Keeping up appearances: The international politics of slave trade abolition in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 66, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 809-832

  Mason, Matthew ^a  

^a BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 77949814920     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. Erik Gøbel, "The Danish Edict of 16th March 1792 to Abolish the Slave Trade," in Jan Parmentier and Sander Spanoghe, eds., Orbis in Orbem: Liber Amicorum John Everaert (Ghent, Belgium, 2007), 251-63, esp. 259, 262 ("noble achievement")
2. [London] Courier, Feb. 6, 1807, [3] ("unresisted progress")
3. For the United States, see John P. Kaminski, ed., A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate over the Constitution (Madison, Wis., 1995), 121, 126, 133, 135, 138, 141-42, 148, 181
4. For the American sense that abolition involved a competition, see the [Philadelphia] Aurora General Advertiser, Dec. 23, 1806
5. [Providence, R.I.] Phenix, Apr. 18, 1807. Lord Grenville exaggerated American commitment to abolition by declaring that the Constitution "had fixed the period of the abolition to take place in 1808," rather than more accurately stating that Congress could only consider abolition to take effect after that year
6. See The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time (London, 1812), 8: col. 663. For years thereafter, some Britons thought inflating America's record on abolition a useful way to goad continental Europe into cooperation
7. See for example the Edinburgh Review; Or, Critical Journal 36, no. 71 (October 1821-February 1822): 34-52. Similarly, Anti-Federalists in the United States exaggerated British commitment to abolition in the late 1780s to shame the Federalists (with their twenty-year delay) by contrast
8. See Kaminski, Necessary Evil, 126, 133, 148. The participants did not acknowledge that Denmark had already won this particular race by withdrawing from the slave trade in 1792, a ban that took effect in 1803
9. [Boston] Columbian Centinel, July 14, 18, 1810 ("anniversary"). See also July 10, 1811, July 14, 1813, Aug. 21, 1816. In 1820, in a discussion within James Monroe's cabinet, John C. Calhoun declared that one of his objections to cooperating with Britain on the slave trade was that under such a scenario, "we appear to the world as the satellite and she the primary planet - a position the more disparaging to us, because in point of fact she was merely following our lead" in 1807
10. See Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848 (1874-77; repr., Freeport, N.Y., 1969), 5: 218. And in 1826 fellow Carolinian Robert Hayne roared that because the United States was "the first to set its face against the Slave Trade," it might "well call upon other nations 'to go and do likewise,' before they can be permitted to taunt us on this subject."
11. See James F. Hopkins et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Clay (Lexington, Ky., 1973), 5: 222 n. 5
12. For a sampling of the literature on these internal debates, see Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1975)
13. J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester, Eng., 1995)
14. Matthew E. Mason, "Slavery Overshadowed: Congress Debates Prohibiting the Atlantic Slave Trade to the United States, 1806-1807," Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 59-81
15. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006)
16. Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge, 1970), 6
17. Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 313-26
18. Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, "Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-Year Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade," International Organization 53 (Autumn 1999): 631-68
19. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), 242
20. Jenny S. Martinez, "Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law," Yale Law Journal 117, no. 4 (January 2008): 550-641, esp. 557-58
21. For a quick measure of how far-reaching and persistent British exertions for abolition were, see the ninety-five volumes of diplomatic correspondence and other documents those exertions generated, published in the Irish University Press facsimile repr. ser. British Parliamentary Papers: Slave Trade (Shannon, Ireland, 1968-71). Just the tables of contents in these volumes reveal that the British government engaged the issue with every conceivably relevant state throughout the world
22. For useful secondary overviews of Britain's treaty exertions throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic and beyond, see W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York, 1896), 131-50, app. B
23. Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York, 1975)
24. Martinez, Yale Law Journal 117: 550-641. Ralph A. Austen has argued that the suppression of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean "must be seen as a British rather than a European policy."
25. See Austen, "From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean: European Abolition, the African Slave Trade, and Asian Economic Structures," in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin (Madison, Wis., 1981), 117-40, esp. 126-28 (quotation, 126). In fact, that does not make abolition there much different from in the Atlantic
26. For the waning of British antislavery commitment to the East, see Matthew S. Hopper, "Imperialism and the Dilemma of Slavery in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf, 1873-1939," Itinerario 30, no. 3 (2006): 76-94. In this article I follow standard scholarly practice in applying the term abolition to the drive to end the Atlantic slave trade, as opposed to antislavery, which applies to the eradication of slavery itself
27. João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, trans. Richard Wall (New York, 2006), 9-14 (quotations, 10)
28. David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1980), 49-91
29. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990), 157-60
30. Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814-48: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (New York, 2000), 138-62, esp. 156-57
31. Marques, Sounds of Silence, 43-47, 62-63 n. 23. 159-92
32. Bethell, Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, 27-61 ("no state," 31)
33. For a profile of the interests involved in the Brazilian slave trade, see Jeffrey D. Needell, "The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade in 1850: Historiography, Slave Agency and Statesmanship," Journal of Latin American Studies 33, no. 4 (November 2001): 681-711, esp. 686
34. Murray, Odious Commerce, 208-40
35. See Needell, Journal of Latin American Studies 33: 698-711
36. Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871 (Stanford, Calif., 2006), esp. 138-55
37. For another discussion of the counterproductive nature of British coercion, see Harral E. Landry, "Slavery and the Slave Trade in Atlantic Diplomacy, 1850-1861," Journal of Southern History 27, no. 2 (May 1961): 184-207, esp. 188-90
38. Landry also argues that the slave trade cooperation of James Buchanan's administration in the United States was forthcoming once the British relaxed their pressure, though much of his evidence is drawn from the very different administration of Abraham Lincoln Harral E. Landry, " Journal of Southern History (ibid., 190-207, esp. 204)
39. Robin Law, "Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade" (paper delivered at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture's conference "The bloody Writing is for ever torn': Domestic and International Consequences of the First Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade," Aug. 8-12, 2007, Accra and Elmina, Ghana), 16 ("utterly absurd")
40. Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007), 51 ("excitement")
41. See also Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian, "The Changing Meanings of Freedom: The British Foreign Office and the Handling of the Liberated Africans in Brazil" (paper delivered at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture's conference "'The bloody Writing is for ever torn': Domestic and International Consequences of the First Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade," Aug. 8-12, 2007, Accra and Elmina, Ghana)
42. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 41, Class B, 640
43. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 286. Jenny S. Martinez emphasizes the mixed commissions' effectiveness more than I do here, though she also recognizes the loopholes resistant powers took advantage of within the courts and after the courts had ruled
44. See Kaufmann and Pape, International Organization 53: 631-68 (quotation, 661). Whatever the merits of this case for the British motive, the importance of elite networks seems particularly clear for high government officials in the smuggling nations
45. Serge Daget, "France, Suppression of the Illegal Trade, and England, 1817-1850," in Eltis and Walvin, Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 193-217 ("official abolitionist morality," 193)
46. See also Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London, 1988), 475-81, 484
47. Kielstra, Politics of Slave Trade Suppression
48. J. Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A Short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978), 1, 83 ("all Catholics"), 86, 90-94, 111
49. Michael P. Riccards, Vicars of Christ: Popes, Power and Politics in the Modern World (New York, 1998), 5. I am grateful to Daniel Walker Howe for bringing my attention to Gregory XVI's denunciation of the trade
50. Pieter C. Emmer, "Abolition of the Abolished: The Illegal Dutch Slave Trade and the Mixed Courts," in Eltis and Walvin, Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 177-92
51. Manning, Slavery and African Life, 157-60
52. Austen, "From Atlantic to the Indian Ocean," 126-28
53. Horne, Deepest South
54. For a fuller picture of the variety of opinion on the slave trade in antebellum America, see Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971)
55. Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 3: 556-59
56. Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 5: 216-19 ("professions of benevolence," 5: 217)
57. For useful secondary overviews of this Anglo-American conflict over the right of search, see Hugh G. Soulsby, The Right of Search and the Slave Trade in Anglo-American Relations, 1814-1862 (Baltimore, 1933)
58. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, comp. and ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001), chaps. 5-6
59. For others among the multitudinous examples of aspersions cast on Britain's motives for its abolition drive, see William R. Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831-1860 (Washington, D.C., 1932, 1939), 2: 211, 218, 248-51
60. Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831-1860 (11: 170-73. France constitutes one possible exception to my emphasis on American uniqueness, given that it resisted Britain on the right of search longer (until 1831) than any other power besides the United States (until 1862). Furthermore, in the early 1840s, in context of tensions over the Levant and controversial British seizures of French ships, French Anglophobia killed not only a proposed new treaty expanding the right of search but also the existing conventions of 1831 and 1833. An 1845 Anglo-French treaty modified the right of search in ways that made it less effective. All this considered, however, British ministers proved far more likely to treat France than the United States with gloves off on this issue. Meanwhile Frenchmen generally expressed their resentment of British pressure in assemblies, newspapers, and private correspondence rather than in high-level diplomacy. And the instability of domestic French politics threw France into dependency on Britain at crucial times, such as in 1831 when Britain was the new regime's only friend among the great powers of Europe
61. Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 6: 35-37 ("assent to the principle," 6: 36-37)
62. Soulsby, Right of Search and Slave Trade, 18 ("virtually threatens"). I am indebted to Brett Rushforth for suggesting the point about American independence and human rights
63. Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 2d sess., 1820, 1323 ("anxiety to suppress")
64. Aurora General Advertiser, Aug. 28, 1819
65. Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, 4: 151-52
66. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 9, Class B (1823), 150-51
67. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 9, Class B (1824), 81-82
68. For the law's effect in Britain, see Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 40 (1819), cols. 1547-49
69. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 2d ser., vol. 5 (1821), cols. 1285-89
70. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 2d ser., vol. 7 (1822), cols. 1399-1406
71. Du Bois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, 258. The Americans also put conspicuous pressure on the French to join in declaring the trade piracy
72. See British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 31, Class D, 60-127 (quotations, 62)
73. Register of the Debates in Congress, 18th Cong., 2d sess., appendix, 1825, 2-3 ("definitive sentiments," 3), 8-26, 73-75 ("sully the glory," 75)
74. Annals of Congress, 17th Cong., 2d sess., 1822-23, 331-33 ("that nefarious traffic," 332), 1147-55
75. For secondary analyses of this congressional debate, see Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812-1823 (Berkeley, Calif., 1964), 275-77
76. Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, Ill., 1972), 136-44
77. Hopkins et al., Papers of Henry Clay, 4: 253-54 ("United States were"), 273
78. Hopkins et al., Papers of Henry Clay, 5: 235
79. Hopkins et al., Papers of Henry Clay, 7: 355, 365, 388. The Portuguese and Brazilian orthodoxy in relation to the slave trade in the 1810s and 1820s consisted of what João Pedro Marques has called "tolerationism," which "could theoretically accept (and desire) the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself, but . . . restricted by the laws of necessity and the public good, thrust such an event into a distant and indeterminate future."
80. See Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York, 1990), 1: 123 (quotation). Henry Clay cautioned U.S. minister Condy Raguet to avoid intemperate language for good reason. In 1827 Raguet stormed out of his post in Brazil amid mutual recriminations
81. See Hopkins et al., Papers of Henry Clay, 6: 98-99, 281. A later U.S. minister to Brazil, Henry A. Wise, also made himself unpopular there in 1846 by pursuing a more vigorous policy against the illicit slave trade to that country under cover of the U.S. flag. In private correspondence with his superiors, he advocated an aggressive British-style approach to this problem given that the balance of power between Brazil and the United States favored the latter. But in discussions with the Brazilians themselves, even he was careful to offer "a disclaimer of any intention to interfere with the domestic policy of Brazil at all."
82. See Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, 2: 313 (quotation), 369-71, 379-81
83. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 21, Class D, 204-43 ("open and unprovoked aggressions," 204, "For the abolition," 205)
84. British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 25, Class D, 60-63 ("While the United States," 62)
85. Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, 11: 203
86. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 17, Class D (1839), 23-35 ("carelessness," 25)
87. British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 7, vol. XXXIX, 74-75 ("respect to the feelings," 75)
88. For American invective, see Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, 7: 66, 358-59, 420
89. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. vol. 46, Class B, 222-24, 226-28. British abolitionists also manifested both the frustrations and a light touch with the Americans
90. See Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 36, 1817, col. 1321
91. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 2d ser., vol. 4, 1821, cols. 428-29
92. "Her Majesty's Government," the exasperated Viscount wrote, "would fain hope that the day is not far distant when the Government of the United States will cease to confound two things which are in their nature entirely different, will look to things and not to words, and . . . will join the Christian league" by truly getting behind abolition (British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 21, Class D, 259-60) . But Palmerston was able to let loose because he was on his way out of office in August 1841
93. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 47, Class B [1861], 139, 147, 149). For a hint of how much this new tack accomplished, see Lewis Cass's outburst of resentment against these very same British officials in December 1860
94. For the Royal Navy's complex rules of engagement, British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 8, 12-14
95. Landry, Journal of Southern History 27: 202 ("It is no business")
96. British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 24, Class D, 202-3 ("several persons," 202)
97. British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 63, Class D, 3-4
98. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 45, Class B, 232-33
99. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 20, Class D, 91 ("President" )
100. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 40, Class B, 834 ("Her Majesty's Government")
101. See also British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 14 (1835), 86-87
102. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 64, 261-67, 327
103. For more on Lewis Cass, British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 45, Class B, 259-65
104. Lewis Cass, British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 46, Class B, 255
105. Taken aback and apparently willing to bide their time until a change in administration, Cass's British counterparts desisted from presenting any more evidence of this sort, instead expressing their appreciation for American cooperation on slave trade suppression (Lewis Cass, British Parliamentary Papers, ibid., vol. 47, Class B [1861], 179-80
106. Lewis Cass, British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 47, Class B [1862], 158)
107. Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, 6: 466-75
108. Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade, 230-43 ("no Southern State," 231, "to bid defiance," 232)
109. Manisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), chap. 5
110. George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 51-53. It was significant that an Alabamian spoke in such terms, since the last slave ship to smuggle Africans into America landed in Alabama
111. See Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (New York, 2007)
112. Intercepted circular printed in the [Washington, D.C.] National Intelligencer, Mar. 31, 1863
113. For Jefferson Davis, see Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (New York, 1881), 1: 3-7, 77-79, 61-62, 302-3, 537, 560
114. Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (2: 192-93
115. For the relevant provisions in the Confederate Constitution, Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (ibid., 1: 642, 657, 671. In distinguishing between slavery and the slave trade, Davis ran in company with a host of antebellum proslavery ideologues who praised American slavery but would not do the same for the Atlantic slave trade
116. See Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 232-35
117. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 47, Class B (1862), 161-71
118. British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 48, Class B, 287-313
119. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, chap. 10
120. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 2d ser., vol. 8, 1823, col. 769 ("until we abolished slavery")
121. David Eltis, "The Impact of Abolition on the Atlantic Slave Trade," in Eltis and Walvin, Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 155-76 ("nearly 200,000 members," 155)
122. I arrived at the larger percentage (which in more exact terms is 20.74 percent) based on David Eltis, "The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Annual Time Series of Imports into the Americas Broken Down by Region," Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 1 (February 1987): 109-38, esp. 136
123. Eltis, "The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 58, no. 1 (January 2001): 17-46, esp. 43
124. See also Eltis, "Impact of Abolition," 155-76
125. A point made very well by Eltis, Hispanic American Historical Review 67: 109-38. My emphasis on national honor extends to the Atlantic what João Pedro Marques has argued for Portugal's final acquiescence in abolition
126. For the large literature that underwrites this argument, see for starters David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966)
127. And for a more recent entry, see Brown, Moral Capital