-Caveat Lector- A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"
/A -Cui Bono?-
an exerpt from:
Sins of the Fathers
James Pope Hennessy©1967
All rights reseved
Capricorn Books
New York, NY
LCCN 67-11141
286 pps 1969 pbk Out-of-print
-
-- Up in Boston, and despite clear evidence to the contrary, people will deny
that Bostonians ever had anything to do with the slave trade, and the
Massachusetts Historical Society has even gone to the pains of publishing
documents to show that the New England slave trade was centred on Newport,
Rhode Island. In Newport itself the clapboard town's complicity in the trade
cannot be ignored, but emphasis is laid on the leading part played in it by
immigrant Portuguese Jews like Aaron Lopez, who lie buried there in the calm
and shady little graveyard of the first American synagogue. In
Charlottesville, Virginia, you get embarrassed replies if you ask how it came
about that the venerated Thomas Jefferson who wrote against slavery still
owned slaves and constructed Monticello with slave labour. When you get down
into the Carolinas some of the descendants of the planters and merchants,
some members of the old and charming aristocracy of Charleston and elsewhere,
can scarcely understand why one thinks the old days of slavery were bad at
all. They will refer to Roman slaves, to Saxon slaves, even to the building
of the Egyptian pyramids, as well as, of course, to slavery as mentioned in
the Bible. 1 got the uneasy feeling that I recall having had many years ago
in Montgomery, Alabama that to certain nostalgic Southerners it is the
abolition of slavery, rather than its original existence, that constitutes
the real crime.--
-- The slave trade was, of course, only one section of the widespread
shipping interests of the Rhode Island merchants, who also dealt in whale and
sperm oil, in spermaceti candles, and in and import-export business with the
ports of Europe. Most of these firms were family concerns there were
Christopher, George and Robert Champlin, the four Brown brothers of
Providence Plantation, a large family named Wanton, as well as individuals
like Philip Wilkinson and Stephen d'Ayrault, junior. From 1790 on the slave
trade was chiefly in the hands of the brothers de Wolf, the youngest of whom,
Levi, is said to have 'retired in disgust after making one voyage to
Africa'.--
-- But though the Jews of Rhode Island remained as unmoved by African misery
as the planters of the South or as the merchants of Liverpool and Bristol,
there flourished in New England one body of noble-minded persons to whom the
slave trade and slavery itself had always been anathema: the Quakers. In 1773
the Rhode Island Quakers, in particular, received powerful and expert support
for their views from a new recruit to their ranks in the person of Moses
Brown, youngest of the four slave-trading brothers of Providence Plantation.
Converted to Quakerism, Moses Brown gave up slaving to devote the remainder
of his life to fighting the trade, and to trying to persuade his immediate
family and other prominent Rhode Island merchants to desist from it as well.
The zeal of the convert is frequently derided, yet Moses Brown in America,
like John Newton in England, was specifically equipped by experience to
preach the abolition of an evil trade in which he had himself for so long
taken part.--
Chapter 13
The Great Column of Blood
I
CALABAR because of its deep water anchorage and efficient and obliging native
traders might be popular with European ships' masters, but the actual export
product of this eerie region Calabari Negroes were not always in demand
on the other side of the Atlantic. In the West Indies, planters could not on
the whole afford to be choosy, and would accept Calabaris or anything else
reasonably young and healthy that they could get. On the great rice and
indigo plantations of South Carolina, however, Calabaris were not wanted.
'There must not be a Calabar amongst them,' the eminent Charleston slave
trader Henry Laurens wrote to the St Kitts merchants, Smith and Clifton, when
indenting for a fresh stock of slaves in 1755. 'Prime negro men of any
country except Calabar bring great prices with us, £40 stg. and upwards,'
Laurens wrote in September of the same year to another St Kitts middle-man.
Apart from the fact that the chief demand in and around Charleston was for
Gambians and other tall races, and that he refused to handle what he termed
'a scabby flock' of new slaves from the Delta, Laurens gave an interesting
reason for the prejudice against the natives of Calabar: 'Stout healthy
fellows sell to most advantage with us,' he wrote to Peter Furnell, of
Jamaica; 'the country not material if they are not from Calabar which slaves
are quite out of repute from numbers in every cargo that have been sold with
us destroying themselves.' The Calabaris, in fact, carried with them over the
sea their inborn contempt for the value of human life, and their longing for
the African nether-world the gate to
