THERE, RIGHT IN CHARLESTON HARBOR, was the horror that the South did not want to imagine—a slave ship. Vomit and urine and feces and blood had seeped deep into the raw wood of the sunless, slapped-together slave decks in the hold, staining them indelibly with filth. Cockroaches by the millions seethed among the boards, and clouds of fleas and gnats rose up from them. The stench that came from this vessel wasn’t the smell of a ship full of cattle and horses, but that peculiar smell that surrounds humans, and only humans who are very afraid and very sick or dying or dead. And in late August 1858, when the water in Charleston Harbor was as still and flat and thick as oil, and the air was stifling hot and heavy, that hideous odor issued from the brig called the Echo captured off the coast of Cuba a few days before.
Because it was the summer, the season of disease, many of Charleston’s better-off residents had left the city. Robert and Emma Bunch and their daughter, Helen, were back in New York on annual leave. But for those Charlestonians who remained behind, the spectacle of the Echo and its Africans was a disgusting but almost irresistible novelty. Because the transatlantic slave trade had been banned for fifty years, many people had never beheld such a ship before. “You will see by this morning’s Mercury that we have a slaver in our harbor,” one distinguished Charlestonian wrote to a friend. “She has on board about 300 naked native Negroes, sixty of them women. Every one of whom is in the family way. Everybody is talking about them. The yellow fever…and every other subject have faded before this. There is really and truly an excitement among these cold, stolid Charlestonians.”
That the Echo had been captured at all was the result of a dawning awareness by the U.S. government of something that Robert Bunch had been explaining to the Foreign Office in London for years: the fleets of slave ships flying the American flag, supported by moneymen in New York, and incited and abetted by fire-eaters such as Rhett and Spratt, posed a growing threat to the authority of Washington and to the Union itself. The slave traffic was growing fast. Something had to be done before the momentum became unstoppable. So, quietly and against stubborn bureaucratic resistance, President Buchanan had ordered American warships to step up their anti-slaving patrols off the coast of Cuba as well as the coast of West Africa. And the Echo was their first prize.
The story of the Echo’s capture, as told in the Charleston newspapers, began at dawn on Saturday, August 21, 1858, when the USS Dolphin pulled out of the Cuban port of Sagua La Grande, about 150 miles east of Havana. The Dolphin was a brig-of-war, and she had been on desultory anti-slaving missions off the coasts of Brazil and Africa from the time she’d first been commissioned more than twenty years before. With two square-rigged masts and six 32-pound guns she was, despite her age, quick and deadly by the standards of the time, but she’d seen little action.
Now, through the course of the morning, the Dolphin’s crew could see far ahead of them the twin masts of another brig. They didn’t pay much attention. The stranger wasn’t a very big ship and looked like the kind of boat used for coastal trade among the maze of islets and keys off the north shore of Cuba. But by around one in the afternoon, the Dolphin had pulled closer. Its commander, Lt. J. N. Maffitt, was about as shrewd a skipper as could be found in the U.S. Navy at the time, and he knew right away that this ship looked too light in the water for a coastal trader. The Dolphin picked up speed. The strange brig started to take evasive action, hauling in some of its canvas and tacking hard to starboard with the celerity and efficiency that is possible only when a ship is manned by a large and well-trained crew. Coastal traders didn’t normally have those kinds of men on board.
Maffit decided to play a little game with his quarry. He ran up the British flag, so the strange brig could see the colors clearly. The British could not board an American vessel without provoking an international incident, which is why so many slavers flew the Stars and Stripes whenever they thought they might be challenged by one of Her Majesty’s ships. At first the stranger showed no colors at all, but after hours of giving chase, Maffitt fired a shot close under her stern. The stranger ran up the American flag. She had fallen into the trap. Maffitt took down the British ensign and ran up the American one. Still the stranger struggled to get away. Maffitt fired again, this time under the ship’s bow. The stranger hauled down her sails, struck her American colors, and threw them into the sea.
The armed boarding party from the Dolphin noticed that the name of the ship, Echo, was painted on a slab of wood nailed to the stern, but the original name, Putnam, was still visible, a ghost image of white painted over in black. “We found her a brig of 320 tons, filled with Africans,” one of the Dolphin’s officers wrote to a friend later that week. “The appearance was most revolting; never can I forget it. There were 328 negroes crowded together between decks.” They were crammed in, half crouched and so closely packed that only the tops of their heads were clearly visible, and the stench was almost unbearable. “The poor wretches looked half starved, and some of them were mere skeletons,” wrote the officer. The sails and other fittings of the ship were American. Many of the crew were American. The captain, a Mr. Townsend, was from Boston.
Some 455 Africans had been taken on board the Echo near Kabinda on the African coast. More than 100 perished during the weeks at sea and were thrown overboard. (“The shark of the Atlantic is still, as he has ever been, the partner of the slave trader,” wrote a British editorialist.) It took the U.S. Navy prize crew six days to sail the Echo to Charleston Harbor, the most important American port within reach of the fetid vessel. By then, another eight captives had died. And they just kept dying.
Within hours of the Echo’s arrival, Charlestonians were debating what to do with the human cargo. Even if the Negro Seamen Act had still been in full effect, there was no precedent for the arrival of Africans under these circumstances, and there was no jail in the city that could hold them. In the Charleston Daily Courier the next morning, a correspondent writing under the name “Curtius” argued that the only “humane” thing to do would be to make slaves of the African prisoners and train them to perform useful occupations in South Carolina. But, of course, the Northern states would condemn such an action, he wrote, and the Federal government would never allow it.
In the event, Federal officials decided to hold the Africans at a massive fort called Sumter, which had been under construction for years near the entrance to the harbor and still was not quite finished. The Echo was brought in and anchored near the Custom House. The town’s notables had to charter their own transportation to get a look at the Africans themselves.
“The gentlemen, representing a great variety of interests, were much gratified at the spectacle presented by these savages, who appeared in fine spirit and entertained their visitors with a display of their abilities in dancing and singing,” wrote the correspondent for the Charleston Mercury. The dancing was a grim ritual, in fact, that belonged to no particular culture in Africa, but to the trade in captives. Once a day at most, the people packed into the ship’s hold would be brought on deck to get some air. Those who were dead or dying were identified and thrown into the sea. Food was forced down the throats of those who refused to eat. Sometimes the captain and, rarely, some of the other officers took their pick of the women. And there on the shifting deck, someone would beat a drum “to dance the slaves,” to give them a little exercise. Those who refused were whipped. Then they were herded below again into their floating hell.
“Their dances resembled in great degree the popular burlesque of the Shaking Quaker,” wrote the correspondent for the Mercury. “In their singing they preserve good time, but their voices are rather sharp and shrill.” The writer, with sneering irony, compared them to opera virtuosos. “The whole exhibition was exceedingly interesting and novel, in which the Negroes seemed to take great delight,” he said. “Very few are left in the hospital, and those manifest anxiety to get out. The ailments with which they are afflicted are readily yielding to medical treatment, and the general health of the gang has much improved.”
This was a lie, of course. Yellow fever was raging in Charleston at the time, and Fort Sumter was not immune. The Africans also “ate freely the shell-fish which collected around the fort, and died rapidly,” wrote a doctor assigned to care for them. “Their condition on leaving the brig Echo was painful and disgusting in the extreme. They had been huddled together closer than cattle, and slept at night in as close contact as spoons when packed together. Privation of every kind, coupled with disease, had reduced all of them to the merest skeletons, and to such a state of desuetude and debility that on entering the fort they could not so much as step over a small beam, one foot high, in the doorway, but were compelled to sit on it and balance themselves over. It is impossible for you to imagine their sad and distressed condition.”
A week after the Echo first arrived in Charleston Harbor, its manifest horrors had begun to sink in. The Mercury might paint a picture of happy savages desperate to stay in the United States, but the Courier seized on the evident atrocities committed aboard the ship to justify its position against revival of the slave trade. It is “inhuman and brutalizing, and we would not stain our national flag, or our Southern escutcheon, by re-opening it.” Bringing new Africans to the South would “heathenize” the “now civilized and Christian slaves” already there, said the Charleston Courier editorial. It would brutalize the owners, breaking down ties between servants and masters; it would fill Northern pockets with more money, since that is where the capital would come from for the trade; it would anger the Northern tier of slave-owning, slave-rearing states and would have a ruinous effect on the price of the slaves now in their owners’ hands. “The very agitation of the question is calculated to distract and divide the South,” the editorialist wrote. It would “alienate friends and strengthen enemies” and “precipitate the downfall of the Republic.”
“God forbid that the slave trade should ever again be prosecuted under the flag of the Union or the flag of the South,” proclaimed the Charleston Daily Courier.
The U.S. marshal at Charleston, who had been vocal in his support for reopening the slave trade with Africa, felt different after watching over some of its victims for three weeks at Fort Sumter. “Thirty-five died while in my custody,” he wrote to a friend, “and at one time I supposed that one hundred would have fallen a sacrifice to the cruelties to which the poor creatures had been subjected on board the slaver. I wish that everyone in South Carolina who is in favor of the re-opening of the slave trade could have seen what I have been compelled to witness….It seems to me that I can never forget it.”
But for those who viewed the slave trade as the key to the South’s economic future and the symbol of slavery’s righteousness and rectitude, even the spectacle of atrocity presented by the Echo was unavailing.