11

Lawful to Set to Sea

“We hereby for us, our heirs and successors grant unto the same Royal African Company of England . . . that it shall and may be lawful to . . . set to sea such as many ships, pinnaces and barks as shall be thought fitting . . . for the buying, selling, bartering and exchanging of, for or with any gold, silver, Negroes, Slaves, goods, wares and manufactures . . .”

Witness the King at Westminster the seven and twentieth day of September [1672]

BY THE KING

Charter of the Royal African Company

IN THE YEAR that the Stuarts were restored to the English throne, 1660, that monarchy had already substantial interests in the Caribbean and in mainland America. Jamaica had been captured from Spain in 1655, but the heart of this American empire was still, for the moment, the rich sugar island of Barbados. Its geographical position made it a natural lodge gate to the Americas. It was also a place much used by the North American colonists, who bought all manner of things there, slaves included. Thus, in 1645, the young Reverend George Downing went down from Harvard, as chaplain of a merchantman, and wrote to his cousin, John Winthrop (still governor of Connecticut): “If you go to Barbados, you shall see a flourishing island, [with] many able men. I believe that they have bought this year no less than a thousand negroes and, the more they buy, the better able are they to buy for, in a year and a half, they will earn (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost.”^I

Emmanuel Downing, father of George, then comfortably settled in the port of Salem, Massachusetts, also wrote to Winthrop in 1645, saying, “I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.”¹

At this stage, North American slaves were still few, almost all of them obtained by purchase in the West Indies. One journey, though, was made in 1645 from Boston, Massachusetts, to West Africa, where a certain Captain Smith seized some slaves. But these were afterwards returned, since the merchant concerned apparently did not wish to disturb good commercial relations with Africa by an act of kidnapping.

In 1651, in the face of what seemed the obvious need for Africans, at least in the Caribbean if not in New England, a new Guinea Company in London was founded, in which, not surprisingly, the chief interloper of recent years, Samuel Vassall, was the major shareowner. Vassall was a Londoner but was, in the sense that so many prominent merchants, especially slave traders, were, also a citizen of the world. Nowadays we take it for granted that private persons and politicians travel; in the seventeenth century, the only people who did so were merchants and seamen; statesmen and monarchs stayed at home. Thus we find Vassall one of the early “incorporators” of Massachusetts. He also collaborated with Lord Berkeley (to whom Burton dedicated his Anatomy of Melancholy) to develop Virginia. Vassall had an adventurous life, being once committed to prison for “seducing the king’s people” (that is, forcing English workers as indentured laborers to embark for the Americas against their will). He had endless debts and lawsuits, and several terms of imprisonment. An MP, for the City of London, he was also a commissioner concerned in the establishment of the Providence plantations in Narragansett Bay.

The eclipse of the monarchy of Charles I, and the coming of a Puritan administration, had had no effect on the City of London’s desire to make money from slaves; nor did the change in the regime after the Restoration of 1660 alter that ambition.

The territory in which these Londoners were to trade was smaller than that allowed to their predecessors as monopolists, Nicholas Crisp and his friends: it was limited on the one hand to a stretch of land on the Gold Coast sixty miles on each side of the fort of Cormantine, and on the other hand to the banks of the river Ceberro (by now happily Anglicized as “Sherbro”), near the river Sierra Leone. This company did not prosper, for its ships were attacked at sea by the royalist Prince Rupert, then leading a piratical monarchist fleet to the West Indies in alliance with the Portuguese. They were also attacked by the buccaneer Captain Carloff and his Danes. The losses of the company perhaps reached three hundred thousand pounds.

All the same, the trading of slaves by London-based ships now started on a regular basis. One instruction of 1651 by the Guinea Company demanded of a captain that he bring back to England “fifteen or twenty lusty negers”—presumably for use at home in England. Another asked a captain to “put aboard . . . so many negers as your ship can carry”—a cargo also apparently for London. Yet a third letter requested, more conventionally, “We pray you buy as many lusty negers as she well can carry, and so despatch her to the Barbados.”²

In 1660, after the Restoration, a new company, that of the Royal Adventurers into Africa, was founded in London. The impulse for this was given by that same Prince Rupert who, in his days of impecunious exile, had attacked the old Guinea Company’s ships. King Charles, with whom Rupert had quarreled, was anxious to find a role for him, and seems to have been genuinely pleased at the idea of the new venture. For Rupert had been, with his brother Maurice, not only to the Cape Verde Islands and the river Gambia (where Rupert had been wounded), but also to the West Indies, where he fought the Cromwellians at Nevis (Maurice was drowned off that island). They were the first members of a European royal family to go to West Africa; and the last till the nineteenth century.

This new company was, as was then thought the best economic course, given a monopoly of the English African trade for a thousand years. The Royal Adventurers, each of whom invested £250 in the enterprise, included most of the important cavalier politicians: for example, the king’s friend the duke of Buckingham, and the rich and generous Lord Craven (the benefactor of the “Winter Queen”). Other backers included three members of the future “Cabal,” Lord Ashley, the duke of Albemarle (General Monck), and Lord Arlington, as well as Lords Berkeley (son of Vassall’s partner), Crofts (the duke of Monmouth’s guardian), Jermyn (a prominent Catholic and, despite “his looks of a drayman,” the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria’s cavaliere servente), and Lord Sandwich, the admiral who had brought back King Charles II from exile in Holland. The king’s brother, the unemployed duke of York, became president, and Princess Henrietta (“Minette”), the king’s sister, also had a share.

There were, in fact, on this list of investors, four members of the royal family, two dukes, a marquis, five earls, four barons, and seven knights. Though the company was managed by a committee of six (headed by Lord Craven), it seemed more an “aristocratic treasure hunt than an organised business.” But once the patentees tried to trade—for gold principally, to begin with, slaves playing a minor role—they found themselves impeded by the Dutch.

A new charter was issued for the company of Adventurers in January 1663. Shareholders this time again included the king, and the duke of York (with two thousand pounds invested). Among those who had not figured in the list of subscribers three years before were the new Queen Catherine of Braganza (as a daughter of the restored king of Portugal, she should have known all about the African trade: indeed, her colossal dowry of £330,000 was financed by a special levy on Lisbon merchants, including slave traders^II), the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria, and Samuel Pepys. The last wrote: “There was walking in the gallery some of the Barbary Company [Salé in “South Barbary” was the northernmost point where the company could trade], and there we saw a draft of the arms of the company, which the King is of, and so is called the Royal Company, which is, in a field argent, an elephant proper, with a canton on which England and France is quartered supported by two Moors.”³ (A canton is a section of a coat of arms occupying less than a quarter of it.) The young John Locke, philosopher of toleration, then teaching at Oxford, was another subscriber. For the profits which could be made from trading slaves had by then been appreciated in England.

The commitment by the Court to the African trade was strong. In 1663, it was agreed that some of the gold brought back from the Gold Coast should be turned by the Royal Mint into coins with an elephant on one side. They were popularly called “guineas” from the beginning. Soon established at a rate of twenty-one shillings, the coin was made until 1813, and the unit of currency continued in use till the abolition of the old shilling in 1967.

Neither the new king nor his brother—the one flippant, the other feeble—had any hesitation about embarking on the same course as their continental brother princes; nor do any of the standard biographies of these self-centered monarchs devote any attention to the matter. They were children of their age. If they ever considered the plight of African slaves, for which there is no evidence, they would have accepted the Catholic Church’s acceptance of the commerce, and supposed that it was better for an African to be in the New World at the behest of a Christian master than in Africa working for an infidel.

The company set about restoring the English forts on the west coast of Africa, and seeking to recover what the Dutch (or Swedes) had taken. The cost of refurbishment was three hundred thousand pounds. Forty English ships set off for Guinea in the first year. Robert Holmes conquered the Cape Verde Islands, and recaptured Cape Coast and several other Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast, before crossing to seize New Amsterdam, in New Holland, in North America, a city soon after renamed after the leading shareholder in the Royal Adventurers, the duke of York. Cape Coast was hereafter the English headquarters in Africa.

A quarter of this new African trade was, to begin with, devoted to slaves: in 1665, the company estimated its annual return from gold as two hundred thousand pounds, from slaves as one hundred thousand, and from ivory, wax, hides, woods, grain (pepper) as another one hundred thousand. Lord Windsor, the sickly first civilian governor of the new English colony of Jamaica, was told in 1663 that the company would soon deliver three hundred slaves to his colony; his colleague of Barbados, Lord Willoughby of Parham, was informed that he could expect to receive three thousand slaves annually at seventeen pounds each. The estimate was not far out: in the seven months after August 1663, 3,075 captives were delivered to Barbados.

The company had assured the king that “the very being of the plantations depends upon the supply of negro servants for their works.”⁴ So its agents began to trade slaves seriously. Slavery, as an expanding English business, dominated the first formal letter of the company to Willoughby in Barbados. The plan was unfolded of also selling to the Spaniards on a large scale. Spanish merchants were to be allowed to go to Jamaica (from which they had only recently been expelled as masters) or Barbados to buy slaves whom the company would have brought there. That the Crown of England was learning from that of Spain how to profit from the traffic is shown by a rule that ten Spanish pieces-of-eight were to be paid as tax to the government for every slave exported to the Spanish empire.

These innovations constituted a challenge to the Dutch. Those serious traders still desired to establish exclusive European rights to trade on the coast of Guinea. To confirm their rights, they sought to bring the rulers in Africa to their side by presents, and bribes. Hence what the English call the Second Dutch War, inspired by rivalries over the slave trade as much as anything else. Admiral Ruyter, greatest of Dutch admirals, soon reconquered most of the forts on Guinea, and established Fort Amsterdam on the site at Cormantine. The English company lost money, and failed to provide the planters in the West Indies with anything like the number of slaves which they had come to believe they needed. Prices rose: whereas formerly the slaves had been bought for twelve to eighteen pounds each, they were now sometimes sold at thirty pounds.

There were many demands for a free trade in slaves. In 1667, Lord Willoughby in Barbados added his support when he said that, unless English captains were allowed to go to Guinea for blacks as and when they liked, the plantations would be ruined.

In fact, with the Adventurers in parlous financial straits (they owed a hundred thousand pounds to creditors by 1668), licenses began to be sold to private individuals to trade within the monopoly. For the next five years, the greater part of the English trade was to be in the hands of such independent merchants; and they never forgot the advantages which they then enjoyed.

In an effort to gain efficiency, the Adventurers founded a daughter company, the Gambia Adventurers, to exploit the rivers Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Sherbro. Though that was a success, by 1668 the original Adventurers, ruined by the Dutch war (“beaten to dirt . . . to the utter ruine of our Royall Company,” as Samuel Pepys put it), were scarcely much more than a holding company, in which the English interest in Africa was vested, being pressed for a mere £57,000 by their creditors.⁵ They did what trading they could through the ubiquitous Afro-Portuguese lançados who still dominated the banks of the river Gambia.

The troubles of the Royal Adventurers continued, so much so that in 1672—a year when half Lombard Street seemed to be ruined—the company was wound up and, in its place, the Royal African Company (hereinafter RAC) founded: it paid £34,000 for the assets of the Adventurers, with which money the old company would pay off its creditors at 8s in the pound, its shareholders at £2 a head. The history of these English companies was, therefore, very similar to that of the comparable enterprises in France. The new RAC would retain its predecessor’s handsome premises, Africa House, in Broad Street (later they moved to Leadenhall Street), and some of the staff remained the same, as did many of the shareholders. But there was a new flotation, and 200 people subscribed the large sum of £111,600. Though the RAC desired to import gold, ivory, dyewood, hides, and wax, it was more concerned with slaves from the beginning than the previous company had been. Its charter, like that of its predecessor, gave it a license for trade lasting a thousand years—a thousand years of carrying gold to England and Africans to America would surely enrich a multitude. The boundaries of its operations were also wide: from Cape Blanco in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south.

The charter had some engaging provisions. The RAC was required to provide the king and his successors with two elephants whenever they should set foot in Africa (they never did). The company would also have a monopoly of all African trade till 1688 and, thereafter, it would be able to extract a fee from other English traders on the coast.

The governor, and largest shareholder, was James, Duke of York. Thus the company maintained the royal connection which the Adventurers had had. But there were in this company more merchants than noblemen. The directors also included four proprietors of plantations in Carolina (Lord Shaftesbury—the minister, to whom Britain would owe the Habeas Corpus Act—and Lord Craven; Sir George Carteret, commissioner for trade and plantations; and Sir John Colleton, a landowner in Barbados as well as Carolina), as well as the ever-active Lord Berkeley, “the first peer . . . to collect directorships.” The shareholders included fifteen of the lords mayor of London in the years between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, twenty-five sheriffs of London and, like the Royal Adventurers, the philosopher of liberty, John Locke (he took £400 of stock to begin with, and £200 more in 1675).

The RAC’s African posts were to be on the Gold Coast: at Cormantine, Cape Coast, Anashan, Commenda, Aga, and Accra. Cape Coast was confirmed as the headquarters, with a garrison of fifty English soldiers, thirty slaves, a resident commander responsible for all English actions in West Africa, and some other officials. The RAC was also soon exploring the possibilities of trade in slaves as far south as the Dutch reserve of Loango Bay; and, though they soon established an interest there, the long-standing liking in the Vili kingdom for Dutch textiles obliged British slave traders to buy their cargoes in Rotterdam or Amsterdam before setting out.

The RAC was one of the largest early joint-stock companies, combining the idea of incorporation (an ancient method of organization for charitable purposes) with the modern one of the association of capital. But since the sum raised by the company, though large, was less than what was needed to finance the activities envisaged, and since new building was necessary on the West African coast, the company had to borrow from the beginning and interest on this loan accounted for much of the budget. Commerce was not helped by having a royal duke as the chairman. Nor did the king pay what he had offered. In the West Indies, turnover was slow, too, because it seemed necessary to extend credit to planters who bought slaves. Then, to buy slaves on the scale needed to make a profit, the RAC’s captains had to have £100,000 worth of goods per voyage (for example East Indian cloth, Swedish iron bars, Dutch guns, or French brandy) for exchange. They rarely achieved that.

Another difficulty was that the company, largely an enterprise of London merchants, was from the beginning of its life denounced and often outmaneuvered by interloping merchants and captains from “out-ports”—principally Bristol, a great port from the middle ages onwards which, by 1700, had become Britain’s premier sugar and West Indies harbor. The city’s distilleries and sugar refineries (active as early as 1654), on the river Avon and near Frome, were kept busy by the import of much raw sugar and molasses. (Bristol was also Britain’s chief port for shipping, and kidnapping, indentured servants, many of whom originally came from Ireland.)

The RAC had, however, its defenders. Thus Charles Davenant, commissioner for excise, probably the ablest economist of the day (son of William Davenant, the playwright), argued that the company was “in the place of an academy, for training an indefinite number in the regular knowledge of . . . the African trade”⁶: a university of the slave trade, so to say. The Company paid what the biographer of its president, the duke of York, describes as modest dividends in the 1680s.^III

By the end of the seventeenth century, as much as three-fifths of the income of the RAC derived from the sale of slaves.^IV Between its foundation and 1689, the company indeed exported just under 90,000 slaves—about 24,000 from the so-called Windward Coast, or the modern Liberia; nearly 20,000 from the Gold Coast; 14,000 from Whydah, on the Slave Coast (an important slave entrepôt from then till 1850); and a little over 10,000 slaves each from Senegambia and Angola. Six thousand slaves came from Benin and the two Calabar rivers. The largest number of these, over 25,000, went to Barbados; nearly 23,000 went to Jamaica (that island’s own enslaved population increased from 550 in 1661 to nearly 10,000 in 1673); nearly 7,000 went to Nevis; and the rest were sold either to the Spaniards or to English North Americans. The RAC sold 75,000 slaves to British North America between 1673 and 1725. These figures would suggest that over 5,000 slaves left Africa every year in ships of the RAC, about 4,000 arriving. In one way or another, the British Caribbean perhaps imported nearly 175,000 slaves in the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, instead of a total of under 70,000 in the preceding quarter-century.⁷

In 1671, Sir John Yeamans, a Barbados planter of Bristol origin who became the first governor of Carolina, and who indeed founded Charleston, brought slaves from Barbados to clear his plantation on the river Ashley—the first notice of an introduction of slaves to that colony (he was accused of wishing to subordinate Carolina to Barbados, a charge he angrily rebutted, though Carolina for a long time continued in the shadow of Barbados). But some English colonists were also buying from the Spaniards. In 1674, Andrew Percival, who also had a plantation on the Ashley, was even ordered by the colony’s proprietors to “begin a trade with the Spaniards for negroes.”

The English New Yorkers were even more imaginative: they established, in the first years after the capture of Manhattan, a fruitful relation with the pirates who infested the East India route and had their headquarters at Madagascar. How many slaves were thereby brought by the formidable journey from there may never be known, for these importers never made a legal entry. But several New Yorkers, we know, did well out of this improbable trade. For example, Frederick Philipse (born Flypse), a Dutch entrepreneur, came to America in 1647 from Friesland as a carpenter with the Dutch West India Company. Adolphus Philipse, his son, was described, at the end of the century, as returning in a ship from Madagascar with “nothing but negroes.” Frederick Philipse, who bought the Yonkers plantation and built Castle Philipse, as he also did the manor hall of Yonkers, had his respectability as a long-standing member of the Council of New York bruised by a quarrel, precisely because of his Madagascar trade, with the powerful East India Company. Philipse’s dealings in slaves began in the 1680s, and prospered in the 1690s. That was because of a friendship established by letter with an adventurous New Yorker, Adam Baldridge, who had set himself up on the island of Sainte-Marie, off Madagascar’s east coast. Rum and gunpowder were Philipse’s cargoes for exchange.⁸

Philipse had successors, both among the new Anglo-Saxon and the old Dutch merchants of New York, which remained, however, in those days behind both Boston and Philadelphia as the commercially powerful city of the continent.

These were good years for the RAC. The Gambia Adventurers’ license ended, and the RAC entered into possession of its monopoly. In 1683, the RAC was allowed to raise its prices for slaves, previously fixed at eighteen pounds a head. The company was successfully competing with the Dutch. In West Africa, a new fort was embarked on at a lovely, sheltered bay, Dick’s Cove (Dixcove), to the west of the Dutch ports at Axim and Elmina. Increasingly, English merchants now went direct to the Baltic for Swedish iron and amber, so useful to exchange for slaves in Africa, rather than buying such things in Amsterdam, where prices had increased vertiginously. Glass beads were also obtained directly, in London. The cheap fabric imitating East Indian goods known as “annabasses,” which was popular in Africa, had been bought in Holland till 1677. But after that, the RAC’s Court of Assistants ordered its Committee on Goods—the bureaucracy was already considerable—to promote the manufacture of the stuff in England; and so the twenty thousand or so pieces of this material shipped from England to exchange for slaves in Africa in the 1680s were of English manufacture. The same thing occurred in respect of scarlet cloth and “boysadoes,” a heavy material which had also previously been made in Holland. Birmingham knives and guns manufactured, say, by John Sibley & Co, took over from the Dutch trade. Serges in the Indian style, such as says (once of silk, now of a very fine wool) and perpetuanas (a very durable woolen), were henceforth made in Devonshire, carried by sea from Exeter, and then dyed in London. Thus the RAC stimulated what would become English manufacturing superiority in the eighteenth century.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 placed the RAC in a difficult position. Coincidentally, the date was when its exclusive license came to an end, or had to be renewed. But the company could hope for little from the new regime. The removal of royal support was evident. The last instruction to a naval officer to seize interlopers found trading in the area of the company’s monopoly was dated the day that King James left London in early December. Several of the old directors, such as Henry Jermyn, now Lord Saint Albans, fled to France with him. Thereafter, the company limited itself to encouraging interlopers to obtain proper licenses, and trying to persuade them to seek their cargoes to the east of the river Volta, where there were no English forts.

The RAC traded over sixteen thousand slaves between 1690 and 1700. But there was now every year more competition from interlopers. Even Edinburgh was engaged: for example, in 1695, George Watson, first accountant of the newly formed Bank of Scotland, collaborated with the London-based Scottish firm of Michael Kincaird and James Foulkes, and some others (Robert McKerral of Dublin, William Gordon, Alexander Lorimer, who was concerned in Anglo-Dutch trade, and James Foulis, manager of the London branch of the Bank of Scotland), to fit out a slave ship of 120 tons.

The RAC learned of these activities from their agents, whom they had at almost every port of England, as in the empire: a report by Sir Henry Morgan—the onetime brutal pirate who, by an appointment as curious as it was scandalous, had become lieutenant-governor of Jamaica—explained, with the intolerance of the robber turned policeman, that, “notwithstanding our vigilance, some interlopers do escape and, landing their negroes, distribute them in plantations near adjacent and so avoid seizure.”⁹ (When Morgan withdrew from Portobelo in 1668, one of his prizes had been a consignment of thirty slaves.)

The inquiries into the best manner in which to carry out the African trade were extensive. The government received a vast number of petitions from anyone remotely connected with it: clothiers of Somerset, dyers of London, artificers of Bristol, as well as merchants of Virginia and Maryland and planters of Barbados, all of whom inveighed against the company. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that, in the summer of 1698, the RAC, with only a quarter-century used up out of the presumed thousand years of privilege mentioned in its charter, lost its monopoly. Interlopers henceforth were able to practice as “separate traders.” A new act, giving them legal status, declared, though, that the forts maintained on the Gold Coast by the company were “undoubtedly necessary” and that all who traded to Africa should help in their maintenance. So the separate traders had in theory to pay an ad valorem tax of 10 percent on all exports to Africa—to the RAC, whose position was to some extent preserved. The independent traders were also to pay 10 percent on all direct imports to Britain from northwest Africa between Capes Blanco and Monte. Exports to the Americas, including slaves, were to be free of taxes. In return, traders were to have rights at the company’s forts. Governors and other officials at the forts would, however, be appointed by the Crown, and be paid well enough for them not to be tempted to trade in slaves, an injunction which was never kept.

The “Ten Percenters,” as the English independent traders came to be known, complained about these “impositions.” The arguments were many and bitter. Taxes were not paid or, if they were, paid late. The tax was altogether remitted in 1712. Thereafter it was the turn of the company to rail at the interlopers’ bad 'margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-indent:14.4pt;line-height:normal'>With these changes, Bristol, home of interlopers, fully entered the slave trade—though this is to anticipate, there were to be over 2,000 separate slave voyages to Africa from that port up to 1807.¹⁰ Many smaller English maritime towns entered into the business too. All the heroic Elizabethan ports of Devon, such as Barnstaple, Bideford, and Plymouth, sent a slave ship or two in the next few years, as did Lyme Regis and Poole, Dartmouth and Falmouth, Exeter and her neighbor Topsham, Portsmouth and Weymouth, not to speak of Berwick and Whitehaven, as well as Lancaster and Deal, the last of which was the city of the tragic Luxborough, accidentally burned on her journey home from Jamaica, leaving her crew, under Captain Kellaway, to survive in a yawl, eating their (dead) companions’ flesh and drinking their own urine. The Irish ports of Dublin and Belfast, Kinsale and Limerick were also active in the trade in a mild way. Some of these lesser ports had already sent slave expeditions to Africa before this date: the Speedwell of Dartmouth took 170 slaves to Barbados from Mozambique in 1682.¹¹

The majority of the slaves whom the English carried worked on sugar plantations by the end of the seventeenth century: “The pleasure, the glory and grandeur of England,” Sir Dalby Thomas, the first governor of the English fort at Cape Coast under the new arrangements, would write, “has been advanced more by sugar than any other commodity, wool not excepted.”¹²

The success of these changes is borne out by the figures. Ten Percenters would carry 75,000 slaves between 1698 and 1707, as against 18,000 by the RAC. The RAC tried to continue their fight for strict insistence on the rules; in 1699, Charles Chaplin, their man at the new city of Kingston, Jamaica, seized the Africa, James Tanner captain, for not paying the 10-percent tax. But one such action had little effect.

A characteristic merchant among the Ten Percenters of these years was Isaac Milner of Whitehaven, who moved to London but all the same showed his old home town the way into the African trade. He sent twenty-four expeditions from London or Whitehaven to Africa between 1698 and 1712 and, throughout this time, was an active agitator against allowing the RAC any trace of privilege. He was interested in the wine trade from Madeira and Lisbon, too.

It was understood that the North American colonies would continue to buy in the Caribbean. None of these English colonies needed slaves as yet on a large scale. But all the same, these captives were beginning to be found in New England. Each of these colonies has its own history.

For example, in Connecticut, there is little evidence of trading slaves in the seventeenth century; in 1709, the governor wrote to the commissioners of trade and plantations in London: “We have made strict enquiry what number of negroes have been imported June 1698–December 1707, and find that there hath not been one vessel, either of the Royal Africa Company’s or of separate traders, that hath imported any negroes hither in that space of time, nor any since or before, that we can hear of. There are but few negroes in this Government and those we are supplied with [come] from the neighboring provinces, for the most part, except that, sometimes, half a dozen in a year may be imported from the West Indies.”¹³

In Massachusetts, as late as 1680, her elderly governor, Simon Bradstreet, had said that the colony had only about 100 or 120 slaves, and added, “There hath been no company of blacks or slaves brought into the Country since the beginning of this plantation, for the space of fifty years, only one small vessel about two years since, after twenty months’ voyage to Madagascar, brought hither betwixt forty and fifty Negroes, most women and children sold here for £15 and £20 apiece.” He must have been referring to slaves brought direct from Africa, for many had by then come into the colony from the West Indies: a French refugee in 1687 reported, “There is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two [slaves]. There are those that have five or six. . . .”¹⁴

New Hampshire, meantime, had nothing in the way of a slave trade till about 1708. In that year, Governor Joseph Dudley wrote, “There are in New Hampshire negro servants to the number of 70. . . . About 20 of them in the nine years past have been brought in. . . .”¹⁵ After that there are several mentions of direct journeys to Africa, though the ships concerned were probably based in Boston or Salem.

Only in 1683 was there news of black slaves in New Jersey. There was then a dispute between the collector of the port of New York and a master who had returned from Madagascar with slaves. The latter thought that, if he brought his slaves to New York, they would be seized; so he took them into Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he sold them.

Among the so-called border colonies, Virginia had begun a long history as the home of tobacco plantations. Even so, in 1649 she had a mere three hundred slaves. The annual import was fewer than twenty. Her needs were modest and were, for the moment, confined to the requirements for house slaves. The work on tobacco plantations was mostly done, at first, by European indentured laborers. But slaves soon began to play a part. In 1670, Virginia had about two thousand Africans, though there had been no ships importing them for several years. Natural increase must explain the change. That in turn must have been inspired by the Virginia climate or the relatively benign treatment offered by tobacco planters (characteristics of Virginia throughout its history as a slave-employing territory). Virginia was, however, in 1700 still largely a colony of white yeomanry. Edmund Jennings, acting governor of Virginia in 1708, wrote to the Board of Trade: “ . . . before the year 1680 what negroes were brought to Virginia were imported generally from Barbados, for it was very rare to have a negro ship come to this country direct from Africa.”¹⁶ All the same, there was increasing interest. In 1681, William Fitzhugh, an English-born lawyer, planter, and merchant, who died in 1701 leaving fifty-four thousand acres in Virginia, wrote to a friend, Ralph Wormley, also a landowner: “I request you to do me the favour, if you intend to buy any for yourself, and it be not too much trouble to you, to secure me five or six, whereof three or four boys, if you can.”¹⁷ In the 1690s, these planters were beginning to find Africans better tobacco workers than the Europeans; and indentured servants were increasingly hard to find. Their plantations were beginning, too, to have the same imbalances between male and female which marked sugar plantations in “the islands,” as well as the same system of allocating slaves of different sexes to live in separate barracks, which obstructed the possibility of family life.

As for Maryland, that colony for many years constituted too small a market to bid for an entire cargo of slaves: she procured her slaves in ones and twos from Virginia or the West Indies. The territory did not have slavery by law for many years, even if an act of 1664, “concerning negroes and other slaves,” recognized their existence, in the indirect English way. Governor Charles Calvert wrote in 1664 to his father, Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of the colony, that, although he had tried to find someone to sell him one or two hundred slaves from the Royal Company of Adventurers in London, “I find we are not men of estates good enough to undertake such a business.” But, he added, he “could wish [that] we were, for we are naturally inclined to love negroes, if our purses would endure it.”¹⁸ In the 1670s, there was a hardening of the position: the Maryland assembly passed an act stipulating that, just because slaves became Christian, they should not presume themselves free; and even the children of Christian captives might be considered slaves. No doubt this declaration reflected a shortage of labor: even in 1670, there still was no regular direct trading from Africa to North America. Only in 1685 did a serious slave trade to Maryland tentatively begin: in that year, instructions from the RAC’s Committee on Shipping (the ever-active Lord Berkeley was on it) asked a sea captain, Marmaduke Goodhand, to deliver two hundred slaves to be shared among Edward Porteus (a merchant of Gloucester County, Virginia), Richard Gardiner, and Christopher Robinson (a future secretary of the colony), on the Potomac River. Next year, there was a reference to a consignment of “slaves and sugar” in Maryland from Barbados. The intention had been to load tobacco, as if the transaction were normal; and there are some other isolated references to slaves arriving at Annapolis or smaller ports on Chesapeake Bay.

Meantime, in 1670, just after the foundation of Carolina, and the proclamation of its somewhat feudal constitution, influenced if not written by the prudent shareholder of the RAC, John Locke, with a modest paragraph about slavery as an institution to be accepted, there is the first mention of slaves there: an early colonist, Henry Brayne, wrote to Lord Ashley, the Cabinet minister and director of the RAC who was also one of the fathers of the state: “I have put on . . . enough for my people which is one lusty man, three Christian servants and an overseer I brought out of Virginia. . . .”¹⁹

For some time, there were few African slaves in this new colony but, by 1699 at least, direct trade between it and Africa had begun. In that year, Governor Blake and others in Carolina gave to Captain William Rhett “all such sums of money, goods, wares, merchandise, negro slaves, gold, elephants teeth, wax effects, and things whatsoever which the said captain William Rhett had in his hands in account of their being part owners of the ship Providence . . . whereof the said William Rhett is commander”; and Captain Daniel Johnson was arrested and thrown into Marshalsea Prison in London for failing to pay the appropriate dues for landing slaves in Carolina in 1703.²⁰ But in those days one in four slaves in the colony was an Indian. The year after that, a report to the Board of Trade from Governor Sir Nathaniel Johnson (a promoter of silk cultivation) estimated that, with a total population in Carolina of 9,580 “souls,” there were 1,800 African male slaves, 1,100 African female slaves, and 1,200 African child slaves, alongside 500 Indian male slaves, 600 Indian female slaves, and 300 Indian children—of whom many of the latter had been captured by Johnson himself in an expedition in 1703.

Still, no country was then free from the threat of being embroiled in the trade. Just when the British were beginning to take slaving in Africa seriously, a British resident in Constantinople, Thomas Bendish, reported in 1657 to the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, that some Venetians there had a stock of English slaves (perhaps initially captives of the Barbary pirates) whom they brought every year to that city to be sold for eighty to a hundred dollars apiece. Bendish redeemed some but lacked the money to free them all.²¹Doubtless they were eventually bought by a Turkish nobleman who liked their pink complexions.

^IDowning, a villainous individual, later served Cromwell in London as scoutmaster-general and then as minister to Holland, where, remaining after 1660, he betrayed several regicides to Charles II. Downing Street in London is inappropriately called after this double-faced traitor, whose name for a time was a synonym for infamy.

^IIThe dowry also included Tangier, and privileges for English merchants in the Portuguese empire.

^IIIAccording to Aubrey, William Davenant was the son of Shakespeare by the wife of an innkeeper in Oxford.

^IVThe other two-fifths being gold from Senegambia and the Gold Coast; camwood and beeswax from Sierra Leone; and gum, used for textiles, from the Sénégal Valley.