Smuggler Nation (25 page)

Sympathetic judges made it next to impossible to vigorously prosecute illicit slavers in the courts of the Southern New York district.
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And those charged with violating the U.S. antislave-trade laws had access to the best legal counsel available in the city, including Beebe, Dean & Donahue, top admiralty lawyers located at 76 Wall Street.
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Of the cases that went to court, few ended with convictions, let
alone serious penalties.
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One federal judge in New York, Samuel Betts, once even released a slave ship captain on bail so he could travel to Brazil to obtain evidence for his defense. The captain never returned and allegedly bragged, “You don’t have to worry about facing trial in New York City.… I can get any man off in New York for $1,000.”
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New York specialized in outfitting slave ships. Other eastern ports built them, including Baltimore, Boston, Beverly, Portland, Providence, and Salem. Baltimore shipbuilding firms such as those owned by Samuel and John Smith, William van Wyck, John Hollins, and Stewart and Plunkett had long supplied vessels for the slave trade, and they continued to do so after the federal prohibitions.
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Baltimore shipbuilders, famous for their fast clippers, became especially favored suppliers for slave traders as British naval patrols stepped up their enforcement in the 1830s.
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As historian Warren Howard explains: “The trim Baltimore clippers, which had become a specialty of the city’s shipbuilders, made very handy slavers. They were fast enough to outrun ordinary British cruisers.… Spanish and Brazilian slave traders paid good prices for Baltimore clippers, and some of the city’s businessmen took advantage of this market.”
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Howard notes that the “get-rich-quick schemes” of the Baltimore ship sellers produced a “mild boom in Baltimore shipyards” in 1838.
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The American flag became even more important to the slave trade than American-built and American-outfitted ships. By the 1830s the United States was one of the last remaining maritime powers unwilling to grant Britain the right to search suspected slave ships sailing under its flag. Consequently, the Stars and Stripes became the flag of choice not only for American slave traffickers but for traffickers of all nationalities trying to keep British patrols at bay. In 1844, George Proffitt, the U.S. minister in Rio, conceded that the slave trade was “almost entirely carried out under our flag, in American-built vessels.”
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But American-flagged did not necessarily mean American-owned, even if the ship was American-built and Americans were among the officers and crew.
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A U.S. citizen was often designated to play the role of “flag captain” on a slave ship as added insurance against capture.
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But only American-built ships could receive U.S. registers, which added further incentive for traffickers to favor U.S.-made vessels.
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Unable to legally board and search even the most blatant slave traders flying the American flag, in June 1839 a British naval patrol created quite a stir by escorting American-flagged slaving ships from the African coast to New York Harbor and handing them over to local authorities to prosecute.
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The Royal Navy also sometimes boarded and searched American-flagged ships without permission, much to the irritation of Washington. In 1850, in response to a request from Congress to produce a report on illegal searches, the Millard Fillmore administration reported that of the ten American vessels recently inspected unlawfully by Britain, nine turned out to be slave ships.
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American officials stationed in foreign ports often had a lax attitude toward U.S. complicity in the slave trade, motivated as much by disdain for British meddling as sympathy for slave trafficking. They viewed their main job and priority to be protecting American commerce from British interference, even if this meant a high tolerance for slave-trade-related abuses. The most egregious case was the American consul in Havana, Nicholas Trist, appointed in 1833. Havana-based British authorities singled him out in their reports, claiming that Trist routinely signed off on papers allowing suspected slave traffickers to fly the American flag. John Quincy Adams concluded that the British documents persuasively showed “either the vilest treachery or the most culpable indifference to his duties.”
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The
New York Herald
reported that there seemed to be cause for Trist’s “instant removal.”
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The politically well-connected Trist nevertheless managed to hold on to his post and was not replaced until a change in administration in 1841.

When less Anglophobic U.S. officials in foreign ports expressed alarm about American complicity in the slave trade, their reports simply gathered dust in Washington. Such was the case in Brazil during the 1840s. David Tod, the American consul in Rio de Janeiro, often reported on American complicity in the slave trade and recommended various actions, including banning all commerce carried on American ships between Africa and Brazil. Yet Tod did not even receive a reply about the matter from his superiors for three years. The pleas by his predecessor, Henry Wise, were similarly ignored.
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Meanwhile, as historian Don Fehrenbacher writes, “Slave traders landed more than 350,000 Africans in Brazil during the 1840s, and according to most
contemporary estimates, at least half of those importations were achieved with American help of some kind.”
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Illicit Importation and the Southern Borderlands

The illicit importation of slaves into the United States was only a small part of the foreign slave trade. Nevertheless, it was not inconsequential, especially early on in the southern borderlands, where it was closely connected to territorial expansion. Estimates of the number of slaves smuggled into the United States vary dramatically, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. In his classic work on the slave trade, W.E.B. Dubois estimated that a quarter million slaves were illicitly imported into the United States between 1807 and 1862. More recent scholarship considers this number greatly inflated.
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At the same time, it should be noted that Dubois’s estimate does not include the substantial smuggling of slaves into the country in violation of state laws prior to the federal ban. Historian Warren Howard describes the quantification conundrum:

Anyone who believed all the rumors of slaving voyagers would paint a lurid picture of lawbreaking on an incredible scale: of small slavers successfully landing twice as many Africans as they could possibly have carried; of slaving expeditions so numerous that the Africans could hardly have found enough slaves to sell to them, and the plantation owners found work for so many slaves. Unfortunately, this sort of distortion has been committed. On the other hand, satisfactory proof of illegal voyages is so rare that anyone demanding it will close his eyes to most of the lawbreaking that went on.
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Although the numbers debate will never be settled, there is general agreement that there was a major influx of smuggled slaves between the 1790s and 1820s when state and federal antislave-trade laws were in their infancy and demand for slaves was rapidly growing in southern frontier regions with severe labor shortages. And this early influx of smuggled slaves contributed to the growth of the domestic slave population through natural reproduction. It should also be noted that even when illicit shipments of foreign slaves were seized during this period,
the slaves were typically simply sold at public auctions rather than freed, further adding to the domestic slave population.
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The porous southern borderlands, which had a tiny federal policing presence and a long tradition of smuggling, served as the gateway for illicit slave imports to the plantations of the Deep South (the area that became the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama). The Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled U.S. territory, both facilitated the smuggling of slaves through the Gulf and opened up new lands for the expansion of the slave-based plantation economy. As we saw earlier, Louisiana and its port city of New Orleans proved to be especially attractive for all sorts of smuggling, not just slave trafficking. Louisiana’s best-known illicit traders, the Laffites, were also leading slave traffickers. They effectively integrated the business of piracy and slave trading, specializing in capturing foreign slaving ships in the Gulf and then clandestinely diverting their human cargo to Louisiana’s expanding sugar plantations.

The congressional ban on the importation of foreign slaves into the newly acquired territory clashed with growing demand for slave labor, making locals resentful of federal authorities and supportive of slave smugglers such as the Laffites. Consequently, slave smuggling was a widespread practice for several decades after the Louisiana Purchase.
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As the mayor of New Orleans declared, “I defy all the vigilance of man to prevent the introduction of slaves by some means or other.”
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Rising prices also increased the rewards from smuggling. A German merchant doing business in New Orleans reported that in 1813 slaves purchased from the Laffites for under $200 each were selling for at least $600 in the city.
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Five years later, one slave buyer reported that “fresh imported Guinea negroes were lately sold in NOrleans at $1,500.”
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To distance themselves from the reach of U.S. authorities, in 1817 the Laffites and their accomplices moved their base to Galveston Island in Spanish Mexico, some seventy miles from the Louisiana border, turning it into a bustling contraband depot and slave-trading center. The island, about twenty-seven miles long and three miles wide, provided an ideal smuggling hub: good natural harbors and a location remote from central authorities, yet still in close proximity to the U.S. border and slave plantations. The U.S. Navy took notice of Galveston’s
slave-smuggling business in 1817 when the captain of the USS
Congress
reported to his superiors that several hundred slaves in Galveston were destined for New Orleans planters. “Every exertion will be made to intercept them,” he said, “but I have little hope of success.”
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That same summer, the New Orleans customs collector reported that a New York ship had reached Galveston carrying nearly three hundred slaves, sold “to the Laffites … and other speculators in this place, who have or will resell to the planters.”
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James Bowie (the American folk hero who is mostly remembered for the Bowie knife, as well as for his role in the battle of the Alamo) joined the Laffites at Galveston, where he and his brothers specialized in trafficking slaves across the border into nearby Louisiana. According to historian William Davis, “James himself did the most dangerous work of conveying the contrabands through the swamps and bayous, bringing them in lots of forty at a time.”
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Between 1819 and 1820, he reportedly smuggled at least 180 slaves.

The Bowie brothers also devised an ingenious import scheme that exploited the fact that smuggled slaves captured by the authorities were typically sold off at public auctions. The Bowies would take on the role of informants, turning in their human cargo to the local customs officials without revealing that they were actually the smugglers. They would then purchase the slaves back at auction, with half the purchase price refunded to them by the government as a reward for having originally turned the slaves in. As one of the Bowie brothers wrote, we “fitted out some small boats at the mouth of the Calcasieu [River] and went in to trade on shares. Our plan of operation was as follows: We first purchased forty Negroes from Lafitte at a rate of one dollar per pound, or an average of $140 for each negro: we brought them into the limits of the United States and delivered them to a customs-house officer.”
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Through this creative manipulation and abuse of the legal system, illegally imported slaves became legal domestic slaves with a bill of sale, at great profit to the smugglers-turned-informants.

Spanish Florida, bordering Georgia, was also a key entry point for smuggling slaves into the United States in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Illicitly importing slaves via Florida began with Georgia’s ban on the foreign slave trade in 1798, and it continued to grow after the federal ban took effect in 1808. According to Richard
Drake’s “Revelations of a Slave Smuggler,” after the U.S. prohibition Florida became a “nursery for slave-breeders, and many American citizens grew rich by trafficking in Guinea negroes, and smuggling them continually, in small parties, through the Southern United States.”
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One investor in the illicit importation of newly arrived slaves in Florida was the former governor of Georgia, David B. Mitchell. He resigned as governor to take the position as federal Indian agent to the Creek nation, which he then used as a convenient cover to traffic slaves from Florida into the Creek lands.

Just as Galveston Island supplied Louisiana with smuggled slaves, Florida’s Amelia Island and its port town of Fernandina supplied Georgia. Its economic advantage came from proximity to the United States, conveniently located at the mouth of the St. Mary’s River, which marked the border between Spanish Florida and Georgia. Jefferson’s embargo in 1808 and the War of 1812 provided a tremendous boost to the island’s smuggling-based economy; the U.S. ban on importing slaves simply added another profitable trade item.
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But at the same time as the smuggling boomtown of Fernandina was building more warehouses to store U.S.-bound slaves, the town also had a tolerant attitude toward free blacks and escaped slaves—much to the frustration of Georgia slaveholders across the border.
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