold dust, and peanuts. Enoch Ware, trading agent aboard the Salem brig Northumberland, gloated over his arriving on the coast ahead of his competitors:

Now if no envious competitor present himself the prospect could not be well better#that is if my Sierra Leone tobacco will suit for the slave trade. No! What am I to know for what purpose it is to be sold? I sell for produce or money. The use of it afterwards certainly am not accountable for. . . . scarcely a hundred pounds of Tobacco or Powder that is sold but what sooner or later is used for purchasing slaves though it may go through half a dozen hands first." 15

Britain was not exactly guiltless in halting the slave trade either, for on occasion her navy protected English merchant ships (called auxiliaries) carrying goods useful in the trade. Even more reprehensible was the practice, when slavery became illegal throughout the British Empire in 1833, of forcibly loading liberated Africans from slave ships onto British ships as "emigrant laborers" and transporting them to sugar plantations in the West Indies. Horatio Bridge, purser aboard the USS Saratoga in the 1840s, wrote that "English philanthropy cuts a very suspicious figure'' in using released slaves as pawns in the struggle for economic dominance in the Indies. In opposing this view Lieutenant Forbes of HMS Bonetta held that emigration was voluntary, and that one of the emigrant ships featured a surgeon and a brass band. But he also noted that a salaried agent received "a guinea a head for each emigrant! "16

Nevertheless, the Royal Navy increased its seizure of vessels believed to be operating in the slave trade and in the absence of the U.S. Navy stepped up its boarding of American merchant ships under the pretense of "right of visit," a watered-down version of "right of search" suggested by Lord Palmerston, the abrasive British foreign minister.

The American public did not make this nice semantic distinction, and was also angered by disputes with Great Britain over the boundaries between the U.S. and Canada in Maine and the Oregon Territory. The possibility of war appeared likely, and was not lessened when the British armed cruiser Buzzard sailed into New York Harbor in June 1839. (James Covey, a liberated slave who was soon to act as interpreter for the Mende captives during the Amistad trial in New Haven, was a crew member.) The Buzzard had crossed the Atlantic from Africa to escort, under guard, the American brig Eagle and schooner Clara, both suspected slavers. The British had little alternative, for there were no U.S. Navy ships patrolling the African coast to whom the vessels might have been surrendered. To further complicate the situation, the U.S. attorney general promptly released the Eagle and Clara on the grounds they were "Spanish owned.''l7

Tensions still ran high in 1840 when Lieutenant Paine, commander of the 97-foot U.S. Navy schooner Grampus was ordered to cruise against slavers off Africa. (In an ironic turn, the Grampus had been sent to New Haven in January of 1840 in an abortive plan of the Van Buren administration to spirit away the Amistad captives to certain execution or slavery in Cuba.) Paine and Commander Tucker of the Royal Navy agreed to undertake joint cruising and to turn over to each other the ships they seized, whether British or American. This eminently sensible agreement was unfortunately rejected by Congress. The Paine Tucker arrangement formed the basis of one of the provisions of the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which is remembered today for the friendly accord reached by Daniel Webster and Lord Ashburton in settling the United States-Canada boundary dispute.

Article 8 of the treaty called for cooperative cruising between the two countries' African squadrons, each country to supply a squadron of 80 guns, and stipulated that no British ships were to search American shipping. The 80-gun requirement sounded formidable, but it would be ineffective unless the 80 guns were distributed among many patrolling vessels. Rather than a few heavily armed frigates or sloops of war, the duty required fast, shallow-draft ships mounting only one or two guns, for the slavers sacrificed everything to speed and rarely carried armament. But Perry's squadron#the frigate Macedonian, sloops-of-war Saratoga and Decatur, and 10-gun brig Porpoise, accompanied by a storeship#was typical of the first 15 years of the African Squadron. 18

On 30 March 1843, Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur sent explicit instructions to Perry: "You are charged with the protection of American Commerce. . . and with suppression of the Slave Trade, so far as the same may be carried on by American Citizens or under the American Flag." But, he added, "while the United States sincerely desire the suppression of the slave trade. . . they do not regard the success of their efforts as their paramount interest." He also suggested to President John Tyler that the presence of the African Squadron would help American traders obtain a share of the lucrative palm oil trade monopolized by the British and the French.19

As ordered, Perry established his base at Porto Praia on the island of São Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands, 300 miles west of Cape Verde, 1,500 miles from the Gulf of Guinea, and 2,500 miles from mouth of the Congo River. It provided some protection against rough weather but was fever-ridden in the summer months. Located about 3,000 miles from New York and frequently visited by whale ships, Porto Praia had an American consul, and supplies could be landed there without payment of custom duties. Perry would have preferred floating storehouses, but a miserly Congress never voted the funds to implement his request.

Cruising under sail was difficult. The winds were usually light and variable, blowing from west to southwest along the Guinea Coast. This factor, plus a current running from west to east as far as the Congo River, made Africa a lee shore and required a difficult beat back to Porto Praia. If Perry's ships were to keep to the schedule he set for them, they had to keep well out to sea on the return voyage, making it unlikely that they would cross the path of a slaver on the vast reaches of the Atlantic. 20

As directed by Upshur, Perry energetically protected American commerce. In punishment for the murder of the crew of the American trading schooner Mary Carver by African natives, he burned several villages and killed the ringleaders. He also used the squadron to protect the Liberian settlement against hostile African neighbors.

With these duties, Perry's ships engaged in limited surveillance of the slave trade. During the two years he commanded the African Squadron only one suspected slaver was taken: the brigantineUncas captured by the USS Porpoise with no slaves aboard. Prior to the Mary Carver incident Perry wrote to Upshur on 5 September 1843, "I cannot hear of any American vessels being engaged in the slave trade nor do I believe that there has been one so engaged in years." Exasperated British captains sent him documented correspondence on slavers flying the American flag taken to date, but Perry would have none of it. Lieutenant Bridge claimed that, because the death penalty specified by U.S. law was such a threat, all slavers would be careful to fly the flags of Portugal, Spain, or Brazil to escape capture, and that they would take pains to carry a double set of registration papers. He defended Perry as "a gentleman of the highest professional character, persevering, sagacious, and determined.'' 21

J.Y. Mason, Upshur's successor, blandly papered over Perry's inactivity in his annual report to the president on 25 November 1844: "The operations of the squadron have, it is believed, exercised a favorable influence in preventing the slave trade. . . . [because of] the presence of our own naval forces, with authority to visit all vessels under the American flag, it is not probable that our citizens will engage in this disgraceful and perilous traffic, or our flag be used by others to any great extent."22

The African Squadron appeared to be an opportunity to end the horrors of the slave trade, but from its inception under Commodore Matthew Perry to its withdrawal in 1862, the treaty objective was compromised by successive secretaries of the navy who emphasized the prevention of "all violations of the rights and laws of fair trade" rather than the prevention of slaving. Of the nine secretaries of the navy from 1842 to 1861, seven were Southerners, tacitly sympathetic to slavery; Connecticut-born Isaac Toucey was pro slavery; and only George Bancroft was antislavery. In 1851 Secretary William Graham would even suggest that the squadron could be disbanded, leaving the Brazil Squadron and the Home Squadron to intercept slavers on the west side of the Atlantic.23

As compared with the British efforts on the African coast, the effectiveness of the U.S. Navy's African Squadron was limited. During its service, the African Squadron usually numbered between three and five vessels. When the squadron included the USS Constitution, or the former British frigates Macedonian and Cyane, which had been captured by the U.S. during the War of 1812, the Royal Navy could not help but notice the allusions to American naval success during that war. But the aging, poorly maintained vessels spent most of their time in the long passage to and from the slaving areas and were on station along the 3,000 miles of coast only a few weeks of the year. Commander W.F. Lynch warned Secretary Dobbin in 1853 that the U.S. would be "perhaps justly accused, of observing the letter and neglecting the spirit" of the treaty if small, fast steamships did not replace the sailing vessels in the African Squadron. However, the British used steamships in their patrolling ten years before the U.S. finally sent the steam sloop-of-war San Jacinto and the steam patrol craft Sumpter and Alyatic to the African Squadron in 1859. 24

Finally, in 1849 the secretary of the navy did issue explicit orders for the guidance of officers boarding suspected slave ships flying the American flag. They were to be on the lookout for the "presence of more

Water Casks, Handcuffs and other articles than the crew required," for anyone throwing papers overboard, and for double sets of logbooks or vessel registration papers. They were to inspect consular certificates carefully, for it was known that consular seals were sometimes forged by embossing the document with the back of a half dollar. The boarding officer "must not be too harsh on suspicion of being a slaver but if the captain acts in an insolent manner to refuse compliance" he was to be put on board the cruiser. Acknowledging that foreign slavers used the American flag as a shield against British cruisers, Secretary Upshur warned that it should not be imagined that "the mere hoisting of [the American] flag shall give immunity to those who have no right to use it."25

Not all Southerners winked at the slave trade. In a curious anomaly, a few slave holders # notably Henry A. Wise, U.S. minister to Brazil # were adamantly opposed to the trade. Wise wrote to the federal government on 18 February 1845, protesting the sale of American vessels to Portuguese slavers at Rio de Janeiro: "I beseech # I implore the President of the United States to take a stand on this subject. You have no conception of the bold effrontery and the flagrant outrages of the African slave trade. . . . every patriot in our land would blush for our country, did he know and see, as I do, how our own citizens sail and sell our flag to the uses and abuses of that accursed traffic.''26 On his own initiative, Wise had seized a ship, correctly surmising that it carried goods for use in the slave trade. The only reward for his bold action was to be reprimanded by the U.S. government.

From 1840 to 1849, Britain gradually closed off the slave trade at embarkation points. Royal Navy officers burned several barracoons, including those up the Gallinas River from which the Amistad captives had been shipped. They then negotiated subsidized treaties with native chiefs to force them out of the slave trade. This resulted in a southward shift of the trade from the bulge of Africa, north of the Niger River Delta, to the area of the Congo River mouth, 900 miles south of the Niger.27

Unhappily for U.S. naval officers, an incident in 1846 totally dampened their zeal for blockading. The USS Boxer seized the Malaga, laden with slaving goods under charter to a Brazilian slave trader, and sent it back to the United States. There, a New England judge ruled that it was no crime to sell supplies to slave traders and released the ship, which then went out on a genuine slaving voyage. Subsequently, the vessel's owners had the gall to sue the captain of the Boxer for more than $10,000 in damages. The laggard U.S. Navy Department finally got around to defending the Boxer’s captain, but no more ships were seized for three years until 1849, when a Pennsylvania judge overturned the earlier decision and rebuked the owners of the Malaga. 28

In the early 1850s Lieutenant Andrew Hull Foote of Connecticut spent several years with the African Squadron. His book, Africa and the American Flag, which circulated widely in 1854, offered practical suggestions for improving the blockade and appealed to the humanitarian instincts of the American public. Foote called for enforcing the threat of execution for slaving, claiming it was contrary to "justice that the perpetrators of such crimes have been dismissed with impunity when captured." He also suggested that store ships for resupply would provide greater flexibility of operation, that more ships be stationed near the Congo, and that the sale of American vessels in Africa be banned. Foote vigorously affirmed "Every person interested in upholding the rights of humanity . . . will sympathize with the capture and deliverance of African slaves." Nevertheless, he like most officials and naval officers from the president on down adhered to the decades old prejudice that "it is contrary to national honor and national interests that the right of search should be entrusted to the hands of any foreign authority."29

Foote's well-intended call for more efficient blockading went largely unheeded, except for the establishment of supply ships near the equator. Beyond that, the navy's efforts were hamstrung by the increasing polarization in the U.S. over slavery. In reaction to Northern abolitionist pressure, and after the Compromise of 1850 extended the slave territory in the west (while admitting California as a free state) and strengthened the fugitive slave laws, Southern Congressmen in 1854 tried to repeal the slave-trading prohibition of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Prominent Southern planters made a similar call at a commercial convention at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1859. On the eve of the Civil War, 4,500,000 bales of cotton were produced in the South, attended by a sharp demand for more slaves needed to work the gang system of cotton growing. Efforts to extend slave-holding into Kansas, and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott Decision seemed to extend the power of slaveholders and increase tension over slavery in the nation.30

So it was not surprising that, in 1859, Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey sent instructions to William Inman, the new commander of the African Squadron, that protection of American commerce be given top priority, with the chasing of slavers of lesser importance. Inman construed Toucey's instructions as permission to ignore the search for slavers, and he proceeded on a leisurely cruise aboard the USS Constellation to Madeira, off North Africa. A few months later he received an urgent message from Toucey, probably at the instigation of President James Buchanan, directing him to "renew his exertions," a code term for "get cracking!" Indeed, the African Squadron had now been expanded to include six sailing sloops of war plus, at last, the powerful steam sloop-of-war San Jacinto and two small, fast, lightly armed steamers, the Sumpter and Mystic, which had originally been chartered by the navy for service off Paraguay. Toucey also ordered that the squadron's supply base be moved to St. Paul de Loando (Loango), which was close to the center of slaving activity at the Congo River.31

Mystic Seaport's G.W. Blunt White Library contains an informal but highly valuable record of the final years of the African Squadron in the journal kept by Henry Eason, an enlisted man aboard the USS Marion. 32 This 20-year-old, 16-gun sloop of war with a crew of 150, commanded by Thomas Brent, served in Inman's squadron from 1858 to 1860. Eason had had a widely varied seafaring life, for he mentioned having sailed on the Great Lakes, rounded Cape Horn, and spent "four years in a hot climate" during six years at sea. In his journal Eason recorded shrewd insights into the problems and contradictions of blockading operations in the U. S. Navy and vivid pictures of life under sail in the 1850s.

On being ordered to Africa, the Marion left Norfolk, Virginia, on 6 April 1858 for Porto Praia. On 8 May the Marion left Porto Praia, stopping at Monrovia, Liberia, on 20 May to hire Krewmen. These members of a coastal tribe were skilled watermen who handled large canoes through the heavy surf along the harborless shores of equatorial West Africa. They hired out to both U.S. Navy ships and slavers alike. "They do all the work in boats, the weather being too hot for white men," wrote Eason. Their names # ”Tom Fryingpan, Jack Ropeyarn, Ben Bolt, Harry Bluff, Jack Two Glass, Jack Half Dollar, Tom Stargazer" suggest a condescending distancing of white mariners from the Krewmen, but the natives were proud of these names.33

After landing missionaries at Cape Palmas, the Marion arrived in the Bight of Benin, where coastal marshes harbored swarms of malarial mosquitoes. There she encountered the Royal Navy "steamer Sharpshooter. . . cruising for the same purpose as ourselves . . . . In the afternoon we saw another Steamer, but did not speak her. These waters are full of English steam gunboats, while we have only five vessels on the station . . . . The English having so many vessels here, capture 3 slavers to our 1. . . they have also the advantage over us, in being Steamers, while all ours are sailing vessels."

A few days later, the Marion again met theSharpshooter, which had been chasing the schooner Blue Lightning of Baltimore, "but she always gave them the slip." The schooner's name and rig suggest that it may have been a Baltimore clipper, perhaps similar to the Amistad in design.

Other notorious slaving areas visited by the Clarion on her first cruise included Whydah (Ouidah) and the Lagos River north of the Niger River Delta, and Loango, Cabinda, and the Congo River to the south. After 14 weeks on the African coast she made the four-week passage back to the Cape Verde Islands, where she arrived on 1 October.

The following, a detailed account of capturing the suspected slaver Brothers of Charleston, South Carolina, off Mayumba on 8 September 1858, is typical of Eason's power of observation:

On Wednesday the 8th at about 10 o'clock in the forenoon, our lookout man reported a sail on the starboard bow. Twas a little cloudy & she was heading in for the land; we make her out to be a Brigantine. When she saw us, she changed her course, hauled up on a wind & tried to cross our bows. Making all sail, we chased him, under no colours; she tried hard to give us the slip, but at 11 o'clock we came up with her but she, showing no colours, we fired a shot cross her bows, & in a twinkling of an eye, the Stars and Stripes were floating at her peak, no colours have ever been hoisted faster than these were. She had evidently been waiting for us to hoist our Ensign first so that she might hoist false ones & thus blindfold us. She thought us to be an Englishman & hence her hoisting the American flag, as if we had been what she expected, we could not have searched her. We sent a boat after her with Lieut. Stone & then hoisted our colours, quickly showing her the mistake she had made, in supposing us to be an Englishman. Lieut. Stone, shortly returned from her, bringing with him a box of prime Havana Segars, as a present to our Captain, which present that gentleman refused but immediately boarded her himself taking with him, our Carpenter & Lieut. Stone. She was lying close to us & we could see everything that took place aboard of her. I saw a friend of mine, named Barnard Ford, with an axe in his hand, he had just broken open a large box, which was found to contain slave boilers for cooking rice in for the slaves. "This is the thing we want,” he cried, & our old Captain’s eyes looked as big as a thirty two pound shot. Barney then dropped the axe, I went to the wheel, looking as big as a Commodore on a ten years furlough. Her name was the Brothers of Charleston, she was two months from Havana, her skipper said she had a general cargo. She had 100 barrels of bread, 5O barrels of rice, 40 water casks, 2 coppers [large pots] for cooking, 15 sponges, 40 water pails, 650 wooden demons, lumber for slave deck, medicines, plenty of good liquor & preserved meat, also 527 Spanish Doubloons. Her crew were 1 American, 2 Spaniard, 1 Portuguese & a sick man in the Forecastle. We took the money aboard our ship, her Captain looking hard at us, when he saw us handling his gold. The day following we sent 1 Lieutenant, l Midshipman, 6 seamen, & 3 Marines, who were to take her to the U.S. as a prize. In the evening the got under weigh, we doing the same, she took the lead about three miles, but we came up to her, & gave her three cheers, which they returned. All on board of her looked happy excepting her own crew, who were “prisoners,” But such are the fortunes of war.

Like all too many vessels seized by the African Squadron on suspicion of slaving, the Brothers was returned to her owners. Against all the incriminating evidence Eason described, Judge Magrath of Charleston dismissed the libel on the grounds that there was nothing in the cargo "which of itself leads to a conclusion of a criminal purpose or excludes the fact of such articles having been intended for a lawful purpose."34

On the Marion's second cruise, the seizure of the New York bark Orion had an even more outrageous consequence than the taking of the Brothers. On 17 April 1859 British officers from HMSTriton informed the Marion that they had detained the Orion up the Congo River as a suspected slaver. Captain Brent searched the vessel and found "two sets of slave coppers [cooking pots], a large quantity of medicine & about 15000 feet of lumber," plus firearms and "large quantities of preserved meats." With a prize crew from the Marion, the Orion was sent to New York for trial. On arrival in June 1859, the vessel was held under bond. However, the bonding procedure allowed the owner to keep his vessel in service until the court acted. The owner promptly sold the Orion and she embarked on yet another slaving cruise! 35

On 29 December 1859, while patrolling off the Congo, the Clarion received news of the Orion ‘s release. In his journal, Eason bluntly indicted the American judicial system for failing to back the U.S. Navy in halting the slave trade in West Africa:

We heard that our Slavers we sent home had been acquitted because the Jury could not find substantial evidence to condemn them. The Orion came out on the coast as a trader the second time & the consequence was that the American Commodore detained her six days but could find nothing to condemn her & a short time after the English steamer Pluto captured her with 808 slaves on board & took her to St. Helena. This will make our people at home open their eyes at an American ship capturing slavers & sending them home for triall [sic]& get honorably acquited then come & load up with slaves three months after. The Orion had everything that is needed on board of slavers.

The patrolling officers developed an intuitive sense of a vessel's guilt or innocence, but sometimes they could not find enough incriminating evidence to warrant seizure. An example was the case of the Mystic-built bark Ada Fish, which the Marion encountered off the Congo River.36 "It falling a calm we sent a boat aboard of her. The Officer in charge of the boat overhauled her papers and then returned again telling our Captain that looked suspicious, being for the Congo river and belonging to the same owners as the Orion.." Captain Brent himself then examined "her papers and cargo, but not finding sufficient evidence to condemn her as a slaver. . . allowed her to proceed on her journey."

Captain Brent's suspicions of the ship were not entirely unfounded. After the trade to Brazil was halted in the mid 1850s, the trade centered on Cuba and ownership of slavers shifted to a cartel of Portuguese and American entrepreneurs in New York. With a decline in maritime trade following the economic Panic of 1857, they were able to acquire many conventional merchant vessels, like the Erie or Orion. Some New England whale ships, with their large holds, and with try works that could be converted to cooking rice, were quietly purchased for the trade as well.37

The immense profits made by successful slavers help explain why the trade persisted, despite the risks, right up to the Civil War. The secretary of the navy suggested that the only way to end the trade was for Britain to pressure Spain to live up to its agreement to abolish the trade to Cuba, or#more provocatively#for the U.S. to annex Cuba.38 Eason documented the profits of the trade while cruising off Loango on 29 March 1859. "There is a large barracoon here, owned by a Frenchman, in which were about 600 young Negroes, of both sexes, who were to be sold for slaves, to any vessel who chose to come for them. They can be bought for about $40 per head, in trade & they will fetch from nine to twelve hundred in Cuba."

If enslaved Africans considered themselves fortunate in being freed by a British or French warship hovering off the African coast, their future prospects were nearly as bleak as being sold into slavery. Like Lieutenant Bridge 15 years earlier, Eason condemned the long-standing practice of forcibly loading freed slaves onto warships bound for the West Indies, where they would serve as plantation laborers or as soldiers. "There is a French ship here, taking in 1500 Negroes. . . to transport to the West Indies for apprentices," he wrote at Gabon in March 1859. "A nice way of slaving, the French have."

Throughout his journal, Eason interspersed his reflections on the shortcomings of the blockade with vivid sketches of daily life on a man of war. Gunnery practice and sail-handling were regular parts of the routine, and Eason laconically mentioned a shipmate who fell from aloft but landed safely in the hammock nettings on the Marion ‘s rail. Like a whaleship, the Maarion ‘s main deck was often "full of pigs, fowls, goats and in fact anything that can be eaten." And apparently the food was no better than that on a whaler: "Our bread was alive with worms and small bugs," complained Eason. "I heard someone say they saw a bag of bread walking up the fore royal back stay but I cannot vouch for its veracity."

Malaria and other fever-inducing diseases were the most dreaded afflictions aboard ships sailing along the coast of equatorial Africa. No one knew that mosquitoes from the coastal swamps transmitted disease, so ships' surgeons could only treat the symptoms. Eason recorded his own plight near the Congo River on 16 March 1860: "This afternoon five of our men were taken sick with the fever. I felt very bad all day and the next morning I went to the Doctor. I had a burning fever every night and sometimes was blind. The Doctor gave me a large quantity of Calomel and some pills."

Under such conditions, the normal two-year assignment to the African Squadron was an ordeal. It is no wonder that, having attempted to enforce the blockade to the best of their ability under trying circumstances, the crew cheered when the Clarion received orders on 10 August 1860 to leave the African Squadron and sail for Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

As the Marion departed, the African Squadron entered its most productive period. On 8 August 1860 the steam sloops-of-war San Jacinto and Mohican took the ship Erie with 897 slaves stowed below deck and the brig Storm King with 619. The 1,483 survivors were delivered to Liberia, and the ships and crews were sent to New York for trial. A month later theConstellation seized the Cora with 705 slaves, and the steamer Mystic proved her utility by capturing two slavers that year. Commodore Inman reported to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in 1861 that he had seized eleven ships and freed 2,793 slaves, "greater in number and effect, than by the whole of the Squadrons that have preceded me." Captain Gordon of the Erie would be hung in 1862, the only American citizen to be executed under provisions of the 1820 Piracy Act.39

Despite Inman's belatedly valiant effort, soon after the Civil War started the U.S. African Squadron was ordered home to help blockade Southern ports. Before departure, the Constellation captured the brig Triton in the Congo River on 20 May 1861, perhaps the navy's last slave-ship capture on the West African coast. In the emergency, President Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward, negotiated a secret treaty with the British to assume the nation's share of the African blockade, including the long-denied right of search of American-flag vessels by British warships. For Hugh Thomas, a British historian, this was as if "Holy Writ had been denied." Quickly adopted by Congressional vote, the treaty was never made public.40

Because the slave trade was a secret operation, historians can only approximate the number of vessels involved, the number captured, the mortality rate, and the number of slaves freed in the nineteenth century. During the entire nineteenth century, about 7,750 slaving voyages were attempted, and 1,635#or 21 percent#of the vessels were seized. Aboard the 79 percent of slave ships that evaded capture, the toll of African captives was horrible. A survey of 17 vessels that carried Africans to Cuba and Brazil between 1844 and 1860 suggests that 1,879 of the 10,744 captives died, for a mortality rate of 17 percent. Although the U.S.was not a principal destination for illegal slaving voyages, the last landing of slaves in the nation may have been those delivered by the schooner Wanderer, which evaded the African Squadron in 1858. The Confederate States of America also prohibited the slave trade, so there were no known landings during the Civil War. The last verified landing of slaves in Cuba was in January 1870, when 900 Africans were delivered.41

How successful were naval efforts? Estimates suggest that 2,000,000 Africans were enslaved between 1800 and 1870, and 200,000, or 10 percent of them, were freed through the efforts of naval patrols. Of the 200,000 liberated Africans, the Royal Navy's West African Squadron accounted for approximately 160,000. From 1843 to 1857, the U.S. Navy took only 19 slavers, six of which were actually condemned, while the Royal Navy seized 600 vessels, 562 of which were condemned.42

Summed up, several factors contributed to the U.S. Navy's inability to stem the flow of slave traffic from Africa to the Americas between 1820 and 1862. These included the Navy Department's emphasis on protecting commerce rather than apprehending slavers, the consequent inadequacy of the naval force assigned to the African Squadron, apathetic support for the effort in Congress, Southern opposition in the 1850s to continuance of the blockade, and the great profits that could be made by slavers throughout the period.

All of these factors were significant, but the weight of evidence strongly suggests that primary emphasis should be on two more fundamental issues. First, the U.S. government's unbending refusal to accept the right of search of American-flag vessels by British Royal Navy officers#a legacy of the first decade of the century that was strongly backed by the chauvinistic American public#made the American flag a shield for slave traders throughout the period. Without fear of interdiction by British cruisers, and with slight chance of encountering a vessel from the U.S. Navy's small African Squadron, slavers commonly adopted the

American flag. An agreement with Great Britain in 1842, or in any year before 1862, would have increased the capture of slavers and suppressed the trade far more rapidly.

Second, the blindly legalistic judicial process, in both Southern and Northern courts, more often than not resulted in release of suspected slavers captured by the African Squadron, even in the face of compelling evidence. With the spirit of free trade and personal property rights espoused so strongly, slavers faced little chance of conviction in U.S. courts. Consequently, the trade continued with the tacit support of the American people. Had these conditions been reversed by the mid-1830s, the grim saga of the Amistad might never have unfolded.

Notes

1. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 547, 554.

2. See Benjamin W. Labaree, et al, America and the Sea: A Maritime History (Mystic: Mystic Seaport, 1998), or any comprehensive text on American history, such as Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press 1965), 375.

3. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 583; Robert Vogel,Without Consent or Contract (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 20-32.

4. W.E.F. Ward,The Royal Navy and the Slavers (New York: Schoken Books, 1970), 121; see also Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass & Company 1968), 45-47.

5. Lieutenant Forbes, Six Months Service in the African Blockade (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), 94; George E. Brooks, Jr., Yankee Traders, Old Coasters and African Middlemen (Boston: Boston University Press, 1970), 113.

6. Brooks,Yankee Traders, 108; Alan R. Booth "The United States African Squadron, 1843-1861, " Boston University Papers in African History, vol. 1, Jeffrey Butler, ed. (Boston: Boston University Press, 1964), 81.

7. Kenneth J. Hagan,This People’s Navy: The Making of American Seapower (New York: Free Press, 1991), 93-94.

8. Booth, "The United States African Squadron," 83.

9. J.L. Cummings, Journal, U.S. frigate John Adams, 1820-22, Log 10, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport; Brooks, Yankee Trader, 200.

10. William E Lynch, Naval Life; or Observations Afloat and on Shore (New York: Charles Scribner, 1851), quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison,"Old Bruin,” Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 74.

11. Hugh G. Soulsby, The Right of Search and the Slave Trade in Anglo-American Relations, 1814-1862 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), 20.

12. Ibid., 23.

13. Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837-1862 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 30-32; see also Thomas,The Slave Trade, 642.

14. Howard, American Slavers, 33; Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 74-75.

15.New England Merchants in Africa: A History Through Documents, 1802 to 1865, Norman R. Bennett and George E. Brooks, Jr., eds. (Boston: Boston University Press, 1963), 319; see also Horatio Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. (New York: G.R Putnam, 1853), 112.

16. Howard, American Slaves, 4-8; Bridge, Journal of an African Cruiser, 551; Forbes, Six Months Service, 26.

17. Howard, American Slavery, 25.

18. J.C. Furnas, "Patrolling the Middle Passage,” American Heritage 9 (October 1958):7.

19. William A. Graham, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 29 November l851 (Washington, D.C., 1852), 4-5.

20. Booth, "The United States African Squadron," 89-90.

21. Ward, Royal Navy and the Slavers, 46-47.

22. Donald R Wright, "Matthew Perry and the African Squadron, " America Spreads Her Sails: US Seapower in the Nineteenth Century (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1973), 93. In "Old Bruin,” his highly readable biography of Perry, Samuel Eliot Morison insists that "both the administration and Perry were sincere in their efforts to suppress this abominable practice" (page 168), but he offers little evidence to support his contention. In The Slave Trade, Hugh Thomas remarks, "Perry's enthusiasm for putting down the slave trade was modest" (page 727). Perhaps contemporary historians have made too much of the fact that Perry's brother Raymond married the daughter of James DeWolfe in 1814 and that the Perry clan was on cordial terms with their Bristol, Rhode Island, relatives. In Chronicles of the Frigate Macedonian (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 224, James Tertius DeKay proposes that Perry "was a creature of his times. He saw what he wished to see, and overlooked those things he found disagreeable."

23. J.Y. Mason, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 25 November 1844 (Washington, D.C., 1845), 514. The figures listed by Mason and his successors are not always accurate. All ships in the squadron were usually listed, whether on station or coming or going between the U.S. and Africa.

24. Howard, American Slavers, 280; William E. Lynch, "Report of Commander W.F. Lynch, in relation to his mission to the coast of Africa," Appendix B to J.C. Dobbin, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, December 1853 (Washington, D.C., 1854), 388-89; see also Pegram Harrison, "A Blind Eye Toward the Slave Trade," Naval History (September/October 1996): 43-46.

25. "General Orders, USS Portsmouth, Flag Ship of Commodore F.H. Gregory, Commander U.S. Naval Forces West Coast of Africa," 1849, Misc. Vol. 397, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport.

26. Quoted in L.E Hill, Diplomatic Relations Between the United Stales and Brazil (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1932), 127-28.

27. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 689-705.

28. Howard, American Slavers, 102-07.

29. Andrew Hull Foote, Africa and the American Flag (1854: reprint, Folkestone and London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1970), 258 and ff., 300, 387. Foote commanded the brig Perry in the African Squadron in 1850-51. Born at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806, he had entered the navy in 1822 and would serve in the West Indian, African, and Asian Squadrons before commanding the Union gunboat flotilla on the western rivers early in the Civil War. Wounded at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, he was promoted to rear admiral, but died in June 1863 before taking command of the Union fleet off Charleston.

30. Morison, Oxford History of the American People, 573; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 102-03.

31. Booth, "The United States African Squadron," 108; Hagan,This People’s Navy, 154-55; see also Isaac Toucey, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 2 December 1859 (Washington, D.C., 1860), 1138-39.

32. Henry Eason, Journal, U.S. sloop-of-war of Marion, 1858-60, Log 902, G.W. Blunt White

Library, Mystic Seaport.

33. According to William E Lynch, "They seldom speak English well, and they understand it but imperfectly. They are very fond of adopting what man-of-war sailors call 'pursers' names, such as 'pipe of tobacco,' 'bottle of beer,' 'tin pot,' 'pea soup,' 'half dollar,' 'after breakfast,' etc." Appendix B. J.C. Dobbin, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, December 1853, 369.

34. Howard, American Slavers, 96-97.

35. Ibid., 174.

36. William N. Peterson, Mystic Built: Ships and Shipyards of the Mystic River, Connecticut, 1784-1919 (Mystic: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1989), 165.

37. Kevin Reilly, "Slavers in Disguise: American Whaling and the African Slave Trade, 1852-1862," American Neptune 53:3 (Summer 1993): 177-89.

38. Isaac Toucey, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1 December 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1861), 8-9.

39. Booth, "The United States African Squadron," 110; James A. Rawley, "Captain Nathaniel Gordon, The Only American Executed for Violating the Slave Trade Laws," Civil War History 39:3 (September 1993): 216-24.

40. Gideon Welles, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 2 December l861 (Washington, D.C., 1862), 5, 21.

41. Thomas, The Slave Trade, 784; Howard, American Slavers , Appendix D.

42. Varying interpretations for the failure of the U.S. Navy's African Squadron to establish a successful blockade of the slave trade may be read in Booth, "The United States African Squadron," and in John Davis, "How and Why the United States African Squadron Failed to Suppress the Trans-Atantic Slave Trade," typescript, 1990, RF 532, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport.

A U.S. Navy veteran of World War II, Calvin Lane is professor emeritus of English at the University of Hartford and a member of Mystic Seaport's interpretive staff.