-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: Mount Hope George Howe©1958,1959 The Viking Press New York, NY LCCN 59-5643 312 pps. – First edition – Out-of-print --[2b]-- III Barring shipwreck, confiscation, and disease, which were covered by insurance,* the operation of the deWolf partnership was almost foolproof. There was a deWolf at each corner and on every leg of the triangle. Molasses from the deWolf plantations in Cuba reached Bristol in deWolf bottoms, was turned into rum at the deWolf distillery, and exported with other trade goods, again in deWolf ships, to the slave coast of Africa. There the cargoes were exchanged for slaves, and the new freight brought back for sale at the starting point in Cuba. Captain Jim's distillery on Thames Street converted 300 gal-lons of molasses every day into 250 gallons of rum. The cost of distillation was 10 cents a gallon. He paid the Treasury an import duty of 5 cents, but received a rebate Of 3 cents, called a drawback, when he exported it as rum. The casks, stamped with his mark, J/DW, would unload from his own ship at his own wharf, pass Bosworth's inspection, and be hauled by his own oxen. As long as they stood on the wharf they were surrounded by boys of the town, clustered like flies about the oozing sweetness and dipping slivers of shingle into the bunghole or scraping the leaky rims. (This operation was called "labbing lasses"; Bosworth did not molest it. From the name came a rhyme the boys sang on Babbitt's wharf next door: Mister Babbitt, Lemme labbit.) [* Modern businessmen would welcome the simplicity of the policies. Here is one which Major Williarn deWolf of the Bristol Insurance Company issued to his brother Charles: "Q. What premium will the Cy. ask for a Risk of $9000 on ship Constantia and her cargo from this port to, in and from Mozambique or any other port or ports of Africa, to the Havanna or Rio de la Plata in So. America, or both, including natural mortality exceeding 20 pr. Centum and Illicit Trade, and also every other kind of Risk, whether contemplated at the time of this insurance or not? On ship and outfits $5000; on Cargo, valued at $140 each, $4000. Chas. deWolf. :'A. The Company will take this Risque @ 15 pr. Cent. William deWolf. 'Agreed. Charles deWolf."] After the rum was distilled, it was stowed in hogsheads, along with other trade goods, aboard the same vessel or another of the deWolf fleet. It retailed at 35 cents a gallon, but had cost Captain Jim much less. It was stowed in the bilge. The six-foot space below the main deck was packed with the more perishable cargo. On one African voyage the three-hundred-ton ship An n took aboard: 184 hogsheads, 26 tierces 28 doz. silk hats and 33 barrels new rum 2043 Ibs. ham 16 boxes claret 80 hogsheads salt 6 pipes molasses 5 chaldrons coal 2 pipes gin 3 casks porter 8 pipes brandy 6 cases India goods 1 case cambries 2 boxes calicoes 10 hogsheads tobacco 17000 staves 620 hogsheads codfish 1200 pieces nankeens 20 firkins butter 1 bale muslins 110 bars iron 30M boards 100 " American steel Ships stores for the voyage 20 pots and kettles The Sukey, on a voyage of 1802, carried such items as twenty bolts of scarlet broadcloth; a case of lute-strings; two gross of men's hats in red, green, and white, embroidered with tinsel lace; three thousand yellow-handled knives; and miscellaneous necklaces, rings, muskets, snuff, and segars. There was little demand for specie on the Slave Coast, and none for paper money. Except for the rum, most of the outward cargoes for the slave-trade were bought from wholesalers like Samuel Parkman of Boston—a grandfather of the great historian. Any boy in town with a heart for the sea and a strong stomach could get a job aboard. Each was allowed a "venture" of his own—a few bunches of red Bristol onions, or a dozen knives from Pardon Handy's ship chandlery. He would trade them in Africa or Havana for whatever trifles might please his wife or his girl. The ship would return with such souvenirs as parrots, birds of paradise, ring-tailed monkeys, cases of oranges and bananas-or if a sailor had no girl, he might turn his venture into Havana segars for himself. Captain Walter Dalton of the brig Olive Branch brought back a leopard. It was just a playful kitten when it landed, and almost white; as it grew older its coat blossomed with beautiful black spots on a tawny ground. On shore, Dalton kept it in a cage next to the fireplace. But once it broke out, and Mrs. Dalton found it with its paws on the edge of her baby's cradle, its pink tongue lolling out between sharp white teeth. That was the end of leopards for her. But the captain was a thrifty man; instead of executing his pet, he sold it to the circus which visited Bristol every Fourth of July. Most of the men in town would be involved in the fitting-out. Before weighing anchor, Captain job Almy of the Sukey settled accounts with Jabez Chase for a medicine chest, with Ben Tilley for cordage from his ropewalk, with the pious Levi deWolf for onions at 2 cents a bunch, with sailmakers, carpenters, calkers, painters, ship chandlers, and innkeepers. He paid Quackey Babbitt, a servant of the wharfowner, $3.20 for sawing firewood, and Russell Warren the housewright (he was later the architect of all the deWolf mansions) $6.07 for scrap iron. Besides his chest of small arms, he carried, for defense against pirates, two carronades lashed amidships and a "chaser" of brass at the stern. The Sukey was a seventy-foot topsail schoonerthe most weatherly rig and profitable burthen for the slave trade. At 1.5 tons per foot of length, and at $25 a ton, she must have cost Captain Jim under $3000 to build, but her cargo, and the wages of her crew, brought his investment up to $15,000. (A vessel's tonnage in those days had nothing to do with displacement. It was a measurement of volume: length by beam by depth of hull. One ton was the equivalent of ninety-five cubic feet.) Wages ran from $8 a month to Elkanah Waldron, boy, up to $30 for Captain Almy. At the customhouse, Collins signed her bill of health. To all the faithful of CHRIST to whom these presents may come. Whereas it is pious and just to bear witness to the Truth, lest Error and Deceit overthrow it; and Whereas the schooner Sukey of Bristol, of which job Almy, under GOD, is Master, and now ready to depart from the FORT of Bristol, and, if GOD pleases, to sail for the Coast of Africa and other places beyond the Sea with twelve Men, including the master of said Schooner; We therefore to you all, by the Tenor of these Presents, do make known, that (Praise be to GOD the MOST HIGH AND GOOD) no Plague or any dangerous or contagious Disease at present exists in the said port of Bristol. His fee for this document was $5.46, and Nathaniel Ingraharn's, for pilotage to the open sea at Newport, was $6.00. The outward voyage of the slaver would be spent in cutting the planks which would form the slave deck on the return. The planks were listed on the manifest as lumber for repairs to the ship herself, or as merchandise for sale abroad. They were not fitted in place, however, until the outward cargo was sold in Africa and the slaves ready to load, for the possession of slave decks in place was prima facie evidence against the ship. Having crossed the Atlantic, the slaver would put in to refit at one of the stations on the western shoulder of Africa—Goree, or the Cape Verdes, or the Los Islands-or, until Britain outlawed the trade in her colonies, at Sierra Leone. The captain laid in bananas, horsebeans, rice, palm wine, farina, and a few live goats, on which to feed his expected cargo. (Slaves were fed twice a day at sea. in lots of ten at a time. The starchy diet was spiced with slabber-sauce, made of flour, water, palm oil, and pepper.) He checked his wooden spoons against the carpenter's chart of lading. Iron spoons, which the slaves might use as weapons, were not carried. The blacksmith checked his thumbscrews, used to punish obstinate slaves, and his iron jaw-openers (called speculum oris), for forcible feeding. The quartermaster refilled his 150-gallon water butts. Then the ship stood down the Gulf of Guinea, past the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Gold Coast, to the Slave Coast and the Bight of Benin, where her cargo awaited her. The trip across the gulf was fifteen hundred miles. The shoreline of the Gulf of Guinea is always green, for there are no seasons at the equator. The wind blows from the south. One Bristol skipper wrote home that the temperature at Saint Paul de Loanda reached 120 degrees in December. There is no tide. Long rollers break far out from the flat beaches, so that ships of any draft had to moor offshore and send longboats in for the bargaining. At times the harmattan wind blows yellow dust five hundred miles out to sea. Shallow rivers, feeding the twisted stilted roots of the mangroves, wind down from the jungle. Along their banks, hidden from the open sea, were the beehive-roofed straw huts of the vendors, called palaver-houses, where the bargaining took place. Beside them stood the stockades, called barracoons, where the slaves were fattened and oiled for sale. The slaves came from many different tribes in the interior. the round-headed chestnut Fulas and the flat-nosed dark Mandingos. Bound together with thongs and forked sticks they had been driven from the interior in long files called kaffles. The religion of the Mandingos combined Mohammedanism with voodoo. They venerated the Mumbo-jumbo, a straw fetish with a man hidden inside it. Quarrels between husband and wife were referred to the Mumbo-jumbo, who always decided in favor of the husband. About their necks they wore charms called grisgris, written on paper by the marabouts, who sold them for high prices to protect the wearer. They believed that an eclipse was caused by a cat putting its paws between the moon and the earth; and they sacrificed chickens to read the future in the entrails. The Fulas were more advanced. They were thrifty and neat. Many of them spoke Arabic and they were excellent cooks. The tribes all feared the sea, except for the sturdy Krus from what was later to become Liberia. The Krus often bought their freedom by manning the slaver's longboats. A slave might have been doomed to servitude by his king in punishment for a crime, or captured in a tribal war and sold to the dealers by his captor, or simply kidnapped. The kings themselves avoided the coast. The King of Benin was so shy of foreigners, to say nothing of the seal that he lived invisible in his great tent, only displaying a foot through the flap from time to time to show his subjects that he was still alive. The King of Dahomey, at his capital village of Abomey, lived in a straw palace lined with the skulls of twenty generations of tribal enemies. Among the sovereigns of the Slave Coast were King Ephrairn of Cambo, King Mammee of Yallaba, King Holiday of Bonny, King Quaco Dooah of Ashantee, and King Vinegar of Rio Bassa. The latter is said to have sold seventy thousand of his subjects in the years from 1808 to 1813. There was King Boatswain of Shebar, who was seven feet tall. None failed to collect his tax-called the coomey—from every white trader who did business in his territory. Liberia itself, the colony of liberated slaves, was bought in 1820 from a syndicate of monarchs named Peter, Long Peter, George, Zoda, Governor, and Jimmy. The price was six muskets, two casks of tobacco, a box of soap, four umbrellas, four hats, eight pairs of shoes, three mirrors, three canes, miscellaneous crockery and dry goods, and a barrel each of powder, beads, nails, and rum. Nominally the country was in Portuguese hands; one of the titles of the King of Portugal was Lord of Guinea. In crumbling castles such as Ambriz and Saint Paul de Loanda a show of government was maintained by the Portuguese proconsuls. But the power lay in the dealers, or "factors," as they were more politely called, who bought slaves from the native kings and resold them at a profit to the white ship-captains. To satisfy the demands of the Cuban canefields and the Carolina cotton plantations, the factors were not above starting a jungle war by offering two rival kings the same price for whatever captives each might take from the other. The factors were of many races. DaSouza, known to the coast as Cha-cha, was a Brazilian mulatto. Madame Ferreira, who perhaps did not trade directly in slaves, but maintained herself handsomely by provisioning those who did, was Portuguese. Henry Brotherton was English. Charles Slocum, who peddled slaves offshore in a bumboat, was a Yankee. When George deWolf's ship Eliza was condemned by the British Admiralty court at Sierra Leone in 1804, Slocum had the enterprise to buy her in and send her back to Bristol for resale to deWolf. Don Pedro Blanco was a Spaniard from Malaga, Thomas Jourdain was French, Blas Covado a Mexican, and N. P. Biering of the Los Islands a Dane. The cynical Theodore Canot, known to the trade as Mongo Gunpowder ("mongo" is the Mandingo word for "king") claimed to be an Italian. When on the search for inventory, in the jungle, he wore a cruising dress of red flannel shirt, Panama hat, and white duck leggins. Canot thus describes the persuasion of rum in the trade: Next day the King made his appearance in all the paraphernalia of African court dress. A few fathoms of check girded his loins, while a blue shirt and red waistcoat were surmounted by a dragoon's cap with brass ornaments. We proceeded to formal business. His Majesty called a palaver of his chiefs and headmen, before whom I announced my terms. Very soon, several young folks were brought for sale who, I am sure, never dreamed, at rising from last night's sleep, that they were destined for Cuban slavery. My merchandise revived the memory of pecadillos that had long been forgotten, and sentences that were forgiven. jealous husbands, when they tasted my rum, suddenly remembered their wives' infidelities, and sold their better halves for liquor in which to forget them. 1 became a magician, unroofing the village and baring its crime and wickedness to the eye of justice. Law became profitable, and virtue had never reached so high a price. The Africans took their rum straight; the factors and their clients, more prudent, diluted theirs with water or lime-juice. New England shipped more rum to the coast than other parts of the country, to the point where a "rum vessel" became the word for a New England slaver. Nobody on the coast, except the slaves themselves, wanted the trade to end. For fifteen hundred miles, from the Gambia to Cape Palmas, the country was a continuous slave market, interrupted only, after 1786, by the free British colony of Sierra Leone, and, after 1820, by the republic of Liberia. European countries maintained trading posts, called "factories," where their citizens could store the slaves they had bought, under guard, while awaiting shipment to market: the Dutch at Almena, the Danes at Accra, the Prussians at Fredericksburg, the British at Annamaboe and Cape Coast Castle, and the French at Fort St. Louis and Goree. There were no factories for the use of Americans, but, on the other hand, there were no American consuls to enforce the laws against the trade. The Bristol captain had to be a shrewd trader as well as a good sailor. Since he might be absent a year or more, the owners gave him great latitude. As soon as his ship anchored, he stacked his tradegoods on deck for the inspection of the factors. As tween-decks was cleared of the outward cargo, the carpenter set up the planking he had cut on the voyage, riveted the leg-irons to it, stretched netting along the gunwales to keep the expected cargo from jumping overboard, and erected a barricade at the quarterdeck to prevent their invading the cabin. Since tween-decks was never more than six feet high, the planking, which was framed midway across it, left a little less than three feet headroom for each layer. Ideal lading was 16 inches by 5 feet 6 inches by 2 feet 10 inches per head. A tight pack was to the captain's interest, for he was entitled to buy for his own account 5 per cent of the total cargo carried, and ship them without paying freight After showing the factor his wares and giving him a "dash," or bribe—perhaps a bottle of rum or a musket—the captain rowed ashore with him to open negotiations in the palaver-house. They could take a long time, for the captain insisted on quality and bought the goods a few at a time. The ship's surgeon examined every inch of a slave before passing him, for a single sick one, in the crowded conditions aboard ship, could endanger the whole cargo. Sometimes the captain had to haggle for weeks at the palaver-house, squatting on a palm mat, while his crew grew mutinous or sick aboard ship. Sometimes he would load only a few head before sailing on to the next post, and he had to weigh anchor at night, for the land breeze rose at ten and failed at two. On the Sukey's voyage Captain Almy had to put in at Cape Mesurado, Grand Popo, Tradetown, Picaninni Sestus, and Bassa before he had disposed of his outward cargo and loaded all of his hundred and twenty slaves. He spent five months in this coasting, which was longer than Captain Jim had allowed for the whole voyage. By the time he cleared from Bassa, twenty-two of the slaves he had bought at Cape Mesurado had died-some of smallpox, some of dysentery, and some of jumping overboard. Through the eighteenth century, while the trade was still legal, the market on the Slave Coast was fairly stable. Prime mercantile males, good for work or breeding, cost a 120-gallon hogshead of rum plus 30 gallons "dash" to the factor-or, if bought for cash, which was rare, about $30 in gold-dust or Spanish milled dollars. The demand for slaves increased enormously with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Charleston exported twenty thousand pounds of cotton in 1791, twenty million in 1801, and forty million in 1803. The price of slaves in Africa rose to as much as a hundred dollars in barter. In 1796 Jeremiah Diman of Bristol writes home to his deWolf brothersin-law that he has paid 8 Joes for slaves on the Coast and sold them for 25 Joes in Havana. (The Joe was a Portuguese gold coin worth $8.) Complicated deals were computed in a unit called the bar, a fictitious currency based originally on the worth of a pig of iron, and soon standardized at So cents in gold. An ounce of bullion traded for 39, bars, or $16. A musket was worth 12. Two yards of cotton cloth were worth 1, and so were 2-4 ounces of tobacco or 16 ounces of ivory. On the Sukey's voyage Captain Almy traded 120 dozen knives for one fine male. They had cost $1 a dozen at Pardon Handy's chandlery. At all times, women over twenty-five years old, and boys under four feet four inches tall, were subject to 20 per cent discount, and the victims of dysentery went even cheaper. When the purchase was completed, the slaves were put in good humor by a parting feast. The day before embarkation their heads were shaved and the initials of their new owner-in the Sukey's case, JDW—were branded on their hips or thighs with an iron seal or a silver wire. The brands were just hot enough to blister the skin without burning it. On the morning of sailing day they were stripped naked and ferried through the surf by the Kru oarsmen to the slaver waiting offshore. Sad stories are told of those departures. An old Negro called Charles Coomer, who died in Bristol at the end of the last century, recalled that he had been snatched from his mother by the boatswain of a longboat when he could not have been older than three or four. Why he did not take Charles's mother too, Charles himself could not say; perhaps the slaver had no room for one more grownup, or perhaps she was too old for the market. He had long since forgotten all about her except that she ran into the surf after him, begging to be taken, and that when the boatswain shook her off she held out a piece of bread to Charles as a parting gift. When the boatswain reached Bristol he smuggled Charles ashore and sold him to Mr. Coomer for a bag of coffee. With all cargo stowed, the ship stood westward on the second leg of her voyage. The Middle Passage, from Africa to the West Indies, lasted seven weeks in fair weather. Officers and crew slept above deck in temporary cabins called doghouses, for the slaves filled every square inch of the forecastle and wardroom, as well as the tween-decks. The males were shackled in pairs, the left ankle of one to the right ankle of the next, with a yoke-iron stapled to the planking between them. The women and children, unfettered, lay behind a screen. With ideal lading the deck-shackles were spaced so closely that the cargo, to lie down, must bend their knees and nest spoonwise, front to back, and, to sit up, telescope themselves like the crew of a toboggan. They were wedged so tight to the boards, and left there for so long, that when they were taken on deck for air they sometimes left strips of their skin on the planking. Then the leg-irons were replaced by darbies at the wrists, the quartermaster turning his heavy bitt-key in one lock before he threw open the other. The slaves were herded up the hatchway, and the retching crew went below to swab out their quarters with vinegar. They say you could smell a slaver five miles down wind. Sometimes the cleaning her out for another round was so expensive that she was sold in her filth at Havana for whatever she would bring, as Captain Sam Wardwell, the deWolfs' rival, sold his Merry Quaker in 1795. Sometimes, in the doldrums, she ran into a week-lone, calm. The white crew, reduced to a gill of water each, lay panting under the deck awning, some of them crying like babies, while the cargo groaned and sweated beneath them and the dogvane above veered from side to side as the vessel rolled on the lazy swell. A tropical shower would sweep down to relieve them, but in five minutes the sun would blaze out again. The slaver's crew was always in danger, either from malaria (it was called the "African fever") or from French or British hijackers, or from the cargo itself. Many Bristol boys laid their bones beside the sultry African rivers. In 1796 Mark Antony deWolf Ill, son of the Mark, junior, who had been lost at sea on a slaving voyage, died of the fever; and in the same year his cousin Simon, junior, whose father had been washed overboard from a privateer, cut his own throat on the Guinea coast. Once, aboard a Bristol vessel in the Bight of Benin, the slaves escaped from their shackles and drove every white man overboard except the captain. He, left alone at the hatchway, saw a huge slave bear down, ready to crash the swinging darbies on his head. He reached into his cabin, picked up a cask of gunpowder, and held a lighted match to the bung. The Negroes, thinking he was about to blow up the ship, climbed over the net and leaped into the sea. Those who could swim reached the shore; those who could not were eaten by sharks. One of the most harrowing tales of the Middle Passage is that of the French brig Rodeur. Heavy with a full cargo, she sailed from Saint Paul de Loanda for Havana. Three days out the slaves, one by one, went blind from ophthalmia. Tight-packed as they were, nothing could halt the contagion. The surgeon persuaded the captain to let the whole cargo on deck at once, in the hope that fresh air would end the plague. As Niles' Register reports it: When they were so permitted, they locked themselves in each other's arms, with the shackles still on their ankles, and, to put an end to their miseries, plunged into the ocean. This, the surgeon said, was the effect of a disease called nostalgia, arising from a desire to revisit their native land. We say that it is as strong a symptom of a broken heart as could be imagined. The Rodeur was justly punished. A passing ship found her adrift in the Sargasso Sea without a black man aboard, and with every white man blind. Such incidents were exceptional. Generally the slaver reached Havana with less than 10 per cent mortality. At the first sight of land the danger of disease and mutiny was considered over. The water butts were opened to crew and cargo alike. The cat-o'-nine-tails was thrown overboard. The netting was dismantled. Sailors shared their biscuit and clothing with the slaves. The females were fitted out with sheets, tablecloths, spare sails, oilcloths, and even monkey-jackets from the wardrobes of all hands, and danced unshackled on the deck. The immigrants' last day aboard was one long masquerade. Arrived at Havana, the captain had to pay a tax of five dollars a head to the Spanish customs and a bribe of eight dollars more-politely called a "douceur"—to the inspector, before he could start unloading. To lighten this overhead, he might list a dozen slaves or so as "died on voyage," besides the ones who had died, and smuggle them ashore at night. But in spite of the risk and expense, the lot which might have averaged fifty dollars on the Coast would generally fetch two hundred dollars in Cuba. After all deductions, the shipowner netted 25 per cent. On a voyage of the Eliza, Captain Sabens paid for fifty-two slaves in Africa with an outward cargo which had cost his owner $2000. Thirty-nine of them survived the Middle Passage. He sold them on the Havana market for prices ranging from $160 to $250; the whole parcel fetched $7853. When he had sold it all, he dismantled the Eliza's slave-deck, loaded again with deWolf molasses, and set out on the shortest and happiest leg of his voyage. He was back in Bristol within two weeks, and made ready to start the Round Trade over again. While the act of 1794 was enforced, no slaver dared enter an American port. But if the price at Charleston rose above that at Havana, it was not too hard to smuggle the slaves, in small boats, from Cuba to the smaller ports of Georgia and South Carolina. Captain Charles Clark of the brig Nancy (she was named for Mrs. James deWolf) describes the operation simply in a report to Captain Jim from Charleston on January 7, 1802. When I wrote you before, I was bound out of the city after my cargo, which had been on the beach to the northward of Charleston. I found them all well, and much better than I expected, for the weather was very cold. They had no clothes, and no shelter except the sandhills and cedar trees, and no person to take care of them. I arrived in Charleston. with them on the 14th Deer. without being troubled. I shall not make as much as I expected, for slaves was very high on the African coast, and my time being short, I was obliged to make the best bargain I could. I sailed with 70 cargo, and lost 4 Of them; but they are all very good and will bring the highest price, that is, from $35 0 up to $500. I don't see that the Trade stops much, for they come in town 2 or 3 hundred some nights. I believe there has been landed since New Years as much as 500 slaves. They land them outside the harbor and march them in at night. 2 or 3 vessels has come in from Africa in ballast. The revenue cutter seized one brig bound from N. Orleans to Charleston. [Louisiana being still French territory, this constituted a violation.] She was cleared from N.O. by calling them passengers. They clear out from there and go into Havana "in distress," and ship from there to the U. States, or sell if the price is high. I think there will be more distressed vessels this winter than ever before. I left on the [African] Coast 14 vessels belonging to the U. States, a great part of them for Charleston. In any event, Captain Jim never had to sell at a loss. if the market at Havana slumped, and the Revenue Marine, as the Coast Guard was then called, made it risky to smuggle into American ports, he could afford to wait. He owned three plantations in Cuba—the Mary Arm, the Mount Hope, and the Esperanza—where he could hold his stock until prices rose again, as they always did, sooner or later. Meanwhile the stock increased by breeding, and grew sugar to be converted into rum at the Bristol distillery. If quarters grew crowded, or the overseer needed ready cash, it was easy to sell off surplus on the Havana market, or to mortgage it at the bank. The slaves were transferred on printed forms, in which the price was inserted by quill. They carried the standard guarantee of health: En el precio de quinientos pesos, con la calidad de bozal, alma en boca, huesos en costal, a uso de feria, sin asegurar de tachas ni enfermedades, mal de corazon, gota, coral de San Lazaro, ni otra cualquiera que pueda padecer la humana naturaleza. (For the price of five hundred dollars, newly imported, well-mannered and hard-working, fit for daily labor, but with no guarantee against weak heart, gout, leprosy, or any other defect or ailment.) If, on the other hand, more stock was needed quickly, Captain Jim could dispatch one of his ships direct from Cuba to Africa to buy it. Her bond was not forfeited provided it was renewed at her hailing port each two years. If there was danger of seizure under the act of 1794, he could transfer her, by a wash sale, to the name of his Cuban agent, and send her out under Spanish colors. He had only to notify Collins that she was sold to a foreigner. Collins then struck her name from American registry and canceled her bond. The state of South Carolina had forbidden the importation of slaves as far back as 1787, for even then the population of Charleston was a dangerous three-quarters Negro. But the invention of the cotton gin promised unlimited profits from slave labor, and the year 1808 was drawing near, when Congress, regardless of the wishes of the states, might abolish the trade altogether. On December 7, 1803, South Carolina reopened her ports for the four years remaining.* The market soared, for the planters knew that their imports would soon be cut off for good. On the Slave Coast the factors knew the same thing and hurried to unload while they could. Simultaneously prices rose in Charleston and fell in Africa. To take advantage of the combination, the deWolf syndicate sent young Henry, the son of brother William, to Charleston. He opened a commission house for the family cargoes, in partnership with an established Charleston merchant named Charles Christian, at 18 Federal Street. The firm not only sold slaves, but dealt in drafts on New York, where "Gentleman Jim," the oldest son of James, stood ready to honor their paper.[ * In the same year, Cuba, to maintain her own supply, required that all cargos entering Havana must include slaves for sale. The trade was abolished by civilized nations in the following years: Denmark, 18o2; Great Britain and the United States, 1807; Sweden, 1813; Holland, 1814; Portugal (north of the equator), 1815; Spain (north of the equator), 1817; France, 1818; Spain, 1820; Brazil, 1829; Portugal, 1830.] Charleston was a gay city for those who could afford it. The Jockey Club held weekly races at the Washington Track. There were plays at the Charleston Theatre and balls at the Saint Cecilia Society. The Marine Hotel on Queen Street was one of the best in the country, offering beefsteak, coffee, and relishes at all hours, horses and sedan-chairs at livery, and a coach "for family use." The Charleston planters were so hungry for slaves that a cargo could usually be disposed of directly from the slaver's deck, as soon as she tied up at Gadsden's wharf. Like their rival brokers, Christian and deWolf advertised extensively in the newspapers (in 1807 twenty-two Charleston firms were engaged in the business), listing their wares under a general description such as "prime Windward coast Negroes," or by country of origin. The best grades came from Gambia on the northwest shoulder of Africa, and from Mozambique on the east coast, though the latter were rarer. Slaves from Calabar, in Nigeria, went cheapest. In hot weather the slaves brought better prices if they were "finished"—i.e., oiled and fattened—for a few weeks before sale. Then the auction would take place at the open-air Exchange, behind the post office at the foot of Broad Street, only a short barefoot walk from the wharf. The women wore blue flannel frocks called "longshorts." The men wore blue cotton trousers. In cold weather the more humane traders gave them warm clothing and imported "Negro shoes" from Boston, at seventy cents a pair, to cover their bare feet. At auctions on the Exchange the lots were displayed on two long tables, while the partners walked through the crowd touting their wares. Henry deWolf, like his father William, was softhearted. He did his best to sell slaves by lots, without separating families, even when they might have brought more at retail. Around the three-legged course Captain Jim shuttled as many slavers as he could buy or charter. He often carried slaves as freight for other owners, at an average rate of forty dollars per head for the Middle Passage. Compare the profits of a voyage in the years when abolition was far in the future with those of one in the four years of open port. At Savannah, in 1785, he sold a consignment which had cost him $38.50 apiece in rum; sale prices ran from $180 for prime fellows down to $4.50 for one woman, totally blind. But on July 17, 1807, 106 slaves from his brig Three Sisters, Captain Champlin, brought $29,090 on the Charleston block, the best grade fetching $500. Prices ran down to $100 for "one foolish boy" and $50 for "one sickly man-boy with the flux." The average was $274.43, yet they had cost him only 75 gallons of rum, or $25.25, on the African coast. The sale lasted three weeks. Purchasers settled for $2250 in cash or produce, and the rest in notes running from sixty days to six months. Christian & deWolf charged 5 per cent commission on the gross, but part of their fee, of course, remained in the family. Even in Charleston there were runaways and hijackers. On December 31, 1807, the last day for legal importation, twelve "new" Negroes, fitted out in red flannel shirts, blue wool trousers, and red worsted caps, were lured from Captain Jim's ship Cleopatra at Gadsden's wharf by a seasoned slave from the up-country ricefields. Speaking their own language, he promised to get them back to Africa if they followed him. All twelve escaped. Henry posted a reward of fifty dollars a head. with five hundred dollars more for the capture of the kidnapper. It is doubtful that they were returned to him. More likely, the kidnapper sold them to his own master. The horrors of the trade did not disturb the Bristol boys who served before the mast. They were more homesick than disgusted. They knew the Gulf of Guinea as well as they knew Massachusetts Bay, and Havana better than Boston. Here, verbatim, is a letter home from a seaman aboard Captain Jim's slave brig Sally, which reveals a tough conscience, a sketchy education, and that disease which the Rodeur's surgeon called nostalgia: Havaner, Jany. 17, 1804 My dear Parence: I now take the opertunity to In form you that 1 am well at present, hopeing that these lines will find you the same. I am a frade it will not hold so long. Capt. Cladding talks of heaving the Brig out a gin to grave her, for wee do not no when we shall git out of this durty Howl. you may not look for us until you see us for God noes when wee shall git out of this place. . . . I have ben gorn so much longer than I expected I have nearly got out of Clothing and Clothing is verry dear heaar and verry sces and tell Betsey to tell her Father if hee sells eny more trousis such as mine wus hee will never git to Heaven in the world hereafter. . . . I roght 2 letters by Capt. Cartwright bound to Newbryport. I expected by Capt. Bradford or Capt. Munrow to have a letter but I have rec. none as yet. I was glad to hear that my Father had moved out of that old rattrap for I was a frade it would Blow down upon them, and tell Unkle Throop I shall beware of the third time for he cheated me once with an old gun out of 9 shilling and one Bitt and the second time he cheated me was with an old bantum Hen that warnt worth ninepence and charged me one and sixpence. If Unkle Sam asks after me ask him if he dont want me to help him pitch of hay agin? Wee all keep up a good hart. In hope to git away some time or other. remember my love to Grand dady and grand mamma Waldron and to all the Family and so no more at present I remain your loveing Son un till Deth Richard Waldron Nor did the slaves touch at Bristol to trouble the civic conscience, except for the happy few whom the sea-captains brought in as servants for themselves or their employers, for under Rhode Island law they would become free after ten years' servitude, and their offspring were free from birth. They were known as "privilege" slaves, and had been branded specially with the letter P on hip or shoulder before ever leaving Africa, to set them apart from the commercial cargo. Their masters could take credit for having saved them from the auction block. It was the purser's right to pick names for the privilege slaves. They were solemnly baptized on the long beat across the Atlantic with such names as jack Crowbar, Bottle of Beer, Flying jib, and Pea Soup. One cabin boy aboard Captain Jim's Yankee was called lack Jibsheet, and another Cuffee Cockroach. (Cuffee was a common name for black boys; it is a corruption of the Mandingo word qofi, meaning a child who is born on the sacred Mohammedan Friday. Many popular names for Negroes were imported directly from Africa. Quackey Babbitt, who sawed wood for the Sukey, was probably one of the Quaqua tribe from the eastern end of the Ivory Coast. Sambo is the name of another tribe. The word "pickaninny" is taken directly from a town off Cape Lahore, and "coon" itself probably derives from the factors' barracoons.) Captain Jim kept two of the likeliest youngsters. They were captured at two different beaches on the same voyage of his brig Lavinia: the girl when she was caught peering from behind a mangrove at the white men, and the boy while he was playing in the sand. They were of different tribes, he perhaps a Mandingo and she a Fula. On the trip home the purser called them Pomp and Peggy. They became the pets of the voyage. When Nancy deWolf received them—they were a Christmas present from her husband in 1803—she gave them the more elegant names of Polydore and Agiway. When they came of age, she had them married in her front parlor by Bishop Griswold. Polydore made numerous voyages back to Africa as a cook—the Negroes, being small, made good sailors. He was mild and quiet, while Agiway was as cranky as her mistress. They raised a family of nine daughters whom Captain Jim, with vulgar merriment, often compared to the nine Potter sisters, his mother and his aunts. He set them up in a cottage on Coree, at the northeast end of town, where Polydore was frequently elected mayor in the annual election of the colored population. They lived out their days in importance on a monthly salary of four dollars. Captain Jim never let anyone but Agiway pleat his ruffled shirts, and Polydore's chowder was the best in town. Nothing would have persuaded them to return to Africa. Agiway claimed to have inherited the secrets of voodoo and was much feared by the other ex-slaves. But her amulets and incantations she promised never to use against the Great Folks. In the 182os, when the abolitionists were recruiting settlers for the Negro republic of Liberia, no less a person than President Elijah Johnson visited Captain Jim to get him to release Polydore and Agiway for the colony. They listened upstairs, each with a kettle of boiling water to pour on the unwelcome liberator in case he persuaded their master to give them up. He failed. They overheard the captain, as he offered the President a glass of canary, tell him, "Lord, your Excellency, they're not my slaves; I'm theirs. If you'll take me to Liberia and set me free from them, I'm ready to go right now. In their old age, when they needed sunlight, they would sit on the slanted bulkhead of their cottage, and Captain Jim's grandchildren teased them with this jingle: Agiway and Polydore Sitting on the cellar door; Polydore and Agiway, Sitting in the cellarway! Down fell the cellar door, Bump went Polydore; Up flew the cellarway, Off blew Agiway! Besides the planters and slave-brokers from Havana and Charleston who visited Bristol in the course of business, the opportunities of the African and Caribbean trade led foreign seamen and merchants to become permanent residents. The village became almost as cosmopolitan as Newport or Salem. As Father Fauque related, there had been Irishmen in the crew of the Prince Charles of Lorraine. The deWolf fleet often picked up Portuguese hands in the Azores on the outward voyage. One of them was Jack deCosta, ancestor of many present Bristolians. When the daughter of John Brown of Providence married a German named Herreshoff, son of one of Frederick the Great's bodyguard, he set the young couple up on Proprietor Byfield's old Poppasquash farm, which he bought in at the sale of Tory property after the Revolution. A French merchant named Captain Daniel Morice—he had been an officer in the army of Louis XVI—fled to Bristol from Haiti. The time was 1803, when the Negro slaves revolted against the French. Captain Morice went first to Cuba, where Don Marcos, the son of Captain James deWolf, smuggled him aboard a homebound brig one night. Thereafter Captain Morice lived in Bristol as an American citizen, and his daughter, Mrs. Arselia Babbitt, beloved of all, was still alive as late as 1925. IV On March 2, 1807, President Jefferson signed the long-expected act which would outlaw the slave trade on the first of the following year. Captain Jim had not gone to sea since the start of the century. He was now forty-one and too old for the rigors of the slave trade, but that summer he took his favorite ship, the Andromache, on one last voyage to Africa. Perhaps he made it for sheer bravado, perhaps for an example to his effete sons, or perhaps for a final firsthand taste of the lucrative business he had learned so long before from his uncle Potter and John Brown. He never dealt in slaves again. But he foresaw the depression which would follow the end of the trade. In the last week of 1807 Jefferson, harassed by the English and French depredations on our commerce which had lasted since the start of the Napoleonic wars, clamped an embargo on all American seaborne commerce. The embargo ruined many New England shipowners. Sam Wardwell, Captain Jim's enemy, was forced to move out West and take up farming. The firm of Christian & deWolf was dissolved; Henry deWolf returned to Bristol and took up farming too. The Navy had to bunk and feed the crews of the idle ships in Charleston harbor. But the embargo hardly affected Captain Jim. He could afford to let his fleet lie idle for a while, for he foresaw the future of steam power. Long before the shipowners of Massachusetts transferred their capital ashore, he invested his slaving profits in the textile mills being built along the watercourses north of Providence. The invention of the gin promised an endless supply of clean Carolina cotton, cheaper and surer than the cotton of the Guianas; and the slaves which he himself had helped to import assured plenty of labor to grow and pick it. Steam power and Yankee ingenuity would soon provide the country with cloth, free of foreign or presidential interference. He turned his energy to philanthropy, agriculture, and politics. He had sat in the state legislature since 1802. When the Town Council voted to build a house of industry—i.e., a poorhouse—for the village paupers, he donated the land, saying that his sons would need to make it their home when he was no longer alive to provide for them. (This grim stone building, overlooking Mill Cut, stood until 1952, but there is no record that any of the Great Folks was reduced to living in it.) Russell. Warren, the carpenter-architect, built him a fine house, which he called the Mount, on a thousand acres of farmland across the Back Road from his father-in-law Governor Bradford. Warren could build a portrait in brick and clapboard as a painter does in oils. The house he had built for Levi deWolf was ascetic, John's was thriftily comfortable, William's was lavishly careless, and young George's (Charles's son) was flamboyant—all like the owners themselves. Captain Jim's was spacious and substantial; nothing was wasted and nothing stinted. It dwarfed the house of Governor Bradford, and the farmhouse which his old mother had inherited from her brother Simeon Potter. The saddle on which it stood was almost as high as Mount Hope itself. From his third-story windows Captain Jim could look over Bristol harbor and Mount Hope Bay at the same time. The United States Gazetteer wrote that . . . for elegance of style, for the general splendour of its ap-pearance, and the beauty and extensiveness of the various improve-ments, it will rank among the finest in our country. It was three stories high, of clapboard, with a curved stone wall at the driveway, and a twelve-foot arched gate leading up to the sandstone steps. The rooms were lighted by astral chandeliers with opal hurricane globes, and heated by Franklin stoves set into marble mantelpieces. On the fireboard of one was a portrait of the captain's five sons on horseback. The drawing room was painted with scenes from the Cuban plantations. In the hall a tall clock chimed "Over the Water to Charlie" every hour. Each day little Agiway (and after her, her nine daughters) in her long-short, with a turban on her head, washed down the teakwood floors with tea leaves. The whole house was scented with rose petals. A score of stables, outbuildings, and barns surrounded it. On axis of the central hall, fifty yards from the house, stood the privy, raised on its own sandstone steps. Pilasters of the Scamozzi order embellished its corners. A painted statue of King Philip surmounted its peak, aiming an arrow at Mount Hope. Inside, there were six holes. The pair facing the door were a little larger, and raised a little higher, than the pairs at each side. On the summit of Mount Hope, a hard mile distant, Captain Jim. built a summerhouse, crowned with a second statue of King Philip. On Tanyard Lane, just south of his stables, he laid out a deer park; it was the only one in New England. A high fence, set on a granite wall, enclosed it, and urchins from town would walk the two miles out to the Mount to peer through the palings at the red deer grazing inside. On March 4, 1809, the day when Madison succeeded Jefferson, the unpopular embargo was repealed. The commerce of legitimate seaports like Salern revived at once, but that of Bristol, too long rooted in the outlaw slave trade, languished still. The years from the end of the trade to the outbreak of war in 1812 were idle ones in Bristol, which was not used to idleness. But most Bristol boys were trained to the farm as well as to the sea, and Dicky Waldron probably got his wish to pitch hay for his uncle Sam. The village grew more onions than any other town in New England except Wethersfield, Connecticut. Farmer John deWolf's eccentric son 'Fessor wrote an idyllic poem which describes the village during the lull: THE SUMMER EVENING The sun beneath the western hills His upper edge now dips; His last departing ray with gold King Philip's feathers tips. The sou'west breeze has died away, The poplar leaves are still, And half unground remains the grist In Stephen Cladding's mill. The sea is calm, and not a wave Rolls o'er its surface fair, And half to Prudence one may hear Old Uncle Springer swear. Now onion-boys with shoulder'd hoes Come trooping into town, And trumpets made of onion-tops Proclaim their labor done. Now round the crib, with necks upstretch`d Thick swarms the gabbling train, While Goody on the stepstone sits And lib'ral throws the grain. With dimpled cheek and bosom fair, Bedeck'd with many a posy, Now sally forth in smiling bands The lasses plump and rosy. Hail, Bristol, happiest village, hail! What rich produce is thine; Girls, geese and onions thou canst boast, 0 Triad most divine! The lasses, sheltered in bonnet and petticoat and stay, were as abject as the squaws of King Philip's time, and the lads were as restless as Simeon Potter. In the year when this poem was written, a youth was haled before the Town Council for accosting a girl at night on the Common, but when he proved she had "shown him an ankle," they lectured her instead of whipping him. pps. 97-133 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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