The Empire of Necessity (5 page)

This was what historians call Spanish America’s market revolution, and slaves were the flywheel on which the whole thing turned.

For centuries, the Spanish Crown had tried to regulate slavery, along with all other economic activity in the Americas, under a system called mercantilism. Spain prohibited its colonies from trading with one another, banned foreign ships from entering American ports, prohibited individual merchants from owning their own fleets of cargo ships, and limited manufacturing. Selected countries or companies were granted the monopoly right to import slaves, and only into a handful of ports, principally Cartagena in Colombia, Veracruz in Mexico, and Havana in Cuba. The idea was to prevent the development of a too-powerful merchant class in America, making sure its colonies remained a source of gold and silver and an exclusive for goods made in or shipped through Spain.

That was the theory, anyway. The practice was something else. Contrabanding flourished from the early days of the Conquest. The city of Buenos Aires was conceived in corruption. During its early years in the 1500s, its Spanish founders did well skimming off the Andean silver that passed through the city to Spain, and over the centuries smuggling made up a large part of Río de la Plata’s trade. When one early Spanish governor tried to stop the smuggling of slaves by Portuguese traders from Brazil, he was poisoned to death. By the late 1700s, illegal, untaxed trade, much of it coming from the new United States or Great Britain, made up nearly half the gulf’s commerce. Merchandise flowed in and out of the Atlantic, back and forth through the porous border with Brazil, and up and down the Paraná River, which connected both Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Paraguay.
⁶

Africans were often the contraband. They might be unloaded at night on a dark beach down the coast from Buenos Aires and brought unnoticed into the city’s market. Or their importer could march them into the city during the day and simply say they were
negros descaminados
—“lost blacks”—found someplace in the interior, which meant their sale was exempt from import licenses or tax receipts. At times, though, Africans were the cover for what was really being smuggled, with merchants using permission to import a small consignment of slaves to mask a hold full of Parisian toilet water or New York pickles. And on some British ships coming into Spanish American ports, black sailors temporarily pretended to be slaves, just long enough to convince customs inspectors that they were the ship’s cargo and not whatever it was that was being smuggled.
⁷

By the late 1770s, Spain was under increasing pressure to grant its colonial subjects “
más libertad
,” more economic liberty. The Atlantic world was becoming more commercialized, with new opportunities for colonials to engage in contraband and more openings for enemies like Great Britain to make inroads. The Crown therefore needed to find ways to regularize illegal trade, both to keep the loyalty of its colonial subjects and to check London. Madrid also hoped to stimulate the economy and thereby generate more revenue to fight the many fronts in its seemingly never-ending wars with one empire or another.

So starting with the American Revolution, Spain responded to each burst of insurrectionary ardor, each declaration of the rights of man, by issuing yet another decree allowing freer trade, including the “free trade of blacks.”
⁸

In November 1776, after the signing in July of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, Spain opened Cuban ports to North American ships, including slave ships. Following the French Revolution of 1789, the Crown allowed individual Spaniards and foreigners to bring slaves into the ports of Caracas, Puerto Rico, Havana, and Santo Domingo. After the start of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, Madrid added Montevideo to the growing list of free-trade slaving ports, lowered taxes on the sale of slaves, and allowed merchants to set their prices according to the “principle” of supply and demand, selling their Africans with the “same liberty” that they could “any other commercial good.” In 1793, the year the French executed their king, Spain again lowered export duties on goods traded for slaves, exempting slave ships from sales and registry taxes, and permitted colonies to trade among themselves, as well as with Portuguese Brazil, to acquire slaves.
⁹

Then, in January 1804, Haiti became an independent nation, having defeated French troops trying to restore slavery on the island. “We have dared to be free, let us be thus by ourselves and for ourselves,” its leaders declared, shocking those who would use the word
freedom
to mean freedom to buy and sell Africans as they would. A few months later, Spain extended the right of its American subjects, as well as that of any other resident in its dominion, to sail their own ships to Africa and “to buy blacks wherever they were to be found.”
*

The gulf’s merchants were notoriously grasping, and when they did get freer trade they used corruption as the thin edge of the wedge to get more. Each concession Spain made to its American subjects only provided new opportunities to skirt revenue collectors. For instance, Madrid eventually allowed merchants to buy foreign-built vessels and either trade directly with neutral countries or sail straight to Africa, buy Africans, and bring them back, practically tax free. But many Río de la Plata merchants found it cheaper to conspire with Boston and Providence shippers than to spend money to build up their own fleets. New England captains, upon approaching Montevideo or Buenos Aires in ships laden with Manchester broadcloth, New Haven pistols, or Gold Coast slaves would lower the stars and stripes, raise the royal Spanish standard, ready their counterfeit papers, and prepare to tell port authorities that the ship they were sailing was owned by a local Spaniard. A “sham sale” was how New Englanders described the practice. And thus with the extension of free trade, slavery, an institution already founded on a lie, became, with this trick and those mentioned earlier, even more associated with illusion.

By the time Mordeille arrived on the
Hope
, with the
Neptune
following behind, slave trading in Río de la Plata had become a free-for-all. More African slaves arrived in 1804 than in any previous year. Buenos Aires was growing by a third every year, Montevideo was doubling, and by 1804 Africans and African Americans made up more than 30 percent of their populations.
¹⁰

*   *   *

Slavery was the motor of Spanish America’s market revolution, though not exactly in the same way it was in plantation zones of the Caribbean, coastal Brazil, or, later, the U.S. South. As in those areas, Africans and African-descendant peoples might be used to produce commercial exports for Europe, mining gold, for instance, diving for pearls in the Caribbean and the Pacific, drying hides, or cutting cane.
¹¹
But a large number, perhaps even most, of Africans arriving under the new “free trade in blacks” system were put to work creating goods traded
among
the colonies.

Enslaved Africans and African Americans slaughtered cattle and sheared wool on the pampas of Argentina, spun cotton and wove clothing in textile workshops in Mexico City, and planted coffee in the mountains outside of Bogotá. They fermented grapes for wine at the foot of the Andes and boiled Peruvian sugar to make candy. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, enslaved shipwrights built cargo vessels that were used to carry Chilean wheat to Lima markets. Throughout the thriving cities of mainland Spanish America, slaves worked, often for wages, as laborers, bakers, brickmakers, liverymen, cobblers, carpenters, tanners, smiths, rag pickers, cooks, and servants. Others, like Montevideo’s doleful itinerants, took to the streets, peddling goods they either made themselves or sold on commission.

It wasn’t just their labor that spurred the commercialization of society. The driving of more and more slaves inland, across the continent, the opening up of new slave roads and the expansion of old ones, tied hinterland markets together and created local circuits of finance and trade. Enslaved peoples were at one and the same time investments (purchased and then rented out as laborers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital, making them an odd mix of abstract and concrete value. Collateral for loans and items for speculation, slaves were also objects of nostalgia, mementos of a fixed but fading aristocratic world even as they served as the coin of a new commercialized one. Slaves literally made money: working in Lima’s mint, they trampled quicksilver into ore with their bare feet, pressing toxic mercury into their bloodstream in order to amalgamate the silver used for coins. And they were money, at least in a way. It wasn’t so much that the value of individual slaves was standardized in relation to currency. Slaves were the standard: when appraisers calculated the value of any given hacienda, slaves usually accounted for over half its worth, much more valuable than inanimate capital goods like tools and millworks.

The world was changing fast, old lines of rank and status were blurring, and slaves, along with livestock and land, often appeared to be the last substantial things. Slaves didn’t just create wealth: as items of conspicuous consumption for a rising merchant class, they displayed wealth. And since some slaves in Spanish America, especially those in cities like Montevideo and Buenos Aires, were paid wages, they were also consumers, spending their money on items that arrived in ships with other slaves or maybe even, in a few instances, with themselves.
¹²

*   *   *

French privateers like Hippolyte Mordeille made the promise of “free trade in blacks” a reality, both because the smuggling they excelled at was an application of the principle and because Spain, as an ally of Paris in the Napoleonic Wars, tended to allow them to sell their British-taken prizes in Spanish American ports. The romance of pirates often imagines them as anarchists, sailing the “ever free” sea bound to no law and respectful of no property. In fact, they were vanguard merchant capitalists, or at least they were in the case of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Starting in 1800, the local commercial guild collected an informal tax from its members to fund corsairs to protect their freight against enemy ships. The guild then began issuing its own private letters of marque, authorizing pirates to seize and sell enemy merchandise. Soon, individual merchants were entering into formal, contractual relations with privateer companies incorporated in France.
¹³

Mordeille, who had been sailing to the Río de la Plata for nearly a decade, worked closely with commercial houses in Cádiz, Spain, and merchants in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. He is credited with pioneering Río de la Plata’s comprehensive privateering contracts, which stipulated the rights and obligations of all involved—merchants, captain, and crew—and the percentage each would get from the seizure of “good prizes,” distributed according to the “onboard hierarchy and the importance of tasks each performs.” Money was raised, loans were advanced, weapons and munitions purchased, crews assembled, and ships outfitted and dispatched to seize the cargo of merchant vessels flying the flags of enemy nations. The Frenchman brought whatever cargo he might take off British ships into Montevideo, including guns, tools, textiles, as well as luxury items like silk shawls, fine handkerchiefs, Brittany linen, Flemish lace skirts, ornate fans, pearls, silver mirrors, gold combs, and filigreed rosaries. But by a large margin, Mordeille’s most valuable cargo was slaves.
¹⁴

Even in this new world of freer trade, Mordeille still needed royal permission to convert his plunder into salable commodities. So shortly after arriving in Montevideo that January of 1804 with the
Neptune
in tow, he sat down and wrote a letter to the Spanish viceroy, Joaquín del Pino, whose residence was across the water in Buenos Aires.

3

A LION WITHOUT A CROWN

“The actions I have been compelled to take as a corsair have hardened my heart,” Mordeille wrote in his letter to the viceroy, in French-laced Spanish. The voyage across the Atlantic was rough, his men were hungry, and his ships were badly in need of repair. “But what brings me the most sadness and melancholy,” he continued, “is that my work has not benefited the blacks.”

The management of a slave ship took skill. Many alert men were needed to feed the captives, to distribute the victuals and stand watch, because every captain knew that revolts often took place at mealtime, to dole out water, rationing it so it lasted the journey, and to disinfect the slave hold. All this activity required patience and attentiveness.
¹

The
Hope
’s crew had those virtues when it came to sailing and fighting, Mordeille told del Pino, but not to slaving. “Natural diligences”—defecation and urination—were problems, Mordeille said, particularly during the night. Slaves needing to relieve themselves were to inform the sailor on duty, who was supposed to accompany them to a makeshift latrine on deck. “But it terrified my men to go into the hold,” the privateer admitted. Guards had to maneuver past cramped bodies, fumbling with heavy keys in the fetid dark, and then guide shackled men and women up the hatch ladder. It was easier to ignore the calls and let the enslaved defecate on themselves, adding to the layers of already dried vomit and excrement that encrusted the hold’s floor. It was disgusting, Mordeille said.

During the Atlantic crossing, the
Neptune
’s surgeon, James Wallace, had supervised the handling of the slaves. But circumstances made the trip from Bonny to America worse than usual. The ship was adequately stocked for its scheduled run to Barbados but its provisions had to be stretched to cover Mordeille’s seventy-two sailors, who were short on supplies. Water had run low. (Wallace had tried to make the slaves’ water ration last by having the casks sealed, then cutting a small hole on top, through which was inserted a musket barrel, its breech broken off, to be used like a straw.) The mortality rate on this trip wasn’t exceptionally high. On the
Neptune
’s previous voyage, in 1802, 395 Africans were boarded at Bonny; 355 disembarked in British Guiana. This time, 349 out of an original shipment of about 400 had survived.