The Empire of Necessity (59 page)

disease and illness

economy

“free trade of blacks”

Fugitive Slave Act

Islam and

Melville on

mercantile corruption

Middle Passage

mortality rate

overland trade route

parricide

paternalism

rebellions,
see
slave revolts

as “social death”

Spanish American,
see
Spanish American slavery

suicide

United States

See also
Spanish American slavery;
specific countries

smallpox

vaccine,

Soriano, Cristina

South Africa

South America.
See
Spanish American slavery;
specific countries and cities

South Carolina

South Georgia Islands

Spain

Catholicism

colonial economy

end of colonialism

fashion

Inquisition

mercantilism

reconquista

slave trade,
see
Spanish American slavery

Spanish American slavery

abolition of

contraband

disease and illness

economy

“free trade of blacks”

Islam and

market revolution

mortality rate

paperwork and legalisms

Spence, Charles

Sprague, Peleg

Sprague, Seth

Starbuck, Thomas

Staten Island

Stewart, Charles Samuel

Story, Joseph

Stowe, Harriet Beecher,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Stuckey, Sterling

Sufism

sugar

suicide, slave

as flight

Susan
(ship)

Swain, Uriah

Swain, Valentine

Sydney

syphilis

Talcahuano

Tasmania

Tennessee

Texas

annexation of

Thoreau, Henry David

Walden

Tierra del Fuego

Timbo

Timbuktu

tobacco

Tobago

Topaz

Toussaint Louverture

Trinidad

Trowbridge, Phineas

Tryal
(ship)

chase, battle, and capture of

as
Dichosa

rebellion and deception

reward money

sale of surviving rebels

trial and executions

Turner, Charles

United States

abolition

Civil War

colonial era

economy

expansionism

Revolutionary War

Second Great Awakening

slavery

South

United States
(ship)

Uruguay

Valdivia

Valdivia, Pedro de

Valparaiso

Van Doren, Carl

Venezuela

Venus

Veracruz

Vesey, Denmark

Villagrán, Francisco de

Virginia

Voltaire

Wallace, James

Wallace, Robert

Wampanoags

Warren
(ship)

Washington, George

Webster, Daniel

West African slavery.
See
slavery; Spanish American slavery;
specific countries

Weston, Ezra (King Caesar)

whaling

Whittier, John Greenleaf, “The Slave Ships”

Wilentz, Amy

Williams, Stanley

Wolof

slave revolt

women, black

as adornments

concubines

Tryal

as wet nurses

Wood, Gordon

Wordsworth, William

yellow fever

Yucatan

Zong
(ship)

ALSO BY GREG GRANDIN

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City

Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War

The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

G
REG
G
RANDIN
is the author of
Fordlandia
, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, in the United Kingdom, the James Tate Black Prize, as well as
Empire’s Workshop
and
The Last Colonial Massacre
. A professor of history at New York University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and, most recently, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, where he was the Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History. Grandin has served on the UN Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan civil war and has written for the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Nation
, the
London Review of Books
,
New Statesman
, and the
New York Times
.

THE EMPIRE OF NECESSITY. Copyright © 2014 by Greg Grandin. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.henryholt.com

Jacket design by Rick Pracher

Jacket image: François-Auguste Biard,
Slaves on the West Coast of Africa, c. 1833,
© Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library

e-ISBN 978-1-4299-4317-8

First Edition: January 2014

*
Neither Spanish American merchants, when they called for more “liberty” and “more free trade,” nor the Crown, when in response to those calls it deregulated the economy, tended to invoke the idea of individual rights. Rather, they used the language of “utility,” of achieving a greater “good,” as needed to increase the prosperity of the empire. Spanish theologians did recognize that individuals possessed what they called a
fuero interno
, a realm of inner sovereignty, and they even had come to believe, as did English-speaking Protestant religious thinkers and philosophers, that the pursuit of personal gain could generate public virtue. But the Crown didn’t accept the subversive natural-law idea that individual self-interest was itself a virtue.

*
There was a similar relationship between fashion and subversion in the United States. On November 17, 1793, a fire that started in the backyard stables of the Albany home of Leonard Gansevoort, Herman Melville’s great-uncle, nearly burned Albany to the ground. It was part of a rash of arsons (including another one in the barn of Peter Gansevoort, Melville’s Revolutionary War hero grandfather) blamed on slaves who, some of Albany’s Dutch gentry feared, were inspired by the Haitian Revolution. The police arrested a slave named Pompey as the conspiracy’s leader. They never found out his true motive, but they were sure he was guilty not just of arson but of another transgression: he liked nice clothing. During the hard years of the American Revolution, Albany dressed gray on gray, as wartime austerity reinforced the Dutch merchant gentry’s staid reputation. Cut off from trade, families weaved their own drab linsey-woolseys. But when the fighting stopped, ships again came up the Hudson carrying “rich silks, satins, and broad-cloths.” “Colors of the rainbow took the place of the sombre brown and the heavy black previously worn by females, while blue, pea green and scarlet broad-cloths were selected by the males for dress coats.” Just as Spaniards accused “blacks, mulattos, Indians and mestizos” of stealing to dress better than their birth, the Albany slave Pompey was accused of robbing money from his mistress to buy “what he desired in the way of dress.” He was said to be “foppish,” a “gay fellow among the wenches” who hoped to “imitate in dress those who mingled in a different society.” His name even changed with the times. Instead of the neoclassical Pompey (his first master, like other slavers of his day, apparently had taken to reading the 1770 English edition of
Plutarch’s Lives
), he went by the frolicsome Pomp. At some point before the fire, Pomp, having fled to Manhattan, was caught “parading” on Broadway “wearing a bright red cloth coat, cut in the prevailing fashion, adorned with gilt buttons.” He was captured and returned to Albany. Later, Pomp, along with two other slaves convicted on the charge of arson—Bet, a sixteen-year-old girl and the property of Herman Melville’s cousin Philip van Rensselaer, and Dinah, a fourteen-year-old girl and the slave of another Melville relative, Volkert Douw—were executed, hung from an elm tree not far from Melville’s grandfather’s Albany mansion.

*
“Free trade” is often thought of as a removal of the government from the economy. But Spain’s deregulation of slavery actually made the treatment of slaves within its colonies more of a public policy problem; as the trade and the ownership of slaves became more widespread, no one person, class, or company could be held accountable for its excesses. In tandem with the liberalization of slavery came a series of laws and decrees regulating slave hygiene, slave burial, slave punishment, and slave education.

*
Africans were the primary victims of smallpox in the New World. But they also played a crucial role in its eradication. In 1803, after his daughter died from the disease, Spain’s King Carlos IV ordered its vaccine (a practical version had been recently fabricated by the British) to be disseminated throughout his dominion. Francisco Xavier de Balmis, the doctor who headed the royal expedition appointed to carry out the task, decided it was best to transport the vaccine live. Twenty-two foundlings aged three to nine were boarded on a ship: doctors made a small incision on the arms of two of them and inserted a mixture of lymph and pus, which after a few days produced the pustules that would provide the material to vaccinate the next two boys. The procedure was repeated until the ship reached America. Once there, the foundlings were feted and praised, laid at the foot of church altars, and adopted by the king himself as “special children of the country.” But Balmis’s team didn’t have the funds to cover all of Spanish America. It turned to the one institution that already reached across the far-flung realm: slavery. In Havana, Balmis bought four young slave girls, whom he used to send the vaccine to the Yucatan (once they performed their service, the two girls were sold). At first, slaves were sent on journeys specifically organized to transport the vaccine. But as time passed, it became easier just to use already established commercial routes, sending the vaccine “arm to arm of the blacks” who were being shipped as cargo. Portugal had from the beginning relied on African slaves to get the vaccine across the Atlantic, sending it to Brazil in the arms of seven enslaved children. It was then taken to Río de la Plata in a shipment of thirty-eight vaccinated slaves who were to be sold in Montevideo. An African woman “with pustules in perfect development” carried the vaccine to Buenos Aires. And from there, slaves took the “miracle discovery”—which made slavery much more profitable for slavers—through the rest of Argentina, over the Andes, and into Chile. Interestingly, before the Spanish began to disseminate the vaccine through the arms of orphans and slaves, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt reported that young African slaves and Native American cow herders on the slopes of the Andes knew that exposure to the tubercles of cow udders protected them from the pox. Africans and Indians, Humboldt said, “display great sagacity in observing the character, habits, and diseases of the animals with which they live.”