The Amistad in a Global Maritime Context

Gaddis Smith

The famous case of the Amistad illustrates the ambiguous relationship of the sea to the history of human freedom. For the Africans of the Amistad, the sea was first an avenue of bondage over which they were carried in the notorious illegal slave trade across the Atlantic to Cuba. And then, on the coastal voyage whose nature and consequences we have been studying, the sea provided a risky opening toward freedom. The importance of that case in the history of the United States, and especially in the history of the African-American people, is now fully established and properly commemorated.

The purpose of this essay is to suggest that the Amistad can also be seen in a global context wherein the sea connects the rapidly rising demand for agricultural products which characterized the mid-nineteenth century, the grim persistence of slavery and other forms of bondage in the face of an awakened concern for human rights in Britain, America, and elsewhere, and clashing interpretations of national and international law. The Amistad incident also illuminates two other large issues: the contradictory impact of the sea on the lives of individual Africans in American waters in the decades before the Civil War; and the efforts of slave-owning interests to protect their institution from sea-borne threats while being forced to rely on the sea for the trade which sustained their prosperity.

In the first years of the nineteenth century, all maritime nations made the transportation of slaves from Africa illegal under domestic and treaty law. But only the British committed substantial naval and political resources to stamping out the illegal trade. The United States gave little more than lip-service to that goal and, until the Civil War, actually obstructed the suppression of the slave trade by refusing to allow the British to board and search American ships. Slavers, whether American or not, routinely used the American flag as a cover for their crimes. That sorry episode in our national history has been amply documented.(1)

Although the international slave trade was illegal, no laws prevented the carriage of slaves from one place to another within countries where slavery itself remained legal. The intended voyage of the Amistad was such a coastal carriage–with the ultimate legal issue resting, as we know, on whether the Africans being carried were legally slaves. In the United States there was, as in Cuba, an active internal slave trade. Surplus slaves from the eastern seaboard were sold and transported to the booming cotton frontier along the Gulf coast. Since the railroad network in the South was rudimentary even on the eve of the Civil War, much of this transportation was by sea.

The long coastal voyage out of Chesapeake Bay, around the shoals and storms of Cape Hatteras, into and across the Gulf Stream, and through the narrow passage south of Florida, was extremely difficult. The same currents and winds that carried the Amistad north and east all the way to Long Island pushed and battered many a vessel on the voyage south. Frequently vessels were driven by stress of weather into the Bahamas, British territory; and on several occasions the vessels carried slaves. When those slaves escaped, the United States government, on behalf of the owners of legal property, demanded that the British provide compensation.

In 1833 the British Parliament emancipated all slaves in the British Empire. That made a difference in how slaves arriving in the Bahamas by stress of weather or revolt–-as in the case of the Amistad -–would be treated. The most famous case was that of the brig Creole, which sailed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, for New Orleans in October, 1841, with one hundred and thirty-five slaves on board. The passage was difficult, and after eleven days the vessel put into Abaco, in the Bahamas. There a number of the slaves staged a successful mutiny. The white owner of some of the slaves was killed and members of the crew were wounded. The mutineers then ordered the Creole to Nassau, the major port and capital of the Bahamas. The British authorities freed the slaves on the grounds that no slavery existed in the Bahamas.(2)

John C. Calhoun led the American slaveowners' outcry against the British, arguing that vital interests of the United States were at stake. Northern abolitionists, in contrast, applauded the British action and pointed to the somewhat analogous case of the Amistad. The Creole case, as Howard Jones has shown, was only one of a cluster of contentious issues between the United States and Great Britain. Although there was loose talk of war between the two countries, an amicable settlement was reached through the diplomacy of Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British diplomat Lord Ashburton. The British did not pay compensation for the freed slaves from the Creole or for any slaves escaping in the Bahamas after emancipation in 1833, but Lord Ashburton gave private assurance that the British authorities would not actively assist slaves in gaining their freedom. Calhoun and his colleagues were unmollified, and the issue became moot because the coastal slave trade was carried on thereafter primarily on steam vessels, less liable to be carried off course.

Africans, slave and free, went to sea in many different situations, finding there both opportunities not afforded on land and special dangers and disabilities. Seafaring employment was much favored by free Africans in the United States, and in the early nineteenth century perhaps 20 percent of all seamen on American flag vessels were of African descent. Seamen's wages were low and perils of the sea were great, but Africans received the same wages as all others for the same work. Ironically, employment which provided relative opportunity for free blacks was often seen by whites as akin to slavery. And indeed it was, in respect to the severe conditions under which seamen labored: the arbitrary and often brutal authority of the captain, the use of flogging and other corporal punishment, and the service to which the seaman was held #under penalty of imprisonment#for the duration of a voyage.(3)

Until the twentieth century, a seaman dissatisfied with working conditions on a vessel could not leave at an intermediate port without facing arrest. After the Civil War, advocates of seamen's rights said that this was involuntary servitude, unconstitutional by the thirteenth amendment. The Supreme Court said no#and seamen, both on American ships in foreign waters and on foreign ships in American ports, were regularly hunted down like fugitive slaves and returned to their ships. All seamen#black, yellow, or white suffered equally in this regard.(4)

Free seamen of African descent were subject, from the 1820s until the Civil War, to one serious disability on account of race. Slave-owning seaboard states, beginning with South Carolina, passed the Negro Seamen Acts, designed to prevent subversive, insurrectionary ideas from being infused into their slave population. These laws required that whenever a vessel arrived in a Southern port, all black crew members had to be held in jail until the vessel sailed#at which time they would be escorted back on board. The owner of the vessel had to pay the cost of the incarceration, and tight-fisted captains were in the habit of deducting those costs from the wages paid the victims. If an imprisoned seaman were abandoned in jail, he was liable to be sold into slavery.(5)

The validity of the Negro Seamen Acts was challenged in the Federal Courts. In one 1844 case, for example, Judge Peleg Sprague, of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts, declared:

A State cannot thus interfere with the navigation of the United States, nor dictate to the owners of an American vessel the composition of her crew. The only ground of disability is color. If one color may be excluded, any other may;#if dark complexions may be subject to prohibition, white may be equally so;#or both whites and blacks may be excluded; or any other physical quality, or religious or political opinion, may be selected as the criterion of exclusion, or admission. If the parties may be subjected to imprisonment, expenses and bond, any other penalties and punishments may be inflicted. Such legislation is not consistent with the regulations of commerce established by the laws of the United States, pursuant to authority expressly given by the constitution; and this statute is invalid.(6)

The Southern states ignored this and other decisions. The Negro Seamen Acts remained in force. One result was that the number of African seamen on vessels entering Southern ports declined in the years before the Civil War, thus restricting an avenue of employment.

In the late eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century, slaves were often found as seamen on American vessels, hired out by owners, who received the wages. This practice continued until the end of slavery on local vessels operating entirely within the Southern states or on Southern inland waters. But the hiring out of slaves for international voyages disappeared in the 1830s, because the slave seamen often saw and seized the opportunity for freedom by deserting in a foreign port where there was no slavery. Free seamen were somewhat deterred from desertion because it meant loss of all wages, but the slave had no wages to lose. Owners of slaves escaping in such a manner tried to hold the captain of the vessel responsible, but the courts did not agree. The hiring of slaves as seamen on international voyages thus ended#and with it an opportunity for escape.

Slaves also stowed away on vessels leaving Southern ports for the North or for foreign ports, or signed as seamen pretending to be free. This was a risky game, because if one's deception were discovered, the captain was in line for a sizable reward for the apprehension and return of the runaway. To acquiesce in the slave's escape would bring no gain and, after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, might put the captain in trouble with the law.

The ambiguous relation of Africans to the sea is also illustrated in the law of salvage. The customs and law of salvage in the United States and all other maritime countries were intended to encourage people to take great risks to save property in danger on the sea. Those who saved property could apply to the courts to receive a reward, based on the judge's estimate of the risk involved and the likelihood that without the saving effort the property would have been lost. Awards could range from a low of 5 percent of the value of the property to as high as 90 percent. Seamen participating in salvage could on occasion receive huge sums, equivalent to many years' wages.

The law of salvage, however, provided no entitlement to compensation for saving life on the grounds that the value of life was beyond calculation and that common humanity should dictate life-saving regardless of the expectation of award. But what if life were property, the life of a slave? This, recall, was a subsidiary issue in the Amistad case. The officers and crew of the United States vessel apprehending the Amistad sought a salvage award based on the value of the Africans as slaves. When the Africans were declared free men, they ceased to have monetary value and, of course, were not returned to their "owners"# hence no salvage award.

But it happened from time to time that slaves on legal voyages were saved and salvage was paid. It also happened that slaves attempting to reach freedom by sea in small rafts were found adrift by passing vessels, taken aboard, and restored to owners in return for payment of salvage. Salvage law thus encouraged vessels to save the lives of seagoing runaways, who in many cases were in danger of dying from thirst and starvation. For example, five runaways in a canoe were found near death one hundred and eighty miles off South Carolina. The ship that picked them up received salvage. Life saved in such instances was freedom denied. Another case involved the ship Leander with fifty-six slaves and no crew, adrift off Charleston. The slaves claimed that the whites had simply died. The judge, however, decided that there had been a revolt. The fact that the ship was seaworthy and had ample food and water created some difficulty. But the judge concluded that "there being no white persons on board and the slaves being regarded as cargo, I must consider the Leander as derelict." The salvers received $16,000–one-third the value of the ship and the slaves.(7)

The illegal African slave trade, the coastal transportation of slaves in the Caribbean and the United States, and the punitive Negro Seamen Acts were all part of the response of slave-owning economies to the rising demand for cotton and sugar. Labor was scarce and soil fertility was being rapidly depleted. These conditions came together to create a phenomenon that could well be called "the other slave trade"#a phenomenon which links African slavery and the bondage of the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century, some of the issues that arose in the case of the Amistad with tragedy in the Pacific, and contention between an American and a foreign authority.

In the 1840s and 1850s the desperate need for powerful fertilizer produced a world-wide search for guano, the accumulated droppings of sea birds. Abundant deposits of guano were rare, because they required a surrounding ocean teeming with small fish for the birds to consume, rocks on which the birds could nest, and no rain to wash off the droppings. In the 1840s such conditions existed around the Chincha Islands, off the coast of Peru. Through centuries, guano deposits hundreds of feet deep had accumulated. The material was the most effective and valuable fertilizer then known. The Peruvian government moved to exploit this treasure by digging and selling it to American and European ships arriving at the islands.(8)

Digging the stuff was very dangerous. The fine dust, loaded with ammonia, filled the lungs and killed workers in months or perhaps a year. Slavery had been abolished in Peru, and the Indians could not be induced to work the guano for any amount of money. Where to turn? The Peruvians turned, as did other interests throughout Latin America, to China, a country then suffering extreme social and political instability. The port of Amoy, and later the Portuguese enclave of Macao, became the Chinese equivalent of the slave coast of Africa. British and European firms built barracoons#the name used also for slave enclosures on the African coast#and paid Chinese agents to trick, drug, and otherwise gather young Chinese men, or coolies.

The coolies were assembled in the barracoons, forced to put their mark on contracts obligating them to work for four or five years anywhere in the world for any employer to whom the contract was assigned#and at extremely low wages, usually four or five dollars a month. American ships flocked to the trade, taking hundreds of coolies on board, packing them almost as tightly as slaves from Africa, and delivering them to Panama, British Guyana, and Cuba in large numbers, but most notoriously to Peru for labor and almost certain death digging guano.(9)

One instance in particular links this other slave trade to the place where much of the Amistad drama unfolded: the case of the ship Robert Bowne, commanded and owned by one Leslie Bryson, of 32 Grand Avenue, New Haven. Bryson, who bought his ship for almost nothing in San Francisco, loaded more than four hundred coolies in Amoy and headed for Peru, where he intended to deliver the men and their contracts for a good profit. Almost immediately coolies on board began to die#from a combination of opium withdrawal, seasickness, probably cholera, and the dreadful sanitary conditions on board. Captain Bryson thought he could stem the mortality by cutting off the pigtails of his cargo. The Chinese resented this treatment and more generally the fact of their captivity. They rose in revolt, killing Bryson and the other officers. Ultimately some of the mutineers were captured by a joint Anglo-American naval expedition and brought to trial by the Chinese, who acquitted them on the reasonable grounds that they had acted in self-defense, having been taken aboard against their will in an enterprise blatantly against Chinese law.(10)

The chief American diplomat in China, a Yale man named Peter Parker, denounced the Chinese for dishonoring the United States and perpetrating a travesty of justice. He wanted the American naval commander, recently arrived in Chinese waters, Matthew Perry, to attack the Chinese in retaliation. Perry said, in effect, "Go to hell, Peter Parker; I have other orders." Those orders were to open up Japan. Parker, to his credit, soon changed his mind and saw the coolie trade as the abomination it was. So did the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress. Both countries passed laws excluding their own ships from the trade. It continued, however, under Spanish, Portuguese, and Peruvian flags until the 1870s#a lingering example of the efforts of some men to find cheap alternatives, with scant respect for human rights. They defied laws of particular nations and international ideals as long as they could succeed.

Such men, of course, did not always succeed, and sometimes their intended victims used the sea as a means of freedom, as the Amistad Africans here in New Haven and the Chinese out of Amoy on a ship captained by a New Havener illustrate.

NOTES

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Harvard Historical Studies, 1, 1896), although nearly a century old, is still valuable. See also Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837-1862 (Berkeley, U. of California Press, 1963).

2. Howard Jones, To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1843 (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1977), 78-86, 139-154; describes the Creole case and puts it in a legal and international context. See also Jones, "The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt," Civil War History XXI (1975), 28-50.

3. For a more extended discussion see Gaddis Smith, "Black Seamen and the Federal Courts," in Timothy J. Runyan, ed.,Ships, Seafaring and Society (Detroit, 1987), 321-338.

4. The crucial Supreme Court case is Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275 (1897).

5. The pioneering articles on this subject are by Philip M. Hamer, " Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1802-1848," Journal of Southern History I (1935), 3-28; and "British Consuls and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1850-1860," ibid., 138-168.

6. The Cynosure, I Sprague 88 (1844).

7. Flinn v. The Leander, 9 Federal Cases 175 (1808).

8. For more detail see Gaddis Smith, "Agricultural Roots of Maritime History," The American Neptune XLIV (1984), 5-10.

9. Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolies in Peru, 1849-1874 (Durham, N.C.,1951); Robert J. Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations Between China and the United States, 1850-1915 (Tucson, Arizona, 1988).

10. Extensive correspondence on the Robert Bowne affair is printed in "Slave and Coolie Trade," 34th Congress, 1st Session, 1852, Senate Executive Document 99.

GADDIS SMITH is Director of the Center for International and Area Studies and Larned Professor of History, Yale University.