Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

l i v e r p o ol a n d t r a n sat l a n t ic s l av e ry

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery Edited by David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS NATIONAL MUSEUMS LIVERPOOL HISTORIC SOCIETY OF LANCASHIRE AND CHESHIRE

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To the memory of Roger Anstey and Paul Hair

First published 2007 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Board of Trustees of National Museums Liverpool William Brown Street Liverpool L3 8EN Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Department of History and Archaeology University of Chester Parkgate Road Chester CH1 4BJ Copyright © 2007 Liverpool University Press, Board of Trustees of National Museums Liverpool and the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978–1–84631–066–9 cased Designed and typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound in the European Union by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

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Contents

Preface Notes on Contributors

vii ix

Introduction David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles

1



1 Liverpool’s Dominance in the British Slave Trade, 1740–1807 14 Kenneth Morgan



2 African Agency and the Liverpool Slave Trade Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson

43



3 Human Capital in the British Slave Trade Stephen D. Behrendt

66



4 Liverpool’s Slave Trade to the Colonial Chesapeake: Slaving on the Periphery Lorena S. Walsh

98



5 The Liverpool Slave Trade, Lancaster and its Environs Melinda Elder



6 The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Ethnicities in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica Trevor Burnard

138

7 The Wealth and Social Aspirations of Liverpool’s Slave Merchants of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century David Pope

164

8 ‘Cemented by the Blood of a Negro’? The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool Jane Longmore

227





118



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9 Commerce, Civilization and Christianity: The Development of the Sierra Leone Company 252 Suzanne Schwarz

10 Abolitionism in Liverpool Brian Howman

277

Index

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Preface

T

h e essays in this volume were originally presented at the international conference on Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in October 2005. The conference was jointly organized by the editors on behalf of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire and National Museums Liverpool. The inspiration for the conference was the influential book Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition edited by Roger Anstey and Paul Hair in 1976.1 This volume brought together a collection of papers that constituted the result of recent research by the contributors, but it also formed an important overall summary of Liverpool’s role in the trade. While it remains a major contribution to the subject (and remarkably is still in print), we felt that it was an appropriate time to re-examine the advances in research on the subject in the intervening period. The approach of the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007 and the development of the International Slavery Museum by National Museums Liverpool made it a particularly apposite moment in which to reflect upon Liverpool’s role in transatlantic slavery. The Anstey and Hair volume derived from a seminar held at the School of History at the University of Liverpool in May 1974; it seemed appropriate to follow this pattern and bring together a group of scholars to discuss recent developments in research. The original seminar comprised only scholars very largely based in Britain,2 but given Liverpool’s overall importance in the trade and the amount of work and interest internationally, we cast our net more widely. The conference attracted over 160 delegates and both it and this publication have benefited hugely from this wider involvement. Some 21 papers were delivered in six half-day sessions and topics included memorialization and representation, abolition and identity, African agency and the economic and social impact on Liverpool. We felt it was important to bring coherence to the volume rather than produce a published record of the whole conference. We have thus chosen ten papers which

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seem to us to encompass the principal aspects that informed Liverpool’s involvement in transatlantic slavery and which also show it within the wider context of change in Africa and the Caribbean. As with our predecessors, we have included one paper not given at the conference, but which seemed to provide an important additional aspect not otherwise covered in the papers. We hope that by doing so we have produced an overview of the current state of research which can stand alongside the Anstey and Hair volume. The original conference was made possible by the financial support of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire and the support of National Museums Liverpool in providing the venue and the design and production of promotional material. Graeme Milne (University of Liverpool) and Rachel Mulhearn (NML) assisted in the organization of the conference and Sally Berry and Nataly Jones (both of NML) in its administration. Members of the Historic Society’s Council, particularly Diane Ascott, provided additional help during the conference. We are grateful to all our contributors for readily agreeing to publication of their papers and for complying with all our demands as editors. We would also like to thank the staff of Liverpool University Press for ­enthusiastically supporting the publication. David Richardson Suzanne Schwarz Anthony Tibbles Notes

1. Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, 2 (Liverpool, 1976). A second and enlarged edition of the volume was published in 1989. 2. The publication included two essays later commissioned from scholars working in the United States.

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Notes on Contributors

Stephen D. Behrendt  is Senior Lecturer in History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.  He now is finishing a book with John Latham and David Northrup on eighteenth-century Old Calabar (Nigeria) history.  He also is working on a Liverpool shipping database (currently 29,000 voyages) to help write a maritime history of the port, 1750–1815. Trevor Burnard  teaches at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite 1691–1776 (Routledge, 2002) and Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and many articles on early America, the West Indies and the Atlantic World. He is working on a joint project on eighteenth-century Saint Domingue and Jamaica as well as a history of Kingston, Jamaica. Melinda Elder  is an Associate Lecturer with the Open University in the North West of England. She has a long-standing interest in the transatlantic trade of North West England and is author of The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth-Century Lancaster (Ryburn Press, 1992). Her current research interests include the organization of Lancaster’s colonial trade in the West Indies. Brian Howman  is a social and political historian, whose specific academic interests include the slave abolition movement, early industrial society and political activity amongst the non-elite. He is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Communication Studies at the University of Chester. Jane Longmore  was recently appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Southampton Solent University. Born and educated in Wallasey, she read Modern History at Oxford University and gained her doctorate from the University of Reading. Her recent publications include ‘Civic Liverpool: 1680–1800’, in John Belchem (ed.), Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History (Liverpool University Press, 2006) and ‘The Urban Renaissance in Liverpool 1769–1800’, in Elizabeth Barker and Alex Kidson (eds), Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool (Yale University Press, 2007). She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Paul E. Lovejoy  is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of

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Canada and holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History. He is currently Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and is also Research Professor, University of Hull in England. He has published more than twenty books on African history and African Diaspora studies. Kenneth Morgan  is Professor of History at Brunel University, West London, where he is a member of the Centre for American, Transatlantic and Caribbean History (CATCH). His research and publications focus on the history of Britain and her colonies, and on music history. His recent books include Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet (University of Illinois Press, 2005) and Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (Oxford University Press, 2007). David Pope  is an honorary research fellow at Liverpool Hope University where he formerly taught in the History Department.  His main research interest is Liverpool’s mercantile and ship-owning community in the second half of the eighteenth century.  He has published articles on its Catholic members in North West Catholic History and Recusant History. David Richardson  is Professor of Economic History and Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, the University of Hull. He is co-author of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM, published by Cambridge University Press (1999), an enlarged and revised edition of which is now available online at www.slavevoyages.com. Suzanne Schwarz  is Professor of History at Liverpool Hope University. She is the editor of Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2008). Her current research interests focus on the Sierra Leone Company in the late eighteenth century and the strategies developed by leading abolitionists to undermine the slave trade from within Africa. She was President of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire between 2003 and 2006, and is currently the Publicity Officer for this Society. Tony Tibbles  is Director of Merseyside Maritime Museum, National Museums Liverpool. He was the project leader for the Museum’s Transatlantic Slavery Gallery and led the content team for the new International Slavery Museum. He has written and lectured on the interpretation of transatlantic slavery and has acted as an adviser to slavery-related projects in the UK, Senegal and the USA. Lorena S. Walsh  is a research historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Her publications include From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville, VA, 1997); ‘The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African Origins, and Some Implications’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 58 (2001), 139–70; and ‘Motives of Honour, Pleasure, and Profitt’: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).

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Introduction Liverpool, the African Slave Trade and Abolition Thirty Years On David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles

T

h e publication i n 1976 of a collection of essays under the title Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition, edited by Roger Anstey and Paul Hair, both sadly now deceased, was an important contribution to the historiography on the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition. The fact that Britain was among the leading eighteenth-century slave trading nations, with Liverpool in the vanguard, and that from the 1780s she was also in the forefront of abolitionism inevitably gave peculiar significance to the volume. But these were not the only factors to give the volume such significance. The essays it contained were also instrumental in shaping some of the most important debates on the British slave trade and its abolition over the following two decades. For example, the essay by the late Marion Johnson highlighted the role of African agency in the slave trade, an issue that has since become a major theme in the historiography on the slave trade more generally.1 Similarly, the one by Seymour Drescher foreshadowed his subsequent iconoclastic and highly contentious assault on theories that linked British abolitionism to the belief that the value of the West Indian slave system to Britain was in decline before 1807.2 Other essays in the volume were equally important in provoking continuing debates over other issues relating to the slave trade, including its profitability and the causes of shipboard slave mortality.3 Few collections of essays have been at the centre of historical debate on the slave trade as that so modestly edited some three decades ago by Roger Anstey and Paul Hair, themselves not inconsiderable contributors to our understanding of the slave trade and British abolition, as well as European encounters with Africa and Africans in the age of transatlantic slavery.

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Historical writing is often shaped by the preoccupations of the age in which it is written. Anstey and Hair recognized that their edited collection was no exception. They noted that the upsurge of interest in the slave trade at that time derived from ‘changing global power dispositions’, a reference, among other things perhaps, to the American civil rights movement and to decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, the former linked to the racial nature of transatlantic slavery and the latter to the consequences of the global encounters between Europeans and others after Columbus, important components of which were the Atlantic slave trade and later the Scramble for Africa. Recognizing that the history of the slave trade was itself highly contested and controversial, Anstey and Hair also expressed their conviction that a clinical approach to the human past is of more lasting value than an emotive or passionate one. In doing so, they were doubtless mindful of the so-called ‘Cliometric revolution’, with its emphasis on social science modelling and quantification, that was sweeping through US historiography in the 1960s and 1970s, with antebellum US slavery a key testing ground of such methodologies.4 They were perhaps mindful, too, of the application of development theory, some of it pioneered in the Caribbean, to the study of British history as well as to Africa’s past and contemporary life.5 Though they conceded that the essays in the volume did not provide a definitive history of the Liverpool slave trade and British abolition, they were probably right in claiming that they did provide a moderately comprehensive guide to the then emergent approaches to the study of slavery and abolition and to the contemporary state of knowledge on certain aspects of them. A listing of some of the contributors to the volume – Seymour Drescher, Stanley Engerman, Marion Johnson, Herbert Klein, Walter Minchinton, David Richardson, and even Roger Anstey himself – underlines their claim that their volume offered a good selection of clinical approaches to the study of Liverpool and slavery. Some contributions also helped to establish the parameters within which subsequent debates on slavery would be conducted, especially in the British context, a clear testimony to the perspicacity of Anstey and Hair as editors of the volume. Thirty years on, the intellectual and political climate within which the study of the slave trade now takes place has, of course, changed remarkably. Whereas in the early 1970s the application of the computer to historical work was still in its infancy, in the last two decades computers have transformed not only data collection but also analysis in history and other disciplines. Nowhere is this more evident than in the study of the slave trade and slavery, where the compilation of large-scale, multi-source international datasets has revolutionized our shared knowledge base and also our capacity to discern what Bernard Bailyn described some years

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Introduction 

ago as the ‘latent events’ or long-run trends and patterns of history.6 The application of quantitative methods to the study of the slave trade, while not universally applauded, has progressed hand in glove with the spread of information technology, allowing levels of specification of trends in slaving activities and their geographical parameters unimaginable just a few years ago. If quantification has been one hallmark of slave-trade research, so increasingly has been a new emphasis on human agency and the cultural context within which slaving activities as well as abolitionism developed. These tendencies have been rooted in intellectual challenges to development and structural theory from post-modernism that have privileged agency over structure as well as renewed interest in the institutional and cultural frameworks within which economic behaviour occurs.7 They are reinforced by a growing preoccupation of those researching in the humanities and social sciences with issues of identity. These issues, in turn, have assumed unparalleled significance in an era of unprecedented remixing of peoples of different cultural and ethnic origin and of advances in science, notably genetics, which, together with documentary and other sources, hold out the possibility of tracing the ancestral homelands of the descendants of peoples forcibly removed from their place of birth.8 In addition to deploying datasets and quantification to establish and explain the broad global and regional contours of slaving activities, historians are now equally – and perhaps increasingly – aware of the particular or the specific and with the cultural and human context and legacies of the triangular trade. Such awareness is reflected in studies of the cultural boundaries of slaving and abolitionism and the impact of slave resistance on the same; in the resurgence in scholarly interest in slave biographies; and in the fascination of historians with the ethnicity, skills and heritage of the enslaved and their impact in shaping American plantation societies.9 These twin and, in many respects, mutually reinforcing tendencies in scholarship on the slave trade are reflected in the essays in this volume. With the exception of the contributions of Schwarz and Howman, which focus on issues of abolition, all the essays have a strong quantitative component. Several draw on a slave voyage dataset (or later manifestations of the same) first published in 1999 and others, notably those by Trevor Burnard and David Pope, on datasets compiled independently from other sources.10 In this respect, this volume builds on the quantitative elements of the earlier collection edited by Anstey and Hair, now enriched by the growth in capacity to compile and analyse large volumes of quantifiable data made possible by advances in computing and information technology in the last two decades. While this new collection of essays retains strong quantitative elements, it also gives greater prominence to the human dimensions of the slave

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trade than did that of Anstey and Hair, where, with few exceptions, human agency, whether on the part of the enslaved or their captors, figured only modestly in the stories that contributors sought to tell. In this collection, Burnard’s study of slave sales in Jamaica sheds some light on the circumstances that affected the processes of adjustment by survivors of the Middle Passage to life in the Americas, but otherwise the stories of the enslaved remain largely conspicuous by their absence. There is, however, a substantial amount of information about those who ran the slave trade out of Liverpool, including their trading networks and their partners in Africa and the Americas, and about what those who profited from the trade elected to do with their gains. In this respect, therefore, the new volume offers a rather more rounded, even if still incomplete, picture of the relationship between personal action, social capital and international commercial opportunities in shaping the economic and social history of Liverpool in the eighteenth century. This claim is endorsed by a review of the essays in this volume, which broadly fall into two groups. The first, comprising the essays by Morgan, Lovejoy and Richardson, Behrendt, Walsh, and Elder, focuses on issues relating to the organization and efficiency of the Liverpool slave trade. In the process they offer some insights into how Liverpool came to dominate the British slave trade. The second comprises the essays by Burnard, Pope, Longmore, Schwarz, and Howman, and focuses on the human and social outcomes of the slave trade, including opposition to it. In varying degrees, each contribution reminds us of the interplay between human agency and social forces in shaping historical development. Among the contributions on the economics of the Liverpool slave trade, Morgan’s is the most wide-ranging. His essay focuses on the period after 1740, by which time Liverpool’s presence in the Atlantic slave trade was already well established. Indeed, by 1740, Liverpool traders had already overtaken London merchants in slave trafficking and were on the verge of wresting ascendancy in the trade from their other rivals in Bristol. Thereafter, Liverpool traders exerted increasing dominance in British slaving activities through to their abolition in 1807. This is reflected in the port’s traders’ share of slave arrivals in different markets in the Americas, a point on which Morgan places much emphasis. Morgan does not seek, however, to address what for some remains a critical and as yet unresolved question, namely, how Liverpool traders found themselves by 1740 in the position of being able to challenge their more established and wealthier southern rivals for control of British slave-trading. This remains a contentious issue, though the range of possible factors that contributed to this outcome may be shrinking. Relative to their rivals, for example, Liverpool traders do not seem to have established before 1760 any clear advantages in productivity in

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Introduction 

shipping slaves, though a pre-1730 gap in productivity between Bristol and Liverpool ships seems to have been narrowing.11 Explanations of Liverpool’s emerging ascendancy in the slave trade in 1730–60, therefore, probably lie in factors other than efficiency in carrying slaves, a conclusion to which Morgan’s essay offers some corroboration. For Morgan, the factors that explain Liverpool’s dominance of the slave trade after 1740 were largely local and regional, as well as financial, with some acknowledgement of the enterprise of the town’s merchant community added for good measure. Whatever combination of factors one chooses – and the list may be longer than Morgan claims – it is surely right to emphasize that no single explanation exists for Liverpool’s rise to prominence in, or its subsequent dominance of, the British slave trade. Other essays in this collection draw our attention to other factors that allowed Liverpool to dominate the British slave trade. Lovejoy and Richardson focus on the pattern of Liverpool’s slave trade in Africa across the eighteenth century, in the process highlighting the unusual geographical distribution of the port’s activities in Africa and how this not only increased the scale of direct Afro-European commercial relations but also the efficiency with which such relations were managed as the eighteenth century progressed. As latecomers to the slave trade, Liverpool merchants expanded their activities by concentrating their trade at parts of the African coast previously largely neglected by most other trading groups. Specifically, this involved loading exceptionally high proportions of slaves at Bight of Biafran ports such as Old Calabar and Bonny and, after 1750, at a number of trading places in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast. Trade with such regions may have entailed exceptional risks, not least in the Bight of Biafra, where no resident European trading infrastructure existed and where expanding trade depended therefore on building commercial relations with local merchants. Lovejoy and Richardson document how, by adapting local institutions and political practices, stable commercial relations were built, enabling in the process Old Calabar and, above all, Bonny – places often considered by contemporaries as fatal to Europeans – to emerge as two of the major and most efficient suppliers of slaves in the eighteenth century. Liverpudlians were not the only merchants to benefit from such connections, for Bristol traders also traded heavily with the same region, but, in tandem with other factors, the trading alliances that Liverpool merchants forged with the Bight of Biafra contributed substantially to Liverpool’s success as a slave port. Bonny also figures prominently in the story that Stephen Behrendt tells of the human capital – defined here as the experience and skills of the waged personnel that manned ships – involved in building and sustaining Liverpool’s pre-eminence in the British slave trade. Important to Behrendt’s

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story is the distinction between fort-based and ship-based trade in Africa, where resident Europeans played an important part as middlemen in the former, and shipmasters and their officers in directing coastal business in the latter. In an analysis that echoes the findings of Lovejoy and Richardson, Behrendt argues that ship trade was much more important to Liverpool traders than to London ones and, in turn, depended on the availability on Merseyside of well trained mariners, experienced in the intricacies of trade in different African localities. A ready supply of such labour skills enabled local Liverpool merchants to turn around ships quickly and in accordance with the seasonal needs of trade in African venues, thereby giving Liverpool merchants a comparative advantage in slaving activities. Behrendt supports his argument by reminding us that London and Bristol traders contemplating trade with ports in Africa where ship-based activities predominated drew on skilled personnel from Liverpool. He further reinforces it by a comparative analysis of muster rolls for slave ships leaving Bristol, London and Liverpool, which reveals that Liverpool ships enlisted noticeably higher proportions of crew from local places of abode than those leaving Bristol and London. Behrendt’s essay thus adds to the list of local factors noted by Morgan that helped to consolidate Liverpool’s leadership in the British slave trade from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. The essays by Walsh and Elder suggest that other forms of capital – in their case, social capital in the form of networks and associated connections – proved important in enabling Liverpool to gain a foothold in the slave trade before 1750 and thereafter to draw on additional sources of investment to sustain its command over the trade. Walsh focuses on the Liverpool slave trade to the Chesapeake, a region that, she reminds us, was always largely peripheral to the town’s slaving activities. Overall, fewer than 20 per cent of all slave voyages from Africa to the Chesapeake originated in Liverpool, a much lower proportion than Liverpool’s total share of the slave trade. Moreover, few Liverpool slave ships made more than a single voyage to the Chesapeake. Walsh ascribes this situation to the competition for labour in other markets in British America and to the fact that, because slaves began to reproduce in Maryland and Virginia from the 1740s, if not earlier, relative to other markets demand for imported slaves peaked early in the Chesapeake and before Liverpool emerged as the principal British slave port. Nevertheless, despite these handicaps, Liverpool traders made significant headway in meeting demand for imported slaves in the tobacco colonies. In seeking explanations for this, Walsh relates Liverpool’s involvement in slave imports into the Chesapeake to its wider participation in the region’s other trades, and identifies, in particular, a close correlation between Liverpool involvement in tobacco and naval stores exports from Virginia, on the one hand, and imports of enslaved Africans and white indentured or convict

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labour on the other. This correlation was especially noticeable before 1748, when Liverpool families such as the Cunliffes and the Gildarts developed particularly strong commercial ties with Virginia. Liverpool’s entry into the Chesapeake slave trade was thus built on networks forged through earlier bilateral trade links. After 1748, these linkages withered – and the scale of Liverpool’s slave imports into the Chesapeake fell away for this and other reasons – as the integration of tobacco and slave trades weakened, in part because of competition from Glasgow and Whitehaven in the tobacco trade and in part because of growing difficulties in synchronizing slave ship arrivals with the harvest season for Chesapeake crops. Where Walsh alerts us to the importance of relating slaving activities to the wider patterns of transatlantic trade, notably in crops produced by slave labour, Elder highlights the relationship between investment in the slave trade and the hinterland of slave ports in Britain. In the case of Liverpool, attention has been given to links between the port and other regions in Britain, including the West Midlands and London. But Elder follows the late Eunice and Maurice Schofield in reminding us, too, of the involvement of capital and people from north Lancashire, Furness and the Lake District in the Liverpool slave trade.12 Lancaster and several other ports in northwest England outside Liverpool emerged as occasional and sometimes quite regular participants in the slave trade. But while recognizing this, Elder is also keen to draw attention to the migration of people and capital from such areas directly into the Liverpool slave trade itself. Indeed, a not insignificant part of Liverpool’s expansion in slaving activities in 1750–75 was financed and in other ways supported, according to Elder, by a movement of people from several slave trade investment ‘hotspots’ north of the town. Prominent among those involved in activities of this type were Miles Barber, John Bolton, John and Thomas Hodgson, and James Penny. Significantly, earlier associations between such men based on place of birth and upbringing provided the foundation upon which their Liverpool-centred slave-trading partnerships were built. Personal connections like these even stretched to the West Indies, where individuals born at places in north-west England outside Liverpool set up as slave factors. Equally significantly, the flows of capital and people from north of Liverpool into the town’s slave trade ultimately moved in both directions, as migrant capitalists to the town tended to retire with their gains from slavery to their places of birth, where they sometimes built new estates. Elder’s essay thus complements that of Behrendt in showing how the Liverpool slave trade drew on the capital and human resources of an expanding hinterland, while also anticipating some of the findings of David Pope, whose essay in this volume, to be discussed shortly, focuses on how wealth generated by the Liverpool slave trade was reinvested into the wider community.

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In any analysis of the social and economic consequences of the slave trade, its impact on the lives of the enslaved Africans deported from their homelands has rightly attracted considerable investigation. Central to such investigations have been the demographic implications of the slave trade – an issue only tangentially touched upon by the essays in this volume, but the subject of considerable ongoing research – and the degree to which Africans who survived the trauma of the Middle Passage were able to draw on their own heritage in rebuilding their lives in exile. The last is the subject of Burnard’s essay in this volume. His study focuses on the experiences of late seventeenth-century forced African migrants to Jamaica, victims of British slaving long before Liverpool traders entered the business, but his findings parallel to some extent those of related studies he has undertaken based on eighteenth-century records.13 The new study, based on planter inventories for the period 1674–90 when the Royal African Company dominated British slaving, suggests that while there was some ethnic grouping of slaves on ships leaving Africa, the processes of slave sales on arrival in the Americas ensured that there was considerable – indeed almost random – mixing of slaves on plantations in Jamaica. The ensuing heterogeneity in the ethnic composition of slave plantation populations was further increased, according to Burnard, by ongoing turnover in populations caused by changes in ownership of plantations. Burnard does not deny that slaves of similar ethnic backgrounds could or did come together on American plantations, but his analysis inclines him, nevertheless, to challenge those who have argued in favour of cultural continuities between Africa and the Americas and to lean towards interpretations, such as those of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, that place the emphasis on the trauma of the Middle Passage and the discontinuity of African experiences in the diaspora.14 While Burnard does not go so far as to see transatlantic slavery as a form of ‘social death’, he does nonetheless paint a more atomized and dehumanized picture of slave plantation life than that portrayed by some other recent commentators. The portrait created by Burnard contrasts sharply, as one might expect in a business where the power relationships between slaves and their owners were so polarized, with that drawn by Pope of the social aspirations of late eighteenth-century Liverpool slave traders. As Pope notes, though claims are often made about the fortunes made by slave traders and the relationship of such fortunes to British economic growth, the social origins of Liverpool slave traders, the wealth they garnered from slave trafficking, and how they reinvested such wealth are all subjects hitherto largely neglected by historians. Pope seeks to redress this neglect by tracing the careers and lives of the largest known 201 investors in the Liverpool slave trade in 1750–99. He focuses in particular on patterns of wealth accumulation and investment in real and personal property, as well as various indicators

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of social aspiration such as investments in marriage and in the education of offspring. This represents a mammoth and as yet incomplete exercise. Nevertheless, Pope’s findings to date suggest that most traders came from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, with surprisingly large numbers from rural backgrounds and from localities some distance from Liverpool. Some accumulated through trade very large personal and real property holdings, and many others created fortunes sufficient to enable them to migrate from town-centre to suburban locations, to acquire estates outside Liverpool, and to live in comparative comfort. These indicators of upward social mobility were reinforced by building alliances through marriage with the professional middle class and the gentry and by the enrolment of sons at Oxbridge. Pope is at pains to stress that the experiences of slave traders varied widely, as did the proportion of the wealth they gained directly from the slave trade. But the picture he begins to draw is one of physical as well as inter-generational upward social mobility rooted ultimately in the exploitation of enslaved Africans. The contrast between the findings of Burnard’s and Pope’s essays could hardly be sharper. Whereas Pope explores the relationship between slave-based wealth and the personal and social ambitions of Liverpool merchants, Jane Longmore focuses on how involvement in the slave trade affected Liverpool’s history more broadly. Taking her lead from an early nineteenth-century actor who, when hissed by his Liverpool audience, riposted with the charge that every brick in the building of its town was cemented ‘by the blood of a negro’, Longmore challenges claims made by contemporaries, as well as by historians, that investment by the town’s eighteenth-century merchant community in ‘cultural capital’ such as theatres and literary societies, or in local medical facilities and other charitable activities, was motivated by its conscience over slave trafficking. Nor, despite the fact that Liverpool’s population grew almost fifteen-fold in the eighteenth century, does she find much evidence that, other than in trade recessions, slave merchants were much inclined to invest in residential construction, though she does acknowledge that they invested substantial sums in their own real estate. Instead, Longmore argues, when slave traders did invest in activities other than in new ventures, they did so in local industrial, shipbuilding and port facilities. She documents a number of such enterprises, in the process claiming that such investments helped to build a strong local economy, with a mix of industry, commerce, and finance and ‘a multi-occupational structure’. In this respect, Longmore seems to confirm that the enterprise shown by Liverpool merchants in slave-trading spilled over into the local economy. Significantly, too, Longmore argues, the balance between industry and trade, which sustained Liverpool’s eighteenth-century economic growth, seems to have been eroded in the following years as local industry decayed

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and the town became a ‘more monolithic seaport’, serving the needs of other industrial centres. Longmore speculates on why this happened, and in doing so invites historians to consider how far the ending of the slave trade, which, she believes, created before 1807 employment for up to one in eight Liverpool families, contributed to this long-run restructuring of the town’s domestic economy. Whatever the merits of Longmore’s concluding argument, the essays by Schwarz and Howman make it clear that, even in the slave-trading capital of Europe, economic self-interest could not prevent some from voicing opposition to slavery and the slave trade from the mid-1780s onward. In a wide-ranging review of the fortunes of the Sierra Leone Company before it became a Crown possession in 1808, Schwarz notes that among its 2,000 shareholders were at least two Liverpool names, William Rathbone and John Yates. Both were prepared, like their fellow supporters, to underwrite financially the company’s goals of introducing an ethical dimension into British commercial relations with Africa and, in the process, challenging at their African roots the foundations of American plantation societies. Schwarz traces the Company’s origins, the economic and social strategies devised by its architects, who included some of the leading abolitionists of the time, and the factors that contributed to its failure as a privately funded project. Among the last, she highlights resentment among black immigrants into the colony at abolitionist attempts to impose their own moral values on colonists’ lifestyles, the colony’s dependence on local African ethnic groups for protection, and, ultimately, its reliance on African slave-based food supplies to sustain it. In highlighting such problems, Schwarz exposes issues underlying the Company’s failure that have even wider significance. The failure of the Company to generate viable free labour cash crops such as sugar and coffee, and thereby make it self-sustaining, underlines Seymour Drescher’s recent claims about the continuing robustness of American slavery in the face of free labour alternatives through to and beyond 1807.15 At the same time, Schwarz’s emphasis on the naivety of investors in Sierra Leone in failing to understand the realities of economic life in Africa serves to underline how well in previous centuries Liverpool and other slave traders had come to understand those realities, and to adapt creatively to them, without seeking to impose their own ideological assumptions on their African trading partners.16 If Schwarz’s essay is consistent with recent work on labour ideology and performance after 1780, as well as with the importance of the local cultural and social context in looking at Afro-European exchange, Howman’s essay on Liverpool abolitionists sits equally comfortably with recent general approaches to British abolitionism. Specifically, his emphasis on the surge of abolitionism in the town in 1788, on its inter-class and trans-gender basis,

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Introduction

11

and on its ties to individual agency and literary outputs, makes Liverpool in 1787–1807 a microcosm of wider national trends and a precursor, as he notes, of an even larger local anti-slavery movement from the 1820s onward. Howman argues that support for abolition in the town before 1807 has been largely under-estimated. It is an opinion with which the late Frank Sanderson, who contributed an essay on Liverpool abolitionism to the volume edited by Anstey and Hair, would have concurred.17 That said, Howman also notes the tensions between radical and more conservative strands of Liverpool abolitionist arguments from the late 1780s. He argues that this, together with the scale of Liverpool’s economic dependence on slavery, probably accounts for the fact that Liverpool was one of the few major British towns not to organize a petitioning campaign against the slave trade before 1807. Moreover, lest one should think that the election of the staunch abolitionist, William Roscoe, as an MP for Liverpool in 1806 signalled a local change of heart over the slave trade, Howman suggests that Roscoe bribed his way to victory and emphasizes that he lost his seat in the election following his vote for slave trade abolition in 1807. Liverpool may have been home to some abolitionists, but in the slave-trading capital of Europe, humanitarianism towards Africans evidently carried personal and social risks and participation in its delivery came with a high price tag. In sum, this collection of essays on Liverpool, the African slave trade and abolition, published in the bicentenary year of the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, offers much new information about, as well as fresh interpretation of, Liverpool’s involvement in transatlantic slavery; of the benefits its population derived from this activity, as well as its costs to enslaved Africans; and of the rise of opposition to the slave trade from the 1780s. In noting how, even in Liverpool, opposition to the slave trade grew, the essays also remind us of the gains Liverpudlians – and Britons more generally – made from enslaving and transporting Africans to the Americas. In pursuing such themes, the essays draw on a wide range of historical sources, many of them embodied in new datasets. In terms of interpretation, almost without exception the essays privilege human agency in shaping historical events and trends while paying due regard to the wider context within which Liverpool’s association with the slave trade and abolition took place. In these respects, the essays reflect wider trends in the historiography of transatlantic slavery. They also suggest that research on the relationship between Liverpool, the slave trade and abolition still continues to fascinate historians as much as it did when Anstey and Hair published their volume of essays on the same subjects. To echo one of their remarks, there remain many questions to answer and much research to be done. But insofar as their volume helped to stimulate further research by new generations of scholars, the essays in this new

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collection bear ample testimony to the foresight of Anstey and Hair and, indeed, to their continuing influence thirty years on. Notes

1. Most notably perhaps in John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge, 1992), and among others more recently in James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the AfricanPortuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005). 2. On the so-called decline theory, see L. J. Ragatz, The Decline of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean 1763–1833 (New York, 1928), and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944), chapters 7–9. Drescher’s assault on the theory appeared in Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977). This, in turn, prompted a vigorous rebuttal from some historians that continues to this day; see, for example David Beck Ryden, ‘Does Decline Make Sense? The West Indian Economy and the Abolition of the British Slave Trade’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXI (2001), 347–74; Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the British Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville, FL, 2002). 3. On profits see, for example, two recent articles by Guillaume Daudin, ‘Comment Calculer les Profits de la Traite’, Outre-Mer: Revue d’Histoire, 336–37 (2002), 43–62; and ‘Profitability of Slave and Long-Distance Trading in Context: The Case of Eighteenth-Century France’, Journal of Economic History, 64 (2004), 144–71, and the sources cited therein. On slave mortality see Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Explaining the Decline in Mortality in the Eighteenth Century British Slave Trade’, Economic History Review, 53 (2000), 262–83, and the sources cited therein. 4. Most famously in A. H. Conrad and J. R. Meyer, ‘The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South’, Journal of Political Economy, LXVI (1958), 95–130; and Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974). See also Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: the Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989). 5. W. A. Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (London, 1955); Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1959); A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973). 6. On Bernard Bailyn’s comment, see his ‘The Challenge of Modern Historiography’, American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 1–24. The largest single published dataset relating to the slave trade is David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). A revised and enlarged on-line version of this database is now available at www.slavevoyages.com. 7. On the latter, see, among other things, Lance E. Davis and Douglass C. North, Institutional Change and American Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1971); Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York, 1985); Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge, 2006). 8. See, for example, Antonio Salas, Martin Richards, et al., ‘The African Diaspora: Mitochondrial DNA and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, American Journal of Human

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Introduction

13

Genetics, 74 (2004), 454–465; Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own (New York, 2007). On the first see David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000); David Richardson, ‘Shipboard Revolts, African Authority and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 58 (2001), 69–92; and Eric Robert Taylor, If we Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006). On the second, see Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, GA, 2005), and Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy (eds), The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (Princeton, 2002). On the last see, among others, Thornton, Africa and Africans; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005). Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. David Richardson, ‘Slavery and Bristol’s “Golden Age”’, Slavery and Abolition, 26 (2005), 41–43. M. M. Schofield, ‘The Slave Trade from Lancashire and Cheshire Ports Outside Liverpool, c.1750–c.1790’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 126 (1976), 30–73; E. M. Schofield and M. M. Schofield, ‘A Good Fortune and a Good Wife: The Marriage of Christopher Hasell of Liverpool. Merchant, 1765’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 138 (1988), 85–111; David Richardson and M. M. Schofield, ‘Whitehaven and the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, XCII (1992), 183–204. Trevor Burnard, ‘Who Bought Slaves in Early America? Purchasers of Slaves from the Royal African Company, 1674–1708’, Slavery and Abolition, 17 (1996), 68–92; and his ‘E Pluribus Plures: African Ethnicities in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Jamaica’, Jamaican Historical Review, XXI (2001), 8–22, 56–59. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, 1976). See also Philip D. Morgan, ‘Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments’, Slavery and Abolition, 18 (1997), 122–45. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford, 2002). On the adaptation of European traders to African conditions, see, for example, Eltis, African Slavery; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 333–55, and ‘The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c.1600–1810’, Journal of African History, 42 (1999), 25–50. F. E. Sanderson, ‘The Liverpool Abolitionists’, in Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, 2 (Liverpool, 1976), 196–238.

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1

Liverpool’s Dominance in the British Slave Trade, 1740–1807 Kenneth Morgan

O

n e of th e best-k now n f e atu r es of eighteenth-century British commercial history is the prominence of Liverpool as a slave-trading port. After the London-based Royal African Company’s monopoly in the slave trade ended in 1698, Liverpudlians entered the ‘Guinea’ business slowly: they dispatched only two slaving vessels in the first decade of the eighteenth century when the slave trade had just become legally open to private merchants. The Mersey port’s slave-trading activity rose significantly, however, after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and continued to grow rapidly thereafter. Forty-two slave ships cleared out from Liverpool in the period 1721–30 and 197 between 1731 and 1740; these represented 6 per cent and 27 per cent respectively of the slave ships leaving Britain. Liverpool then overtook London and Bristol, the other two large British slave trading centres. Liverpool sent out 217 slaving ships in the period 1741–50 – 43 per cent of the vessels dispatched in the British slave trade.1 A continuous rise after the mid-1740s led Liverpool to a commanding position in the trade. Bristol and London, by contrast, had more fluctuating involvement in the slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century.2

 This paper was prepared while I held a British Academy Research Readership. Versions were presented to the Third International Congress of Maritime History, Centre for Maritime and Regional History, Fiskeri-og Søfartsmuseet, Esbjerg, Denmark, August 2000; to the Imperial History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, January 2005; and to the conference on Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, Merseyside Maritime Museum, October 2005. I would like to thank Lewis R. Fischer for communicating the paper at Esbjerg in my absence. I also thank Sheryllynne Haggerty for research assistance and the British Academy for a research grant to cover work in archives.

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Liverpool’s Dominance in the British Slave Trade, 1740–1807

15

In 1751–60 Liverpool dispatched ships on 500 slaving ventures, which gave her a 56 per cent share of ships embarked on slaving voyages from Britain. In 1761–70, 1771–80 and 1781–90 Liverpool dispatched 684, 608 and 579 slaving voyages, accounting respectively for shares of 54, 60 and 70 per cent of slaving ventures from Britain. Liverpool sent out 910 slave ships between 1791 and 1800 and 790 in the final years of the British slave trade from 1801 to 1807. In those two periods 77 and 79 per cent of the slaving voyages leaving Britain were from the Mersey. Liverpool probably invested around £200,000 in the slave trade in 1750 and more than £1 million in 1800.3 In 1807 Liverpool had an annual investment of £2,641,200 in the slave trade.4 It was dubbed ‘the metropolis of slavery’.5 Throughout the entire period of the British slave trade Liverpool ships delivered an estimated 1,171,171 slaves to the New World, making it the most important port of departure for transatlantic slaving voyages before the nineteenth century.6 Contemporaries recognized the commercial significance of Liverpool’s rise to dominance in the British slave trade. In 1746, according to the Scots merchant Alexander Harvie, the most beneficial trade from Europe to the British West Indies was ‘the trade to the coast of Africa for slaves by which the people of Liverpool have enriched themselves’.7 The best eighteenthcentury account of Liverpool’s transatlantic slaving activity argued that the port’s commitment to the slave trade from the second half of the 1740s began to invigorate her entire foreign trade.8 In 1783 a leading Liverpool slave-trading partnership, John & Thomas Hodgson, announced that ‘the African trade has done unheard of wonders for this Town … particularly in these last 12 or 18 months, & it has a great deal of fortune yet in the wheel’.9 This was a correct prediction, for the abolitionist movement had little impact on Liverpool’s slaving fraternity.10 It was claimed at the time that Liverpool’s commercial significance would decline without her pursuit of the African slave trade – an incorrect forecast.11 A Bristol directory published in 1794 claimed that the ardour for participation in the slave trade had ‘much abated among the humane and benevolent merchants of Bristol … while the people of Liverpool, in their indiscriminate rage for commerce and for getting money at all events, have nearly engrossed this Trade’.12 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Liverpool’s urban chroniclers assessed the impact of the slave trade on their native town in a succession of antiquarian accounts.13 In more recent times, Liverpool’s success as a slaving port has attracted renewed attention. Analysis has focused particularly on the profitability of the slave trade; the financial mechanisms through which Liverpudlians handled payment for slave sales; the volume of shipping in Liverpool’s slave trade and the numbers of slaves embarked and disembarked from voyages beginning on the River Mersey; the careers of a handful of leading

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Liverpool slaving merchants; the impact of the slave trade on Liverpool and its industrial hinterland; and the role of abolitionism in Liverpool. Much remains to be unearthed, however, about Liverpool’s slave-trading activity as a whole.14 Experienced students of the early modern Atlantic economy have acknowledged this to be the case, and have noted that Liverpool’s dominance as the chief British slaving port is not explained easily.15 This paper adds to the existing historiography on Liverpool’s slave trade by analysing the Merseyside port’s dominance in British transatlantic slaving from the 1740s onwards. The analysis falls into four sections. The first part provides a context for Liverpool’s transatlantic slaving activity by emphasizing the general demographic and economic growth of Merseyside in the eighteenth century. This shows that the slave trade was just one indicator of a north-western port and urban centre experiencing expansion: Liverpool’s commercial progress was broader than merely a penchant for transatlantic slaving. The second section discusses the locational advantages enjoyed by Liverpool that had a significant bearing on her ability to pursue the slave trade successfully. These geographical features are related to the ships, export cargoes, and finance involved in the slave trade and to the beneficial commercial effects of a burgeoning hinterland. The third section shows that Liverpool’s slave-trading success was based on effective penetration of markets for slaves in Africa and of delivery areas for Africans in the Americas. Liverpool slave traders exercised considerable market power in important supply areas for slaves and in leading regions for slave deliveries from the 1740s until the end of the British slave trade. The fourth section argues that this market power hinged upon the use of effective institutional trading arrangements at times when the British slave trade was expanding as a whole.16 Since Londoners and Bristolians eventually pursued other avenues of trade with more vigour than the slave trade, it would be unwise to argue that Liverpool’s dominant role in transatlantic slaving reflected commercial decline at London and Bristol. Nonetheless the evidence cited below will show that from the wartime years of the 1740s, Liverpool’s conduct of the slave trade demonstrated considerable business acumen in that line of commerce, possibly more than Bristol and London could muster. Liverpool’s slave-trading activity rose within the context of a growing Atlantic outlook among western European port cities in the late seventeenthand early eighteenth centuries. Bristol, Glasgow, Whitehaven, Dublin, Cork, Bordeaux and Lisbon increased their role in transatlantic commerce in this epoch as oceanic trade formed part of European maritime expansion. Liverpool was one of a number of American and European slave ports

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17

(including Nantes, Newport, Rhode Island and Rio de Janeiro) that dominated their respective national slave trades.17 In 1665, 90 per cent of Liverpool’s shipments were with Ireland. Half a century later Liverpool had a flourishing nexus of transatlantic trade, especially with the Chesapeake tobacco colonies and the West Indian sugar islands. Liverpool supplied credit and indentured servants to Virginia and Maryland between 1680 and 1720, and provided labour and provisions – beef, butter and pork from Ireland – for Jamaica and the Lesser Antilles. Liverpool’s tobacco imports reached 1.7 million pounds (771,800 kilograms) in 1700, 6.1 million pounds (2,769,400 kilograms) in 1750, and a peak of 10.4 million pounds (4,721,600 kilograms) in 1790. In most years after 1750 Liverpool was the third largest British port for tobacco imports (after London and Glasgow). Liverpool’s sugar imports amounted to 11,600 hundredweight (589 metric tonnes) in 1700, 100,000 hundredweight (5,080 metric tonnes) in 1750, and 499,900 hundredweight (25,395 metric tonnes) in 1800. In the second half of the eighteenth century Liverpool was the third principal British centre for sugar imports and at the century’s end she achieved second place. Liverpool merchants, already drawn into the orbit of transatlantic trade in the late seventeenth century, took advantage of market conditions to enter the Atlantic slave trade and the trades in staple commodities associated with plantations based on slave labour.18 Liverpool’s involvement in the slave trade was connected to these other branches of foreign commerce. Peter Whitfield Branker, a master and merchant in the Liverpool slave trade, suggested in 1799 that the prosperity of Liverpool ‘was chiefly owing to the African trade’ and that much of the port’s West India trade, a substantial part of its Baltic trade and some of its coasting trade would suffer if the British slave trade was abolished.19 The West India trade was closely linked to the slave trade because return cargoes of produce on both types of ship largely consisted of sugar. The Baltic trade helped to provide timber and naval stores for Liverpool’s shipping. Coasting vessels distributed the tropical groceries brought back to Merseyside for domestic consumption. Apart from greater involvement in transatlantic commerce, Liverpool benefited from broadly based commercial and demographic growth from the late seventeenth century. From being England’s third port and twentieth town in 1700, Liverpool’s population rose from about 7,000 inhabitants in 1708 to 34,000 in 1773 and to over 77,000 by 1801. This rapidly accelerating population, arising from natural increase and substantial inmigration, enabled Liverpool to dominate urban networks in its hinterland. If one splits population figures for Manchester and Salford, Liverpool was England’s second leading urban centre by 1800.20 Liverpool’s occupational structure included a high preponderance of transport workers, especially

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

mariners, and craftsmen, including shipbuilders and sailmakers.21 Merchants occupied a dominant position among the Liverpool trading community.22 Those who participated in the slave trade, however, also came from other commercial and maritime occupations. They included former captains, brokers, shipowners, gunmakers, brewers, joiners, glaziers, bookkeepers, soap manufacturers, corn merchants, tailors, watchmakers, silversmiths, coopers, timber merchants, calico printers, linen and woollen drapers, druggists, sailmakers, iron merchants, wine merchants and butchers.23 The town’s industrial base included metal manufacturing, glassworks, cotton mills, salt refining and potteries, all of which provided exports, along with the textile products of south Lancashire. These industries were more extensive after 1750 than before, but they played a significant role in supporting Liverpool’s commerce, either in the slave trade or more generally, after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.24 In the mid1720s a memorial noted that the recent rise of the Liverpool slave trade had stimulated manufacturing of cotton and woollen textiles, copper and pewter in Lancashire and had produced ‘the most flourishing circumstances, whereby the numerous inhabitants … are furnished with means sufficient to enable them to pay their rents, and a handsome subsistence for their familys’.25 The industries of south Lancashire expanded in the mideighteenth century, partly because of available cheap labour and partly because of the commercial and demographic impetus to manufacturing and exports associated with the growth of Liverpool.26 It also seems that Liverpool was more readily adaptable to industrial change than Bristol, investing more in her immediate hinterland than the ‘metropolis of the west’, which seems to have favoured investment farther afield, notably in the iron communities of Shropshire and South Wales.27 The tonnage of shipping entering and clearing Liverpool increased as trade expanded. In 1709 some 14,600 tons of British- and foreign-owned shipping entered the port of Liverpool; the figure reached 31,700 tons in 1751 and 241,000 tons in 1790. By 1751 Liverpool received more inward shipping tonnage than any other English provincial port, a position she retained through the rest of the eighteenth century. In terms of outward shipping, Liverpool dispatched 12,600 tons in 1709, 33,700 tons in 1751, and 237,900 tons in 1790. Only by 1790 did Liverpool become the premier English provincial port in terms of outward shipping tonnage, a result of the bulky volume of the coal trade that kept up the large amount of tonnage dispatched from far northern ports such as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sunderland and Whitehaven that served regional coalfields.28 To accommodate this rising volume of shipping, Liverpool built six wet docks during the eighteenth century. These were funded by the Liverpool Corporation to a sum in excess of £1 million. Liverpool was

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19

unusual in terms of corporate governance because it was exceptionally well endowed financially compared with other towns in Georgian Britain. Liverpool’s docks helped to counteract the tidal range of the River Mersey and provided better facilities for the loading and unloading of cargoes.29 Merchants played an important part in the building of these docks; they were instrumental, for example, in ensuring that the wet dock of 1715 was opened.30 Provision of good dock facilities was not vital to successful commercial growth – witness the booming trade but congested quays and wharves of the River Thames in London, with no provision of docks until the 1790s.31 But certainly ports where dock development was slow found their shipping hampered to some degree, as the examples of Bristol before the building of the Floating Harbour and Glasgow before the dredging of the Clyde show.32 Liverpool’s civic and mercantile commitment to dockbuilding was far more enterprising than that displayed by any other British port in the eighteenth century, and this facilitated the growth of shipping and trade on the Mersey. When the Liverpool slave trade reached its height after 1780, there was no shortage of adequate docking facilities to cope with an expanded volume of shipping and large slave ships.33 In 1795 John Aiken extolled the number and extent of Liverpool’s docks as better for handling long-distance trade than any other maritime city in Britain and perhaps in Europe.34 Liverpool’s dockyards were the site of extensive shipbuilding for the slave trade. A Bristolian visiting Liverpool in 1773 noted that ‘the Liverpool People go on with such spirit’, adding that they had a plentiful supply of ships for the slave trade.35 William Vaughan, who wrote a series of pamphlets in the 1790s comparing London’s port deficiencies with other ports, noted that ‘Liverpool owes everything to its docks and spirit of enterprise’.36 The extent to which Liverpool’s commercial prosperity grew more as a result of dock provision than through the slave trade is difficult to evaluate.37 What is not beyond doubt, however, is that Liverpool’s docks were the centre of flourishing shipbuilding and the slave trade was readily supplied by such vessels. Liverpool was the place of build for 2,120 of the 8,087 ships (26 per cent) engaged in the British slave trade between 1701 and 1810. By contrast, 541 slave vessels were constructed in the same period at London and Bristol, a shade under a quarter of the Liverpool total. In addition, 1,742 of the 2,120 Liverpool-built ships used for slaving voyages (82 per cent) were constructed in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Liverpool dominated the British ports in the slave trade.38 Some ships were purpose-built for transatlantic slaving.39 However, this was almost certainly not true of most vessels in the trade. Over three-quarters of the ships used in the eighteenth-century British slave trade were second-hand, and it is likely that many slaving vessels

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dispatched from Liverpool had previously been deployed in direct trades across the Atlantic.40 Nevertheless, these statistics suggest that Liverpool had readier access to the supply of ships for the slave trade than her rivals at other British ports, and that she concentrated on supplying vessels from her own shipyards for the slave trade in tandem with the rise of her prominence in transatlantic slaving. Liverpool’s success in the slave trade owed much to her merchants’ ability to make good use of the port’s locational advantages. Liverpool’s slaving vessels and transatlantic trade generally benefited in the war years of the 1740s – the period when Liverpool first assumed ascendancy among British slave trading ports – by having a geographical position that was more distant from sea passages frequented by enemy men-of-war than was the case at Bristol, London or ports on England’s southern coast. Ships leaving those ports had to face French and Spanish privateers at the mouth of the English Channel. Liverpudlians, by contrast, could send their ships on the route around the north of Ireland on their Atlantic voyages. Masters of French privateers avoided sailing into the Irish Sea, regarding navigation there as dangerous without a pilot. Liverpool’s relative safety from attack enabled her to emerge from the War of the Austrian Succession with a substantial share of the trades in slaves and Caribbean produce.41 Between 1739 and 1748 Liverpool delivered an estimated 53,567 slaves to American and West Indian markets; the equivalent figures for Bristol and London were 60,450 and 13,279 slaves respectively.42 Locational advantage in wartime also assisted Glasgow, for in the 1740s she started to emerge as a major port in the Chesapeake tobacco trade. Glasgow’s merchants were partly able to flourish in this trade at this point because, like Liverpool, they benefited from the lack of enemy privateers in northerly waters.43 Southern English ports were more frequently exposed to foreign depredations during the war years that comprised almost half of the eighteenth century, which is one reason why Southampton, Portsmouth, Poole and Plymouth only had a limited role in transatlantic commerce and the slave trade.44 In 1760 a contemporary visitor suggested that Liverpool’s locational advantage over shipping routes in wartime continued in the Seven Years’ War. ‘This port is admirably situated for trade, being almost central in the channel’, he wrote, ‘so that in wartime, by coming north-about, their ships have a good chance for escaping the many privateers belonging to the enemy which cruise to the southward.’ The visitor added that insurance costs were therefore less for Liverpool vessels than for some rival ports; as a result, Liverpudlians could undersell their competitors.45

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21

Table 1.1.  Slave voyages from Liverpool, London and Bristol in wartime, 1739– 1807 (number and percentage share of three ports). Liverpool

London

Years

No.

%

No.

1739–48

313

48.0

1756–63

480

58.4

332 1,605

1776–83 1793–1807

Bristol %

No.

%

94

14.4

245

37.6

176

21.4

166

20.2

64.0

147

28.3

40

7.7

84.7

227

12.0

62

3.3

Source: David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).

Table 1.1 shows that Liverpool increased its dominant share of the British slave trade in subsequent war years, especially at the expense of Bristol. Liverpool’s sound performance in the slave trade during wartime contrasts with the collapse of French slave trading activity during the major wars of the eighteenth century.46 Locational advantage helped Liverpool to pursue the slave trade vigorously during wartime, but it was aided by the enterprise of the town’s slave merchants, which is discussed below. A second locational advantage for Liverpool’s slave trading activity lay in its proximity to the Isle of Man, for Douglas, the capital and main port, was only 75 miles (121 kilometres) from the mouth of the Mersey. Until 1765 the Isle of Man enjoyed a status as a tax-free haven for goods that could not be imported legally into Britain without paying customs duties. Manx merchants, in close conjunction with Liverpool merchants and mariners, landed East India goods from Holland and warehoused them until Liverpool vessels called to pick them up as additional outward cargo for Africa. The wares included textiles such as romals, bandanoes and muslins, but also beads, cutlasses, pistols, iron products, gunpowder and cowrie shells, originally imported into Holland from the Maldives and used as currency in West Africa. Some vessels returning from Africa to Liverpool sold produce in Manx ports on their route home. This trade in ‘Guinea’ goods between Liverpool and the Isle of Man was one factor aiding Liverpool’s ascendancy in the British slave trade from the 1740s onwards.47 The scale of this trade was substantial. Between 1718 and 1764 over 190 Dutch voyages brought goods valued at nearly £224,000 to the Isle of Man. In the same period, 370 voyages with East India goods worth £152,500 arrived in Manx harbours from British ports, primarily from Liverpool.48 In 1764 Liverpool had 46 inward and 56 outward vessels trading with the Isle Man: Bristol, by comparison, had none.49 Some

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4,000–6,000 barrels of gunpowder were lodged at the Isle of Man between November 1764 and mid-January 1765, all intended for Liverpool ships bound to Africa.50 Liverpool merchants appear to have had a larger trade than Bristolians in procuring well assorted, cheaper additions to their ‘Guinea’ cargoes from Holland and the Isle of Man – notably brass battery, arms, gunpowder, spirits and beads.51 During wartime Bristol slave traders, by contrast, sometimes experienced difficulty in obtaining foreign-produced goods, which comprised 50–60 per cent of their exports to Africa.52 ‘Bristol’s evident reliance upon foreign supplies of essential trade goods for Africa’, it has been claimed, ‘was perhaps its Achilles heel as a slaving port in the long term’.53 Individual Manx merchants such as John Murray and William Teare carved lucrative niches in handling foreign goods for Liverpool merchants. Moreover, since the Isle of Man was a smugglers’ haven, the real quantity and value of goods intended for Africa that entered Manx coves was higher than the reported figures. All this commercial activity flourished until 1765 when the Revestment Act (5 Geo III, c 39), under which the British crown purchased the fiscal rights of the island from the Derbys and the Atholls, subjected warehousing of goods entering Manx harbours to stringent regulations, ending the tax-free status of the Isle of Man.54 A third locational advantage for Liverpool’s slave merchants lay in the close commercial relationship between Liverpool and its hinterland. Two particular features stand out, both of which aided Liverpool more during the second half of the eighteenth century than the first. One was the proximity of Liverpool to the textile industries of south Lancashire, which experienced considerable expansion in output, with accompanying demographic growth in industrial communities, after about 1750. English cottons and linens first began to compete effectively with East India textiles among exports sent by slave ships to Africa in the period 1749–58. Since textiles comprised, in quantity and by value, the most important type of wares traded for African captives, and the English cotton and linen industries flourished within a 60-mile (97-kilometre) radius of Liverpool, it is not surprising that these commodities had an increased share among ‘Guinea’ cargoes at a time when Liverpool consolidated its position in the slave trade.55 Bristol’s hinterland lacked the cottons and linens that flourished in south Lancashire; these were fashioned cheaply but with good quality and no effective British competition.56 Liverpool thus had an advantage in supplying the most common type of textiles suitable for Africans. They also cultivated close trading relations with Manchester suppliers, which was useful for securing textiles of the right fashion in a timely way.57 According to James Wallace’s contemporary account, Manchester textiles supplied by Liverpool ships to the Spanish

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23

American market via Jamaica were a noteworthy feature of the slave trade between c.1722 and 1740.58 By the late eighteenth century, exports sent on British slave voyages were predominantly domestically manufactured goods and mainly textiles. Over the years 1772–76 and 1783–87 the annual average official value of Liverpool’s exports to Africa (£325,534) easily exceeded the combined value of Bristol and London’s equivalent exports (£176,950).59 Improved communications aided the close connections between Liverpool and its hinterland. The turnpike network connecting Liverpool with towns in its hinterland, such as St Helen’s, Warrington and Northwich, was improved from the 1720s but poor road connections east of the Mersey were still common by 1750.60 Similarly, apart from making the Mersey navigable to Warrington in the 1690s and improving the Weaver navigation into Cheshire in 1721, little progress was made in the waterborne communications network surrounding Liverpool until after about 1750. But then canals were built in rapid succession, starting with the Sankey Brook navigation connecting St Helens with the Mersey at Bootle between 1757 and 1761 – the effective beginning of Britain’s canal age – and continuing through to the Leeds–Liverpool canal cutting through the Wigan coalfield (1770–1816). These improvements made Liverpool ‘the supreme transportation node of the North-West and created a focus of routeways superior to those serving all other English ports’.61 The advances in internal communications also boosted the growth of industrial development in Liverpool’s hinterland, notably copper-smelting, brewing and distilling, potting and salt- and sugar-refining.62 A burgeoning hinterland that featured industrial and demographic growth along with improved communications aided Liverpool’s overseas commercial endeavours, including the slave trade, by providing suitable goods for exports from the surrounding environs of the town, a growing consumer market for imported products, and interior arteries that could be tapped for the supply and distribution of goods.63 Any limitations to the extent and growth of hinterlands around port cities could lead to relative decline in trading activity, as at Bristol where a slower rate of demographic and industrial growth impacted on the level of trading activity in the eighteenth century.64 A sparsely populated hinterland coupled with other locational disadvantages could effectively curtail a port’s role in longdistance commerce. This explains why Whitehaven’s spurt forward in the slave and tobacco trades in the 1740s and 1750s was short-lived. Isolated from most of Britain, Whitehaven’s hinterland was sparsely populated, local goods produced (such as coal) were unsuitable for long-distance trade, and import-processing manufactures were difficult to establish. To compound these difficulties, Whitehaven had neither a natural haven nor

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a suitable site on a river.65 Liverpool’s more deeply developed hinterland thus gave her a trading advantage over other west-coast outports such as Bristol and Whitehaven. Liverpool’s slave trade also flourished because of her merchants’ market power in areas of slave provenance in West Africa and slave delivery in the Americas. Table 1.2 shows the distribution of slaves disembarked on voyages from British slaving ports between 1741 and 1810 according to the seven main embarkation areas in West Africa.66 Liverpool merchants traded with all these regions but especially with the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa, two leading trading areas in sub-Saharan Africa, by the mideighteenth century. The Bight of Biafra was the one area in West Africa where British merchants and captains dominated the competition for slaves by other European powers, notably France.67 From 1740 to 1810 Liverpoolbased ships gathered 427,770 (75.4 per cent) of the 567,197 Africans from the Bight of Biafra embarked on ships emanating from the three leading English slave ports. In the same period London-based vessels picked up 30,074 (5.3 per cent) and Bristol-based ships 109,353 (19.3 per cent) of the remaining slaves from the Bight of Biafra. In West Central Africa between 1740 and 1810 the number of slaves taken by ships from the three leading English slave ports were 197,788 (81.2 per cent) from Liverpool, 27,770 (11.4 per cent) from Bristol, and 18,111 (7.4 per cent) from London.68 The pattern of Liverpool’s slave-trading in Africa reflected the shift of the areas of slaving along the West African coast in a south-easterly direction in the eighteenth century. The distribution was also connected to the suitability of those areas for supplying slaves at cheap prices to suit the transaction cycles of the slave trade in terms of seasonal shipping arrangements, and the timing of arrival at markets in North America and the West Indies.69 The data in Table 1.2 show that Liverpool’s market penetration of slave supply areas in West Africa grew rapidly in the period 1741–1810, even though during the 1770s the total volume of slaves disembarked on Liverpool’s vessels declined – a result of declining local investment in slaving during the American War of Independence. In two areas, Senegambia and the Gold Coast, Liverpool did not achieve a consistent lead over Bristol and London in slave supplies. Liverpool gathered most slaves from Senegambia between 1741 and 1760 but over the next 30 years London took a larger share of slaves than Bristol or Liverpool from that region. In the final phase of the British slave trade (1791–1807), Liverpool again took the lead as the main British port gathering slaves in Senegambia. The Gold Coast was another area of West Africa where there was a competitive situation between the three leading British slaving ports for gathering slaves. Bristol

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Table 1.2.  Number of slaves, by country of origin, disembarked on voyages from the three largest British slaving ports, 1741–1810. Sierra Windward Gold Senegambia Leone Coast Coast

Bight of Bight of Benin Biafra

West Central Africa

Total

1741–50 London

0

729

0

1,872

330

371

1,578

4,880

2,160

0

460

1,561

684

10,143

6,519

21,527

170

208

210

8,268

764

21,443

5,644

36,707

5,758

1,237

581

3,368

382

0

1,015

12,341

Liverpool

9,247

2,900

7,757

14,263

8,132

30,876

12,919

86,094

Bristol

1,664

858

1,222

14,803

0

22,701

7,311

48,559

1,906

43,681

Liverpool Bristol 1751–60 London

1761–70 London

11,521

3,741

2,024

12,789

1,054

10,646

Liverpool

5,518

14,432

27,612

15,915

17,280

55,361

Bristol

2,064

486

1,394

9,377

746

34,637

14,643 150,761 7,448

56,152

0

40,086

1771–80 London

12,713

1,948

362

18,508

742

5,813

Liverpool

3,616

14,796

21,132

17,773

10,548

56,799

Bristol

1,144

0

210

8,226

557

6,759

4,540

21,436

London

2,411

3,215

811

18,158

367

5,335

1,062

31,359

Liverpool

1,456

8,833

9,351

28,520

13,549

82,588

140

589

941

6,977

257

21,822

573

31,299

London

1,881

5,966

1,016

24,594

3,695

2,793

2,107

42,052

Liverpool

2,682

11,128

12,153

18,293

140

4,880

391

4,918

154

1,991

1,844

14,318

621

2,440

669

24,359

5,311

5,116

10,443

48,959

2,301

7,869

6,080

14,846

6,504

80,640

189

269

0

2,553

0

0

6,150 130,814

1781–90

Bristol

11,607 155,904

1791–1800

Bristol

14,738 111,363

92,530 262,887

1801–10 London Liverpool Bristol

53,420 171,660 410

3,421

Source: Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

was the leading port there between 1741 and 1760: London dominated that trade in 1771–80 and again from 1791 to 1810. In only two of the seven decades represented in Table 1.2 (1761–70 and 1781–90) was Liverpool the leading British port on the Gold Coast. In the other five areas of Atlantic Africa, Liverpool assumed dominance before the end of the Seven Years’ War. From the 1740s onwards Liverpool was the leading British port taking slaves from the Windward Coast and West Central Africa. From the 1750s Liverpool took the lead among British ports gathering slaves in Sierra Leone, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra. The five Atlantic African areas that Liverpool dominated from the 1750s accounted for just over three-quarters of the volume of the slave embarkations from the three leading British slaving ports. There were at least three broad reasons why Liverpool slave merchants became dominant in five of the seven areas of slave supply in Africa from the 1750s until the end of the British slave trade. First, Liverpudlians maintained their dominance in the five areas without ever falling behind their rivals. Once they had achieved the premier position among British ports securing slave supplies from the Windward Coast and West Central Africa from the 1740s, and from Sierra Leone and the Bights of Benin and Biafra in the 1750s, they never relinquished their dominance despite fluctuating trading conditions, interruptions through wartime conditions, and attempts by their rivals to regain their trade. For instance, Bristol experienced a resurgence in trade to the Bight of Biafra in the first half of the 1760s, acquiring 19,743 slaves there compared with totals of 14,968 for Liverpool and 3,887 for London. But Liverpudlians overcame the challenge by more than doubling their slave exports from the Bight of Biafra in the second half of the 1760s. In no subsequent quinquennium was Liverpool challenged seriously by Bristol or London in levels of slaves acquired from the Bight of Biafra.70 The implication of these findings is that Liverpool made good commercial connections with traders in the African areas referred to and ensured that such links were maintained and consolidated. A second reason why Liverpool traders dominated so much of the supply of slaves to British vessels along the African coast after 1740 is that they showed considerable enterprise in undertaking commercial transactions with areas that failed to attract many British competitors. Whereas Bristolians in the period 1746–69 continued to trade for slaves mainly on the parts of the coast where previous generations of Bristol merchants had traded – notably the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast and Angola – Liverpool’s slave merchants opened up new areas of trading activity in Sierra Leone, the Cameroons, and Gabon.71 Later in the century, the Liverpool slave trader Francis Ingram ‘pioneered the British slave trade at Porto Novo [in the Bight of Benin], where slave exports

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27

increased from fewer than 200 slaves in the 1780s to more than 3,000 slaves in the 1790s’.72 These are just two examples of Liverpudlians’ willingness to tap new markets for slaves in Africa. A third reason for Liverpool’s dominance over slave supplies to the British slave trade lay in Liverpool’s well-known commercial presence to African entrepreneurs and middlemen and the knowledge of Liverpool itself by some of these businessmen. ‘When the slave trade existed between this country and the Africans’, a witness before a parliamentary committee recalled in 1850, ‘it was almost confined to Liverpool, and the natives have only known Liverpool as their “friends” as they call them; and if other ships, for instance belonging to London or Bristol visit the Rivers they call them “small country” vessels and do not look upon them as legitimate traders: it is a characteristic attached to Liverpool’.73 There were also social ties between traders and Africans in Liverpool. By the late 1780s between 50 and 70 Africans studied annually at schools near Liverpool, where they made contacts and learned about the conduct of the slave trade.74 The one area for which sufficient material survives to explain Liverpool’s dominance is the Bight of Biafra – the leading supply area in West Africa for slaves embarked on Liverpool ships and on English vessels as a whole from about 1740 until the end of the British slave trade.75 Liverpool initiated and sustained closer trade connections with African trading chiefs in that region (especially in Bonny and Old and New Calabar) than other British slaving ports. Her merchants and captains were in regular contact with the Efik Calabar chief Antera Duke and with other chiefs such as Duke Abashy. All the ship captains mentioned in Antera Duke’s diary – the one surviving diary of an African chief acting as middleman in the slave trade – were from Liverpool.76 Other surviving letters between Liverpool slave traders and Old Calabar traders point to good communication skills in English between these parties.77 Liverpool’s close connections with Africans over the handling of human pawns in West Africa, whereby relatives of coastal traders were held on the coast as collateral for the supply of slaves to ships after goods had been put into traders’ hands, helped them to secure slaves. Pawnship was a form of cultural credit, a mode of transacting business that implied reciprocal obligations and trust between Liverpool ship captains and Africans.78 This undoubtedly contributed to the market power that Liverpudlians exercised in areas such as the Bight of Biafra. Loading rates of Africans on British vessels were also quicker in the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa than at other coastal regions that supplied slaves, so Liverpool’s slave trade, which was prominent in those areas, benefited from this efficiency measure.79 Another point worth emphasis is that leading Liverpool slave merchants particularly concentrated on acquiring slaves from the Bight of Biafra.

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Sixteen of the leading 50 Liverpool slave merchants between 1700 and 1807 embarked over half of their slaves in the Bight of Biafra. They were William Gregson, William Boats, William Earle, William Davenport, John Tarleton, Thomas Earle, John Crosbie, Jonathan Blundell, Samuel Shaw, Daniel Backhouse, Thomas Seaman, Ambrose Lace, William Harper, Edward Wilson, Peter Baker and James Percival. A further 12 of the 50 leading Liverpool slave merchants took between 40 and 50 per cent of enslaved Africans for their voyages from this region. They were George Case, John Knight, James Aspinall, Felix Doran, William Begg, Robert Green, Thomas Tarleton, James Gregson, Thomas Rumbold, Thomas Leyland, William Trafford and Peter Holme.80 Table 1.3 shows the distribution of slave voyages from English ports by major disembarkation regions. It highlights several features of Liverpool’s market power among slave markets in the Americas. Taking the entire period from 1741–1810, Liverpool merchants dominated every transatlantic area for slave delivery with which ships traded in the British Empire with the exception of the Chesapeake where Bristol, building on prior trade with that region, was the leading English port disembarking slaves in the 1740s and 1750s.81 There were American regions where other ports held the trump cards for various periods. Bristol outstripped Liverpool in delivering slaves to the Carolinas, Georgia, and the British Leewards in the 1740s and 1750s, and to Jamaica in the 1740s. But these were exceptions to the rule. What is more striking in Table 1.3 is the widespread nature of Liverpool’s market power in slave sales. Particular features of this dominance stand out. Liverpool delivered far more slaves to Jamaica, the largest single disembarkation destination for Africans in the British Empire, than London and Bristol combined, even though the slave trade of both those ports to Jamaica was considerable in size. Thus between 1741 and 1810 Liverpool merchants disembarked 391,914 (65.9 per cent) of the 594,499 slaves sold in Jamaica from ships entering from the three leading English slaving ports. Bristol delivered 117,593 slaves (19.8 per cent) and London 84,992 slaves (14.3 per cent) to Jamaica in the same period. Liverpool also delivered more than twice as many slaves as London and Bristol combined to Barbados. From 1741 to 1810 Liverpool-based ships disembarked 85,879 slaves at Barbados, while Bristol- and London-based ships delivered 6,809 and 13,815 respectively. The proportion of the 106,503 slaves delivered to Barbados from these three ports after 1740 came to 80.6 per cent for Liverpool, 6.4 per cent for Bristol and 13.0 per cent for London. Liverpool’s achievement in dominating the supply of slaves to Jamaica and Barbados after 1740 in British-based vessels occurred even though London and Bristol were trading in Africans substantially for decades before Liverpool first made its mark in the slave trade.

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29

Two factors account for Liverpool’s dominance over slave disembarkation areas in the British slave trade. One explanation, as already suggested, lay in Liverpool’s commercial exploitation of Jamaica. Twelve of the 50 leading Liverpool slave merchants in the period 1700–1807 disembarked over half their slaves in Jamaica. They were William Boats, James Aspinall, Richard Savage, John Gregson, Arthur Heywood, James Gregson, Thomas Leyland, Thomas Seaman, James Percival, Peter Holme, Edward Wilson and Thomas Clarke. A further 8 of the 50 delivered between 40 and 50 per cent of their slave cargoes to Jamaica in the same period. They were William Gregson, George Case, John Tarleton, Benjamin Heywood, Francis Ingram, William Dobb, Thomas Rumbold and Moses Benson.82 The preference of leading Liverpool slave merchants for Jamaican markets is borne out by the fact that only one of the 50 leading slave merchants sent over half the slaves he acquired to another market. This was William Trafford, who delivered 53.6 per cent of the 8,214 slaves he shipped to Dominica.83 Clearly, the Liverpudlian connection with Jamaica was strong during the eighteenth century. Merchants on Merseyside must have found that reliability, as well as information and transaction costs, consolidated their links to that important slave market. A second reason for Liverpool’s dominance over other British ports in slave disembarkation centres is that Liverpudlians showed more enterprise than Bristolians and Londoners in exploiting newly acquired markets for slaves and supplying slaves to foreign and conquered colonies. Liverpool slave merchants rapidly exploited captured markets such as Guadeloupe and Martinique (taken from the French in the period 1759–63). They delivered 75 per cent of the Africans arriving at those markets on English ships during the Seven Years’ War.84 At the end of the war Liverpool merchants claimed to have imported 12,437 slaves into Guadeloupe since 1759.85 After the Seven Years’ War Liverpudlians were more energetic than Bristolians and Londoners in sending Africans to the Ceded Islands (especially Grenada). Between 1763 and 1775 Liverpool vessels supplied 64 per cent of the Africans delivered in English vessels to those islands.86 After the American Revolution Liverpool merchants were more adventurous than their counterparts in London and Bristol in supplying slaves to foreign or captured territories, such as St. Lucia, Trinidad, Martinique, the Dutch Caribbean, San Domingo, the Virgin Islands, and Cuba, where Havana was the largest single slave market for British vessels sailing to foreign ports and colonies.87 Thus between 1781 and 1807 Liverpool merchants delivered 10,656 slaves to Cuba – 69.8 per cent of the Africans disembarked there on voyages beginning in Britain. Similarly, between the same years Liverpudlians shipped 20,633 (86.3 per cent) of 23,899 Africans disembarked at Trinidad from voyages starting in Britain. These were lucrative lines

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav30 30

1,449

7,929

Liverpool

Bristol

5,460

Liverpool

Bristol

4,561

3,231

Bristol

669

793

850

London

Liverpool

Bristol

1771–80

1,288

London

Liverpool

1761–70

1,192

3,420

London

1751–60

689

London

1741–50

Chesapeake

3,602

6,387

4,412

3,056

8,207

4,919

6,771

6,225

3,592

1,361

633

239

Carolinas/ Georgia

21,189

53,626

14,475

20,007

40,056

13,018

20,346

43,598

2,359

27,003

24,383

5,642

Jamaica

207

7,866

2,390

2,053

21,269

4,932

498

22,123

1,461

3,586

10,228

1,417

Barbados

1,272

18,157

3,513

19,558

23,454

4,156

14,088

11,966

2,886

13,162

6,663

1,873

British Leewards

7,932

38,849

13,794

7,202

26,910

9,423

0

0

0

0

0

0

British Windwards and Trinidad/Tobago

0

0

0

0

326

0

0

165

0

0

0

0

Guianas

0

880

2,020

1,278

9,151

1,815

3,204

11,092

1,449

1,744

578

0

French Caribbean

0

0

0

1,125

1,307

1,598

0

190

400

0

239

0

Spanish America/ Caribbean

Table 1.3.  Number of slaves disembarked in selected regions of the Americas by British port of origin, 1741–1810.

35,052

126,558

41,273

57,510

135,241

41,149

50,367

98,779

13,339

54,785

44,173

9,860

Total

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav31 31

0

0

Liverpool

Bristol

0

0

Liverpool

Bristol

0

0

Liverpool

Bristol

240

12,719

5,326

0

0

0

614

2,217

1,895

Source: Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

0

London

1801–10

0

London

1791–1800

0

London

1781–90

Chesapeake

Carolinas/ Georgia

5,344 0

590

1,044

465

15,282

2,271

0

3,767

300

Barbados

50,493

14,922

16,402

116,163

18,759

12,056

63,595

15,817

Jamaica

0

5,129

452

277

4,195

0

349

9,746

1,536

British Leewards

645

33,035

7,169

6,004

47,923

9,554

12,883

70,751

9,013

British Windwards and Trinidad/Tobago

1,584

43,074

12,799

1,659

26,164

6,598

0

0

0

Guianas

165

9,814

642

555

19,030

944

208

804

272

French Caribbean

480

14,276

5,185

0

8,852

664

705

9,410

1,530

Spanish America/ Caribbean

3,704

173,884

47,539

25,362

237,609

38,790

26,815

160,290

30,363

Total

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

of trade. Baker & Dawson of Liverpool made a contract with the Spanish government in May 1786 and delivered more than 11,000 slaves to Spanish America which they estimated were worth in excess of £350,000.88 Liverpool merchants also dominated the trade to Demerara, the most rapidly developing slave colony in the western hemisphere at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thus between 1797, just after British forces captured Demerara from Holland, and 1805, Liverpool supplied 61,574 of the 84,214 slaves (73.1 per cent) delivered on British vessels to Demerara.89 In addition to these aspects of Liverpool’s slave trade, institutional factors also need emphasis. The Atlantic slave trade, like other forms of early modern long-distance commerce, relied heavily on the provision of credit in the purchase and sale of slaves and goods. In Britain, suppliers of exports extended long credits so that slave merchants had sufficient time to collect remittances before payment to their suppliers became due. One historian has argued that there was an inelastic supply of goods and credit from providers of trade goods when the Liverpool slave trade was at its peak.90 There is substantial evidence, however, to argue the opposite case: that plenty of credit was available for Liverpool and other merchants engaged in the slave trade, with only temporary contractions in the length or amount of credit available from suppliers when business conditions experienced a downturn or when, as occasionally happened, financial crises shook the reputation of traders.91 Extensive and available credit helped smaller investors to take shares in slave cargoes and to strengthen Britain’s leading international role in the eighteenth-century slave trade. Liverpudlians may have had an advantage in the supply of credit over other British ports, for by the eve of the American Revolution they were able to secure two years’ credit from some Manchester tradesmen.92 This situation contributed significantly to Liverpool’s successful conduct of the slave trade.93 Liverpool’s trading connections with Manchester and other manufacturing centres in south Lancashire, involving credit and business alliances, undoubtedly helped to underpin the Mersey port’s success in the slave trade.94 The business acumen of Liverpool slave traders is also revealed in their ways of securing remittances for slave sales. Liverpool slave merchants had an extensive bill market in south Lancashire, with important London connections: a small number of acceptance houses in the metropolis (often large West India trading houses) served as payers of bills remitted to Liverpool as proceeds from slave auctions. This was the channel through which Liverpudlians realized their net profits regularly; and it may be that this was a major reason for their success in the slave trade.95 By the late eighteenth century, Liverpool slave merchants used these bills, accepted by

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33

a London house, to settle credit balances with their suppliers.96 Liverpool slave merchants also pioneered a system of immediate remittance for slave sales where they took out a guarantee with a secure firm, usually in London, to pay the bills when presented. This system, known as accepting ‘bills in the bottom’ of the ship, was used by Liverpool merchants trading with South Carolina and the West Indies in the 1750s and was soon copied by merchants from other ports. The terms of payment were usually either three, six, nine and twelve months or four, eight, twelve and sixteen months, but even longer credit periods were granted by the late eighteenth century.97 Liverpool merchants such as Robert Bostock named the London houses that they wanted to guarantee their bills.98 They also informed their ship captains of the agents and factors at different Caribbean islands who participated in such a guarantee system.99 This method of guaranteeing post-dated bills of exchange was something that the Royal African Company (in its monopoly period 1672–1698) and all French slave traders lacked.100 Liverpool merchants therefore developed a reasonably secure means of extracting payment for slaves that other significant branches of the slave trade failed to exploit. Although Bristolians also made use of the guarantee system, Liverpudlians exploited it to a greater degree by the late eighteenth century.101 This secure method of gaining remittances for slave payments brought Liverpool slave merchants into close commercial connection with large London merchant houses. It enabled Liverpudlians to extend large credits because the Londoners had confidence in the ability of reputable Liverpool slaving firms to sell slaves profitably and gain returns.102 The rise of transatlantic commerce, the increase in shipping tonnage entering and leaving the port, a demographic upsurge, manufacturing growth in the town and its hinterland, the provision of good dock facilities – all these features of Liverpool’s eighteenth-century economic growth provided a context for the port’s transatlantic slaving activity, showing that, as might be expected, such a commitment to the slave trade did not occur in a vacuum. But these broad economic factors do not explain why Liverpudlians should have chosen to invest so much capital in the slave trade rather than other areas of commerce (or, indeed, into safer investments such as government consols). And they do not tell us whether opportunity costs in the slave trade were better than in the direct transatlantic commodity trades. Nor does consideration of these issues explain the timing of Liverpool’s dominance in the British slave trade. This paper has shown that other factors also contributed to Liverpool’s pre-eminence among British ports in the slave trade. The locational advantages enjoyed by Liverpool merchants

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in relation to safer shipping routes around the north of Ireland in wartime, access before 1765 to substantial amounts of smuggled merchandise on the Isle of Man, and proximity to an industrializing hinterland with plenty of textile production all aided Liverpool’s slave trade substantially. Indeed, this particular ‘mix’ of locational advantages was unique to Liverpool. Beyond these factors, however, one must credit Liverpool’s rise as a slave-trading port to the business acumen of her merchants. Liverpool slave merchants exercised market power over areas such as the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa by maintaining good relations with African traders and supplying a wide range of assorted trade goods, both of domestic and foreign origin. After the 1740s Liverpool exercised market power over slave deliveries to the Americas, notably at Jamaica and Barbados. Her merchants were quicker than rivals at other ports to exploit new markets for slaves such as the Ceded Islands after 1763 and Cuba in the late eighteenth century. Liverpool merchants also pioneered the ‘guarantee’ system of securing remittances in the bottom of the ship and maintained effective links with London financiers in realizing net proceeds from slave sales. The spiralling Atlantic trading system of the eighteenth century saw the leading English west-coast outports specialize to some degree in particular lines of trade as the volume and value of commerce grew over time: Bristol in the sugar trade, Glasgow in the tobacco trade, Liverpool in the slave trade.103 Liverpool’s concentration on the slave trade was aided by its general demographic and commercial growth as a port and urban centre, and by its locational advantages, but it was stimulated most of all by the business acuity of its slave merchants. Notes

1. These and subsequent figures on ships in this paragraph are taken from David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The TransAtlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). Different figures are given in D. P. Lamb, ‘Volume and Tonnage of the Liverpool Slave Trade 1772–1807’, in Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional series, 2 (Liverpool, 1976), 91–112, and David Richardson, ‘The Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade: Estimates of its Volume and Coastal Distribution in Africa’, Research in Economic History, 12 (1989), 185–95. 2. David Richardson, ‘Slavery and Bristol’s “Golden Age”’, Slavery and Abolition, 26 (2005), 36–38. 3. David Richardson, ‘Liverpool and the English Slave Trade’, in Anthony Tibbles (ed.), Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity (London, 1994), 75. See also Liverpool Record Office (hereafter LRO), ‘Account of the Ships and Cargoes and Amount employed in the African Slave Trade from the Port of Liverpool’,

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

35

3 March 1790, Holt and Gregson Papers, vol. 10, ff. 367–69, duplicated on f. 445, which claims that the ‘amount employed’ in 138 slave vessels at Liverpool in 1790 was £1,074,314. For a similar calculation for 1790, based on the value of the ship, outfit and cargo of 139 Liverpool slaving vessels reckoned at £1,092,546, see Sheila Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 145 vols. (Wilmington, DE, 1975), vol. 70, 210–19. Another contemporary calculation reckoned that the ships and their outfits in Liverpool’s slave trade at the end of the eighteenth century came to at least £1,600,000: see Edward Law, The Opening of the Case in Support of the Petitions of the Merchants of London and Liverpool against the Bill to Prohibit the Trading for Slaves on the Coast of Africa Within Certain Limits (London, 1799), 2. The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), T 70/1585, ‘Brief Estimate of the Fleet to the Town and Port of Liverpool from the Abolition of the African Trade’, 1807, by White & Farmer. History of the Election for Members of Parliament … Liverpool, 1806 (Liverpool, 1806), viii. Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh, Boyd Alexander Papers, Alexander Harvie to Claude Alexander, 5 April 1746. [ James Wallace], A General and Descriptive History of the Antient and Present State of the Town of Liverpool, Comprising a Review of its Government, Police, Antiquities, and Modern Improvements; The Progressive Increase of Streets, Squares, Public Buildings, and Inhabitants; Together with a Circumstantial Account of the True Causes of its Extensive African Trade. The Whole Carefully Compiled from Original Manuscripts, Authentic Records, and Other Warranted Authorities, 2nd edition (London, 1797), 220. TNA, T 70/1549(2), John and Thomas Hodgson to Richard Miles, 31 January 1783. Seymour Drescher, ‘The Slaving Capital of the World: Liverpool and National Opinion in the Age of Abolition’, Slavery and Abolition, 9 (1988), 129. TNA, BT 6/262, Robert Norris to Stephen Cottrell, 9 March 1789. W. Matthews, The New History, Survey and Description of the City and Suburbs of Bristol, or Complete Guide and Bristol Directory for the Year 1793–4 (Bristol, 1794), 38–39. Contemporary remarks expressing similar sentiments can be found in places, and by people, with no direct Liverpool connection. Thus a Polish visitor to George Washington’s Mount Vernon noted that slavery flourished in North America because of ‘the greed of the Liverpool merchants who before the [American] Revolution peopled this Country with Blacks’. See J. U. Niemcewicz, Under their Vine and Fig Tree, ed. M. Budka (Elizabeth, NJ, 1965), 105. See, for example, Wallace, General and Descriptive History; Richard Brooke, Liverpool as it was During the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century, 1775–1800 (Liverpool, 1853); Liverpool and Slavery. An Historical Account of the Liverpool– African Slave Trade by a Genuine ‘Dicky Sam’ (Liverpool, 1884); and Gomer Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade (London, 1897). Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1944), 52, 63, 83–84, 105; Anstey and Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition; Drescher, ‘Slaving Capital of the World’, 128–43; Gail Cameron and Stan Crooke, Liverpool

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36

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery – Capital of the Slave Trade (Liverpool, 1992), 34–70; and specialist articles cited in the notes below. See Richardson, ‘Liverpool and the English Slave Trade’, 73, and Jacob M. Price, ‘Competition between Ports in British Long Distance Trade, c.1660–1800’, in Agustín Guimerá and Dolores Romero (eds), Puertos y Sistemas Portuarios (Siglos XVI–XX), Actas del Coloquio Internacional El Sistema Portuario Español, Madrid, 19–21 October 1995 (Madrid, 1996), 30. For a wide-ranging, though not fully comprehensive, account of primary sources available on Liverpool’s transatlantic slaving activity, see F. E. Sanderson, ‘Liverpool and the Slave Trade: A Guide to Sources’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 124 (1973), 154–76. An older study that used some of these materials is Averil Mackenzie-Grieve, The Last Years of the English Slave Trade 1750–1807 (London, 1941). See also J. E. Merritt, ‘The Liverpool Slave Trade, 1789–1791’ (University of Nottingham, unpublished MA thesis, 1959). David Eltis, Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Slave-Trading Ports: Towards an Atlantic-Wide Perspective, 1676–1832’, in Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt (eds), Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra) (Stirling, 1999), 15. Paul G. E. Clemens, ‘The Rise of Liverpool, 1665–1750’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 29 (1976), 211–25, and his The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca, NY, 1980); Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 155, 190. See F. William Torrington (ed.), House of Lords Sessional Papers, reprint edition (Dobbs Ferry, NY, 1974), session 1798–9, vol. 2, 119. C. W. Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process 1740–1820 (London, 1974), 336–39; M. J. Power, ‘The Growth of Liverpool’, in John Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History 1790–1840 (Liverpool, 1992), 22; John Langton and Paul Laxton, ‘Parish Registers and Urban Structure: The Example of Eighteenth-Century Liverpool’, Urban History Yearbook (1978), 76; John K. Walton, ‘North’, in Peter Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II: 1540–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), 125. See also John Stobart, ‘The Spatial Organization of a Regional Economy: Central Places in North-West England in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 22 (1996), 147–59. Langton and Laxton, ‘Parish Registers and Urban Structure’, 80–81. Sheryllynne Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Leiden, 2006), 75. Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The British Slave Trade, 1785–1807: Volume, Profitability, and Mortality’ (University of Wisconsin-Madison, unpublished PhD dissertation, 1993), 291–92. Behrendt has studied Liverpool’s slave captains in detail, see ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 (1991), 79–140. Power, ‘The Growth of Liverpool’, 27; F. E. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey: An Economic History of a Port, 1700–1970 (Newton Abbot, 1971), 17–21; P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982), 41; Sheila Marriner, The Economic and Social Development of Merseyside (London, 1982), 47–57.

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37

25. TNA T 70/172, 22 March 1726. A memorial of some Liverpool merchants trading to the Coast of Africa, 22 March 1726, f. 29r. 26. Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge, 2002), 78, 80. 27. M. J. Daunton, ‘Towns and Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Philip Abrams and E. A. Wrigley (eds), Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology (Cambridge, 1978), 266–69; W. E. Minchinton, ‘Bristol – Metropolis of the West in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 4 (1954), 69–89. 28. Corfield, Impact of English Towns, 40. 29. Power, ‘The Growth of Liverpool’, 24; Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, 13–15, 72–77; Marriner, Economic and Social Development of Merseyside, 30–33; Nancy Ritchie Noakes, Liverpool’s Historic Waterfront: The World’s First Mercantile Dock System, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, Supplementary series 7 (London, 1984); Jane Longmore, ‘Liverpool Corporation as Landowners and Dock Builders, 1709–1835’, in C. W. Chalklin and J. R. Wordie (eds), Town and Countryside: The English Landowner in the National Economy, 1660–1860 (London, 1989), 122. 30. Michael Power, ‘Councillors and Commerce in Liverpool, 1650–1750’, Urban History, 24 (1999), 301–23. See also A. C. Wardle, ‘The Opening of Liverpool’s First Dock’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 93 (1942), 128–31. 31. Henry Roseveare, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Port of London’, in Guímerá and Romero (eds), Puertos y Sistemas Portuarios, 37–52. 32. Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 29–32; W. E. Minchinton, ‘The Port of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century’, in Patrick McGrath (ed.), Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (Newton Abbot, 1972), 127–60; J. F. Riddell, Clyde Navigation: a History of the Development and Deepening of the River Clyde (Edinburgh, 1979). 33. The growth in the size of Liverpool slave ships is shown in Lamb, ‘Volume and Tonnage of the Liverpool Slave Trade’, 99–100. 34. John Aiken, A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester (London, 1795), 354–56. 35. University of Melbourne Archives, Bright Family Papers, Lowbridge Bright Letterbook (1765–73), 5 November 1773, Lowbridge Bright to Bright, Milward and Duncomb. 36. William Vaughan, ‘On Wet Docks, Quays, and Warehouses for the Port of London’ (1793) in Anon., Tracts on Docks and Commerce Printed Between the Years 1793 and 1800 (London, 1839), 2; Roseveare, ‘Eighteenth-Century Port of London’, 44, 46, 48. 37. One source claims that the role of the slave trade in Liverpool’s commercial prosperity has been exaggerated, though it concedes that without transatlantic slaving the ‘ultimate success of the port’ might have been ‘perhaps to some extent retarded’. See James Touzeau, The Rise and Progress of Liverpool, 2 vols. (Liverpool, 1910), II, 745. No hard evidence is offered to support this judgement. 38. Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Little is included on the construction of Liverpool’s slave fleet in R. Stewart-Brown, Liverpool Ships in

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the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool, 1932). 39. TNA, BT 6/9, Evidence of James Penny, 8 March 1788, in Minutes of Evidence taken by a Committee of the Privy Council appointed by the King to Enquire into the Slave Trade, ff. 340, 346. 40. Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits: Merchant Decision Making in the British Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVIII (2001), 178, 180. 41. Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 20; Patrick Crowhurst, The Defence of British Trade, 1689–1815 (Folkestone, 1977), 66. Between 1739 and 1748, 16 out of 101 vessels captured by the French and Spanish from Liverpool were involved in the African trade, according to Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 659–61. 42. Richardson, ‘Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade’, 185–95. 43. Crowhurst, Defence of British Trade, 151–52. Between 1756 and 1763, 26 out of 97 Liverpool ships captured were involved in the African trade, according to Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 665–67. 44. Price, ‘Competition between Ports’, 29; Nigel Tattersfield, The Forgotten Trade: Comprising the Log of the ‘Daniel and Henry’ of 1700 and Accounts of the Slave Trade from the Minor Ports of England, 1698–1725 (London, 1991). 45. Thomas Baines, History of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool, and of the Rise of Manufacturing Industry in the Adjoining Counties (London, 1852), 427. 46. Gaston Martin, L’Ere des Négriers 1714–1774 (Paris, 1931), chapters 4, 6. 47. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (New York, 1997), 247. For instructions by Liverpool slave merchants to ship captains to call at the Isle of Man, see Keele University Library, Raymond Richards Collection, Davies-Davenport Papers, William Davenport letter and bill book (1748–61), 26 July 1753, William Davenport, Lawrence Spencer and Robert Cheshire to Captain Samuel Sacheverall, and 7 February 1761 John Maine, James Gildart, William Davenport, Charles Davenport, William Gardiner, William Heys and William Sandford to Captain William Hindle; Merseyside Maritime Museum (hereafter MMM), Liverpool, Earle Collection, William Earle letterbook (1760–1), William Earle to William and John Monson, 8 October 1761; and various letters in the Manx National Heritage Library, Douglas, the Atholl Papers. 48. Frances Wilkins, The Manx Slave Traders (Kidderminster, 1999), 20, 22. For scattered material on the Manx involvement in the Liverpool slave trade, see Chris Pickard, ‘Eighteenth Century Manx Merchantmen and Privateers’, Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society Proceedings, IX no. 4 (1987–9), 501–16. 49. Brooke, Liverpool as it was, 505. 50. Society of Merchant Venturers, Bristol, Society of Merchant Venturers letterbook (1753–80), Isaac Baugh to Robert Nugent, 22 January 1760, and Isaac Elton to Robert Nugent, 15 January 1765; TNA, CO 388/95 I (4), Representation of John Murray to the Earl of Halifax, 10 April 1765. This gunpowder came from Bristol because Liverpool had no gunpowder industry. 51. Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 145. 52. David Richardson, ‘West African Consumption Patterns and their Influence on the Eighteenth-Century English Slave Trade’, in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (eds), The Uncommon Market: Essays on the Atlantic Slave Trade

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(New York, 1979), 303–30. 53. David Richardson, Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America, vol. 1: The Years of Expansion 1698–1729, Bristol Record Society’s Publications, vol. 38 (Bristol, 1986), xx. 54. Wilkins, Manx Slave Traders, 47. 55. Marion Johnson, Anglo–African Trade in the Eighteenth Century, ed. J. T. Lindblad and Robert Ross (Leiden, 1990). 56. A. P. Wadsworth and Julia de Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (Manchester, 1931), 158. 57. Richardson, ‘West African Consumption Patterns’, 309. 58. Wallace, General and Descriptive History, 207–8. 59. Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers, vol. 67, 1–52. 60. Marriner, Social and Economic Development of Merseyside, 15–16. 61. Power, ‘Growth of Liverpool’, 25; T. S. Willan, The Navigation of the River Weaver in the Eighteenth Century, Chetham Society Publications, 3rd series, 3 (Manchester, 1951); T. C. Barker, ‘The Sankey Navigation’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 100 (1948), 121–55, and Barker, ‘The Beginnings of the Canal Age in the British Isles’, in L. S. Pressnell (ed.), Studies in the Industrial Revolution: Essays Presented to T. S. Ashton (Oxford, 1960), 1–22; John Langton, ‘Liverpool and its Hinterland in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in B. L. Anderson and P. J. M. Stoney (eds), Commerce, Industry and Transport: Studies in Economic Change on Merseyside (Liverpool, 1983), 1–20 (quotation p. 20). 62. T. C. Barker, ‘Lancashire Coal, Cheshire Salt and the Rise of Liverpool’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 103 (1951), 83–101; John Langton, Geographical Change and Industrial Revolution: Coalmining in SouthWest Lancashire, 1590–1799 (Cambridge, 1979), 166, 177. 63. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (Harlow, 1973), 95. 64. Kenneth Morgan, ‘The Economic Development of Bristol, 1700–1850’, in Madge Dresser and Philip Ollerenshaw (eds), The Making of Modern Bristol (Tiverton, 1996), 148–75. 65. J. V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1981), xii, 104, 106–8, 112, 119–20, 142–46, 155–56. See also Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973), I, 590, 594–604; David Richardson and M. M. Schofield, ‘Whitehaven and the Eighteenth Century British Slave Trade’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 92 (1992), 183–204. 66. In addition to the known areas of slave embarkation given in Table 1.2, there were unspecified African areas in the sources. My assumption is that these unknown locations displayed a random or stochastic distribution of slave embarkation. 67. David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660– 1807’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 453. 68. Liverpool took 61 per cent of the slaves loaded by Europeans in the Bight of Biafra between 1698 and 1807: see Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson,

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40

69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery ‘Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 338. Behrendt, ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits’, 171–204. Based on Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. David Richardson, ‘Profits in the Liverpool Slave Trade: The Accounts of William Davenport, 1757–1784’, in Anstey and Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition, 66; Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America, vol. 3, The Years of Decline 1746–1769, Bristol Record Society’s Publications, 42 (Bristol, 1991), xxi. Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Annual Volume and Regional Distribution of the British Slave Trade, 1780–1807’, Journal of African History, 38 (1997), 201. Quoted in B. K. Drake, ‘The Liverpool-African Voyage c.1790–1807: Commercial Problems’, in Anstey and Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition, 144. Bruce L. Mouser, ‘Women Slaves of Guinea-Conakry’, in Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, WI, 1983), 323. This specifically refers to Africans from the Sierra Leone region. Behrendt, ‘Annual Volume and Regional Distribution of the British Slave Trade’, 301–3, 316, 325–26; David Richardson, ‘Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700–1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution’, Journal of African History, 30 (1989), 13, 17. MMM, William Earle Letterbook, William Earle to Duke Abashy, 10 February 1761; Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 533–53; Suzanne Schwarz (ed.), Slave Captain: The Career of James Irving in the Liverpool Slave Trade (Wrexham, 1995), 24; P. E. H. Hair, ‘Antera Duke of Old Calabar – A Little More about an African Entrepreneur’, History in Africa, 17 (1990), 359–65; Daryll Forde (ed.), Efik Traders of Old Calabar, Containing the Diary of Antera Duke, an Efik Slave-Trading Chief of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1956); Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade, 1760–1789’, in Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (eds), Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington, KY, 2001), 89–115. Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History’, 333–55. David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), 465–84. Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. The 50 leading merchants were ranked by the number of slaves they embarked and disembarked. The proportionate share given here for these merchants includes slaves going to unspecified African regions. For Liverpool’s slave trade to the tobacco colonies, see Lorena S. Walsh, this volume, 98–117. Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. For the definition of the 50 leading Liverpool slave merchants, see n. 80. These calculations include slaves dispatched to unspecified destinations. Based on Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford, 1936), 188–89. Cf. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which estimates that Liverpool delivered 14,749 Africans to Guadeloupe between 1758 and 1763.

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41

86. Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Cf. Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade, vol. 3, xxiii, xxviii–xxx. 87. David Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade, vol. 4, The Final Years, 1770–1807, British Record Society’s Publications, vol. 47 (1996), xxvii; Behrendt, ‘Annual Volume and Regional Distribution of the British Slave Trade’, 55. 88. Schwarz (ed.), Slave Captain, 17; British Library, Add Mss 38,416, letter from William Eden, 10 June 1788, Liverpool Papers, vol. CCXXVII: Papers relating to the Slave Trade, 1787–1823. For a summary of Baker & Dawson’s contracts to supply slaves to Spanish America, see David MacPherson, Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation, with Brief Notices of the Arts and Sciences Connected with Them, 4 vols. (London, 1805), iv, 166–67. One of the partners, John Dawson, went bankrupt for an estimated £500,000 during the credit crisis of 1793 (L. S. Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution [Oxford, 1956], 546–47). 89. Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977), 95–96. 90. Joseph E. Inikori, ‘Market Structure and the Profits of the British African Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History, 41 (1981), 753–58. 91. B. L. Anderson, ‘Money and the Structure of Credit in the Eighteenth Century’, Business History, 12 (1970), 85–101; B. L. Anderson and David Richardson, ‘Market Structure and the Profits of the British African Trade: A Comment’, in Journal of Economic History, 43 (1983), 718. 92. Bristol Record Office, Bright Mss, Richard Bright to Henry Bright, 24 January 1772, Letters of the Brights of Colwall, 1772. 93. Robert Norris, A Short Account of the African Slave Trade (Liverpool, 1788), 10. 94. For preliminary thoughts on this topic, see Robin Pearson and David Richardson, ‘Business Networking in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, LIV (2001), 657–79. 95. Richard B. Sheridan, ‘The Commercial and Financial Organisation of the British Slave Trade’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 11 (1958), 255–57; B. L. Anderson, ‘The Lancashire Bill System and its Liverpool Practitioners: The Case of a Slave Merchant’, in W. H. Chaloner and Barrie M. Ratcliffe (eds), Trade and Transport: Essays in Economic History in Honour of T. S. Willan (Manchester, 1977), 59–77; Richardson, ‘British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, 448–49. 96. TNA, C 107/13, James Rogers Papers, Joseph Caton to James Rogers, 11 January 1790. 97. Jacob M. Price, ‘Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies’, in Barbara L. Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991), 311–17; Kenneth Morgan, ‘Remittance Procedures in the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade’, Business History Review, 79 (2005), 715–49. 98. Liverpool Record Office (hereafter LRO), Robert Bostock letterbook (1779–90), Alexander Willock to Captain Robert Bostock, 29 December 1785; Bourdieu Chollet & Bourdieu to Captain Robert Bostock, 29 December 1785; James Baillies to Robert Bostock, 14 February 1786; Robert Bostock to James Baillie, 14 June 1787. 99. LRO, Thomas Leyland letterbook (1786–88), Thomas Leyland to Captain

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100. 101. 102. 103.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery Charles Wilson, 4 August 1788, and to Captain George Maxwell; MMM, G. & R. Tod to Captain Thomas Brassey, 1 July 1807. David Richardson, ‘Profitability in the Bristol–Liverpool Slave Trade’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 62 (1975), 307. Morgan, ‘Remittance Procedures’, 745–46. Richardson, ‘British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, 448–49. Jacob M. Price, ‘The Rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707–1775’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XI (1954), 190, reprinted in his Tobacco in Atlantic Trade: The Chesapeake, London and Glasgow, 1675–1775 (Aldershot, 1995), Chapter 1.

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African Agency and the Liverpool Slave Trade Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson

T

h e conce pts of trust and networking have been powerful tools in the hands of historians seeking to explore the factors that underpinned the rise of the Atlantic economy from the seventeenth century onwards. Familial and other relationships, often reinforced by transplanting family members from Europe to distant parts of the Atlantic Basin, are seen as having been critical in nurturing trust between commercial agents on different sides of the Atlantic and thereby facilitating the flows of credit needed to unlock the resources of the New World.1 Without such credit flows and the networks upon which they rested, the growth of transatlantic trade would have been slower than it was. This was true, regardless of whether one looks at trades in commodities such as sugar and tobacco, or in the trade in enslaved Africans that underwrote production of such staples. Credit lubricated the supply of labour inputs into and the production of outputs from the plantation zones of the Americas, enabling merchant communities in many parts of the Atlantic world, including Liverpool, to prosper from the exploitation of enslaved African labour. Trust and networking underpinned credit security and trade growth. Other papers in this volume reinforce the significance attaching to family ties in consolidating trust and promoting trade between Liverpool and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. In particular, they show how transplanted Liverpudlians and others from north-west England took on slave factorage and other activities in the West Indies on behalf of Liverpool clients, often acting as agents to collect debts arising from sales of slaves and other goods to local merchants and planters. While networking remained an enduring feature of Liverpool’s transatlantic commercial dealings, it is also evident that continuing growth of Liverpool’s slave trade from the 1730s depended on more than family ties to support it. By the

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1750s, indeed, credit relationships with the West Indies were rooted in institutional arrangements that largely bypassed family ties.2 These more impersonal mechanisms of debt collection revolved around bill remittances drawn on London and other sugar consignment and banking houses. They remained intact until Parliament outlawed the British slave trade in 1807. Adjustments in credit arrangements relating to slave sales in the British West Indies thus evolved in tandem with increases in Britain’s eighteenthcentury slave trade and Liverpool’s part in it. Personal or familial methods of credit protection gave way to more impersonal ones. The story of the evolution of Liverpool’s credit relationships with British America is a familiar one. Less well known is the story of how Liverpool traders handled credit relationships with Africa as their involvement in the slave-carrying trade grew from very modest to unparalleled levels over the course of the eighteenth century. Contemporaries frequently noted that, just as American planters demanded credit when purchasing slaves, so African dealers usually required credit from Europeans in order to procure slaves from inland markets.3 Liverpool traders were not exempt from such demands. On the contrary, the very scale of their slaving activities meant that they must have become one of the major suppliers of credit to African dealers. Their ability to supply such credit rested in part on their relationship with British producers of trade goods for Africa. Some appear to have offered generous terms of credit to Liverpool merchants in the later eighteenth century. The willingness of Liverpool traders, however, to give credit to African slave dealers also hinged on trust, or, more specifically, on their belief that those to whom they gave credit would fulfill contracts to supply slaves. In this respect, the fundamentals of credit relationships in Africa paralleled those affecting slave sales in the Americas, and ensuring that Africans delivered on their contracts was arguably just as important for the long-term growth of Liverpool’s trade as securing repayment for slaves on the other side of the Atlantic. Understanding how Liverpool traders managed credit relations in Africa lies at the heart of this paper. Liverpool-registered ships entered the slave trade from the mid-1690s but were regularly involved in it only after 1713.4 Even then, Liverpool’s share of the British slave trade remained modest compared to that of London and Bristol whose merchants successively dominated the British slave trade until the 1730s. Only after 1740 did Liverpool begin to assume supremacy in British slave trading and ultimately eclipse all other British and indeed European ports as a slave-trading venue. Compared to their principal rivals, therefore, Liverpool traders were late entrants into slave trafficking and entered the slave trade at a time when commercial relations by some trading groups with Atlantic Africa had long since been

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established. This had important implications for the pattern of Liverpool’s commercial activity in Africa. Table 2.1.  Slave exports from Atlantic Africa to the Americas, by region of departure, 1701–1810. Region

1701–25

1726–50

1751–76 1776–1800 1801–10

1701–1810

Senegambia

51,918

98,157

132,778

88,645

6,017

377,515

Sierra Leone

9,336

14,230

90,329

98,774

14,164

226,833

Windward Coast

8,415

37,196

173,119

57,947

5,830

282,507

Gold Coast

241,089

216,495

253,685

245,661

56,059

1,012,989

Bight of Benin (Slave Coast)

397,246

329,175

295,905

262,602

102,027

1,386,955

Bight of Biafra

65,006

169,357

314,673

350,225

108,381

1,007,642

304,763

584,794

653,546

835,710

56,059

2,459,164

West Central Africa Total

6,753,793

Source: 1801–10: David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999); all others based on David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘A New Assessment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, in David Eltis and David Richardson (eds), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, 2008).

It is useful to look at the picture of European slaving activity in Africa when Liverpool traders first entered the slave trade. The relevant data are given in Table 2.1. They show that, among the seven slave supply regions into which Atlantic Africa is conventionally divided, three regions – the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin (or Slave Coast) and West Central Africa – accounted for close to nine-tenths of the slaves taken from Africa by all carriers in 1701–25.5 Within these regions, moreover, trade was concentrated at a few key locations. At the Gold Coast, it was focused at Cape Coast and Elmina; at the Bight of Benin, at Ouidah; and at West Central Africa, at Luanda south of the Congo River.6 Relative to West Central Africa south of the Congo, trade at West Central Africa north of the Congo was still modest in 1701–25. The geography of European slave exports from Africa in 1701–25 largely reflected the impact of established European–African trade networks built around years of investment in trade forts and castles in Africa by European monopoly trading companies. There were investments in trading establishments in Africa by such companies before 1701 in regions

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other than the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa. For example, there existed resident European or mulatto populations in Senegambia, Casamance and Sierra Leone, some with ancestry that dated from the Portuguese commercial interaction with such places from the early sixteenth century onwards.7 But apart from Senegambia, where the French and English maintained forts at St. Louis and James Fort, respectively, investment at other sites west of the Gold Coast was very modest compared to the places which dominated Afro-European exchange in 1701–25. At these places – Cape Coast, Elmina, Ouidah and Luanda – European residents and their offspring acted as intermediaries between African slave suppliers and European slave carriers. A similar pattern existed in the northernmost region of Senegambia. The imprint of corporate trading organizations on slaving activities in Africa was still powerful, then, when Liverpool merchants first invested in slaving voyages. The geography of slave exports from Africa changed radically in the century beginning in 1701–25, as further inspection of Table 2.1 shows. The table shows that the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin continued to supply large numbers of slaves after 1725, but that from neither region did slave shipments evince much long-term annual increase. By contrast, there was some growth in slave exports from Senegambia through 1775, and a more prolonged and sustained growth of slave exports from West Central Africa, the other principal source of slaves in 1701–25. A significant part of the growth of exports from West Central Africa came from places south of the Congo, notably Luanda and Benguela, where the Portuguese maintained settlements. A large part, however, of the growth in exports from West Central Africa originated at places around or north of the Congo River where European residents were notable by their absence. This shift of trade within West Central Africa towards new trading venues, moreover, was symptomatic of much larger adjustments in trading patterns after 1725, which saw rapid growth in activity at regions previously largely neglected by European slave shippers and where the presence of resident Europeans was, at best, very limited. Particularly striking are the growth in slave shipments from Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast between 1726 and 1776 and the sustained growth of exports from the Bight of Biafra in the seven decades after 1725. Expansion of exports of captives from Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast was linked in part to a mid-eighteenth century influx of resident Europeans, who lived among and in some cases intermarried with local traders.8 By comparison, the growth of slave exports from the Bight of Biafra, as at the Loango Coast of West Central Africa to the south, was based on the growth of commercial relations with indigenous merchant communities. Resident Europeans continued, therefore, to be important intermediaries in trade relations at some parts of the African coast

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throughout the eighteenth century, but much of the growth of slave exports from Africa took place at places where direct dealings between African slave suppliers and European slave purchasers were the norm. Growth of the eighteenth-century slave trade thus depended on the negotiation of new Afro-European working relationships. This involved the creation of bonds of trust between African supplier and European shipper of slaves and, where appropriate, of mechanisms to enforce contracts and protect credit. In short, the visibility of African agency in the operation of the slave trade increased sharply at the very time when Liverpool’s ascendancy in the trade increased. Table 2.2.  Growth and regional distribution of Liverpool slave trade in Africa, 1701–1807

Total slaves

1701–25

1726–50

1751–76 1776–1800 1801–07

1701–1807

16,058

121,322

445,212

560,023

211,298

1,353,913

Shares by region

%

%

%

%

%

%

Senegambia

8.4

15.2

5.3

1.2

1.1

3.9

Sierra Leone

3.4

0.5

8.0

5.7

4.2

5.7

Windward Coast

—

3.9

19.8

5.3

2.6

9.6

34.8

7.8

10.4

11.5

8.0

10.5

Bight of Benin

8.2

3.4

9.0

6.9

3.0

6.7

Bight of Biafra

20.1

41.7

38.0

46.7

50.2

43.6

6.4

26.4

9.5

22.8

30.9

19.8

17.9

—

—

—

—

0.2

Gold Coast

West Central Africa South East Africa

Source: Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Merchants from Merseyside were key agents in the changes that occurred in the geography of Afro-European exchange after 1725. Table 2.2 underlines this point. It shows that in 1701–25 Liverpool merchants took just over half of their slaves from the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin and Senegambia, areas where the Royal African Company and its predecessors had established English forts or trading factories before 1700.9 These regions continued to attract Liverpool traders during the rest of the eighteenth century. The data also reveal, however, that even in 1701–25 Liverpool traders were willing to broker trade with other regions, notably the Bight of Biafra, the Loango Coast of West Central Africa, and South East Africa. The last fizzled out from the 1720s, but trade with the Bight

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of Biafra continued to grow steadily, eclipsing that with any other region between 1726 and 1807, and overall accounting for over two out of five of all the slaves shipped from Africa by Liverpool vessels in the eighteenth century. There was also a surge of Liverpool trade at West Central Africa north of or near the Congo River in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and then after a slide in the following forty years, a resurgence in exports from the region in the final decades of the British slave trade before 1807. The slippage in Liverpool trade with West Central Africa in the middle years of the eighteenth century reflected increased competition for slaves in the region from other carriers, notably the French and the Dutch. The collapse of their slaving activities from 1793 allowed Liverpool to rebuild its trade with West Central Africa in 1793–1807. Table 2.2 also shows, however, that surges in Liverpool trade with Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast in 1751–76 more than offset the mid-century decline in Liverpool activity in West Central Africa. Ships trading to these two regions sometimes took slaves from both, so that the precise contribution of each region to Liverpool’s or, indeed, to all carriers’ slave exports is open to debate.10 Together, however, the two regions accounted for over one in four of the slaves taken from Africa in Liverpool ships in 1751–76 and, like West Central Africa, around one in six of all slaves carried from Africa by Liverpool traders during their whole history of involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Dealings with the Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast were therefore pivotal to the growth of the Liverpool slave trade between 1725 and 1807. In all of these regions direct dealings with local merchants by shipmasters was a key feature of commercial operations. Table 2.3 columns 2 and 4 juxtapose the contribution of each region in Atlantic Africa to both Liverpool and total slave exports from Africa in 1701–1810. It reveals the unusually high dependence of Liverpool traders on Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast and, above all, the Bight of Biafra. According to Table 2.3 columns 2 and 4, the share of these regions of Liverpool slave shipments in 1701–1810 was close to two or, in the case of the Bight of Biafra, three times the norm for slave traders as a whole. By contrast, West Central Africa and the Bight of Benin contributed shares of Liverpool slave exports that were well below their overall contribution to slave exports. For Liverpool slave traders, the Bight of Biafra, not the Bight of Benin, was the so-called ‘Slave Coast’. The figures presented by Table 2.3 with respect to West Central Africa are perhaps misleading, however, for this region comprised two more or less distinct sub-regions from the point of view of slave shippers.11 One region was south of the Congo River, which because of Atlantic wind and current systems, among other factors, was dominated by the Portuguese from Brazil and was

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Table 2.3.  A comparison of the general distribution of slave exports from Atlantic Africa with that for Liverpool ships, by regions, percentage shares, 1701–1810.

Total trade

Total trade between and including Senegal and Congo rivers

Senegambia

5.6

7.2

3.9

Sierra Leone

3.4

4.3

5.7

Windward Coast

4.2

5.4

9.6

Gold Coast

15.0

19.3

10.5

Bight of Benin

20.5

26.4

6.7

Bight of Biafra

14.9

19.2

43.6

West Central Africa

36.4

17.1

19.8

Region

Liverpool trade

Note: The Liverpool figures exclude South East Africa. The calculations underlying column 3 assume that some two-thirds (or 1.5 million) of the slaves taken from West Central Africa embarked ship in the Portuguese zone south of the Congo, giving a total figure of slave shipments from the Congo north to Senegal of some 5.25 million slaves in 1701–1810. Source: See Table 2.1, Table 2.2 and text.

effectively outside the orbit of traders based in Europe. The other, around and north of the Congo and stretching as far north as Cape Lopez, was an arena of competition for European traders, including the British, Dutch and French. If one allows for this distinction between sub-regions in West Central Africa and simply compares the pattern of Liverpool exports with that of the total slave trade from Senegal in the north to the Congo in the south, then the contribution of the redefined West Central African region to Liverpool’s slave shipments, as shown in Table 2.3 column 3, becomes closer to its contribution to all slave shipments from the Congo north to Senegal in 1701–1810. Relating these regional patterns of Liverpool’s trade in Africa to the long-run growth of the town’s slave trade, the Bight of Biafra was evidently the cornerstone of Liverpool’s slaving activities from 1725 through to 1807. At the same time, trade with the area around or north of the Congo River (which includes the Loango Coast) played a pivotal supporting role in the growth of Liverpool’s slave trade in 1725–50, while trade with Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast proved equally important in allowing Liverpool traders further to expand their position in the slave trade in 1751–76.

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Though trade with the last two regions remained relatively important through 1807, their contribution to Liverpool’s continuing dominance of the British slave trade fell after 1776 as the port’s trade with West Central Africa recovered strongly in the decades before Parliament abolished the British slave trade. This description of the relationship between the changing geography of Liverpool activity in Africa and growth of the town’s slaving activities does not mean that historians should ignore trade with other regions. But the fact remains that over three out of four slaves carried by Liverpool ships came from areas of the African coast where there was little or no permanent European presence in 1701–25. Liverpool traders were, in short, among the leading slave carriers to diversify the pattern of slaving activity in Africa in the eighteenth century and in the process to forge new commercial alliances with local African slave dealers. Understanding how they accomplished the latter is critical to explaining Liverpool’s performance as a slave port. Because Liverpool came to dominate the European-based slave trade, its diversification of its African trade may also shed light on the relative performance of other European slave ports too. In every region, the supply of captives for sale to European carriers remained essentially under African control, but various factors combined to explain the changing contribution of different regions to the growth of slave supply. They included population density, political structures and warfare, the environment, and even religious conflict. Such factors undoubtedly influenced the changing geography of slave supply in Atlantic Africa described above.12 Higher regional population densities surely allowed the Bight of Biafra to sustain greater long-run levels of slave exports than the Windward Coast. Ecological crises contributed to the growth of slave exports from West Central Africa, while religious conflict arising from the spread of Islam was in part responsible for the surge in slave exports from Sierra Leone in 1750–90.13 Events within the African interior, some of them unrelated to transatlantic slavery, thus helped to determine shifts in the balance of slave shipments between different coastal regions. The fact, however, that Liverpool traders dominated trade with the Bight of Biafra, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast suggests that other factors, too, contributed to reshaping the course of regional patterns of slave shipments. Prominent among these were commercial relationships forged between local merchant communities and slave carriers, as well as the impact of conflicts in Europe on the capacity of different carrier groups to sustain activity in wartime. The former largely account for Liverpool’s dominance of trade at the Bight of Biafra, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast in 1720–1807, while the latter helps to explain the much higher levels of activity by the port’s merchants at West Central Africa in wartime than in peacetime in 1748–1807.14 It is on the first set of factors – the ones that

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most obviously link patterns of Liverpool coastal trade with local African agency – that we shall focus here. In particular, we propose to look at how Liverpool traders managed credit relations with local slave dealers at the Bight of Biafra, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast as elements in promoting their commercial hegemony in these regions. The pattern of commercial relations that Liverpool traders built with the three African slave supply regions identified above was shaped in large part by the geography of their coastlines and river systems. Trade in the Bight of Biafra was heavily concentrated at Elem Kalabari (or New Calabar) and Bonny, both in the Niger Delta, and at Old Calabar on the Cross River. Elem Kalabari was the main centre of activity before 1700, but thereafter it shifted first to Old Calabar and then from 1730 until 1807 back towards the Niger Delta island port of Bonny, though there was a growth of trade at Cameroons and Gabon to the east and south of Old Calabar from the 1750s.15 Despite the entry of Cameroons and Gabon into the slave trade – a process encouraged by Liverpool traders 16 – almost two-thirds of all captives taken from the Bight of Biafra by Liverpool ships embarked ship at Bonny after 1720. Old Calabar, Cameroons and Gabon, in descending order, accounted for almost all the rest. By the 1790s, if not earlier, Elem Kalabari was effectively under Bonny’s sphere of influence. Anglo-African commercial exchanges in the Bight of Biafra thus pivoted around dealings between shipmasters and the commercial communities of Bonny and Old Calabar.17 The intimacy of such exchanges was, moreover, reinforced by the fact that ships trading in the Bight almost invariably acquired their slaves at just one venue, thereby encouraging some Liverpool merchants to concentrate on the Niger Delta and others at the Cross River and places further east. Offshore islands and coastal river systems helped to determine the location of trading venues in Sierra Leone, ensuring that the Isle de Los, Bananoes, Bance Island and Sherbro, among other places, became important slave embarkation venues. This contrasted with the Windward Coast, which was largely devoid of inlets and river systems, and where trade was conducted with coastal communities at places such as Cape Mount, Sestra Crue, Lahou, and Bassa, or even with individual traders on the beach. None of these venues came near to matching Bonny or Old Calabar in terms of population or scale of annual slave exports. Moreover, unlike the Bight of Biafra, where traders typically acquired their slaves at just one port, in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast they commonly visited several venues to do so. Indeed, at the latter, trade often involved a great deal of boating or coasting activities as shipmasters dispatched smaller yawls or other vessels

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along the coast and, in Sierra Leone, upstream in search of opportunities to purchase slaves.18 This cruising activity makes it difficult sometimes to distinguish slave exports from Sierra Leone from those of the Windward Coast. For this reason, we treat the two regions as one. Because trade at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast commonly took place at several venues, the acquisition of slaves tended to proceed at a slower pace than in the Bight of Biafra. This fact goes some way to explaining why Liverpool merchants tended to focus more consistently on trade with the Bight than with places further north.19 It also opened up possibilities for Europeans to set up small trading establishments in the region, to marry into local communities, and to become intermediaries in the transactions between African slave suppliers and Liverpool and other traders. This, in turn, had important implications for how Liverpool traders built commercial relations and sought to protect credit in the Bight of Biafra, on the one hand, and Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, on the other. It was, however, the more centralized infrastructure of trade at the Bight of Biafran ports that ultimately proved more attractive to those who chose to invest in Liverpool slaving voyages. The transactions for slaves that occurred on the beaches of the Windward Coast were essentially barter-based and involved little or no credit.20 Credit was, however, a feature of the commerce in people in almost every other part of Atlantic Africa. This was true not only of the places frequented by Liverpool ships but those, such as the Gold Coast, where their presence was more limited.21 Credit largely lubricated the procurement of slaves from inland areas. Most of the slaves shipped from Bonny and Old Calabar were Igbo and Ibibio, acquired through the interior Aro trading network, which exploited its oracle at Arochuku to dominate internal trade relations and generate slaves. African traders based at Old Calabar and Bonny visited internal markets where they bought slaves from the Aro before moving them down river or overland to the coast. Most of the slaves taken from Biafran ports probably came from within 100–150 miles (160–240 kilometres) of the coast.22 This was most likely the case, too, at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, though the surge of exports from Sierra Leone in 1751–76 was linked in part to religious and political conflict in the more remote inland area of Futa Jallon, some of the victims of which were exported to Sierra Leone and probably Senegambia.23 However far slaves travelled to the coast before embarking ship, they were all typically victims of violence. As the overall levels of slave export mounted, so the circles of violence widened and intensified. So, too, did demand for credit among suppliers of slaves. It is widely agreed that trust based on networking, iterative or repeat behaviour and social capital was fundamental to the growth of transatlantic

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trade in the early modern period. Trust helped to minimize risk and thereby reduce costs and promote commercial exchange. Most studies of trust relate to European dealings in the Americas, but trust and social capital were also important features of Liverpool dealings in Africa. Indeed, in Africa, credit was commonly called ‘trust’.24 Liverpool merchants and shipmasters often made repeat voyages to the same trading venues in Africa, where they engaged with the same local traders, some of whom were members of commercial lineages of some longevity. The most closely studied of such lineages are those of Old Calabar, where the Robin John, Duke and Honesty families dominated trade with eighteenth-century Liverpool traders, but similar lineages are discernible at Bonny, where the Perekuele or Pepple family assumed major standing, and at Bananoes and Sherbro in Sierra Leone, where James and William Cleveland and their relatives were prominent in the late eighteenth century.25 Such lineages ensured that iterative exchange transcended generations, nurturing trust through time. The last was also fostered through social capital. Members of the African commercial elites sometimes sent their sons to Liverpool for educational and other purposes, in the process building personal relationships with Liverpool merchant families. By this and other means, English (or at least pidgin versions of it) became the lingua franca at many of the venues visited by Liverpool traders and in the correspondence that African traders sustained with their Liverpool counterparts.26 At the same time, shipmasters visiting African ports often participated in local social events, some of them unconnected with slave transactions.27 The interactions between Liverpool and African traders, therefore, provide numerous instances of the importance of social ‘embeddedness’ in nurturing trust to which scholars have drawn our attention.28 Such social embeddedness was commonplace in relations with resident European traders and their descendants at places such as Isle de Los and Bance Island in Sierra Leone, but it is also evident in relations with the indigenous commercial elites of Bonny and Old Calabar. In this respect, the social mechanisms that transfused transatlantic exchange and credit extended to Liverpool’s exchange and credit relations at the African coast. Once established, moreover, they became barriers to other traders seeking to compete against those of Liverpool in their favoured trading venues. Trust, or unsecured credit, appears to have been the basis upon which Liverpool traders conducted their slaving operations when they relied on intermediation through resident Europeans or their descendants at the coast. This was most evident at Sierra Leone, where it followed the practice established in the late seventeenth century by the Royal African Company and its predecessors in their fort-based trade at Gambia and the Gold Coast. Whether or not resident agents in turn trusted trade

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goods without security to African suppliers of slaves is uncertain, but there are indications that this sometimes happened. Where it did, it was most likely rooted in close relationships between resident Europeans and local communities founded on marriage, descent, and other mechanisms. Unsecured credit, however, was still risky, especially when the survival rate of resident Europeans or their mulatto offspring was precarious. Indeed, the correspondence of Liverpool merchants such as Robert Bostock with shipmasters and resident agents at Sierra Leone around 1790 offers instances of problems arising from the sudden death of resident traders to whom copious amounts of trade goods were supplied on unsecured credit.29 Other factors such as deliberate malfeasance on the part of debtors and the lack of credit recovery mechanisms only added to the risks and uncertainty. As in the West Indies, where credit arrangements to planters buying slaves based on personal trust gave way in time to more robust and less personalized mechanisms of credit protection, so, in Atlantic Africa, Liverpool merchants came to look at methods other than those rooted in personal trust and social capital to secure credit in the course of the eighteenth century. In time, unsecured credit became exceptional in Liverpool’s trade with Africa. It is significant that those who bemoaned the problems arising from advancing unsecured credit at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast specifically urged their shipmasters, on pain of financial penalty, not to advance credit unsecured direct to African slave suppliers.30 This aversion to offering unprotected credit to Africans was not limited to just these two regions; it was commonplace throughout Atlantic Africa. Building trust with local traders was certainly necessary, as far as Liverpool traders were concerned, but it was by itself an insufficient basis upon which to secure protection against default. The search for and development of local credit protection mechanisms supplementary to trust thus became a vital element in promoting growth of Liverpool’s trade in Africa. One mechanism involved letters of reference or endorsement by shipmasters for local traders, sometimes inscribed on ivory bands.31 But the most common mechanisms evolved from the adaptation of African political and institutional arrangements and depended, in terms of their efficiency, on the quality and authority of local governance structures. In terms of Liverpool’s trade with the Bight of Biafra, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, it appears that more efficient mechanisms of credit protection emerged in the first region and less efficient ones in the last two. Exploring how such mechanisms evolved and how they were linked to local governance arrangements provides important insights into how African agency shaped the geography of the slave trade and why Liverpool traders focused so much of their energy on trade with the Bight of Biafra.

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As the Bight of Biafra was the cornerstone of Liverpool’s slave trade, it is appropriate to look first at how credit protection evolved in that region. Studies we have published elsewhere show that in this region commercial relations, including credit protection, were intimately interwoven with local political structures and concentrations of power. This is illustrated by trade at Bonny and at Old Calabar, the two ports that dominated slave exports from the Bight of Biafra during the period of Liverpool’s ascendancy in the slave trade.32 Both ports had close ties with the internal Aro trading network through which captives were funnelled to the coast, but it was to Bonny more than Old Calabar that Liverpool traders became more committed in terms of credit advancement. One factor that may have helped to explain this trend was differences in the structure of political power at the two venues. At Bonny, power was concentrated from the early eighteenth century in an absolute, though elective, military office known as amanyanabo, through which external trade relations came to be monitored and controlled. In the eyes of British traders, the amanyanabo was ‘king’ of Bonny. Trade at Bonny was not confined to the ‘king’. On the contrary, many within the different ‘houses’ to which the people of Bonny belonged became involved in trade. But the king established and enforced the rules within which exchange and credit transfers occurred at Bonny and, in effect, underwrote debt repayment, compelling delinquent traders to meet their obligations. For most of the eighteenth century, the Perekuele or ‘Pepple’ family dominated the office of amanyanabo, thereby exercising almost unfettered – and in Atlantic Africa, possibly unique – powers to arbitrate and enforce the settlement of trade and credit disputes. The social organization of activity at Old Calabar was similar to that at Bonny, but whereas at Bonny the ‘house’ was the key unit of society, at Old Calabar it was the ward or township. Each ward was identified with a particular family or kinship group. The leading families were the Honesty (Creek Town), Henshaw (Henshaw Town), Robin John (Old Town), and Duke (Duke or New Town). There were also institutions that transcended townships, the most significant of which was the Ekpe (or Leopard) Society. This was an exclusively male, secret, and graded society that had its roots in masquerade but which, with a membership drawn from the community’s families, had powers to regulate social activity and the economic activities of members, including contractual obligations. Ranking of individuals within Ekpe was linked to a scale of payment for entry, the highest offices being identified with the richest families, which in Old Calabar depended on performance in overseas trade. Ekpe was therefore an important political institution, with powers and sanctions that could affect overseas trade, though before 1807 at least, Europeans were excluded from membership. But, at Old Calabar, Ekpe failed to evolve into the sort of

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overarching centralized authority that, through the office of amanyanabo, came to exist at Bonny. On the contrary, a perennial feature of life at Old Calabar was inter-ward tension as the leading families in the community competed for, among other things, influence over overseas trade and the revenues and taxes that flowed from it. Such tensions occasionally erupted into inter-ward violence, most famously in a ‘massacre’ in 1767, when, after a prolonged period of trade-related disputes between the Robin Johns of Old Town and British shipmasters, some of the latter conspired with the Duke family to destroy the power of the Robin Johns. In the event, up to 300 of the Robin Johns were killed and others deported.33 Tensions continued to rumble on after 1767, but after the massacre, the Dukes clearly emerged as the new primes inter pares at Old Calabar, though without the absolute powers to manage trade that the Perekuele, as holders of the office of amanyanabo, had at Bonny. In the absence of any centralized authority, other mechanisms of credit protection in international exchanges emerged at Old Calabar. They came to rest on the adaptation of local systems of credit protection rooted in pawnship. Pawnship was an ancient credit protection mechanism in Africa, under which borrowers were required to lodge with lenders some form of collateral for credit advances.34 Collateral might take various forms and commonly included people, who were then held by and did work for the creditor until the capital of debt was repaid. Under local rules, debt arrangements might be timeless, ensuring debts and thus pawnship might transcend generations in a form of debt bondage, the work done by those pawned being usually regarded as interest payment on the capital, not a contribution to the reduction of the debt itself. Arbitration might occur when disputes occurred. At Old Calabar in the eighteenth century, the Ekpe society acted as arbiter. As the export slave trade developed at Old Calabar, these internal mechanisms of credit protection were adapted to offer protection against default by local traders given goods on loan by shipmasters. Variations on internal pawning practices occurred in the process of adaptation. In international transactions, borrowers were almost invariably required to lodge human beings as pawns with shipmasters in exchange for trade goods provided on credit. Typically, masters might press for members of the family or kinship network of traders to be pledged as pawns, thereby seeking to mobilize any obligations debtors felt towards kin to buttress credit protection arrangements. There is evidence that shipmasters had some success in such efforts.35 Transactions were normally privately negotiated and enforced, but when traders failed to meet their obligations, Ekpe may have imposed sanctions on them in order to protect the reputation of other traders. Pawnship agreements in international exchanges tended also

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to be more time limited; redemption of pawns by local traders depended on delivery of an agreed number of slaves within a specified time-period. Contested interpretations of contracts and fear among shipmasters of jeopardizing future trade by over-zealousness in foreclosing on debts could slow the closure of transactions, with ship captains sometimes agreeing among themselves to exchange pawns for slaves to avoid sailing with pawns. Deportation of pawns, nevertheless, certainly occurred, thereby ensuring that sanctions against defaulters were enforced. In this revised format, pawnship thus came to be adopted as the key mechanism of credit protection at eighteenth-century Old Calabar. It became commonplace in international trade at Old Calabar as Liverpool traders assumed dominance over the port’s external relations and it subsequently emerged as the principal mechanism of credit protection in international transactions at Cameroons and Gabon when, from the late 1750s, Liverpool traders began to export slaves from these areas. Liverpool’s slave trade with the Bight of Biafra was identified therefore with two different methods of credit protection, each shaped by the adaptation of local institutions to serve the needs of external trade and credit protection. At Old Calabar and the eastern Bight of Biafra more generally, there evolved a hostage-based system, rooted in private negotiation and enforcement mechanisms, and identified in some ways to family ties, whereas at Bonny in the Niger Delta there emerged a more impersonal system of contract enforcement, underpinned by the autocratic power of the amanyanabo or ‘king’. Of the two, theory and evidence suggest that the latter, which uncoupled debt enforcement from personal considerations and provided a politically based system of arbitration, was the more efficient and reliable. What, if any, impact this had on relative trade performances is difficult to gauge, but insofar as credit lubricated trade, more robust and impersonal mechanisms of debt recovery would theoretically be expected to improve trade efficiency and the turnaround times of ships in Africa. This prediction is consistent with evidence on loading rates of ships in the Bight of Biafra. Table 2.4 summarizes the evidence. Focusing only on Liverpool ships, the table shows that in 1750–1805 loading rates of Liverpool ships visiting Bonny were, on average, double those of ships visiting Old Calabar. Other things being equal, such evidence makes Liverpool merchants’ preference for trade at Bonny relative to Old Calabar unsurprising. A closer look at Table 2.4 also shows, however, that loading rates of ships at Bonny were typically 50–100 per cent higher than on Liverpool ships visiting other places in 1750–1805. It is difficult to escape the conclusion, therefore, that Bonny became a benchmark for efficiency among Liverpool ships visiting Africa for slaves and that alliance with the community’s Perekuele family

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Table 2.4.  Loading rates, Liverpool ships on the African coast, 1750–1805 (slaves per day). Place

1750–75

1791–97

1800–05

Gambia

1.0 (23)

n.a.

n.a.

Windward Coast

1.0 (135)

1.5 (36)

n.a.

Gold Coast

1.3 (61)

2.2 (14)

3.0 (36)

Bonny

3.1 (60)

5.0 (38)

5.7 (59)

Old Calabar

1.5 (52)

2.6 (33)

2.6 (38)

West Central Africa

1.7 (25)

3.4 (66)

4.1 (68)

Bight of Biafra

Source: Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Horrid Hole’. Numbers in parentheses represent number of observations. Windward Coast includes Sierra Leone.

was an important factor in strengthening Liverpool’s position both in the Bight of Biafran slave trade and in the slave trade more generally. In addition to highlighting differences in trade management and outcomes within the Bight of Biafra, Table 2.4 also brings into focus questions about how Liverpool traders managed credit relations at other parts of the African coast. In particular, it shows that, while Liverpool traders were instrumental in expanding slave exports from Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast after 1750, loading rates of Liverpool ships in both regions were rarely more than one slave per day in 1750–1805. This was well below loading rates of Liverpool ships in the Bight of Biafra and other regions, such as the Gold Coast and West Central Africa. As noted earlier, competition from non-British shippers of slaves probably inhibited Liverpool activity in peacetime at West Central Africa from the 1740s, thereby encouraging them to focus more on developing activity at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast in 1750–93. Doing so required them, however, to build trade relations with both regions almost de novo.36 Moreover, as elsewhere, credit provision and protection were both important elements in such relationship building. Unfortunately, we still know relatively little about how credit was managed at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, but, as far as dealings with Africans were concerned, the evidence points to human pawnship and private mechanisms of negotiation and enforcement as being central to the process.37 It is possible that Liverpool traders sought to use experience gained in the Bight of Biafra outside Bonny to negotiate credit protection in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, but it is more likely that the methods that evolved again reflected adaptation of local practice to new use. Analogous to the situation at Old Calabar, the political

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and institutional context in which trade developed at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast seems, on the evidence of credit arrangements, to have been more akin to that in the eastern Bight of Biafra than in the Niger Delta. We have already seen that, unlike Old Calabar, credit mechanisms at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast were complicated by the presence of resident Europeans and their mulatto offspring to whom shipmasters tended to provide credit without security. The same did not apply when shipmasters dealt directly with Africans. In these cases, pawns were seemingly required as collateral for credit, the exception being when deals were based on immediate, barter-like exchanges of goods for slaves. Moreover, all exchanges, whether or not they involved credit, seem to have taken place in a context of minimal or at most very limited formal political oversight, for many communities in or near coastal settlements resided within what some historians have dubbed ‘stateless’ societies in which power tended to be decentralized.38 This is not to suggest that there was no regulation of trade in Sierra Leone and Windward Coast. On the contrary, as at Old Calabar, secret societies, notably the masquerade-based and male-dominated Poro society, had political functions and operated as regulatory agencies.39 Even if, however, societies such as Poro had political and regulatory powers, their exercise seems to have been limited to settling internal disputes rather than international ones. The mechanisms for settling the latter seem, in fact, to have been obscure in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast in the eighteenth century, a factor that perhaps helps to explain a recent finding that ships trading at Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast experienced unusually high risks of attack from the shore by local African groups.40 The reasons for such attacks are not always clear, but reliance by visiting traders on pirogues and other small craft to trade upriver or along the shoreline in these regions doubtless increased their vulnerability to attack. Attacks, however, were not only confined to feeder vessels but were also experienced by lead ships themselves, and point towards a degree of political instability at trading venues in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast that could have done little to promote trust and security in credit relations and thus long-run growth in slave exports. As one of the principal parties involved in trade with these regions, Liverpool ship owners and their masters were naturally among those at most risk from assault by Africans from the shore. This perhaps helps to explain why Liverpool traders consistently preferred trade in the Bight of Biafra, notably at Bonny, and, when international competition allowed it, in West Central Africa, though the methods and efficiency by which credit protection operated in the latter region are still uncertain. Even ignoring the higher risks of attacks on ships at Sierra Leone and the

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Windward Coast, loading rates of Liverpool ships in West Central Africa, as Table 2.4 recalls, were consistently higher than in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast after 1750. In sum, African agency influenced the growth of Liverpool’s trade with Africa. Particularly important was the capacity of Liverpool traders to negotiate sound commercial relations with indigenous African merchants, an important component of which was credit provision. The latter was vital to growth in human trafficking for export, when sizeable proportions of those trafficked came from further inland as the scale of slave exports mounted. Three principal systems of credit protection emerged. The first, based on trust, was associated with dealings with transplanted Europeans and their descendants and became part of the town’s trade with Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast. The second emerged at Bonny in the Bight of Biafra and rested on centralized authority and its law-enforcing powers. In between these two was a third system linked to the pawning or pledging of human beings as collateral for debt. Pawning became prevalent, it seems, where Europeans dealt directly with African traders and where state power was decentralized or was insufficient to enforce contracts. In these circumstances, debt recovery mechanisms came to depend on private order arrangements, based on the adaptation of local pawning practices and linked to kinship ties. This third mechanism of credit protection appears to have become the most common form of credit protection mechanism as trade with regions where European shipmasters dealt directly with Africans grew relative to other regions. Loading rates of ships suggest that the efficiency of such practices, even when outwardly similar, varied from one place to another. Liverpool traders were, nevertheless, in the vanguard of the diversification of trading patterns and thus in the evolution of credit protection arrangements in Atlantic Africa. They also seem to have gained disproportionately from forging early and permanent links with the Bight of Biafra in general and from Bonny in the Niger Delta in particular. In this respect, the pattern and performance of Liverpool merchants’ activity in Africa before 1807 demonstrates not only the importance of relations with local Africans in shaping their success as slave traffickers but also endorses theoretical arguments that emphasize the value of strong states in determining economic performance.41 Liverpool’s rise as a slave port rested, among other things, on trading links with the Bight of Biafra, where British and especially Liverpool ships came to dominate slave exports in the eighteenth century. The reasons for Liverpool’s ability to dominate trade in this region were associated with commercial knowledge developed through iterative exchange across

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generations of traders on both sides of the trading nexus. The integration of the Bight of Biafra into the Atlantic commercial world depended, in turn, on its capacity efficiently to produce increasingly large numbers of slaves. Central to this process was the adaptation of local institutions of centralized authority and pawnship to safeguard Afro-European credit relations and thereby attract external capital necessary for expanding human exports. Relative to other regions, the strength or capacity of institutions in the Bight of Biafra, especially at Bonny, was particularly important in protecting credit and building commercial confidence, and thereby fostering long-term growth through efficiency in discharging contracts. In this respect, Liverpool’s commercial dealings with the Bight of Biafra provide powerful insights into how African agency in the form of local political and commercial institutions contributed to its rising ascendancy in British and indeed European slave-trading before 1807. Notes

1. See, for example, David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), and Simon D. Smith, Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge, 2006). 2. Richard B. Sheridan, ‘The Commercial and Financial Organisation of the British Slave Trade,’ Economic History Review, 2nd series, 11 (1958), 255–57; B. L. Anderson, ‘The Lancashire Bill System and its Liverpool Practitioners: The Case of a Slave Merchant’, in W. H. Chaloner and Barrie M. Ratcliffe (eds), Trade and Transport: Essays in Economic History in Honour of T. S. Willan (Manchester, 1977), 59–77; David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 448–49; Douglas Hamilton, ‘Scottish Trading in the Caribbean: The Rise and Fall of Houston and Co.’, in Ned C. Landsman (ed.), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800 (London, 2001), 94–126; Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005), 84–112. 3. On credit in the slave trade in Africa, see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1830 (Madison, WI, 1988); Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 332–55; Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c.1600–1810’, Journal of African History, 41 (2001), 67–89; and Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840’, Journal of African History, 45 (2004), 363–92. 4. All statistical data in this essay relating to Liverpool’s slave trade comes, unless otherwise stated, from David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).

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5. For definitions of these coastal slave-supply regions, see Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI, 1969). 6. For a fuller discussion of African ports involved in the export slave trade, see David Eltis, Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Slave-Trading Ports: An Atlantic-Wide Perspective’, in Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt (eds), Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra) (Stirling, 1999), 12–34. 7. On the early Portuguese-speaking residents of Upper Guinea, including places between Senegal and the Windward Coast, see Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (Oxford, 1970). 8. See, for example, Eveline C. Martin (ed.), Journal of a Slave Dealer (Nics Owen) 1746–1757 (London, 1930); Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell (eds), The Journal of a Slave Trader. John Newton, 1750–1754 (London, 1962); Hancock, Citizens of the World; Bruce L. Mouser, ‘Trade, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808’, Journal of African History, 14 (1973), 45–63; Mouser, ‘Isle de Los as a Bulking Center in the Slave Trade 1750–1800’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 83 (1996), 77–90; Mouser, ‘Continuing British Interest in the Coastal Guinea-Conakry and Fuuta Jaloo Highlands (1750–1850)’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 43 (2003), 761–90; and Mouser (ed.), A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown 1793–1794 (Bloomington, IN, 2002); George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens, OH, 2003). 9. On the founding of these factories and forts, see George F. Zook, The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa (Lancaster, PA, 1919); Kenneth G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London, 1957). 10. On trade across the boundaries of Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, see Martin and Spurrell (eds), John Newton. It is worth noting that some contemporaries used the term ‘Windward Coast’ to refer to trade west of the Gold Coast and embracing here what we distinguish as Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast. Liverpool Record Office (hereafter LRO), Bostock papers, 387 MD 55, undated [ January 1790], Instructions of Robert Bostock to James Fryer. 11. On this distinction, see David Eltis and David Richardson (eds), An Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven), forthcoming. 12. For general discussions of such factors, see Miller, Way of Death; Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 2nd edition, 2000). 13. One late eighteenth-century trader challenged the contribution of religious conflict to the increasing slave exports from Sierra Leone. Noting that the ‘great Prophet’ had been killed, Robert Bostock of Liverpool suggested his death would ‘be of service to the Country’ and that trade will go regularly forward (LRO, Bostock papers, 387 MD 55, 6 May 1790, Robert Bostock to [Charles] Wilkinson at Rio Pongos; 8 May 1790, Robert Bostock to Richard Harrocks at Isle de Los). 14. On the collapse of French and Dutch slave trading during eighteenth-century wars, see Robert L. Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (Madison, WI, 1979); Johannes M. Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge, 1990).

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15. On changes in the ports of embarkation of slaves at the Bight of Biafra, see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’ and ‘Horrid Hole’. 16. On the involvement of Liverpool traders in pioneering the export slave trade from Cameroons and Gabon, see David Richardson, ‘Profits in the Liverpool Slave Trade: The Accounts of William Davenport, 1757–1784’, in Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Currect Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, 2 (Liverpool, 1976), 60–90; Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, c.1600–c.1960 (Cambridge, 1999). 17. For one source of information about the intimacy of dealings between Efik traders of Old Calabar and Liverpool shipmasters, see Daryll Forde (ed.), Efik Traders of Old Calabar, Containing the Diary of Antera Duke 1785–88 (London, 1956). 18. On the boating activities, see Martin and Spurrell (eds), John Newton. 19. The tempo of trade in different regions is discussed later. 20. This is illustrated by the journal of John Newton in 1750–54; see Martin and Spurrell (eds), John Newton. 21. For credit at the Gold Coast before 1700, see Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, 1982). 22. Based on Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’ and ‘Horrid Hole’; David Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978); David Eltis and Ugo Nwokeji, ‘Characteristics of Captives Leaving the Cameroons for the Americas, 1822–1837’, Journal of African History, 43 (2002), 191–210. 23. Rodney, Upper Guinea; Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1998). 24. Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’. 25. For information on the Calabar and Bonny families, see Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’ and ‘Horrid Hole’ and the sources cited therein. There were resident British traders stationed at places in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast from at least the late 1740s ( Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, January 1749–50 to December 1753 [London, 1932], 18) and their numbers likely expanded in the following decades as slave shipments from both regions grew. Some established mulatto trading dynasties. In addition to the Clevelands, other traders operating in Sierra Leone around 1790 included Charles Wilkinson at Rio Pongo and Richard Harrocks at Isle de Los. Robert Bostock of Liverpool had a correspondence with these traders as well as the Clevelands in the period 1786–93 (LRO, Bostock papers, 387 MD 54–55). 26. For correspondence, see Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade, 1760–1789’, in Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (eds), Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Louisville, KY, 2001), 89–115. 27. See, for example, Forde (ed.), Diary of Antera Duke. 28. Most notably by Mark Granovetter, ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology, 91 (1985), 481–510. 29. LRO, Bostock papers, 387 MD 55, 16 August 1791, Robert Bostock to William Cleveland. According to Bostock, William Cleveland’s brother, James, had died

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30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery owing Bostock £1237 3s. It was, moreover, a debt of ‘the Oldest standing’. Another trader who advanced goods in 1790 to Cleveland anticipated Bostock’s problems. According to Richard Martin, writing to shipowner James Rogers in Bristol on 10 April 1790, ‘I realy think it a grait risk to trus[t] much Property in their [i.e. resident traders’] hands as there is neighther law nor Principall to bind them to thei[r arran]gemnts, or to compel them to perform, & their lives are very precarious which if anything ware to happen all’s lost’ (The National Archives, Chancery Masters’ Exhibits, C 107/12, Bassaw, 19 April 1790, Richard Martin to James Rogers). In 1787 Robert Bostock of Liverpool instructed Captain Peter Berne, commander of the Jemmy bound for Upper Guinea, ‘not to trust any goods to the natives’ of Cape Mount or thereabouts ‘on Any Acct. whatsoever on forfeit of your Commissions and Privilidge hereafter mentd. For trusting of goods there has been the over setting of many voyages as when you trust them you never see them again’ (2 July 1787, [Robert Bostock] to Captain Peter Berne, LRO 387 MD 54). Originals of some ivory bracelets are held at the MMM. Much of what follows draws on Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’ and ‘Horrid Hole’. See Randy J. Sparkes, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, MA, 2004), for further information on the massacre and its consequences. On pawnship in Africa in general, see Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola (eds), Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO, 1994); Lovejoy and Falola Pawnship, Slavery and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2003). We know, for example, that the offspring of some leading indigenous traders at Old Calabar were pledged as pawns to eighteenth-century British shipmasters (Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Trust’). Levels of slave shipments from Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast were very modest before 1750 by the standards of 1751–56. This is not to say that there was no external commercial contact with either region before 1750. There clearly was, as the activities of traders and pirates in both regions before 1750 attest (Davies, Royal African Company). This was new territory, however, for Liverpool traders. Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Business of Slaving’. Among others by Walter Hawthorne, ‘The Production of Slaves where there was no State: The Guinea-Bissau Region, c.1450–c.1815’, Slavery and Abolition, 20 (1999), 97–124; Hawthorne, ‘Nourishing a Stateless Society During the Slave Trade: The Rise of Balanta Paddy-Rice Production in Guinea-Bissau’, Journal of African History, 42 (2001), 1–24; and Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1450–1850 (Portsmouth, NH, 2003). On the Poro society, which existed throughout much of what is modern-day Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Côte d’Ivoire, see Kenneth Little, ‘The Political Function of Poro: Part I’, Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 35 (1965), 349–65, and Little, ‘The Political Function of Poro: Part II’, Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 36 (1966), 62–72; Beryl L. Bellman, The

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Language of Secrecy: Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984). 40. David Richardson, ‘Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVIII (2001), 69–92; Stephen D. Behrendt, David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, LIV (2001), 454–76. See more recently Bruce L. Mouser, ‘Rebellion, Marronage and Jihad: Strategies of Resistance to Slavery on the Sierra Leone Coast, c.1783–1796’, Journal of African History, 48 (2007), 27–44. 41. On the distinctions between weak and strong states and their respective influences on economic performance, see Francis Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (London, 2004).

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3

Human Capital in the British Slave Trade Stephen D. Behrendt

I

n Ja nua ry 1799 Jamaican sugar tycoon Simon Taylor planned to organize a slaving enterprise with his merchant-cousin Robert Taylor of London and merchant Thomas Hughan of Liverpool. Fearful of the abolition of the British slave trade, led by that ‘imp of Hull Wilberforce’, Taylor speculated that his enterprise could yield great profits, as apprehensive merchant-planters would bid up the price of slaves. He also wanted to ensure that a sufficient number of enslaved African workers would arrive at his Jamaican plantations and those of his acquaintances. Taylor decided therefore to help finance four slaving voyages, two to Anomabu on the Gold Coast and two to Bonny in the Bight of Biafra. Rather than fit out all four voyages from Britain’s premier port, London, Taylor opted instead to organize the two Bonny ventures from Liverpool. Taylor’s rationale: ‘I do conceive in general that the Bonny ships can be better fitted out [in Liverpool] than in London and good captains, mates and surgeons be procured there’.1 Simon Taylor’s decision to base his Bonny slavers in Liverpool, not London, points to two commercial advantages enjoyed by Liverpool merchants trading to the Bight of Biafra: a ready supply of goods assorted specifically for the Bonny market; and the availability of skilled slaving officers required to transact trade directly with African businessmen. Historians have noted how Liverpool dealers benefited from close access to key Lancashire/Midland textile and metal manufactures, products critical in all African Atlantic markets.2 Yet no study assesses whether Liverpool maintained a comparative advantage in shipboard personnel or analyses manpower requirements by regional African market. As Taylor understood, a Liverpool ship’s husband had less difficulty mustering experienced captains, mates and surgeons to Bonny than would an agent in London.

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Merchants could therefore plan ventures to depart at set dates, knowing that after they loaded assortments of trading goods, they could assemble key officers and requisite numbers of crewmen. Human capital, defined here as waged shipboard personnel rather than valuable enslaved Africans,3 played a pivotal role in Liverpool’s rise and later dominance in the British slave trade. The availability of well-trained Guinea mariners during most months of the year enabled Merseyside merchants to turn vessels around quickly in port, so that captains could trade during African slave, produce and provisions seasons. In 1750–1807, the period of this study, Liverpool merchants outfitted vessels to all 20 major African slaving markets from the Senegal River to Ambriz on the Angola coast, organizing up to 140 Guinea ventures a year. By contrast, London’s shortage of available officers restricted market options in Africa and so reduced its slave trade to 15–25 voyages annually. Through the second half of the eighteenth century Thames slaving merchants, unable to hire experienced hands, sent most vessels to Upper Guinea and Gold Coast posts staffed by European factors. Liverpool’s principal rivals from Bristol also had a competitive disadvantage in skilled maritime labour, which, though less pronounced than London’s, limited the slave trade from south-west England. Officer shortages became critical in the early 1790s, contributing to Bristol’s slaving collapse after 1793. In organizing their slaving enterprise in 1799, Simon Taylor and partners’ choice of African markets dictated their subsequent decisions on shipping, trading cargoes, provisions, manpower, dates of sail and ports of departure. The syndicate wanted to deliver to Kingston, Jamaica, 1,500 Africans who could be sold quickly for bills of exchange or produce. Simon Taylor believed that planters preferred slaves from Upper Guinea, the Gold Coast, Bonny and New Calabar.4 The merchants decided to outfit 4 ships, each of which would need to thus carry 400–450 slaves and muster 40–43 crewmen. Only Lower Guinea ports could supply African labour in such numbers, and the group settled upon outfitting ships for Anomabu and Bonny. The precise mix of textiles, firearms, manufacturers and alcohol to purchase slaves differed between the two markets; for slave provisions, masters would rely on buying seasonal supplies of Gold Coast corn and Biafran yams.5 When deciding upon crewmen to hire, the partners knew that ships’ trading officers would be assisted by British brokers who resided at the fort at Anomabu, whereas captains, mates and surgeons sailing to Bonny would need to transact business directly with African merchants. By the late eighteenth century Anomabu had developed into the major British fort-trade market, exporting annually several thousand slaves and

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tons of corn. A quadrangular British castle and complex of surrounding slave pens created this ‘great mart on the Gold Coast’, as described by London captain John Adams, a trader there in the late 1790s.6 The three-storey fort, managed by the ‘Company of Merchants Trading to Africa’, measured 600– 700 feet (183–214 metres) in perimeter. It housed apartments for a governor, clerks, factors, soldiers, and surgeons, storerooms for trading goods, corn and water, and prisons to confine enslaved Africans.7 The Fante village of Anomabu surrounding the fort numbered 3,000–4,000 inhabitants, many of whom worked as merchants, canoemen and porters. British vessels first anchored off Cape Coast Castle, the British Gold Coast headquarters, and then sailed 10 miles (16 kilometres) east to Anomabu. Canoemen shuttled goods and people from ship to shore across the surf. British fort officials and local African merchants, led by the Fante caboceer (local leader or ‘chief ’), worked to centralize the slave trade at Anomabu.8 On many slaving ventures captains arrived at Anomabu to load large numbers of Africans purchased by fort traders and examined by surgeons.9 In choosing Bonny, the syndicate wanted to send vessels to the largest, most efficient slave-trading port in the North Atlantic. By 1799 perhaps 3,000 Africans resided there and the outlet supplied 10,000–12,500 slaves to the overseas export trade.10 Described by Captain John Adams as a ‘wholesale market for slaves’, Bonny’s ‘expert traders’ sold slaves to European ship captains at the highest loading rates in the transatlantic trade.11 As there were no year-round European agents in the Bight of Biafra – African authorities would not allow traders to establish factories – ship captains advanced goods to individual Bonny merchants who, in turn, organized large slave- and yam-shipments from fairs upriver. Biafran officials taxed sailing craft per mast, a policy that encouraged merchants to employ large ship-rigged Guineamen.12 The slave trade at Bonny hinged upon the personal relationship between ships’ officers and Biafran merchants. Adams, a mate at Bonny in the 1790s, understood that ‘the great secret of the trade … is to discriminate properly in whom to place confidence’.13 Shipboard traders needed to rely on the creditworthiness of African merchants. Simon Taylor and associates selected African markets that typified the fort- and ship-trade organization of British slaving.14 Anomabu was one of 30–40 fixed factories on the African coast, worked by agents of British merchants or by mulatto traders with English ancestry. The Royal African Company (RAC) laid the foundation stones for almost all of these trading posts, situated on the Upper Guinea, Gold and Slave Coasts. The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa assumed management of nine forts, such as James Fort in the mouth of the Gambia River, Cape Coast Castle, Anomabu and Williams Fort at Ouidah. British merchants

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occupied abandoned RAC factories at Bance Island in Sierra Leone, Agah and Lagoo on the Gold Coast, and Popo in the Bight of Benin.15 Some built wood or mud forts in the Rivers Nuñez and Pongo, the Los Islands and near Cape Mount. Bonny, however, developed into a coastal slaving entrepôt managed solely by African merchants who traded directly with ships’ crewmen. Similar ‘ship-trades’ existed at nearby New Calabar, Old Calabar and Cameroon, in many coastal regions of Upper Guinea and the Bight of Benin and along most of the Angola coast. In each of these regions where the British lacked permanent factory-complexes, slaving merchants needed to hire experienced officers who could negotiate complex business transactions face-to-face with African dealers. Captains’ remuneration illustrates the difference between ship- and fort-trade markets, as those who bargained with African businessmen earned twice the pay of those who treated with factors. In addition to monthly wages, merchants paid Guinea captains commissions and/or privilege slaves. Old Calabar captain William Hindle earned a 4 per cent coast commission ‘for bartering ye Cargo’ (£4 per £104 of the gross proceeds from the slaves purchased in 1761), as did Thomas Trader in Melimba (Angola) in 1764, Robert Bostock, a Windward Coast captain, in 1784, Robert Catterall, a Loango (Angola) master in 1784, and Caesar Lawson, a Bonny trader in 1803.16 British captains who transported slaves purchased by agents received a 2 per cent coast commission or two privilege slaves. In 1787 John Hodson, who loaded slaves at the Los Islands, received a 2 per cent commission (£2 per £102), as did John Ormond, the Pongo River factor who supplied the human cargo.17 Bostock, when a resident Liverpool trader in 1789, purchased slaves from mulatto merchant James Cleveland at Sherbro Island; his captains received two privilege slaves but did not receive coast commissions.18 A decision to transport human cargoes from Anomabu Fort or the shiptrade port of Bonny, then, would lead a slaving merchant to employ officers with skills requisite for each market and reward them for their business acumen. For one of the Gold Coast ships, Simon Taylor recommended London resident John Knies, ‘a smart active young man and who knows the trade having been in it before’. Knies, though, had captained just one slaving ship: in 1790, while at the wheel of the 142-ton ship Venus, he disembarked 233 slaves from Anomabu at Montego Bay, Jamaica. Subsequently Knies worked in the Jamaica–London–Germany sugar trade.19 Knies’s navigation and leadership skills suited the Gold Coast fort trade; in contrast, a merchant outfitting a Bonny Guineaman would not hire a mariner with a ten-year gap in his slave-trading résumé. Simon Taylor did not identify a London Guinea captain for his Biafra enterprise, relying instead on Thomas Hughan to locate an experienced helmsman in Liverpool. What explains

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Simon Taylor’s inability to find a London-based Bonny trader? Why did he believe that ‘good captains, mates and surgeons’ could be hired for that trade in Liverpool but not London? Answering these questions requires one to examine more closely the supply of human capital for the British slave trade. Shortages of experienced mariners presented the greatest difficulty to British merchants planning to organize slaving ventures in any port, whether London, Liverpool or Bristol. High mortality and desertion rates shrank the pool of men who had worked on the African coast; during wars press gangs, in particular in West Indian harbours, raided slavers for redundant labour. Less than half of the ship’s people usually returned to port,20 and since some survivors sought other employment most captains worked with only a few men on consecutive slaving ventures.21 Compounding the problem of annual crew turnover, the peculiar trade in human cargo required outfitters to hire comparatively large crews of skilled shipmates. Whereas a typical West Indiamen that measured 250–300 tons generally mustered a captain, one or two mates, a cooper, a cook and 15–20 seamen, the same ship carrying enslaved Africans would enroll an additional 20 men as coastal traders, craftsmen or guards.22 On average, mariners made about three slaving voyages, so every fourth year Guinea husbands recruited replacement crews for all British slaving vessels. In particular, ‘ship trade’ vessels that embarked the largest human cargoes and carried the most trading mates pressured local manpower supplies.23 In outfitting Guineamen to any African market, owners attempted to hire one crewman per 8–10 slaves, a ratio they believed provided sufficient security. They also employed more mates as slave numbers increased, since mates’ duties included managing shipboard prisons.24 Additionally, smaller Guineamen carried more second, third and fourth mates to markets, such as the Windward Coast, where their longboats plied numerous creeks seeking slave suppliers.25 And in major ship-trade markets additional mates worked also as buyers. In the period 1750–1807 Guineamen frequenting the Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers averaged 15–25 hands. Along the Windward Coast from Cape Mount to Assini, British merchants usually mustered 30 crewmen. Pushing further east to the Gold Coast, vessels increased in tonnage, as did the number of ships’ people. The slavers that anchored at Bonny carried the greatest complement, on average, 38 crewmen, a total similar to the large Angola ports of Melimba and Cabinda. Recruiters needed to locate almost twice as many people to sail to Lower Guinea markets as to West Africa (see Table 3.1). The Guinea business, a survival-of-the-fittest trade, destroyed many

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Table 3.1.  Manpower requirements in the British slave trade, 1750–1807. Crew (average)

Voyage (sample)

A. By African region Bight of Biafra West Central Africa Bight of Benin Gold Coast Windward Coast Sierra Leone Senegambia

34.5 34.0 32.4 31.9 28.0 25.0 19.0

1,642 642 234 584 504 352 345 4,303

B. By African market Bonny Melimba Cabinda Congo River Ouidah Loango Lagos Old Calabar Cape Coast Castle Benin Bassa New Calabar Anomabu Cape Mount Ambriz Cameroons Isle de Los Popo Gabon Sierra Leone Gambia River Senegal River

38.4 37.6 36.3 35.2 34.7 34.2 34.1 33.9 33.6 32.9 31.7 31.0 30.8 30.2 29.1 26.8 25.8 24.2 23.6 23.4 21.3 14.5

771 40 20 90 62 31 29 385 74 76 87 199 257 120 35 120 71 29 53 100 229 104 2,982

Source: David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Manolo Florentino, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database (2nd edition, forthcoming).

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young men who lacked immunities to tropical diseases. In the second half of the eighteenth century one in five crewmen died within eight months of departing England. The large majority of deaths occurred on the African coast.26 Bristol surgeon Alexander Falconbridge singled out the high crew mortality on the Windward Coast, at Bonny and at Old Calabar – all ‘ship trades’, where men lived either in harbour or on shore. Along the 200mile (320-kilometre) coast east of Cape Mount, captains and several mates bartered for small slave lots. In this ‘boating’ trade up rivulets, Falconbridge remarked, ‘frequently there happens such a mortality among the crew, as not to leave a sufficient number of hands to navigate the ships to the West Indies’.27 During peak years, 175–200 men of all ranks died at Bonny, more than at any other African port.28 By contrast, the surf pounding the Gold Coast forts required Guineamen to anchor 2½–3 miles (4–5 kilometres) from the deadly disease environment.29 And, since fewer men needed to work on shore for long stints, twice as many sailors survived Gold Coast ‘fort trade’ voyages. In response to a tight labour market, British merchants offered comparatively high salaries for mates and craftsmen. Detailed Bristol muster roll copies, 1789–94, indicate that captains earned £5 per month, followed by chief mates, surgeons and carpenters (£4 per month), second mates (£3 10s per month), coopers (£3 6s per month) and third mates (£3 per month) – a Guinea premium of 10–20 shillings. Able seamen received 30s per month, however, a pay similar to other British overseas trades.30 During wartime, officers’ wages increased slightly, but they could double for those of lower rank.31 As a further enticement to skilled men, pursers advanced £9 10s to surgeons, £7 10s to carpenters and £7 to first mates, second mates and coopers (see Table 3.2). Bonuses to mates (privilege slaves) and surgeons (privilege slaves or head money) would triple these officers’ monies, if they survived. Merchants paid emoluments because of the dangers of the slave trade – tropical diseases and insurrections – and the scarcity value of skilled Guinea mariners, surgeons and woodworkers. According to one informant in 1768, Bristol merchant Thomas Jones ‘looks on it that the privilege Slaves allowed to such captain or master by his Merchant or Owner to be a Recompense for the great Risq[u]e that he runs of his life in so dangerous a Voyage’.32 High salaries compensated mariners for mortality risks. Shipowners competed to hire the few captain-princes whose bargaining power befitted their senior diplomatic and commercial status and role as teachers. As one merchant noted in 1789: ‘The Masters of the Vessels employed in the African Slave-Trade have a Knowledge of the Wants of that Coast, and possess an Influence with the Black Traders, which no new Set of Men can at once acquire’.33 Captains trained mates in the local slave trades, introducing them to African merchants to extend personal links

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Table 3.2.  Monthly wage scale in the Bristol slave trade, 1789–94. Peace (66 voyages)

Rank (sample) Captain (66) 1st mate (66) Surgeon (67) Supercargo (1) Carpenter (61) 2nd mate (66) Cooper (59) 3rd mate (52) Surgeon’s mate (33) 5th mate (4) Boatswain (55) 4th mate (21) Gunner (2) Cooper’s mate (14) Carpenter’s mate (22) Steward (43) Cook (61) Clerk (3) Joiner (10) Armourer (22) Seaman (614) Boatswain’s mate (2) Sailmaker (4) Apothecary (1) Apprentice (1) Painter (1) 3/4 Seaman (42) 2/3 Seaman (8) Cook’s mate (4) Taylor (2) 1/4 Seaman (4) Armourer’s mate (1) 1/2 Seaman (192) Landsman (112) Boy (137) Master at arms (1)

Average wage (£)

Range

Average advance pay (£)

4.97 4.02 4.01 4.00 3.87 3.52 3.30 2.88 2.51 2.44 2.31 2.25 1.88 1.86 1.85 1.84 1.68 1.67 1.65 1.61 1.53 1.50 1.50 1.50 1.50 1.40 1.30 1.28 1.25 1.13 1.01 1.00 0.90 0.87 0.71 —

£4–£6 £1 10s–£5 £3–£4 10s £4 £1 15s–£4 10s £2–£4 4s £1 10s–£4 £1 10s–£4 5s–£3 10s £2 5s–£2 10s £1 5s–£3 10s £1 5s–£3 10s £1 15s–£2 16s–£2 10s £1 8s–£3 £1 5s–£3 £1–£3 10s £1 5s–£2 £1 4s–£2 £1–£2 10s £1 15s–£2 10s £1 10s £1 5s–£1 15s £1 10s £1 10s £1 8s £1–£2 £1 5s–£1 10s £1–£1 8s 15s–£1 10s 15s–£1 5s £1 10s–£4 10s–£1 10s 10s–£1 4s —

2.83 7.07 9.12 8.00 7.34 7.05 6.74 5.34 5.20 4.88 4.80 4.32 3.75 3.67 3.36 3.51 3.15 5.40 2.40 3.16 2.91 3.00 2.69 3.00 3.00 2.80 2.36 2.58 1.53 2.25 2.03 2.00 2.20 1.61 1.31 —

War (4 voyages) Average Average advance wage (£) pay (£) 4.88 4.38 4.13 — 3.66 4.45 4.25 3.50 3.00 — 4.63 3.00 4.00 — 3.00 3.50 3.25

0 6.25 9.50 — 4.67 5.50 4.50 3.60 3.12 — 7.25 6.00 0 — 0 4.00 3.00

— 3.00 4.50 3.50 —

— 0 9.00 0 —

—

—

— 2.00 2.00 — — — 3.00

— 4.00 0 — — — 0

Source: Bristol Record Office, Bristol muster rolls, 1789–94.

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beyond a generation. Without exaggeration Bristol captain James Fraser (born c.1740), an Angola and Bonny specialist, claimed in the 1780s that he would make captains of all his young officers.34 ‘Ship trade’ masters such as Fraser, who earned 4–6 per cent commissions and the profits from selling privilege slaves, cleared £500–£1,000, depending on cargo size and slave price. The handful of elite Guinea commanders, men with at least five captaincies, who brokered deliveries of enslaved Africans and produce for several vessels, could earn up to £2,000. With such earnings many captains settled as resident English merchants, often specializing in the African markets to which they traded.35 The fact that merchants paid surgeons and surgeons’ mates the largest advance on their wages suggests great difficulties embarking experienced medical men.36 Surgeons, of course, provided on board health care, but in ‘ship trade’ markets they worked with captains as buyers, examining the health of Africans before purchase.37 Not surprisingly, British merchants promoted experienced surgeons with requisite commercial, navigational and leadership skills to command Guineamen to the major markets in the Bight of Biafra or Angola.38 Most slaving surgeons, however, were young, inexperienced in tropical medicine, and entered the trade before the age of 27.39 Of all key officer positions, that of surgeon had the highest turnover due to mortality, disgust with the trade, and the handsome annual salaries that allowed one to retire from sea and start a medical practice.40 In the late eighteenth century surgeons’ average voyage earnings totalled £100–£150 – at least four times the median English annual income.41 In any year only 1 in 15 Guinea surgeons would have been a ‘veteran’ of at least three voyages. In seeking ‘good captains, mates and surgeons’ for two Bonny ships, Simon Taylor knew that the seasonality of the Biafran port’s slave and yam trades dictated that men must be hired in early summer. As he remarked, Bonny ships ‘should leave England in June or early in July’ to arrive there ‘by the beginning of August when the Yams come in for that is the favourite food of all the Eboe Negroes’. Thus he would need to base his vessel in a port that could supply by July at the latest, proper goods for Biafra, captains and mates who had experience bargaining with Bonny businessmen, a surgeon seasoned to Africa, a carpenter who could retool his ship into a Guineaman, and 30 other craftsmen, sailors and guards. The departure date of his London–Gold Coast vessels concerned Taylor less: they should sail ‘whenever they can be gott ready’. Those ships’ husbands did not face pressure from African market conditions as Gold Coast fort officials sold slaves and corn most months, and planters purchased Gold Coast labour after the Caribbean harvest.42 But readying a Guinea ship required one to organize the Guinea outfit, assort a trading cargo, assemble crewmen and

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purchase ships’ papers. Identifying supply constraints in specific outfitting stages is difficult, but biographical information for some London, Liverpool and Bristol slaving crews suggests that delays finding crewmen for Londonbased Guinea ventures occurred frequently. Muster rolls provide the most comprehensive source to analyse the geographical origins of sailors in the British slave trade. An act of Parliament in 1747 required each shipowner to lodge a muster to document the voyage history and hospital money for each crewman.43 Unfortunately few London lists survive during the years of the late British slave trade – those of the Spy and Elizabeth Anderson are the only two detailed rolls to have been located to date.44 By contrast, there are copies of about 350 Bristol and Liverpool musters that record the crewman’s ‘place of birth’ or ‘usual abode’– a town, county or country/nationality. From this subset of 350 a further 250 or so identify the shipmates’ ‘station’, allowing one to assess the home towns of men by rank. For this study we analysed the two London muster rolls (1793), as well as the most detailed runs of outport crew lists: 65 from Bristol (1789–94) and 146 from Liverpool (1798–1807).45 The accounts of the Spy to Angola and Elizabeth Anderson to Bance Island warrant special consideration because they illustrate differences between ship- and fort-trades and suggest that Londoners relied on human capital from outports in the British Isles and overseas. Captain Thomas Wilson and the Spy returned to London from Bonny and Montego Bay, Jamaica, on 1 February 1793 and eight months later departed for Angola. The Spy fitted for 468 slaves, mustered 60 crewmen, and probably carried a letter of marque. All men entered pay at Gravesend on 2 October. To trade in Angola, Wilson hired four mates: Irishmen Thomas Owens of Antrim (1st mate) and Andrew Bennis of Limerick (2nd mate), third mate William Turpin of Yorkshire, and fourth mate Peter Christofen of Fredrikstad, Norway. Thirty-five-year-old surgeon Samuel John Penton of London, a fourteen-year veteran at sea, had probably sailed on at least three slaving voyages, placing him in the top-tier of Guinea surgeons.46 Twenty-five year old carpenter John Smith hailed from Liverpool and had worked on two previous voyages. He would teach his mate, Glaswegian Archibald Galloway, how to retool ships to confine maximum numbers of humans.47 Senegal-born cook Thomas Jones (23 years old) signed on to his seventh Atlantic voyage. Among the 28 seamen were 5 from Aberdeen, aged 19–26. On 29 April 1793 Edinburgh-born James Bowie returned to London after commanding the slaver Elizabeth Anderson to Bance Island and Port Maria, Jamaica. War with France had by then broken out; subsequently

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Bowie secured men only with great difficulty for the ship’s return voyage to the Sierra Leone trading post. Between 14 October and 6 December 1793 Bowie convinced 25 hands to sign the ship’s articles of agreement, including Bristol-born first mate Benjamin Merrick, Ayr-born second mate Trevor Nutry and Bedford-born surgeon John Cunningham.48 Six other men hailed from England, six from Scotland, three from Ireland, two from Denmark and one each from Martinique, the Netherlands, and America. Martinique-born cook John Baptist (39 years old) had already worked 20 years at sea. The muster roll recorded as London-born only the steward, a seaman and a landsman.49 With just 3 officers and 22 shipmates Bowie planned to transport 391 enslaved Africans from Bance Island to Kingston, Jamaica. Additional trading personnel were not needed, though, as Bowie would imprison slaves purchased by the Bance Island factor. The lack of London-born mariners on the Spy and Elizabeth Anderson is striking. Eighty-six men embarked on these two ships in 1793, but only twelve Londoners, including the only London-born officer, surgeon Penton. Captains Thomas Wilson and James Bowie hailed from Durham and Edinburgh, respectively. Less than half the mariners came from England; two in five were born in Scotland or Ireland, and others arrived in London at some time from the Baltic countries, Africa, America, the Netherlands, Wales and the West Indies (see Table 3.3). These breakdowns illustrate London’s cosmopolitanism and international trading patterns.50 But the scarcity of London shipmates suggests also that Guinea outfitters stretched to find locals who knew the slaving business. Indeed, the Spy embarked Liverpool carpenter Smith and second mate Bennis, who worked previously in the Liverpool slave trade,51 and the Elizabeth Anderson offered a substantial £28 10s advance to chief mate Merrick, a 20-year veteran sailor and member of a Bristol slave-trading family.52 Even Captain Wilson, who commanded London slavers beginning in 1774, had a Liverpool connection: a mariner on the Spy in 1790, William Richardson, thought that Wilson ‘had been many years in the Guinea trade out of Liverpool’.53 Other scattered evidence indicates that London Guinea merchants targeted Liverpool – and some Bristol – skippers, particularly those with commercial knowledge about markets other than the Gold Coast. Samuel Linecar, a Liverpool captain in 1750–59, commanded London slavers to Bonny and Old Calabar in the mid-1760s. Robert Cowie commanded four Bristol vessels to Bonny/New Calabar in 1751–60 and then three LondonBonny ventures. Captain William Hayman, trading to the Windward Coast from Liverpool in 1764, worked for London financier Peter Thellusson in 1765. In late 1792 a London syndicate hired Captain Samuel Gamble, a mariner trained on Liverpool ships in the 1780s, to steer the Sandown to the Isle de Los and Rio Pongo.54 Captain Stephen Bowers, a Windward

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Table 3.3.  Geographic origin and officer status of crewmen on the London slavers Spy and Elizabeth Anderson (1793).1 Officers a

Non-officers

Total

Percentage of total crewmen

5b

30

35

40.7

1

11

12

14.0

Scotland

2

18

20

23.3

Ireland

2

10

12

14.0

Sweden

0

5

5

5.8

Denmark

1

3

4

4.7

Prussia

0

3

3

3.5

Norway

0

2

2

2.3

Africa

0

1

1

1.2

America

0

1

1

1.2

Netherlands

0

1

1

1.2

Wales

0

1

1

1.2

West Indies

0

1

1

1.2

10

76

86

England London/Thames

Totals

1  Based on a sample of 60 men mustered on the Spy (2 October 1793) and 26 crewmen mustered on the Elizabeth Anderson (May– December 1793). Notes: officers defined as captains, surgeons and first, second, third, fourth, fifth mates. b The officers from England were Captain Thomas Wilson (Durham); Chief Mate Benjamin Merrick (Bristol); Surgeon John Cunningham (Bedford); Surgeon Samuel John Penton (London); Third Mate William Turpin (Yorkshire). Source: The National Archives, HCA 16/89/2775 (Spy); HCA 16/91/3202 (Elizabeth Anderson). a

Coast trader fired by Liverpool slaving merchant Robert Bostock,55 began working for the London firm Caldcleugh, Boyd and Reid in 1797. Whitehaven-born Hance Hamilton, experienced in the Liverpool–Angola trade, shifted to London in 1802 to command three Thames vessels to the Congo River. In 1803 a London firm fitted the Trusty for the Benin Coast and hired Liverpool captain Andrew Davidson who ‘had a previous knowledge of that place’.56

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Whereas outports supplied the London slave trade, few Londoners mustered on Guineamen that cleared from Bristol or Liverpool. From a sample of 1,247 seamen on Bristol slavers, 1789–94, only 80 men (6 per cent) hailed from the London metropolis. The totals include 14 officers: 1 captain, 3 second mates, 3 third mates, a fourth mate, and 6 surgeons. On Liverpool slavers, 1798–1807, musters recorded 70 men (2 per cent) out of 4,101 whose ‘usual abode’ was London.57 From a subset of 25 Londoners whose ranks were recorded, only 3 were officers: a second mate, a third mate and a surgeon. The number of surgeons is not surprising given London’s prominence as a medical centre: in the period 1770–99 the Royal College of Surgeons certified about 6,000 surgeons who could have worked in the British slave trade.58 In the Bristol and Liverpool samples no Londoner worked as first mate, a rank that demanded Guinea experience.59 Per capita, London and its environs supplied by far the fewest officers to the British slave trade. London’s shortage of capable shipboard traders contrasts to the reservoir of local manpower Liverpool and, to a lesser extent, Bristol merchants had available. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the two communities supplied to their ports’ slavers one-third of the Guinea officers and one-seventh of their non-officers.60 Each drew upon the hinterland to recruit a further quarter of the hands they needed, Bristol relying on men from Somersetshire, Devonshire and southern Wales, Liverpool on Lancashire and the Midlands. Ireland and Scotland supplied one-fifth of the outports’ manning requirements. Liverpool had more shipmates from the United States and Scandinavia since Liverpool’s trade with America and the Baltic increased during the 1790s, depositing foreign-born mariners in Merseyside. Almost all Isle of Man residents who worked in the slave trade mustered out of Liverpool. Black mariners from Africa, Atlantic Islands, the West Indies or America (including some from, perhaps, Portugal) comprised 3 per cent of all crewmen in the late British slave trade (see Tables 3.4–3.6).61 The Jamaica planter Simon Taylor understood that the largest concentration of slaving expertise resided in Liverpool. Since the port had outfitted annually 85 Guineamen in the 1780s and 90s, compared to London and Bristol’s 15–20 voyages per year, for every one slaving mariner walking the docks of London or Bristol there were five in Liverpool. London had a particular shortfall in men trained in Guinea markets dominated by African merchants, such as those on the Windward Coast, in the Bight of Biafra and on the Angola coastline from Majumba to Ambriz. Taylor could not identify London Guinea officers for his Bonny enterprise because in the 30 years before 1799 only 24 Guineamen departed the Thames for the Biafran port. Liverpool, by contrast, outfitted 333 slavers for Bonny from 1770 to 1799,

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Table 3.4.  Crewmen in the Bristol and Liverpool slave trades, 1789–1807 (by country/region). Bristol, 1789–1794 No. England

Liverpool, 1798–1807 %

No.

%

1,154

61.8

England

2,038

49.7

Wales

253

13.6

Ireland

622

15.2

Ireland

218

11.7

Scotland

303

7.4

Scotland

117

6.3

United States

288

7.0

United States

44

2.4

Wales

255

6.2

Scandinavia

24

1.3

Scandinavia

174

4.2

Africa

12

0.6

Portugal

98

2.4

West Indies

12

0.6

Prussia/Russia

96

2.3

Prussia

8

0.4

West Indies

63

1.5

Spain

6

0.3

Africa

42

1.0

Canada

4

0.2

Italy

39

1.0

France

4

0.2

Germany/Holland

38

0.9

Portugal

3

0.2

Atlantic Islands

15

0.4

Atlantic Islands

2

0.1

France

9

0.2

Italy

2

0.1

Spain

8

0.2

East Indies

1

0.1

East Indies

4

0.1

Germany

1

0.1

Canada

3

0.1

Netherlands

1

0.1

Brazil

2

0.0

Philippines

1

0.1

Greece

2

0.0

India

2

0.0

Sample: 1,867 mariners, 1789–94

Sample: 4,101 mariners, 1798–1807

Source: Bristol Record Office, Bristol muster roll copies.

Source: The National Archives, BT 98/58–69, Liverpool muster roll copies.

Note: Percentages in bold indicate at least a twofold difference in the geographic origins of slaving mariners between the two ports.

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Table 3.5  Crewmen in the Bristol and Liverpool slave trades, 1789–1807 (by English/Welsh region). Bristol, 1789–1794

Liverpool, 1798–1807

No.

%

509

40.8

No.

%

819

60.1

Devonshire

96

7.7

London

70

5.1

London

80

6.4

Cheshire

66

4.8

Glamorganshire Lancashire

66

5.3

Cumberland

66

4.8

61

4.9

Somersetshire

61

4.5

Pembrokeshire

50

4.0

Isle of Man

49

3.6

Gloucestershire

48

3.8

Yorkshire

44

3.2

Cornwall

47

3.8

Devonshire

30

2.2

Yorkshire

28

2.2

Northumberland

20

1.5

Carmarthen

26

2.1

Kent

18

1.3

Cumberland

25

2.0

Durham

14

1.0

Northumberland

25

2.0

Channel Islands

14

1.0

Hampshire

19

1.5

Dorsetshire

11

0.8

Dorsetshire

17

1.4

Gloucestershire

11

0.8

Durham

12

1.0

Cornwall

10

0.7

Essex

11

0.9

Kent

11

0.9

18 other shires

59

4.3

Monmouthshire

11

0.9

Somersetshirea

Wiltshire

11

0.9

Isle of Wight

10

0.8

23 other shires

84

6.7

Lancashireb

Sample: 1,247 mariners, 1789–94, from 43 shires

Sample: 1,362 mariners, 1798–1807, from 33 shires

Source: Bristol Record Office, Bristol muster roll copies.

Source: The National Archives, BT 98/58–69, Liverpool muster roll copies.

Notes: Bristol = 408 (29.0% of England/Wales; 21.9% of total) b Liverpool = 686 (29.9% of England/Wales; 16.7% of total) a

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81

Table 3.6.  Crewmen in the Liverpool slave trade, 1798–1807 (by rank and country). Country

Officers 1

Non-officers

No.

%

No.

%

England

222

69.2a

861

53.9

Scotland

46

14.3b

99

6.2

Ireland

28

8.7c

243

15.2

United States

12

3.7

135

8.4

Wales

8

2.5

94

5.9

Sweden

1

0.3

67

4.2

Prussia

1

0.3

47

2.9

Denmark

1

0.3

24

1.5

West Indies

1

0.3

18

1.0

Germany

1

0.3

10

0.6

Sample

321

Lancashire

109

(34.0)

1,598 273

(17.1)

Liverpool

103

(32.1)

226

(14.1)

Sample: 83 of 1,154 Liverpool slaving voyages, 1798–1807. Few Liverpool musters. record rank and abode. Table includes countries/regions contributing at least one officer to the Liverpool slave trade. Key: 1  Officers defined as captains, surgeons and first, second, third, fourth, fifth mates (those who could assume command). The greatest disproportionate number of officers: Isle of Man (54%, 13/24) and Scotland (32%). Notes: includes 61 masters b includes 18 surgeons c includes 17 surgeons. a

Source: The National Archives, BT 98/58–69, Liverpool muster roll copies.

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employing 13,000 men, half of whom returned to Liverpool at some point. By 1799 in London, a metropolis numbering 1,000,000 people and 50,000 mariners, perhaps only 100 city residents had visited the Niger Delta. It is no surprise that London abolitionists, needing supporters to present evidence to Parliament, had great difficulty finding local men knowledgeable about African markets other than those on the Gold Coast. London’s links to the Royal African Company, 1672–1752, shaped the city’s future transatlantic slaving networks until abolition in 1807. Whereas in the 1660s the Company of Adventurers Trading to Africa focused on slaves and ship-trade markets in the Bights of Biafra (principally New Calabar) and Benin, the RAC began shifting towards gold and fort-trades in Upper Guinea and the Gold Coast.62 Workers built trading posts in the Gambia River, along the Sierra Leone and Gold coasts and at Ouidah in the Bight of Benin. Company agents, soldiers, surgeons and other support personnel staffed coastal enclaves and purchased gold, slaves, spices, ivory, dyewoods, fuel, water and foodstuffs from African business people. During the monopoly years from 1672 to 1698 the Company purchased half their slaves in fort-trade markets and half in the Biafra and Angola ship-trades. Over the next half-century London merchants slowly abandoned the Bight of Biafra, and in the period of free trade up to abolition in 1807 the Thames–Angola commercial networks declined steadily. By 1783–1807 Londoners purchased 54 per cent of their slaves from the Gold Coast, 50 per cent of the entire British slave trade there.63 Some Thames merchants maintained factories in the Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers, and thus European coastal agents purchased two-thirds of the slaves embarked on London vessels (see Table 3.7). Patronage connections between London merchants and fort officials, established during the years of the RAC, carried through to the end of the British slave trade. London housed the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, the organization created in 1752 to manage British African forts, and officials hired London residents to supply the trading posts with goods, personnel or ships to freight slaves. London merchant Richard Oswald helped manage Thomas Melville’s contracts to supply RAC Gold Coast forts and transacted business with him when Melville later served as Governor of Cape Coast Castle. John Mill, one of Oswald’s business partners, was the cousin of David Mill, a Cape Coast governor in the late 1770s.64 Oswald shipped slaves from the Gold Coast and from the former RAC factory at Bance Island, which he had rebuilt in the late 1740s. Richard Miles, Jerome Bernard Weuves, Archibald Dalzel and James Swanzy worked as Gold Coast governors from the 1770s to 1807 65 and

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83

Table 3.7.  London and the Gold Coast slave trade, 1750–1807. A.  London’s slave trade (by African region) 1750–1775

1783–1807

African region

slaves

%

slaves

%

Senegambia

30,486

31.3

5,630

4.8

8,862

9.2

11,479

9.7

3,713

3.8

2,912

2.5

31,981

32.9

63,448

53.8

Sierra

Leone a

Windward Coast Gold Coast Bight of Benin

1,984

2.0

8,480

7.2

Bight of Biafra

16,101

16.5

12,480

10.6

4,192

4.3

13,496

11.4

West Central Africa Total

97,319

117,925

Key: a In 1783–1807 the Bance Island factory supplied approximately 10,000 of the estimated 11,479 slaves shipped on London vessels from the Sierra Leone region. Sample: 97,319 of 128,180 estimated slave exports, 1750–75; 117,925 of 133,606 estimated slave exports, 1783–1807 (other London voyages to unknown African destinations). Source: See Table 3.1.

B.  Gold Coast slave exports (by British port) 1750–1775

1783–1807

British port

No.

slaves

%

No.

slaves

%

Liverpool

174

46,688

39.5

168

54,259

39.7

Bristol

119

34,101

28.8

44

12,770

9.3

London

110

32,125

27.2

227

68,039

49.7

Others

24

5,358

4.5

8

1,735

1.3

Total:

427

118,272

447

136,803

Source: See Table 3.1.

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transported slaves to the West Indies while they resided on the Coast and after they returned to London.66 Anthony Calvert, William Camden and Thomas King, the leading British Gold Coast traders from 1783 to 1807, contracted to supply provisions to the forts and to freight slaves.67 Many of these merchants and fort officials were members of Trinity House, a centre for London business and political information.68 To compete in the transatlantic slaving business Bristol and Liverpool merchants began developing networks of trade with gold-scarce and lowercost markets dominated by African businessmen. Bristol moved heavily into Calabar in the peacetime period 1713–39 and subsequently into Bonny and Angola.69 In mid-century, Liverpool merchants pioneered British commerce with Cameroon and then expanded into the Windward Coast and all other ship-trade regions. London’s networks with African merchants in ports such as Old Calabar evaporated, the English language remaining London’s seventeenth-century legacy. As slave prices rose and African merchants became wealthier, transatlantic personal relationships became paramount in ‘ship trade’ zones. A group of ‘charter captains’ from Bristol (1720s–1740s) and Liverpool (1740s–1760s) cemented relations between outport merchants and African businessmen for three generations. These key masters trained mates – future captains – in local commercial customs and, most importantly, introduced them to African dealers.70 Captain Patrick Fairweather’s life illustrates the multi-generational social linkages, forged in the mid-eighteenth century, connecting an English outport to an African ship trade market. Fairweather, sailing from Liverpool, first visited Old Calabar in 1755,71 probably as a teenage apprentice on the Chesterfield captained by Patrick Black. Fairweather attained command in 1768 and wore the mantel of senior ship captain to Old Calabar by 1777. He had by then trained at least six future Liverpool-Calabar captains.72 By the time he left the Liverpool–Calabar trade in 1792, after working as a de facto British governor for 15 years, Fairweather had spent half his life in the Cross River region. One can back-date Fairweather’s social ties to the late 1740s, when merchants William Whaley, William Earle, Patrick Black and William Davenport pioneered the Liverpool slave trade to Old Calabar:73 Whaley accepted Davenport as an apprentice in 1741;74 Whaley and Davenport part-owned the Chesterfield in 1750 and 1751, commanded by Earle; Earle settled as a resident Liverpool merchant in 1753, transferring command to Black; and Black trained Fairweather in the Old Calabar slave trade. Fairweather’s will names Patrick Black and Thomas Earle (William’s nephew) as executors, confirming the mariner’s longstanding relationship with two of the earliest Liverpool–Calabar traders.75 The career of Patrick Fairweather, a prototypical ship trader from Liverpool, contrasts with the Elizabeth Anderson’s James Bowie, a fort-trader

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sailing out of London. Whereas Fairweather trained first as a sailor and then trader, Bowie educated himself as a businessman and then mariner. Bowie, an Edinburgh man born in the mid-1740s, first went to sea at the age of 27. He probably worked in the 1770s for fellow Scot Richard Oswald, owner of the Bance Island slaving factory in Sierra Leone. In 1784–86 he commanded three small vessels to Bance Island for Oswald and his nephews and successors, London merchants John and Alexander Anderson. In 1786 Bowie disembarked at Bance Island to work as one of the Andersons’ principal agents.76 He resided in Sierra Leone until mid-1791, and then he commanded the Elizabeth Anderson on its two triangular voyages to Bance Island, Jamaica and London. Bowie died within eight weeks after returning to England in November 1794.77 The histories of Fairweather and Bowie point to the development of two types of ship captains during the eighteenth century: the Liverpool captain-as-trader, purchasing slaves, ivory and yams in ports such as Old Calabar, and the London captain-as-manager, loading human cargoes and provisions in factories such as Bance Island. Liverpool mariners gained skills in navigation on board ship or perhaps also in school, worked their way up the ranks in transatlantic vessels – usually in either the West India or slave trade – and then attained command after working for three to five years as officers.78 A West Country observer in 1740 commented that Liverpool vessels carried numerous apprentices and mariners ‘married in their manner to their ships’.79 By contrast, London-based captains could work interchangeably as factors at sea or on land. Merchant Richard Oswald, for example, set up his nephew John Anderson as an overseer at a coal works near Glasgow, then placed him in command of one of his London ships to his Sierra Leone factory, and in 1770 employed him as overseer on an American plantation.80 Oswald valued his captain’s management skills, whether supervising coal workers in Scotland, enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage, or those slaves on plantations.81 In the period 1750–1807 Liverpool’s dominance over London in transatlantic slaving rested in human capital – the business skills needed to negotiate the complex trade with hard-bargaining African merchants in most outlets from the Senegal River south to Ambriz. In aspects other than human capital, London held the advantage. Liverpool merchants lacked their London rivals’ immediate access to City bankers, Britain’s largest shipbuilding centre and prize market, warehouses that stored goods from all over the world, including East India Company textiles essential in all slaving markets, maritime insurance and information and patronage networks.82 Liverpool men may have benefited from a cost advantage with Manchester manufacturers,

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particularly two years’ credit,83 but it is hard to imagine London merchant bankers unable to negotiate similar arrangements. Furthermore, some Manchester–Liverpool transport-cost savings for manufacturers would have been offset by the costs of hiring ship brokers to purchase prizes in London and mariners to steer the craft from the Thames to the Mersey.84 London’s infrastructure advantages enabled 14,000 voyages to depart from the Thames in 1794, more than triple Liverpool’s clearances.85 In fact, in the period 1750–1807 the only Atlantic markets where London ships proved uncompetitive were those along the Windward Coast, Bight of Biafra and Angola. Only Liverpool captains traded annually with all major African markets, whether managed by European fort officials, private merchants’ coastal factors, or African businessmen. During this half-century African coastal merchants sold two of every three enslaved Africans loaded directly on British slavers to Liverpool master mariners.86 For all ‘ship trades’, merchants turned to Liverpool to locate experienced captains, mates and surgeons. Those ports that lacked officers who could bargain face-to-face with African merchants in markets such as Old Calabar or Bonny only could trade profitably with fort traders in Upper Guinea, the Gold Coast or Ouidah. London’s lack of competitiveness in the Bight of Biafra – after 1807 in purchasing palm oil from Africans – persisted through the 1850s, signalling further the metropolitan shortage of experienced ship traders.87 Merchants from London specialized in Gold Coast or Upper Guinea markets because they could not compete elsewhere, a commercial weakness that characterized smaller transatlantic slavers.88 Turning from London to Bristol, focusing on human capital also helps to explain why Simon Taylor sought to base his Bonny slavers in Liverpool rather than Bristol. Although matching Liverpool’s expertise in most African ship-trade markets – with the exception of the Windward Coast – Bristol never fitted out more than 51 Guineamen in a year, a figure Liverpool exceeded in all but 10 years in the period 1753–1807. Bristol’s 51 slaving ventures in 1730 and again in 1738 employed 1,500 hands, 150–200 of whom worked as officers. A majority of these vessels slaved in the Bight of Biafra or Angola, regions that required captains, mates and surgeons to work as trade specialists. Liverpool surpassed Bristol’s voyage record in 1753, organizing 61 slaving ventures, and doubled that total by 1792, outfitting 129 Guinea vessels and 4,000 men. The year 1792 marked a final peak in Bristol’s slave trade: the port’s merchants outfitted 37 ventures, the greatest total since 1764. Bristol’s slaving resurgence in 1792 stretched the limits of the port’s pool of human capital, the decline of which had become evident in the 1780s. Promotion rates had increased after the ending of the American war, halving the time it took a mariner to attain an officer rank. Samuel

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Stribling, for example, worked in 1783 as a ‘foremastman’ on the brig Little Pearl and eight years later mustered as first mate. Edward Mentor, a boatswain in 1785, attained command of the Mary in 1789. Exceptional death rates after 1790 exacerbated manpower shortfalls: between February 1791 and December 1792, one-third of Bristol’s officer corps died in the Guinea trade.89 Bristol merchants James Jones, James Rogers and Henry and Robert Hunter responded to the officer shortage by hiring Liverpool slaving expertise. In 1790 Jones employed Liverpool-born John Robinson Wade (master), John Keaten (chief mate) and Robert Milligan (second mate);90 Rogers hired Captain William Woodville, junior, of Liverpool and a Liverpool-born second mate, fourth mate and steward,91 and the Hunters hired Captain John Spencer and first mate Alexander Speers, both Liverpool-born and trained.92 After the onset of the French wars and subsequent English financial crisis in 1793, Bristol’s trade declined to three voyages per year, 1795–1807. Significantly, two-thirds of these final 37 voyages loaded slaves from Gold Coast castles, the Bance Island factory or the British Ouidah fort – markets that required less slave-trading expertise than the ship trades of the Bight of Biafra or Angola, the mainstays of Bristol’s slaving business since the 1720s. Bristol merchants still found financial backers and trading cargoes for their enterprises during the French wars; locating groups of slave-trading officers, however, proved difficult. Paradoxically, the decline of Bristol after 1793 led nine experienced Bristol-trained doctors and thirteen masters to shift to Liverpool,93 helping to buoy Merseyside’s slave trade to record levels in 1798 and 1799. Simon Taylor could not have organized a Bonny venture from Bristol, as he planned his enterprise in early 1799 at the height of Liverpool’s dominance in human capital in the slave trade. In the second half of the eighteenth century Liverpool emerged as the leading European slaving port, outfitting Guineamen to all African markets from the Senegal River to Ambriz. Trading competitively in 20 African locations required Liverpool merchants not only to purchase requisite cargoes demanded by African businessmen but also to assort shipboard personnel knowledgeable about local African commercial practices and customs. Buyer-seller relationships formed the nexus of cross-cultural trade in markets managed solely by coastal African dealers – those that, in total, comprised two-thirds of the British slave trade. Liverpool’s prominence in the key ‘ship trade’ markets managed by captains, mates and surgeons contrasts starkly with London’s leading position in scattered ‘fort trade’ outlets, a legacy of the Royal African Company’s period of gold- and slavetrading supremacy (1672–1713). High mortality rates limited the number

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of experienced slaving officers, posing particular problems for Guinea merchants aiming to transact business in major African markets lacking shore-based Europeans. Those unable to recruit trade specialists, such as Londoners, Rhode Islanders, Danes or other small Guinea venturers, organized voyages to sites staffed by coastal factors. Liverpool, however, benefited from comparatively large pools of human capital in Merseyside, and high officers’ salaries attracted skilled maritime labour from all over the British Isles and North Atlantic to the Lancashire port. By the 1760s a reservoir of slave-trading expertise resided in Liverpool, enabling merchants there to consolidate their leading position won a decade earlier and expand the trade to new heights on the eve of abolition. Notes

1. Institute of Commonwealth Studies (hereafter ICS), University of London, Simon Taylor Letterbook B, December 1797–April 1799, ff. 39, 82–83. Simon Taylor outlined his main thoughts concerning the Guinea plan on 29 January 1799 to Robert Taylor. The Guinea enterprise did not eventuate, in part due to the Slave Carrying Act of 1799, which raised the costs of outfitting slavers. Unless noted otherwise, all slave-trading data come from David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). 2. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1962), 293; Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2000), 89. 3. For a study that discusses slaves as ‘human capital’, see Carlos Newland and Maria Jesus San Segundo, ‘Human Capital and Other Determinants of the Price Life Cycle of a Slave: Peru and La Plata in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History, 56 (1996), 694–701. 4. Upper Guinea defined as Senegambia, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast. Simon Taylor identified slaves shipped from Old Calabar, Gabon and Angola as less in demand in Jamaica. 5. Regarding slavers’ cargoes, see David Richardson, ‘West African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence on the Eighteenth-Century English Slave Trade’, in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (eds), The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1979), 303–30. Tobacco, rum and brandy distinguished Gold Coast cargoes from those at Bonny. 6. Captain John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo (London, 1823, reprinted 1966), 8. 7. Under the north-east bastion was the ‘slave hole’, a prison where perhaps several hundred Africans could be confined. The fort ruins suggest that this prison was a series of narrow tall vaults with ventilating shafts high above the stone floors. M. A. Priestley, ‘A Note on Fort William, Anomabu’, Transactions of the Gold Coast and Togoland Historical Society, 2 (1956), 46–48; J. D. Fage (ed.), ‘A New Check List of the Forts and Castles of Ghana’, Transactions of the Historical Society

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Human Capital in the British Slave Trade

89

of Ghana, 4 (1959), 57–67; A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London, 1963), 349–55. The ‘Company of Merchants Trading to Africa’, the London-based organization created with the dissolution of the Royal African Company (RAC) in 1752. In March 1791 London merchant William Collow’s Gold Coast agents purchased four slaves from a ‘Caboseer’ at Padeora, near Anomabu (‘The Journal of an African Slaver, 1789–1792, with an Introductory Note by George A. Plimpton’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 39 [1929], 387–96; Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Journal of an African Slaver, 1789–1792, and the Gold Coast Slave Trade of William Collow’, History in Africa, 22 [1995], 61–71). For a detailed study of one caboceer’s political position on the Gold Coast – at Ada, a Danish lodge – see Per O. Hernaes, Slaves, Danes, and African Coast Society (Trondheim, 1998), 71–94. Robert Hume, surgeon of the ship Ann, owned by the Liverpool firm Ingram, Butler and Rigby, stated that they took six weeks on the Gold Coast purchasing provisions for several slave vessels, but they purchased no slaves as ‘they were already purchased for us’ (in Evidence of Hume, 31 May 1799, in F. William Torrington (ed.), House of Lords Sessional Papers, Session 1798–99 [Rahway, 1975], vol. 3, 137). Describing trade on the Gold Coast, Bristol surgeon Alexander Falconbridge stated that the ‘trade carried on at these forts, is bartering for negroes, which the governors sell again to the European ships’ (in Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa [London, 1788], 54). According to the editors of Hugh Crow’s memoirs: ‘The inhabitants of Bonny, when our author last visited that port [1807], amounted to about 3,000’ (Memoirs of the Late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool [London, 1830, reprinted 1970], 197). In 1826 a naval surgeon wrote ‘the number of inhabitants including the Villages on the borders of the rivers, under the dominion of the Sovereign of Bonny, may be estimated at 25,000’ (Roland Jackson [ed.], Journal of a Voyage to Bonny River on the West Coast of Africa … by R. M. Jackson [Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 1934], 144). Jackson’s estimate included the town of Bonny, located on an island 50 miles (80 kilometres) in circumference, and 12 nearby principalities or hamlets ‘attached to Bonny’. Adams, Remarks on the Country, 129, 245. The Liverpool ship Kitty, for example, loaded 254 male and 190 female slaves on 27 days, from 28 July to 2 September 1797, including shipments of 75 and 73 slaves, on August 12 and 15 (House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers, House of Lords, 1798 (undated), No. 3, surgeon’s log of the Kitty). For discussion of loading rates, see Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840’, Journal of African History, 45 (2004), 379–83. Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles and Profits: Merchant Decision Making in the British Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 58 (2001), 189–90. Adams, Remarks on the Country, 245. For a discussion of credit and trust, focusing on Old Calabar, see Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 333–55. The terms fort- and ship-trading follow K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London, 1957), 216–32.

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15. In all, British merchants periodically occupied five to ten abandoned trading posts, first built by the RAC. Adams, Remarks on the Country, 205; Behrendt, ‘Journal of an African Slaver’, 61–71. A sub-factor from Accra, employed by the RAC, resided at Pram Pram ( J. J. Crooks [ed.], Records Relating to the Gold Coast Settlements from 1750 to 1874 [London, 1923, reprinted 1973], 79). Agah and Lagoo were two small Company forts built in the seventeenth century that were then periodically abandoned (Davies, Royal African Company, 246–49). London merchants probably rebuilt them in the second half of the eighteenth century. Adams stated that Lagoo was ‘built on the top of a hill having an elevation of three, or four hundred feet’ (Adams, Remarks on the Country, 205). 16. Merseyside Maritime Museum, Davenport Papers, Reel 1, John Maine and partners to William Hindle, Liverpool, 7 February 1761, Trading Invoices and Accounts, 1761–1763, voyages of the ship Tyrell; Gomer Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1744–1812 (London, 1897), 602–6; [Baker and Dawson] to Captain Robert Catterall, Liverpool, 1 March 1784. The National Archives (hereafter TNA). E219/380. Captains who helped organize the sale of slaves in the West Indies earned an additional 2 per cent commission. 17. Sheila Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, 1789 (Wilmington, 1975), vol. 68, 52–53. John Hodson, making his first voyage as captain, commanded John Tarleton and Daniel Backhouse’s ship Eliza from Liverpool to the Isle de Los, Dominica and St Vincent. 18. Vera Johnson, ‘Sidelights on the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1789–1807’, Mariner’s Mirror, 38 (1952), 280–81. 19. ICS, Simon Taylor Letterbook B, Simon Taylor to Robert Taylor, Kingston, 29 January 1799, ff. 82–83; Cornwall Chronicle, 30 October 1790. Knies, of Well Close Square, St George, Middlesex, died in 1812 (TNA, PROB 11/1539). He was a member of the German sugar-baking community of East London. 20. From research on Liverpool muster rolls in 1787, abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Richard Phillips first pointed out that ‘more than half of the seamen, who went out with the ships in the slave trade, did not return with them, and that of these so many perished, as amounted to one-fifth of all employed’ (Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. [London, 1808, reprinted 1968], vol. 1, 247–48). 21. When John Anderson captained the Liverpool slaver Nile in March 1806 and May 1807, for example, he worked with a crew of 32 strangers on the second voyage (TNA, BT 98/67,136; BT 98/68,128). 22. When in November 1804 a husband assembled 50 crewmen for the 285-ton Liverpool ship Aurora, departing for Old Calabar, he employed men on 20 different ‘stations’: captain, first mate, surgeon, second mate, 2nd second mate, third mate, fourth mate, clerk, boatswain, carpenter, joiner, gunner, cooper, armourer, cook, steward, tailor, painter – and then 32 seamen and apprentices (TNA, BT 98/66,271). Most Guineamen employed landsmen – men not bred to sea – to help guard enslaved Africans. Some slavers also employed fifth mates, sixth mates, stewards, sailmakers, surgeons’ mates, carpenters’ mates or second cooks. By contrast, Liverpool Greenland whalers, carrying one mariner per ten tons and usually 40–60 crewmen, distinguished ten ranks – none, of course,

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

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relating to trading skills. In 1803 the Liverpool Greenland whaler Alligator carried a master, a surgeon, a first mate, a second mate, a carpenter, a cooper, four harpooners, six boat steerers, six line managers and twenty-nine seamen (TNA, BT 98/64,97). Only four extant Liverpool muster roll copies formally identify a crewman as ‘trading mate’ (TNA, BT 98/65,447; BT 98/66,333; BT 98/66,419; BT 98/67,503): the slavers Bess (Old Calabar), Brooks (Congo and Cabinda), Robert (Upper Guinea) and Higginson, senior (New Calabar). On the Liverpool slaving schooner Esther, which traded at Angola, the muster recorded Richard Watson as ‘supercargo and 1st mate’ (TNA, BT 98/66,79). Not surprisingly, these trading mates did not work on the Gold Coast. On the Middle Passage some captains put their chief mate in charge of locking African men in their prisons every night, whereas the second mate commanded the group in the women’s room. (Lambert [ed.], Commons Sessional Papers, vol. 73, 119, 375, evidence of Captain Clement Noble, 10 May 1790 and mariner Henry Ellison, 8 June 1790). On the Windward Coast trade from Cape Mount to Assini several mates commanded longboats up small rivulets, dealing for small lots of slaves. When his chief mate died on his second Windward Coast voyage in 1753, Captain John Newton believed it would ‘considerably retard our trade’ (Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell [eds], The Journal of a Slave Trader ( John Newton) 1750–1754 [London, 1962], 31, 89). Unless indicated otherwise, information on crew mortality may be found in Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Crew Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, Slavery and Abolition, 18 (1997), 49–71. Liverpool surgeon and captain John Knox noted that landsmen, who had not apprenticed as sailors, died at the highest rates ‘from not being seasoned to the country’ (Lambert [ed.], Commons Sessional Papers, 68, 156, evidence of Knox, 9 June 1789). Falconbridge, Account of the Slave Trade, 48. Bonny Point, ‘the place where they bury European seamen’, according to mariner William Richardson (Colonel Spencer Childers [ed.], A Mariner of England [London, 1908], 47). Richardson traded at Bonny on the London slaver Spy in 1790. Cambridge University Library, Add Mss 3871, Log of the London slaver Bruce Grove, 3 July 1802 (description of pounding surf ), 14 July (distance from shore). I thank Stanley L. Engerman and David Eltis for providing a copy of this logbook. By contrast, in 1771 the owners of the Justatia, a London–Virginia trader, paid first mate Alexander Tait £3 10s per month, carpenter David Allan £3 10s per month and second mate Johnson Kenon £2 per month. Seamen, as in the slave trade, received £1 10s per month (TNA, HCA 15/58). For pre-1770 wages, see Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 134–50. In the closing years of the British trade, higher slave prices pushed officers’ wages up by as much as 150 per cent. In 1802 William Taylor agreed to work as first mate on the Liverpool slaver Vanguard for £7 7s per month and three prime privilege slaves. At the end of the voyage the owners owed Taylor £301 19s 6d (TNA, HCA 16/103/3981). Jonathan Press, The Merchant Seamen of Bristol, 1747–1789 (Bristol, 1976), 5. Sailors’ wartime wages rose in all Atlantic trades. Thus in November 1779, during the

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92

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery American Revolutionary War, pursers paid seamen on the London–Jamaica ship Landovery £4 per month (TNA, HCA 16/69/1029). TNA, E134/8Geo3/East9, Accounts of the Bristol slaver Juno (1767–68). Letter from W. J. [William James?] to Lord Hawkesbury, dated London, 27 February 1788, in Report of the Lords, Part I, No. 13. Surgeon Alexander Falconbridge stated how he ‘dined one day with Captain Fraser and his officers; he then said, “Every one of you who are here I will make captains” – He has been as good as his word; and I am the only one out of that number that has not commanded a vessel in the Slave Trade’ (Evidence of Falconbridge, 11 March 1790, in Lambert [ed.], Commons Sessional Papers, vol. 72, 344). Becoming a wealthy merchant was within reach of any young man who survived the trade (Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 [1991], 40–45). A classic example is William Boats, ‘born a beggar who died a lord’. Boats, born c.1716, captained seven Liverpool slavers from 1744 to 1756. He first owned shares of Guineamen in 1752 and during the next 42 years, up to his death in 1794 aged 78, he had shares of at least 156 Liverpool Guineamen (Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 485). By 1789 pursers usually advanced ships’ doctors more than two months’ wages. The Bristol musters record that five men received advances of at least £20, four of whom were surgeons. Liverpool slavers also paid surgeons the greatest cash advance. In 1789 surgeon Nicholas Brown received £4 10s per month and a £9 advance; surgeon’s mate Athelstan Stephens £3 10s per month and a £7 advance (TNA, HCA 16/81/2087, Muster roll of the Gregson). Indeed, the duties of captains and surgeons often interchanged, for example, in 1803 when Captain Andrew Davidson disembarked surgeon John McLeod at Ouidah to work as a factor, leaving ‘the medical duties of the ship (with which [Davidson] had considerable acquaintance) to him’ ( John McLeod, A Voyage to Africa [London, 1820, reprinted 1971], 10). Perhaps 1 in 15 British slaving captains trained formally as surgeons (Behrendt, ‘Captains in the British Slave Trade’, 98–100). Most surgeons’ mates entered the slave trade younger than 23 years of age. Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Surgeons in the British Slave Trade: An A-Z Listing’ (typescript), which records biographical information on 1,000 surgeons who made 2,500 Guinea voyages. Surgeons died at the highest rates in the British slave trade, as they lacked immunities to African fevers and worked in close contact with diseased men, women and children (Behrendt, ‘Crew Mortality’, 60–61). On small slavers, such as the 132-ton Bess, surgeons contracted to earn £4 per month wages, one privilege slave, and one shilling per slave sold at market (Liverpool Record Office, hereafter LRO, Letterbook of Robert Bostock, 1789–1792, instructions to Captain James Fryer [ January 1790], 387 MD 54). Surgeon William Cahill would have earned £115: wages of £64 (£4 per month for 16 months); £40 profits from selling an adult male slave and £10 10s ‘head money’ for delivering 210 enslaved Africans to Dominica (1 shilling per slave delivered alive). Surgeons on the largest Guineamen received the profits from selling two privilege slaves and earned up to £250 per voyage.

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42. Behrendt, ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits’, 188, 196. 43. 20 Geo. II c.38. 44. Customs buildings housed copies of muster rolls, usually transcribed in large folios. The London folios may have been destroyed during the London Customs House fire of 1814. Bundles of High Court of Admiralty (HCA) documents include some original musters for vessels in various overseas trades. 45. There are copies of 3,200 slavers’ muster rolls for Bristol (1747–94) and Liverpool (1772–1808). The Bristol Record Office houses the muster ledger copies for that port. The National Archives owns the Liverpool copies, BT 98/45–69. I have estimated the total number of detailed musters because I have yet to complete analysis on the early Bristol years. It appears, however, that the Dolben Act amendment (1789), which concerned sailors’ shipboard conditions, prompted Bristol clerks to record more detailed genealogical and financial information. In 1804 the Liverpool muster roll ledgers begin to consistently record rank and/or abode. High Court of Admiralty documents contain a few original Bristol and Liverpool musters, such as that of the Liverpool slaver Hector, 1798 (TNA, HCA 16/94/3525). 46. Penton sailed on a slaving voyage to the Gold Coast and Antigua in 1788, and, after the Dolben Act, on 6 May 1790 he passed his slave-trade examination given by the Royal College of Surgeons of London. 47. Slaving ventures could not proceed without well-paid carpenters who converted sailing vessels into temporary Guineamen. Once ships departed England they began to modify interiors to maximize space to imprison enslaved Africans. They built bulkheads and roundhouses to create ‘apartments’ to separate enslaved African men, boys, and females. Roomy cabins for officers and passengers became crowded prisons for African women and children. Before arriving on the African coast they constructed a 6–8 foot (1.8–2.4 metre) woodand-iron barricade, extending above deck, to separate African men from women and give officers abaft a greater defensible position during insurrections. 48. On 1 January 1789 the Royal College of Surgeons in London certified Cunningham to work in the slave trade. 49. TNA, HCA 16/91/3202, Muster roll of the Elizabeth Anderson. 50. By the mid-1730s two-thirds of London’s residents had arrived ‘from distant Parts’ and ships from throughout the world moored in the Thames docks (David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 [Cambridge, 1995], 86). 51. Twenty-nine year old Irishman Andrew Bennis worked on the 279-ton Liverpool slaver Molly to the Gold Coast in 1790–91 (TNA, BT 98/52, 21). He first went to sea at the age of 17 and presumably sailed on other Liverpool ships. 52. Benjamin’s father, George Merrick, commanded 11 Bristol Guineamen, 1750– 74, principally to Biafra. The son first went to sea aged 15, perhaps on one of his father’s last ventures. By October 1782 Merrick appears as a second mate on the produce vessel Lively and then as second mate in 1784 on the Royal Charlotte to Bonny and Jamaica (Muster rolls of the Lively, 1783–84, 50, Royal Charlotte, 1785–86, 90). Brother William Merrick worked as third mate on the Leviathan, an African produce ship, and then as a second mate on the Pilgrim, dying at Bonny on 11 February 1788 (Bristol Record Office, hereafter BRO, Leviathan muster, 1786–87, 194; Pilgrim muster, 1788–89, 92).

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53. On its first voyage to Bonny in 1790, Wilson hired the chief mate of the Liverpool slave ship King Pepple to pilot the ship over the bar, suggesting that he had not visited the Biafran port (Childers [ed.], Mariner of England, 46–47). 54. Gamble had frequented the Upper Guinea Coast on previous voyages and met Pongo trader John Ormond, to whom the Sandown’s cargo would be consigned. See Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Captain Samuel Gamble of Liverpool: Navigator, Artist, African Trader, Teacher’ (typescript). 55. As Bostock wrote: ‘I believe [Bowers] to be a damn’d Scoundrel and it is a great loss to me I ever knew him, but I think he may Walk Liverpool Streets sometime before he gets another Vessel or berth’ (LRO, Letterbook of Robert Bostock, 1789–1792, Bostock to James Cleveland, 20 January 1790, 387 MD 54). 56. McLeod, Voyage to Africa, 9. The firm Richard Miles, Thomas Hughan and Robert Taylor – Simon Taylor now declined to partner Guineamen – owned the Trusty. Davidson previously commanded three slave voyages to Angola from 1798 to 1801 for the Liverpool firm Neilson and Heathcote. Earlier he worked as a mate on board the Liverpool slaving brig King of Dahomey, which traded to Ouidah in 1790 and 1792 (TNA, BT 98/52,228; BT 98/54,108). 57. Some men with abode ‘England’ may have hailed from London, but Liverpool musters generally identified the Londoners by their city. It is reasonable to suppose that most of those from ‘England’ resided usually in towns other than Liverpool or London. 58. An estimate projected from 1770–85 data: during these 16 years the RCS certified 2,684 men as surgeons’ mates and surgeons (navy, army, East India Company, hospitals) or diploma recipients. From the outbreak of the Wars of the French Revolution (1793) the RCS certification business expanded sharply (Royal College of Surgeons, London, Company of Surgeons’ Examination Book, 1745–1800). 59. Thus in 1803 Liverpool Guinea captain John Ainsworth mustered a Captain Smart from London as ‘Second Mate to the Coast which is as much as he can do not having been there before’ (TNA, C 108/212, f. 29, John Leigh to John Rimmer, Liverpool, 27 December 1803). 60. The percentage of Liverpool seamen is a lower-bound estimate, as I excluded from analysis any Liverpool muster that identified all shipmates’ place of abode as Liverpool. These musters generally recorded the captains’ place of abode as ‘Liverpool’ and all subsequent men’s abode as ‘do’ (ditto). Liverpool musters record only one place-name in the abode column, for example ‘Liverpool’ or ‘Lancashire’ or ‘England’. Few Liverpool musters record rank and abode (see Table 3.6). 61. One in three Scots in the slave trade worked as officers; four in five Irishmen mustered as seamen, landsmen, cooks, stewards, boatswains or apprentices. Of the 241 Scots whose rank is also recorded on the muster, 86 were officers (defined as captains, first–fifth mates or surgeons), including 32 surgeons, 18 second mates, 17 first mates and 6 captains. Disproportionate numbers of Baltic men worked as carpenters or joiners and black seamen as cooks or stewards. Names of mariners also give clues to their ethnicity/nationality. The British slave trade employed black cooks Prince George Bonny, John Cook, John Baptist and George Prince, and Joseph, Peter, Paul, Jack and Freeman

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62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

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95

were also common surnames. ‘Freeman’ and ‘Prince’ were common names of African–American black sailors (Martha S. Putney, Black Sailors. Afro-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War [Westport, 1987], 53). One American-born Bristol cook, James Adams, was ‘Taken up as a Runaway Negro’ when he arrived in Jamaica (BRO, Friendship muster, 1793–94, 177). Interestingly, not one captain who traded at New Calabar, Old Calabar or Angola in the 1660s worked later for the Royal African Company in these ship-trade markets. The dominance of the Gold Coast trade by London merchants explains Sanderson’s comment that ‘African merchants in the outports were frequently at odds with the African Company and many refused to pay the registration fee which entitled them to membership and the use of the Company facilities in London and [on the Gold Coast in] West Africa’ (F. E. Sanderson, ‘The Liverpool Delegates and Sir William Dolben’s Bill’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 124 [1972], 59–60). Hancock, Citizens of the World, 127, 139–40. From 1772 to 1780 Miles commanded British forts at Tantumkweri, Anomabu and Cape Coast Castle. Dalzel was a Ouidah governor in the late 1760s and the governor at Cape Coast Castle from 1792 to 1802 (George Metcalf, ‘Gold, Assortments and the Trade Ounce: Fante Merchants and the Problem of Supply and Demand in the 1770s’, Journal of African History, 28 [1987], 27–41; Metcalf, ‘A Microcosm of Why Africans Sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s’, Journal of African History, 28 [1987], 378–93; James A. Rawley, ‘Further Light on Archibald Dalzel’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 17 [1984], 317–23). London surgeon and merchant James Swanzy was governor at James Fort at Accra from 1804 to his death in June 1808 (Sierra Leone Gazette [ June 1808], 23). When governors left the Coast they purchased slaves with their trading goods inventories, often transporting slaves on Company storeships (Rawley, ‘Further Light on Archibald Dalzel’, 318). TNA, T 70/34, f. 153; T 70/72, f. 3. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 89; Kenneth James Cozens, ‘Politics, Patronage and Profit: A Case Study of Three 18th Century London Merchants’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Greenwich, 2005), 58–66. In discussing why Bristol merchants pursued Bight of Biafra markets, Richardson points to the established London commercial ties on the Gold Coast and Bristol’s copper and brass manufacturing industry, metals demanded in Bonny, New Calabar and Old Calabar (David Richardson, ‘Slavery and Bristol’s “Golden Age”’, Slavery and Abolition, 26 [April 2005], 43–44). We spotlight Patrick Fairweather of Liverpool, a key Calabar trader from the 1760s to 1792. Bristol’s ‘charter captains’ are worthy of study, men such as Peter and Thomas Skinner, 16 British slaving ventures (1708–25), Jonathan Arding, 11 voyages (1716–37), Thomas and William Kennedy, 14 voyages (1718–34), John Maddox, 15 voyages (1718–38), Japhet Bird, 11 voyages (1722–40), Charles, Daniel and Samuel Rowles, 23 voyages (1716–54), Richard and Edward Hallden, 13 voyages (1722–36), Edward and Joseph Little, 14 voyages (1724–51), David Arthur, 8 voyages (1729–41), Abraham Saunders, 9 voyages (1732–50) and Edward Tovey, 9 voyages (1734–47).

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71. In 1787 a Bristol captain stated that Patrick Fairweather ‘has used this river 32 Years’ (TNA, C 107/12, Richard Rogers to James Rogers, Old Calabar, 29 December 1787). 72. John Cooper, William Brighouse, William Begg, John Reynolds, Robert Harrison and James Keaton (TNA, BT 98/35,57; BT 98/36,250; BT 98/38/211). William Begg worked as surgeon for Fairweather, the other men as mates. 73. Liverpool merchants traded infrequently with Old Calabar until 1748: 1710 (1 venture), 1714 (1), 1725 (1), 1730 (1), 1732 (1), 1738 (4), 1739 (3), 1740 (1), 1741 (2), 1742 (1), 1743 (3), 1744 (4), 1747 (1), 1748 (3). 74. David Richardson, ‘Profits in the Liverpool Slave Trade: The Accounts of William Davenport, 1757–1784’, in Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, 2 (Liverpool, 1976), 61. 75. Fairweather’s estate totalled £900 (Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah, hereafter FHL, Reel 88914, Will of Patrick Fairweather, 2 September 1790, proved 9 December 1799). Fairweather died before his mentor, Patrick Black (died 5 November 1816). Black left an estate valued at £8,000 (FHL, Reel 89082; TNA, PROB 11/1590). 76. Bruce L. Mouser, ‘Trade, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808’, Journal of African History, 14 (1973), 51, 56; evidence of Thomas King, 19 June 1789 in Lambert (ed.), Commons Sessional Papers, 68, 356–57; evidence of John Anderson, 28 May 1799 in Torrington (ed.), House of Lords Sessional Papers, Session 1798–99, vol. 3, 95–96. As written in a petition to the House of Commons dated 19 March 1799, the Andersons ‘established large Factories upon [Bance Island], with many dependent Factories in the Neighbourhood’ ( Journals of the House of Commons, 54, 1798–99, 382–83). 77. TNA, PROB 11/1252, Will of James Bowie, mariner, master in and of the ship Elizabeth Anderson of Edinburgh, proved 31 December 1794. 78. Behrendt, ‘Captains in the British Slave Trade’, 89–93. Some future slaving officers studied at mathematical schools, learning the geometry and arithmetic essential for navigation. For one such Isle of Man school see Ann Harrison, ‘The Mathematical School, Peel’, Journal of the Manx Museum, 7 (1976), 212–16. 79. Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 20 n. 52. 80. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 112, 151. 81. Similarly, Archibald Anderson, a captain who worked for London merchant and fort governor Archibald Dalzel, commanded three vessels to Cape Coast Castle/Anomabu in the 1770s and later captained a Glasgow–Jamaica coal brig (FHL, Petition of Eleanor Anderson to Trinity House, 8 May 1790, Trinity-House Petitions, Reel 395554). 82. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 86–87. 83. Whereas Bristol merchants had only nine months’ credit (Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 143). 84. Slaving merchants had high ship replacement costs. During 1798–1807 prizes comprised half the British slaving fleet (Behrendt, ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits’, 178 n.27). Liverpool merchants purchased most in London, and sailors steered the craft on the 10–14 day coasting voyage to Merseyside. Some

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85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90.

91.

92.

93.

Human Capital in the British Slave Trade

97

examples: the 456-ton Hector, 389–ton Hannah and 392-ton Tamer (TNA, BT 98/60,187; BT 98/60,333; BT 98/61,141). C. Northcote Parkinson, ‘The Seaports: London’ and A. C. Wardle, ‘The Seaports: Liverpool’, in Parkinson (ed.), The Trade Winds: A Study of British Overseas Trade during the French Wars, 1793–1815 (London, 1948), 50, 58. An estimate based on a sample of 1,430,000 slaves embarked on board British slavers, 1750–1807, with the following African regional percentages: Bight of Biafra (37 per cent), Gold Coast (19 per cent), West Central Africa (17 per cent), Windward Coast (8 per cent), Sierra Leone region (7 per cent), Bight of Benin (6 per cent), Senegambia (6 per cent). Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1997), 26–28, 82–90. Similarly, Rhode Island merchants had very limited access to the human capital needed to trade in African ship-trade markets. Almost all Rhode Island captains loaded slaves in fort-trade regions, and most craft carried less than 20 crewmen. Twenty-four leading officers died: three captains, eight chief mates, eight second mates and five surgeons. BRO, Muster rolls of the Albion, 1791–92,204, Lovely Lass, 1794–95,184. Wade worked as mate on the Liverpool slavers Clementina and Kitty (TNA, BT 98/44,204; BT 98/47,123). James Jones’s ship Isabella departed Liverpool for Bristol in January 1793, employing Liverpool mariners Thomas Givin (captain) and John Lynch (first mate) to the Angola coast and Kingston, Jamaica. Givin, born at Chester, entered pay in Liverpool on 24 November 1792. Lynch was born in Liverpool and worked previously on Liverpool slaving voyages. William Woodville (born 1744), an experienced Liverpool captain and trader who worked in the Sierra Leone region and the Windward Coast, trained his son William (born in Liverpool in 1763) in the slave trade. In 1782 William Woodville, junior, worked as a second or third mate for his captain-father on the Liverpool slaver Sam (TNA, BT 98/45,2). Then, aged 22, he worked as a mate on the Liverpool slaver Thomas in 1785, returning to Liverpool in April 1786 (TNA, BT 98/46,110). Shipped from Liverpool as mate on the John, he attained command in January 1787 when Captain Richard Oates died at Bonny (TNA, BT 98/48,37). Then Woodville worked as chief mate on the 525-ton Garland to Bonny in 1788, returning to Liverpool on 2 April 1789 (TNA, BT 98/49,107). Woodville commanded the Rodney again in 1791. John Spencer mustered as a mate on the Essex (1783–85), then commanded the Liverpool slaver Ned on voyages in 1787 and 1788, and then worked as first mate of the Liverpool slaver Fisher in 1790 (TNA, BT 98/44,227; BT 98/86,219; BT 98/50,355). Alexander Speers worked on the Ann in 1788, perhaps as a fourth mate, and then as second or third mate on the same ship in 1789 (TNA, BT 98/49,154; BT 98/50,142). Surgeons Andrew Arnold, Elliot Arthy, James Ayre, David Drynan, William Francis, John Gittens, Thomas Perrin, Billinzly Riddle, Ferdinand Schwind; captains Thomas Crooker, Samuel Hensley, John Hurd, William Jenkins, Henry Kennedy, John Kimber, Robert Martin, Edward Mentor, James Phillips, William Roper, Thomas Smerdon, James Soutar and Joseph Williams.

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4

Liverpool’s Slave Trade to the Colonial Chesapeake: Slaving on the Periphery Lorena S. Walsh

W

h i le Li v e r pool holds the dubious distinction of becoming Britain’s dominant slaving port in the later eighteenth century, supplying slaves to Britain’s North American mainland tobacco colonies was a decidedly peripheral concern for most Liverpool merchants. By the time Liverpool slavers began sending significant numbers of human cargoes to the Chesapeake (present-day Virginia and Maryland) in the 1730s, these merchants had already become, to borrow David Hancock’s apt phrase describing similarly situated London traders of the mideighteenth century, ‘citizens of the world’.1 Most had far-flung trading concerns in Europe, West Africa, the West Indies, the North Atlantic and South Carolina, as well as in the Chesapeake. Consequently, writing about the town’s slave trade from the perspective of one of the more peripheral trading regions is rather akin to a blind person describing some limited parts of an elephant. Therefore I have decided to try to place the commerce in enslaved Africans in the context of Liverpool’s overall trade to the Chesapeake. Between 1698, when substantive, albeit incomplete, collections of colonial Naval Office Records survive, and 1774, when Virginia and Maryland ended their transatlantic trade in slaves, Liverpool merchants carried about 17,500 captive Africans into the region in 140 voyages so far documented.2 This number made up 21 per cent of all African slaves delivered to the region. Liverpool’s sometime rival Bristol was the predominant supplier of Chesapeake slaves, her traders transporting approximately 41,000 captives, half of all Africans imported into the region. London merchants brought in about 24,000 men, women, and children, 29

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Figure 4.1.  Number of slaves delivered by Liverpool traders, 1702–70. Table 4.1.  Number of ships and slaves arriving in the Chesapeake by port of origin of slaving expedition. London

Bristol

Liverpool

Ships

Slaves

Ships

Slaves

Ships

Slaves

1698–1703

32

3,665

8

145

1

1

1704–1718

65

8,896

28

2,729

11

401

1719–1730

32

5,098

66

10,665

9

985

1731–1745

22

3,090

75

15,078

47

5,787

1746–1760

16

1,714

36

8,604

35

4,832

1761–1774

20

1,748

14

4,190

37

5,569

187

24,211

227

41,411

140

17,575

Total

Source: Walsh, ‘The Chesapeake Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVIII (2001), 168–69, and note 2.

per cent of the total transported. Slavers from other British ports supplied only about 1,500 slaves, or just 2 per cent.3 Timing and trade connections explain the dominant roles of Bristol and London. Merchants from these two ports cornered the Chesapeake tobacco trade during the early to mid-seventeenth century, and from the outset were the main suppliers of European manufactures and of

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indentured servants, the primary form of bound labour in the region up to the 1680s. Until the end of the seventeenth century, London slave traders concentrated on more lucrative West Indian labour markets. But with the ending of the Royal African Company’s monopoly of the African trade in 1698, Londoners (some members of the RAC, but more especially separate traders) began sending more shipments of slaves directly from Africa to the Chesapeake, making optimal use of already well-established trading networks. In the early eighteenth century, most Londoners who shipped slaves to the Chesapeake had prior experience in both the tobacco and the indentured servant trades.4 Bristol slavers had the advantage of entering the trade just at the time that Chesapeake planters were most aggressively enlarging their enslaved workforces. Many of the early Bristol slave traders, like the Londoners, had previous experience with the Chesapeake tobacco and servant trades. Unlike the London slavers, Bristol merchants took the Chesapeake labour market seriously indeed. By the 1720s Bristolians were bringing in twice as many Africans as were the Londoners (10,000 as contrasted to 5,000) and brought in even more (15,000) in the 1730s and early 1740s. Although Bristol traders who had already established commercial connections with the region played an important role in initiating Bristol’s entry into the Chesapeake slave market, other city merchants, who specialized in the slave and West Indian produce trades rather than in tobacco, subsequently became the predominant suppliers of enslaved labourers.5 Liverpool merchants were, in contrast, late-comers to all facets of Chesapeake trade. Only in the mid-1680s did some Liverpool traders begin competing for a part of the region’s tobacco. Initially they had limited success in capturing a significant share of the staple, even though during King William’s and Queen Anne’s wars, Liverpool ships plied safer, more northerly routes than did London and Bristol merchants. A number of early eighteenth-century Liverpool traders found themselves shuttling ships from one Chesapeake river basin to another in order to obtain a full cargo of tobacco, while others sent ships to the Lower Eastern Shore, an area that produced the region’s worst tobacco, but one where they encountered few competitors. Indeed early Liverpool tobacco traders seem to have found ingenious ways to defraud royal customs agents by claiming to have imported large quantities of damaged and, thus, duty-free tobacco, and by finding ways to understate the amount of tobacco they actually imported. Selling indentured servants lured from Lancashire and Ireland at a time when European labourers were in short supply also afforded some aspiring Liverpool tobacco dealers a foothold in the staple trade.6 Liverpool merchants were most successful in carving out a niche in the Rappahannock River Basin. This area produced a combination of

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sweet-scented and oronoco tobaccos, the former commanding the highest prices in the English market, and higher grades of the latter in demand in northern Europe.7 Liverpool tobacco merchants doubled their imports of Chesapeake tobacco in the late 1720s and superseded Bristol as the second most important English importer of Chesapeake tobacco in the late 1730s, before losing ground to Whitehaven and Glasgow in the 1740s. Unlike the Bristolians, who concentrated on Virginia tobaccos for the home and Irish markets, Liverpool merchants depended more on the re-export market to northern Europe. However, since few of them were involved in supplying tobacco to the larger French market, there were decided limits to the amount of tobacco they could sell domestically and in northern Europe.8 By the 1730s Liverpool merchants also entered into an extensive, separate trade in naval stores with Virginia’s lower James River Basin.9 It was within the context of these staple trading networks that Liverpool slavers began contesting in earnest for a share of the Chesapeake labour market in the late 1720s. From about 1710 to 1720, most Liverpool merchants hazarded only small cargoes of refuse slaves carried into the Chesapeake from Barbados, rather than send regular shipments directly from Africa. Thereafter, however, Liverpool traders sent six ships to the Chesapeake from Africa between 1726 and 1730. Then between 1731 and 1745 Liverpool slavers surpassed Londoners as the second most important supplier of slaves to the tobacco coast, retained that position in the 1750s, and after 1760 became the leading slave suppliers to the region.10 However, they rose to the fore in a declining labour market. By the mid-1730s the enslaved labour forces of elite Chesapeake planters, unlike those in the West Indies, were growing rapidly through natural increase, and most large tidewater planters ceased buying new African slaves. Consequently, only a minority of elite Chesapeake planters who were aggressively expanding operations in the recently settled Piedmont region to the west continued to buy new Africans.11 The main customers for newly imported slaves became, instead, middling planters, who bought only one or two slaves a year and who could pay only with tobacco and, moreover, required long credits in order to finance their purchases. A second important category of buyers were up-country storekeepers, who bought slaves in lots for resale in the Piedmont. These dealers were willing to purchase less-promising adults and enslaved children, but as a consequence negotiated substantial discounts in the prices they paid for new Africans.12 Thus most Liverpool slave traders continued to find West Indian and South Carolina labour markets, where natural increase was less significant or non-existent and slave buyers significantly richer, better options than the Chesapeake. Chesapeake planters afforded a good market for manufactures, but only a minor market for slaves, one to which, one

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suspects, shipments of slaves were most often diverted when intended West Indian markets were temporarily glutted. Moreover, during the War of the Austrian Succession, Liverpool slavers sharply curtailed shipments from Africa to this more remote region. As was the case with London and Bristol, Liverpool slavers initially made use of already established trading networks. Almost two-thirds of Liverpool merchants sending slaves to Chesapeake markets before 1749, when Liverpool’s overall trade to Chesapeake tobacco peaked, had prior connections in the tobacco or naval stores trades. In addition, nearly a quarter of them had also previously shipped indentured and/or convict servants to the region around the turn of the eighteenth century. Some of the early traders, such as Richard and James Gildart and Foster Cunliffe, continued to ship a limited number of indentured servants and a larger number of convicts into the Chesapeake across the 1740s, 50s, 60s and 70s. In contrast, only 5 per cent of merchants who first sent slaves to the region after 1748 had substantive prior regional trade connections, and only one was also involved in sending convict labourers.13 A minimum of 187 Liverpool merchants participated in the Chesapeake slave trade. Not all the ship owners were recorded, as some Chesapeake naval officers listed all the owners involved in individual voyages, but others listed only one or two principal investors, with a notation of ‘and company’ indicating additional, unrecorded owners. These identified owners included many of Liverpool’s largest slave traders, such as the Blundells, Joseph Brooks, George Campbell, Robert Clay, William Davenport, John Dobson, William Earle, John Goad, John Hardman, the Heywoods, William James and John Welch.14 Individuals or family groups who financed multiple voyages to the Chesapeake were by and large either leading international slave traders or merchants who also traded extensively in Chesapeake tobacco and naval stores. Other owners invested in only one or two voyages to the region, perhaps owning a share in only one slaving vessel, or else, as captains of slaving ships, holding a share in the voyages which they directed. Clearly the managing investors relied on particular trading networks they had forged with West Africa, various West Indian islands and the North American mainland. Merchants who sent multiple shipments of slaves to the Chesapeake often concentrated their purchases in one West African region and then marketed the captives they sent to the Chesapeake in those rivers where they traded most extensively in colonial products. More passive investors often had no established connections of any kind with Chesapeake ports. The peripheral nature of the Chesapeake trade is underscored by the fact that, among owners who sent their first shipments of slaves by 1748 (a total of 43 voyages), over half invested in only one venture to the region.

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Seven of the eleven merchants who financed four or more Chesapeake voyages were also involved in the tobacco and naval stores trades. These included William Evered (four voyages), John Pemberton, William Whaley, and Samuel Shaw (five voyages each), Thomas Seel and John Welsh (seven voyages each), Bryan Blundell (eight voyages), James and Richard Gildart (fourteen voyages) and Foster Cunliffe (seventeen voyages). Table 4.2.  Liverpool slave traders sending 500 or more slaves to the Chesapeake. Name

Number of slaves Number of voyages

James and Richard Gildart

2,206

14

Foster Cunliffe and Sons

1,944

17

John Welsh

1,630

7

Robert Clay

1,167

6

Arthur Heywood

1,101

6

Edward Parr

891

4

William Whaley

866

5

Clayton and Thomas Case

780

3

Bryan Blundell, Sr, and family

761

9

Thomas Seel

747

7

John Pemberton

666

5

Robert Hallhead

620

3

John Penkett

588

2

Samuel Shaw

586

5

Richard Nicholas and Leigh Peers

539

2

Source: See note 2.

Thomas Seel was one of the few Liverpool merchants who combined trade in slaves directly with trade in tobacco, and who atypically concentrated most of his slaving activities in the Chesapeake. Seel started out sending shipments of European goods to the region in 1725. He first tried selling manufactures for tobacco in the South Potomac and the Lower James Rivers, but thereafter settled on the Rappahannock Basin. Initially Seel’s ships called first in Barbados, delivering some European goods there and picking up cargoes of rum, sugar and molasses. They then went to the Chesapeake, where Seel sold the West Indian goods for tobacco. He dispatched one ship nearly every year between 1729 and 1747. From 1736 to 1744 Seel combined tobacco-trading with slaving. During these years his vessels went first to the Gambia to buy slaves, proceeded to the

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Rappahannock where they delivered on average just over 100 captives, and then loaded tobacco for the return voyage to Liverpool. In most years Seel’s ships could complete this triangular itinerary within one year.15 Another substantial tobacco merchant and minor investor in slaving, John Pemberton, did not fare as well as Seel when he attempted to combine the two trades. Pemberton gained direct Chesapeake experience at the turn of the century, when he captained tobacco ships going to the Rappahannock and to the Virginia Eastern Shore. He had also begun investing in slavers trading to Barbados after about 1710, and in 1726 successfully marketed a cargo of 90 Calabar slaves along the Rappahannock. The next year he dispatched an unprecedented three slave ships to that river. Five thousand Africans were poured into the region in 1727, and although one of Pemberton’s ships, the John and Betty, arrived in July, a prime month for selling slaves, the Leopard and the Rose came only in September, late in the season for sales, especially in a glutted market. Moreover, the two later cargoes included few prime men, and many of the slaves arrived sick, a number near death. Pemberton’s agents scrambled to dispose of the last two shipments of captives, but could sell the slaves only for bills of exchange drawn at long sight, or more often, only for tobacco. The agents were also hard-pressed to assemble saving return cargoes for the Leopard and the Rose, and did so only in mid-December, too late in the season to permit these ships to return to Liverpool, be offloaded and then outfitted for another voyage to Africa early in the following year. Pemberton and other investors suffered substantial losses. He tried once more with one shipment of slaves in 1733, but shortly afterwards decided to retire from both the tobacco and slave trades.16 Like Pemberton, Bryan Blundell also developed Chesapeake connections by captaining several tobacco trading voyages at the turn of the century. By the late 1720s he had established a regular trade in naval stores in the Lower James Basin and had also invested heavily in West Indian slaving. Only in the 1750s and 1760s did he and several other family members decide to ship slave cargoes to the Chesapeake. Between 1752 and 1771 the Blundells sent 761 captives to the Rappahannock and the Upper and Lower James. The Blundells’ inside knowledge of local labour markets enabled them to take temporary advantage of a spurt of demand in the limited Chesapeake market following the Seven Years’ War.17 By the early 1740s just four Liverpool firms – Backhouse, Cunliffe, Gildart and Goore – had become the predominant buyers of Chesapeake tobacco. Cunliffe and the Gildarts initially set up stores in Virginia in the 1720s, and continued to operate through country stores in Maryland during the 1740s and 1750s. However, from the 1740s onwards, Goore, the Backhouses and the Gildarts operated primarily through the consignment

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system in Virginia. These four leading tobacco firms had markedly different approaches to the Chesapeake labour market. Charles Goore, who seldom invested in slaving voyages, operated strictly as a Virginia tobacco trader, sending one ship each year to the York, to the Rappahannock, and to the Upper James, and less often additional vessels to the Lower James and the South Potomac naval districts. Thomas and John Backhouse purchased tobacco primarily in the York and Rappahannock basins, where sweetscented tobacco was grown, making a few trials of the Upper James’s high-quality oronoco strains only in the late 1760s. Although they, in contrast to Goore, were heavily involved in the slave trade to the West Indies, the Backhouses sent only two shiploads of slaves to the Chesapeake, apparently considering this regional labour market too limited to bother with, despite their other extensive trade connections with the region.18 Foster Cunliffe and Sons and Richard and James Gildart, like the Backhouses, made substantial investments in West Indian slavers, but these two firms were also highly involved in all facets of the Chesapeake labour market, as well as in the tobacco trade. Cunliffe initially bought oronoco tobacco along the Potomac, but in the 1740s and 1750s shifted his base of operations to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The Gildarts concentrated their tobacco-buying on the York and Rappahannock, and competed with Cunliffe for a share of Maryland’s Eastern Shore bright oronoco tobacco. The two firms were also Liverpool’s two largest suppliers of slaves to the region, each firm transporting nearly 2,000 Africans to Virginia and Maryland between 1732 and 1767. Like Thomas Seel, Cunliffe bought most slaves destined for the Chesapeake in Gambia, and was able to complete most triangular voyages in time to outfit the same ship for another African voyage the following year. Cunliffe sold most of the captives in the labour-short Potomac Basin, which few other slave traders visited, during the years that he was soliciting tobacco there. When he changed to buying Eastern Shore tobacco, Cunliffe curtailed all shipments of slaves to the Chesapeake, reverting to selling only small numbers of refuse slaves his tobacco ships brought from Barbados. The Gildarts also marketed slaves in the Potomac Basin and in Annapolis, Maryland’s main slaving port, from the 1730s into the early 1760s. In the 1740s and 1750s the Cunliffes and the Gildarts also became involved in transporting English and Irish indentured and convict servants to the Eastern Shore.19 After 1748 fewer Liverpool merchants traded in both tobacco and slaves and, as a consequence of diminishing trade connections and declining demand for imported labourers, Liverpool’s slavers began to lose interest in the Chesapeake region. Between 1749 and 1772, Liverpool investors sent a minimum of 67 slave cargoes to the region, carrying over 9,500 captives.

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However, 74 per cent of the vessels ventured only once into Chesapeake waters, and just 16 per cent made two voyages. The West Indies and South Carolina continued to afford better markets for enslaved labour, with the Chesapeake functioning primarily only as a market of last resort. For example, in April 1760 Liverpool merchant William Earle diverted the Industry, bound for South Carolina, to go instead to Norfolk, Virginia, because an Indian war and an outbreak of smallpox had dampened demand for slaves in Charleston.20 As in earlier years, several of the merchant houses who sent multiple voyages to the Chesapeake between 1749 and 1774, including the Blundells, John Sparling, William Bolden, and Samuel Shaw, also traded there in either tobacco or naval stores. Sparling, Bolden, and Shaw started out by running stores on the Lower James, and later shipped slaves to that river. But most of those who invested in slaves sold in the Chesapeake in the third quarter of the eighteenth century were not involved in colonial produce trades.21 On the whole, Liverpool merchants kept their trade in slaves separate from other branches of commerce they might have with the region, including trading in tobacco and naval stores or selling British manufactured goods. Annual shipping schedules for the various trades seldom meshed well, and most merchants found it more efficient to employ one set of ships in the slave trade and others in the produce trades. Liverpool tobacco traders dispatched cargoes of European goods during the winter months with the intent that they arrive in the Chesapeake between March and June. If all went well, it took about three months to assemble a return cargo of tobacco, lumber and pig iron, with the tobacco ships then clearing Chesapeake ports in June, July or August. However when tobacco crops were short, and competition among buyers most intense, some ships would not be fully laden until September or October. Up to 1748, most tobacco traders sent out relatively small ships of 80 to 100 tons burden. But in the 1750s and 1760s as they started operating on a larger scale, the major traders began employing bigger ships of around 200 tons. These larger vessels often required more time to assemble a cargo, with September and October departures becoming more common after 1750. Clearly there was by then insufficient time to fit a trading voyage to Africa into an already tight schedule tailored to suit one rather than multiple trades.22 Liverpool merchants’ continued reliance on the consignment system in the Virginia tobacco trade in turn influenced the methods they used to market slaves in the region. Merchants dealing in both tobacco and slaves enlisted elite gentry planters, with whom they had already formed a tobacco-trading correspondence, to handle slave sales, usually paying them a 10 per cent commission on total sales and requiring them to make good any protested bills of exchange. Unlike Bristol slave traders, who early on

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seem to have adopted uniform selling policies with their agents, Liverpool traders attached specific and differing requirements to individual shipments of slaves. Most is known about the marketing strategies of those merchants who combined trades in tobacco and slaves, since these transactions are documented in colonial planters’ correspondence. Liverpool merchants who had little or no involvement in other facets of Chesapeake trade likely sought advice from leading tobacco or naval stores merchants in obtaining reliable local agents to market their human cargoes.23 John Pemberton and Foster Cunliffe, for example, enlisted members of the rich and powerful Carter clan to market slaves. Others entrusted John Tayloe, one of the pre-eminent gentry slave traders in the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers, with their concerns.24 These gentlemen usually held out for the 10 per cent commission regularly offered by the Bristolians, but Tayloe, who was more inclined to cut corners, occasionally handled shipments for a slightly lower reward.25 Their extensive involvement in the tobacco trade enabled Liverpool merchants to identify the most influential and financially sound Chesapeake gentlemen who were presumably, in turn, in a position to evaluate the creditworthiness of the primarily gentry customers to whom they sold slaves. Not all great planters were interested in marketing human cargoes, but those who did often profited handsomely, so long as they remained prudent in extending credit. Not surprisingly, Liverpool merchants often received unsolicited offers from Chesapeake gentlemen hoping to garner these lucrative commissions, as well as letters from their regular tobacco dealing correspondents recommending assorted kin for slave-selling agencies.26 However, by the 1760s Liverpool slave traders, like their London and Bristol competitors, increasingly delegated slave-selling to local Chesapeake merchants. These agents had the advantage of charging lower commissions – 5 to 7 per cent of gross sales, similar to the percentage charged for selling other products – than did gentry sellers. And as the mix of purchasers shifted from elite to middling planters and to up-country storekeepers, the merchants were in a better position to judge the creditworthiness of prospective slave buyers. In addition, few Liverpool merchants trading along the James River employed the consignment system for acquiring tobacco. So in order to market human cargoes, these slave traders had to rely on independent Virginia merchants, rather than on gentry correspondents.27 On what Chesapeake markets did Liverpool slavers concentrate? Not surprisingly, the Rappahannock Basin where Liverpool merchants established a significant foothold in the tobacco trade was also the area most favoured by the port’s slave traders. This river received at least 35 shipments of over 4,000 slaves, a quarter of the total delivered. Second in importance in terms of numbers of slaves brought in was the Upper

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James River Basin, the area where tobacco production was expanding most rapidly between the 1730s and 1770s. Liverpool slavers sent 19 shipments to this region carrying approximately 3,400 captives, about 19 per cent of the total supplied. Third in importance was the York River Basin, a decidedly declining market, but one in which the purchasers, who grew the most valuable tobacco strains sold primarily on the London market, were most likely to be able to pay in bills of exchange or in hard cash. Twenty-four voyages delivering just over 3,000 slaves went there. Shipments to other Chesapeake labour markets were more limited. Liverpool slavers sent 13 per cent of their cargoes to the thinly supplied Potomac Basin, and lesser numbers to more northerly Maryland ports. They also transported small numbers of captives, primarily refuse slaves from Barbados, to the Lower James, where demand for enslaved labour was low, but which constituted an important source for critically needed naval stores.28 Table 4.3.  Number of voyages and slaves delivered, by port of entry. Port of entry

Number of voyages Number of slaves

Rappahannock, Virginia

35

4,457

Upper James, Virginia

19

3,393

York, Virginia

24

3,030

Potomac, Virginia and Maryland

17

2,249

Port of entry unknown, Virginia

15

1,672

Annapolis, Maryland

8

1,332

Lower James, Virginia

11

566

Port of entry unknown, Maryland

4

488

Patuxent, Maryland

3

313

Oxford, Maryland

4

65

140

17,575

Total

Source: Walsh, ‘Chesapeake Slave Trade’, 168–69, and note 2.

Slave traders hoped to deliver their human cargoes to the Chesapeake primarily in June, July and August. Those who arrived earliest could expect quick sales paid for with a high proportion of relatively sound bills of exchange or with hard cash. Voyages that experienced delays in obtaining a cargo on the African coast had more problems selling their human merchandise, the most affluent buyers – whose agent relatives guaranteed them first choice of incoming cargoes before the captives were offered to the general public – having already made any intended purchases. Less

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affluent or well-connected buyers were usually able to pay only in tobacco, lumber, grain, or on extended credit. Across the eighteenth century, dates of arrival of slaving ships were concentrated in the prime summer selling months. However, more of the ships coming after 1749 arrived later in the autumn, another indication that many had likely been diverted from intended West Indian or South Carolina markets. By the time most of the slave ships arrived, tobacco traders had several months’ head start in securing and assembling cargoes for the earlier arriving tobacco fleet sailing directly from England. In years of large crops, captains of slavers could still manage to take in a load of tobacco, but in seasons when crops were short, those arriving in late summer or early autumn often left without a return cargo, or laden primarily with less valuable timber.29 What role did Liverpool merchandise play in the slave and tobacco trades? There were limits to the market share that Liverpool tobacco buyers could hope to attain in the Chesapeake. On the one hand, the northern continental tobacco markets in which they traded were not expanding as rapidly as the French market, and on the other, the goods Liverpool merchants offered in return satisfied only low-end consumers. Elite Chesapeake planters coveted fashionable metropolitan products, and this meant they would continue to consign a portion of their tobacco to London merchants, whether or not their London factors obtained premium prices for their weed. Moreover, some of these planters were indebted to the Londoners for advances to buy land and slaves, and occasionally for advances granted rather less prudently to finance the planters’ nonproductive conspicuous consumption, forcing those so indebted to consign some portion of their annual output to the metropolis. Elite planters who consigned part or all of their crops to England were to some extent irrevocably wedded to London merchants, but they also tested Bristol, Liverpool and other outport markets. By the 1740s Liverpool merchants almost invariably obtained better prices for some types of tobacco, especially those produced in the Rappahannock Basin, than did traders from Bristol or Whitehaven. This enabled the Liverpool traders to develop a loyal clientele of elite Virginia planters. Liverpool merchants not only offered better prices for certain grades of tobacco, but they also offered a better assortment of inexpensive, utilitarian goods obtained from Liverpool’s hinterlands. Although the planter elite habitually furnished their houses and tables with metropolitan goods and clothed themselves in the latest London fashions, Liverpool offered an attractive assortment of cheap cloth, tools, household metalwares, and salt needed to provision their enslaved workers. These same goods appealed to gentry planters who operated country stores on the side that catered to a middling and small planter clientele.30

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Since the Liverpool tobacco traders continued operating on the consignment system in the York and Rappahannock Basins, gentry planter/ merchants bought store goods with their own or with purchased tobacco. Most were not particular about the quality of the cloth and metalwares they ordered, so long as they were cheap. Earthenware proved particularly attractive, and Chesapeake storekeepers imported hundreds of crates of inexpensive ceramics. James Madison, father of the later president, for example, in 1751 bought a cargo of goods from Thomas and John Backhouse. Over the next year he retailed an assortment of earthenware, shoes, money purses, fishhooks, gunpowder and flints, needles, sewing silk, wash balls, paper, pocket bottles and packs of cards to small planter neighbours.31 And in the 1750s minor gentry planter William Fauntleroy, jr. imported crates of earthenware, meal sifters, powder, shot, hose, combs, iron pots, frying pans, fishing line, seine twine, thread and ‘negrow cottons of Different Cullers’ from the Backhouses, Robert Seel, Charles Goore, Thomas Rumbold and Richard Clay. Fauntleroy was not picky about the exact contents of his imported cargoes so long as the prices were right. In the 1760s and 1770s storekeepers on the Lower James advertised similar cargoes of cheap Liverpool earthen and metal wares, cordage, coal and salt.32 The Liverpool tobacco and naval stores traders usually sent out one ship per year carrying European merchandise, which they exchanged for a return cargo of tobacco. (Cunliffe and Gildart with their chains of stores on the Maryland Eastern Shore usually sent two ships each year). By the later eighteenth century Chesapeake storekeepers wanted two cargoes per year, one of summer goods in the spring and one of winter goods in the autumn. Independent Chesapeake merchants began making up the deficit by shipping loads of tobacco, plank, naval stores and iron on their own account in order to assure themselves of a second annual supply of manufactured goods. By the 1760s, Liverpool was functioning as something like the Wal-Mart of the eighteenth century, although town merchants did not pursue the merchandise trade as aggressively as they might have. In the Chesapeake, the connections between the trades in British merchandise and in slaves were tangential. Liverpool goods mostly provisioned already established slave workforces owned by the planter elite, and catered to the needs and desires of ordinary planters (who were seldom in a position to buy African slaves) for cheap, utilitarian, but attractive European goods. However, Liverpool tobacco merchants did facilitate the trade in slaves, whether or not they were significantly involved in it, by providing some Chesapeake planters with the long-term credit they needed in order to purchase African workers. The town’s major tobacco traders, like the Londoners, increasingly extended credit to corresponding planters. While many elite planters were no longer in the labour market, others, who lacked

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critical connections to London merchants, did borrow from Liverpool factors in order to finance their initial or perhaps one subsequent large purchase of slaves. In this way great Liverpool tobacco traders enabled lesser gentry and middling planters to buy slaves and thus to expand agricultural production.33 Further analysis of slaving voyages underscores the fact that the Chesapeake was not a major destination for Liverpool slavers, and hence that there was little continuity in that trade. Over 80 per cent of ships delivered slaves to the Chesapeake only once, and only 13 per cent made two trips. Just two ships made three voyages to the region and four successfully completed four. Only Foster Cunliffe devoted one vessel almost exclusively to the African–Chesapeake trade between 1732 and 1739. During these years Cunliffe’s Liverpool Merchant made an otherwise unprecedented total of six voyages. Continuity between captains who delivered slaves to the region was equally slender. Among the known captains, 96 out of 115 (83 per cent) carried captives into the Chesapeake only once. Thirteen (11 per cent) made two trips, four captains made three voyages, and only two made four or more. Matthew Goulding, commander of the Liverpool Merchant, topped the list at five Africa–Chesapeake voyages. Clearly, in contrast to prevailing patterns in the tobacco trade, where tobacco ship captains routinely made multiple consecutive voyages to the same river basin, familiarity with the receiving market was considered unimportant to the success of slaving ventures. It was left to the gentlemen or merchants who handled the selling of the human cargoes to advertise the arrival of the ship and to make connections with potential buyers. The size of ships and crews that Liverpool slavers dispatched remained relatively constant. The mean tonnage of vessels employed between 1702 and 1748 was 80 tons, and between 1748 and 1772, 96 tons. In the earlier period the range was between 50 and 140 tons and in the later period from 45 to 180 tons. Most of the slavers were armed, carrying a mean of 10 guns up to 1748 (range 4–16) and a mean of 8 guns in the later period (range 4–17). After the end of hostilities with the French, most slaving ships were not armed. Crew size was similarly stable. The mean number of crew arriving in Chesapeake ports up to and including 1748 was 21, and it rose thereafter to 23. The range in all periods was 4–40. Where did the captives Liverpool slavers shipped to the Chesapeake come from? Just three per cent were transported from the West Indies, primarily Barbados. African ports of departure are known for almost twothirds of the 7,787 people brought in between 1702 and 1748. Senegambia was by far the main area of trade, accounting for 63 per cent of captives of known provenance. Most of the remainder were purchased along the

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Windward and Gold Coasts and in West Central Africa. No ships came from the Bight of Benin and only one voyage each was made from Sierra Leone and the Bight of Biafra. Consequently in the early years of the Liverpool–Chesapeake trade, the town’s slavers supplied Chesapeake planters primarily with slaves from the ethnic groups that they favoured most highly. However, it is unlikely that Liverpool merchants paid much attention to the preferences of planters in a minor market. Rather this was more likely an unintended result of a match between the African trading networks favoured by Liverpool merchants who had other trade connections with the Chesapeake. After 1748, the provenance of the over 9,500 Africans that Liverpool slavers brought into the Chesapeake became much more varied, as the port’s merchants expanded their trading areas in Africa. The region where the slavers bought almost all of the captives transported between 1749 and 1772 is known. The proportion carried from Senegambia dropped to about a quarter, while those from the Windward and Gold Coasts rose to over one-third. Lesser numbers came from Sierra Leone, the Bights of Benin and Biafra and the Cameroons. Few other British traders shipped slaves to the Chesapeake from the Bight of Benin, and no others traded in the Cameroons. London and Bristol merchants concentrated their slaving in other areas, especially the Bight of Biafra. Africans taken from this area of present-day Nigeria likely constituted a majority of all Africans brought into the Chesapeake. Thus towards the end of the region’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, the activities of Liverpool slavers added to ethnic diversity among Africans forcibly relocated to the Chesapeake.34 Although Liverpool slavers sent few shipments of slaves during the opening years of the Seven Years’ War, their efforts peaked towards the end of that conflict. Ten slavers arrived in 1761, five in 1762, and six in 1763, meeting Chesapeake planters’ pent-up demand for additional labourers. The increase in shipments was short-lived, however, as the related Chesapeake– Liverpool tobacco trade did not fare well during the war years. Foster Cunliffe, for example, found his investments in Eastern Shore Maryland stores increasingly unprofitable. He had opened five with the intention of buying up bright oronoco tobacco for the northern Europe re-export market, but after Maryland adopted a tobacco inspection law in 1747, few planters bothered to separate bright from dull leaf. Moreover, Cunliffe’s agents faced increasingly stiff local competition from fellow Liverpool, London and Whitehaven merchants. Meanwhile, high wartime freight rates and losses to French privateers cut into profits, while planters to whom Cunliffe’s factors had extended credit failed to repay their debts. Upon Cunliffe’s death in 1758, his sons Ellis and Robert used the opportunity presented by the founder’s demise to end their involvement in Chesapeake

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113

1.  Senegambia 2.  Sierra Leone Number of slaves

3.  Windward and        Gold Coasts 4.  Benin 5.  Biafra 6.  West Central Africa 7.  Cameroons 8.  Unspecified 9.  Barbados

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

African source

Figure 4.2.  African trading regions, 1702–48.

1.  Senegambia 2.  Sierra Leone Number of slaves

3.  Windward and        Gold Coasts 4.  Benin 5.  Biafra 6.  West Central Africa 7.  Cameroons 8.  Unspecified 9.  Barbados

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

African source

Figure 4.3.  African trading regions, 1749–72.

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tobacco. Liverpool merchants Edward and Francis Lownds closed out their tobacco trade in Maryland at about the same time. Charles Goore waited somewhat longer, but also pulled out of Chesapeake tobacco in the late 1760s. Only Joseph Daltera, who had a contract to purchase tobacco for the French market, initiated new trading operations in the late 1760s.35 Liverpool slavers’ declining interest in the Chesapeake trade – there were a total of 16 shipments between 1764 and 1772 – was likely related to a decline in overall investment in trade to the region at the close of the Seven Years’ War. The decision of Chesapeake legislators to end the transatlantic slave trade as part of their efforts to boycott British goods on the eve of the Revolution finally closed a trade that would likely have petered out soon thereafter for economic rather than political reasons. Continuing natural increase among the region’s enslaved had already become the major source of new enslaved labourers, rather than imported Africans. When commerce resumed at the close of the American Revolution, the goods traded were restricted to manufactures and produce, and no longer involved commerce in involuntarily transported peoples. Notes

1. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995). On the large scale of Liverpool firms, see Jacob M. Price and Paul G. E. Clemens, ‘A Revolution of Scale in Overseas Trade: British Firms in the Chesapeake Trade, 1675–1775’, Journal of Economic History, 47 (1987), 1–43 (especially 28–30, 35–36). 2. Data on Liverpool slaving voyages to the Chesapeake comes from David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The TransAtlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999); voyages listed in Walter Minchinton, Celia King, and Peter Waite (eds), Virginia Slave-Trade Statistics, 1698–1775 (Richmond, VA, 1984); additional Chesapeake voyages compiled by the author and described in Walsh, ‘The Chesapeake Slave Trade: Regional Patterns, African Origins, and Some Implications’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVIII (2001), 139–70; information from the Liverpool Register of Merchant Ships, 1739–1765, and 1765–1784, from the William Earle Letterbook, 1760–61, and from the Invoice Book of Brig Eadith, July 1760, in Abolition and Emancipation: Part 2, Slavery Collections from the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool (Marlborough, Wiltshire, 1998), Reels 10, 18, 21, and 22; and information on other recently documented voyages kindly supplied by David Eltis. For the purposes of this paper, Liverpool ships carrying slaves from the West Indies rather than directly from Africa (N=19) are included in the analysis. Other discussions of Liverpool’s slave trade can be found in James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981), chapter 9, and David Richardson, ‘Liverpool and the English Slave Trade’, in Anthony Tibbles (ed.), Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity (London, 1994), 70–76. 3. Walsh, ‘Chesapeake Slave Trade’. 4. Walsh, ‘Chesapeake Slave Trade’. The author compared lists of tobacco merchants,

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

115

compiled from ongoing research into Chesapeake plantation agriculture, with lists of slave and tobacco merchants in secondary sources. Price and Clemens, ‘A Revolution of Scale’, and Jacob M. Price, ‘One Family’s Empire: The RussellLee-Clerk Connection in Maryland, Britain, and India, 1707–1857’, Maryland Historical Magazine, 72 (1977), 165–225, are especially helpful in documenting major London tobacco merchants. Walsh, ‘Chesapeake Slave Trade’; David Richardson (ed.), Bristol, Africa, and the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Gloucester, 1986–1996); Richardson, The Bristol Slave Traders: A Collective Portrait (Bristol, 1985). Paul G. E. Clemens, ‘The Rise of Liverpool’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 29 (1976), 211–25; Price and Clemens, ‘A Revolution of Scale’, 28–29; Farley Grubb and Tony Stitt, ‘The Liverpool Emigrant Servant Trade and the Transition to Slave Labor in the Chesapeake, 1697–1707: Market Adjustments to War’, Explorations in Economic History, 31 (1994), 376–405. In order to learn more about Liverpool’s trade with the Chesapeake aside from slaving I undertook a preliminary investigation of Virginia and Maryland naval office records (The National Archives, CO 5/1442, 1443, 1444, 1445, 1446, 1447, 1448, 1449, 1450; Maryland Naval Office Records in manuscript and on microfilm, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD). The analysis was sufficiently thorough to ascertain trading patterns, but has not yet been completed. Lorena S. Walsh, ‘Summing the Parts: Implications for Estimating Chesapeake Output and Income Subregionally’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVI (1999), 53–94. Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake: A History of the French Tobacco Monopoly, 1674–1791, and of Its Relationship to the British and American Tobacco Trades (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973), 590, 594. The naval stores trade is documented in Naval Office Records for the Lower James Basin. Walsh, ‘Chesapeake Slave Trade’. Walsh, ‘Chesapeake Slave Trade’; Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville, VA, 1997); Walsh, ‘The Differential Cultural Impact of Free and Coerced Migration to Colonial America’, in David Eltis (ed.), Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Cambridge, 2002), 117–51. The Invoice Book of Brig Eadith lists the names of 31 individuals or mercantile firms who purchased 149 slaves off this vessel in the York River in July 1761. The breakdown by status is as follows: Planter elite

Middling planters

Mercantile firms

No. buyers

5

18

8

No. slaves

22

65

26

% of buyers

16

58

26

% of slaves

15

44

42

Sources: Abolition and Emancipation: Part 2, Slavery Collections from the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Reel 18; purchaser status from York County Project Biographical Files, Department of Research, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

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13. Lorena S. Walsh, ‘Mercantile Strategies, Credit Networks, and Labour Supply in the Colonial Chesapeake in Transatlantic Perspective’, in David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (eds), Slavery in the Development of the Americas (Cambridge, 2004), 89–119. 14. Major slave traders were identified from the published transatlantic slave trade database. The list of merchants trading to Africa belonging to Liverpool in 1752 published in Gomer Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1744–1812 (London, 1897: reprinted Montreal, 2004), 674, was also useful. 15. Information on Seel’s activities comes from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and from Virginia Naval Office Records. 16. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Virginia Naval Office Records; Robert Carter Letterbooks, 1727–28, 1728–31, 1731–32, Robert ‘King’ Carter Papers, 3807, University of Virginia Library, Special Collections Library, Charlottesville, VA; Robert Carter Letterbooks, 1727–28, 1728–30, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, VA. 17. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and Virginia Naval Office Records. 18. Among Chesapeake planters who consigned tobacco to Liverpool firms were Robert ‘King’ Carter, Charles Carter, Daniel Parke Custis, William Massie, Joseph Ball, Edmund Berkeley III, John Baylor, William Beverley, Richard Corbin and William Fauntleroy, jr. These planters’ activities are documented in Walsh, ‘Motives of Honour, Pleasure, and Profitt’: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, NC, forthcoming). See also Clemens, ‘Rise of Liverpool’, and John W. Tyler, ‘Foster Cunliffe and Sons: Liverpool Merchants in the Maryland Tobacco Trade, 1738–1765’, Maryland Historical Magazine, 73 (1978), 246–79. 19. Tyler, ‘Foster Cunliffe’; Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; and Virginia Naval Office Records. 20. William Earle to Sparling and Bolden, 3 April 1760, Earle Letterbook, D/ EARLE/2/2, Merseyside Maritime Museum. 21. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Virginia Naval Office Records; and Minchinton, et al., Virginia Slave Trade Statistics, 170, 178. 22. For the shipping schedules of slavers see Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits: Merchant Decision Making in the British Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVIII (2001), 171–204. 23. Walsh, ‘Mercantile Strategies’. 24. These agencies are documented in the Robert ‘King’ Carter Letterbooks, cited above, and in John, Landon, and Charles Carter Letterbook, 1732–1781, Carter Papers, 4996, University of Virginia Library. 25. Accounts and Letters, 1714–78, of John Tayloe I and John Tayloe II, Tayloe Family Papers, MSS1T2118B1, Virginia Historical Society. 26. See, for example, Richard Corbin to Charles Goore, 22 August 1762, Richard Corbin Letterbook, 1758–1768, Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 27. For storekeepers selling slaves, see, for example, Minchinton, et al., Virginia Slave Trade Statistics, 136, 148, 170, 176. 28. Walsh, ‘Mercantile Strategies’. 29. See Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999), 144–45.

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30. Planters’ reactions to Liverpool prices and goods are discussed in Walsh, ‘Motives of Honour, Pleasure, and Profitt’, forthcoming. Williams (Liverpool Privateers, 467–68) argued that the superior appeal of Manchester goods contributed to Liverpool’s rise in American markets. Chesapeake planters appreciated the cheapness of Liverpool goods, but the main reason some shifted from Bristol to Liverpool factors seems to have been primarily the higher prices Liverpool merchants obtained for their tobacco. 31. Journal of James Madison, MSS 10558, University of Virginia Special Collections Library. 32. Colonel William Fauntleroy, jr, Letterbook and Account Book, 1735–1774, Rockefeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Advertisements for Liverpool cargoes appear in the Virginia Gazette. 33. Extensions of credit are documented in the letterbooks of consigning Chesapeake planters, especially those living in the Rappahannock River basin. See also Jacob M. Price, ‘Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies’, in Barbara L. Solow (ed.), Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge, 1991), 293–339. 34. Walsh, ‘Chesapeake Slave Trade’. For William Davenport’s trade to the Cameroons, see David Richardson, ‘Profits in the Liverpool Slave Trade: The Accounts of William Davenport, 1757–1784’, in Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair, (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, 2 (Liverpool, 1976), 60–90. 35. Henry Callister to Foster Cunliffe, 7 August 1752, Callister Papers, Maryland Diocesan Library; Tyler, ‘Foster Cunliffe’; Price, France and the Chesapeake, 594, 642–43.

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5

The Liverpool Slave Trade, Lancaster and its Environs Melinda Elder

T

h e prospect of Parliament’s abolition of the slave trade heralded a flurry of activity from British slave ports in the opening years of the nineteenth century. Among the Liverpool clearances was the 260-ton Johns, which made five consecutive voyages to Africa and the West Indies between 1802 and 1807. The total number of slaves carried in the hold of this vessel would have been in the region of 1,500.1 At first sight, this would seem a typical series of Liverpool slaving voyages. Yet, on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the captain for most of these voyages, John Nunns, and his partners in the vessel were all Lancaster men. Moreover, the ship had been built and registered in Lancaster and when Captain Nunns died on its final voyage in 1807 off the coast of Trinidad, he was commemorated in a Lancaster churchyard.2 In this instance, the linking of the two ports can be largely explained by legislation passed in 1799 for the better regulation of the slave trade, which required Lancaster slaving vessels to clear from Liverpool. This intertwines a few of the statistics of the two ports while masking a number of Lancaster merchants’ interests in the trade right up to its abolition.3 However, what is being proposed here is that the interconnection between Liverpool and Lancaster and its environs, as regards the transatlantic slave trade, went considerably further than the requirements of this legislation and that viewing the trade from a wider perspective can prove enlightening. This regional interplay took a variety of forms but fundamental to it were the men who migrated south from Lancaster and its environs to participate in the Liverpool slave trade during the eighteenth century. These men’s continued links with their native area influenced partnerships and facilitated interregional trade when it came to the provisioning of slave ships. Such ties could also be seen at work in the buying and selling of slaves in Africa

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Figure 5.1  Liverpool, Lancaster and its environs.

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and the West Indies. The fact that a number of the individuals moving to Liverpool returned home once their business was done invites a broader perspective when considering the wealth and property accrued through the trade. At the heart of the interconnection between the two regions were the men moving south to participate in the Liverpool slave trade as merchants and captains. A thriving coastal trade between Liverpool and Lancaster and, indeed, other Morecambe Bay ports such as Ulverston, would have provided the necessary links between the two regions to promote such a migration.4 Those moving south can be placed in one of two groups. The first features those who came by way of the Lancaster slave trade, where they had already gained direct experience in the port’s small but steady trade with Africa. The second comprises those entering the slave trade for the first time at Liverpool who had migrated from rural north Lancashire, that is, the area surrounding Morecambe Bay. These two groups will be considered in turn, but first there is the case of an individual moving north from Liverpool, under rather different circumstances, who would play a more particular role in Lancaster’s developing slave trade. There would have been little reason to move from a larger to a smaller port other than to seek retirement or semi-retirement from the trade. One who did this was Henry White, whose experience and evident success in the Liverpool slave trade, as both captain and investor, would have made him a valuable contact when he moved north to Lancaster in 1749, the very time when its slave trade was taking off after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.5 Captain White had commanded seven slaving voyages from Liverpool between 1735 and 1744, whereupon he prospered there as merchant. However, by the time he had retired from the Liverpool slave trade in 1756, with 35 investments to his name, the Preston-born mariner-turned-merchant was already living in Lancaster.6 Profits from the trade had evidently made him a suitable match for the widowed daughter of a local influential family, the Cawthornes. The couple were married in Lancaster in 1749, the same year Henry White, now a gentleman, was admitted freeman of the town.7 He was present at the founding of the Lancaster Port Commission in April the following year and bought two new quayside lots in 1752. Significantly, he served as the African Company’s representative in Lancaster during the 1750s, which involved issuing company directives to Lancaster captains and merchants to safeguard their trading interests in the Gambia.8 With his investments in the Liverpool slave trade continuing until 1756, it would seem Henry White had no need to invest in Lancaster’s blossoming slave trade. It is

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hard to imagine, however, that his considerable experience and contacts did not benefit its pioneers. Returning to the first group of migrations south, one sees some of Lancaster’s most committed and ambitious investors in the slave trade transferring their operations to Liverpool during the second half of the eighteenth century. Miles Barber and the Hinde family stand out. Barber, the son of a Lancaster innkeeper, had inherited some property from his father and at 25 made his first investments in the Lancaster slave trade with the Cato, which completed three highly profitable voyages to Africa and the colonies between 1757 and 1762. Other ships and ventures followed in quick succession but Barber was already in the process of relocating his slave-trading business to Liverpool. In 1765, he purchased his freedom of the town and four years later his freedom of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. Barber became a formidable operator in Liverpool. In a fifteen-year period alone, he was associated in over 60 slaving ventures, often as sole investor.9 His reputation was such that a surgeon leaving Liverpool aboard the True Blue in 1776 wrote, ‘I am now engaged on M r Barber the greatest Guinea House in Europe … who is at present the only man that pushes the African trade’.10 Barber’s extensive operations in West Africa will be explored later. Thomas Hinde, meanwhile, along with his younger brothers William and Samuel, had grown up with the slave trade. Their father, also Thomas, had worked his way up from Guinea captain to pre-eminent investor in the Lancaster slave trade. He, too, had had shares in the above-mentioned Cato, and his investments in Lancaster slave ships, often with Miles Barber during the 1750s and 1760s, would span twenty years or more, at least until war broke out with the American colonies in 1776.11 Whether his eldest son Thomas started investing with his father after he became freeman of Lancaster in 1772 is uncertain. What is certain, however, is that from 1782 Thomas Hinde junior started appearing on the registration of Liverpool slaving vessels, sometimes described as ‘of Lancaster’ but more often as ‘of Liverpool’, where he was admitted freeman in 1795 before joining the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa in 1798.12 His investment in upward of 30 slaving ventures, 7 of these in a vessel bearing the family name Hinde, speak of his prominence in the Liverpool trade during this later period. He also continued to attract money from Lancaster. His father, usually accompanied by Samuel Simpson, invested with him in the Hinde, Golden Age, King of Dahomey, George, Tamazin and Minerva. Meanwhile his brothers, William and Samuel Hinde, were associated with a further ten ventures from Liverpool between 1804 and 1807 in which Thomas may also have had shares. Certainly, Thomas and Samuel were joint owners of the Jane when they sought permission to send her on a slaving voyage in

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1806, following legislation preventing vessels not already in the trade from clearing for Africa.13 No less significant is the fact that these Lancaster merchants, especially Miles Barber, took some of the Lancaster slave-ship captains with them to Liverpool. Prominent among those switching to the Liverpool slave trade with Barber during the 1760s were: William Denison, who commanded the Lowther and Molly of Lancaster before Barber’s Rumbold, Jupiter and Hannah of Liverpool; Thomas Hodgson, who commanded the Pitt and Marquis of Granby of Lancaster before Barber’s Gambia and Yannamarow of Liverpool; and James Kendall, who commanded Barber’s Thetis and Dove of Lancaster before his Marton, Granada and Saville of Liverpool.14 All three men clearly prospered from being in charge of these larger Liverpool slave ships, for each went on to become a significant investor in the trade there. Indeed, an acquaintance in later life, Miss Dobson, recalling what she had heard of Thomas Hodgson’s years at sea in the slave trade, wrote, ‘he had been engaged in it in his youth and early manhood, and it had laid the foundation of his rise in life’.15 William Denison and James Kendall would each invest in over 30 slaving ventures, Denison between 1764 and 1788, and Kendall between 1769 and 1777. Thomas Hodgson, meanwhile, would go on to play a more prominent role still. He, together with his elder brother, formed the well-known Liverpool partnership, John and Thomas Hodgson, which was concerned in over 50 slaving ventures between 1771 and 1796. Their first ships were aptly named Two Brothers, and Caton after their native village in the Lune Valley. They obviously prospered through their commercial activities, for in 1781 Thomas was to prove a suitable match for Elizabeth Lightbody, daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant, a marriage which no doubt enhanced his business in return.16 A little later, in 1784, the two brothers would start bringing their new-found wealth back to Caton, which will be considered presently, but it was only when John had turned 60 that they retired altogether from the slave trade and moved back home. Richard Kendall provides one further noteworthy example of captains exchanging Lancaster for Liverpool slave ships.17 As with the Hindes, his move to Liverpool turned into something of a family affair, but this time centred on mariners more than merchants. Kendall, originally from the Lune Valley, started commanding Lancaster slave ships aged 24. His first four commissions, between 1767 and 1771, were aboard Matthew Wright’s two slavers, Agnes I and II. In 1769 Captain Kendall married his boss’s daughter, Margaret, and the following year their first son, John, was born. Kendall continued to command Lancaster slave ships for a number of Lancaster owners and also started taking out shares in these voyages. His last captaincy at Lancaster was aboard the newly built Alithea, which completed a voyage to Sierra Leone and Grenada just before the outbreak of war in 1776. At

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this time, Kendall was renting property near the river on Cable Street in Lancaster and his family was still living there in 1783 when Richard, rather belatedly it would seem, became freeman of the town and when his youngest son, Anthony, was born. However, even then the family’s situation was changing with the end of war and the slave trade’s consequent revival. Absent from his son’s christening, Captain Kendall was already in command of his next slave ship only this time out of Liverpool.18 Between 1783 and 1798, Richard Kendall commanded up to 12 voyages, making him one of the leading slave-ship captains in Liverpool during this period. His first command was aboard the Brothers, belonging to Ralph Fisher and Company. He made two more voyages in this vessel and a further two in the Matty and Betty and the Fisher owned by the same company together with their frequent partners, John and Thomas Hodgson. Thereafter, from 1789, Richard Kendall progressed to shareholder in the slavers he captained, the Margaret, Manchester, Robert and William and, finally, the Amacree in 1798, which between them accounted for seven further voyages.19 By this time, Richard Kendall would have been around 55 years old and would have spent over thirty years in the African trade. That his character and constitution were strong is evident from the same Miss Dobson’s account on meeting him in later life when, like Thomas Hodgson, he had retired to his native Lune Valley at Caton. Of the captain’s constitution, Miss Dobson records, ‘Captain Kendall was a small wiry but handsome man, and when I first knew him must have been 70 or near it. He was more than 80 when he died in 1826’, Her insight into his character is somewhat more arresting: Captain Kendall was a specimen of what the frightful traffic in human creatures can make a man, but it left him the virtues of uprightness and truthfulness. Tho’, I believe, had needs been, he would have cared little for taking the life of a man, he would not have said a thing that was not true, not done a thing that was dishonest. Sailing, as he had done many many times with a daredevil crew of desperate ruffians, with his pistols near his hand as he slept and the companion strewn with pease, that he might hear if anyone approached to assassinate him, he must have been courageous in the extreme. One further entry is of interest, as it speaks of his eldest son John’s involvement in the Liverpool slave trade: One story of Captain Kendall is that he threw his son John overboard when rounding the rock, leaving the port of Liverpool for an African and West Indian voyage. The youth had angered him in some way,

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and the father never knew that he had reached land till he came back from his voyage.20 This was probably aboard the Brothers, clearing from Liverpool in 1786, as John appears among the crew of 26 and would have been 16 years old at the time. He evidently survived the ordeal and may well have continued to work for Ralph Fisher and Company, the Brothers’ owners and his father’s employers, until 1788, for in 1792 the firm gave him his first command aboard their slave ship the Swift. Captain John Kendall undertook a further seven or eight slaving voyages, half of these being for the same firm and, of the remainder, one in command of his father’s vessel the Manchester in 1796.21 The family’s connection with the Liverpool slave trade does not quite end here, as one of John Kendall’s crewmen aboard Ralph Fisher’s Ainsley, bound for Africa in November 1802, was his younger brother Matthew. Death would soon put a stop to both careers, however, for Matthew perished on this voyage in the Gambia in 1803 and John died the following year while trading in Bonny and New Calabar aboard the William; their father would no doubt have read this news in his newspaper back in Caton.22 By this time, father and sons had been a presence in the slave trade for almost 40 years. It was a presence that emerged from the links that existed between the slave trade at Lancaster and Liverpool. While there were those from north Lancashire who had found their way into the Liverpool slave trade through the trade at Lancaster, there were other, no less significant, operators from the region who first entered the slave trade at Liverpool. Their migration will be considered in terms of the different areas fringing Morecambe Bay, Furness to the north-west, Lonsdale (the Lune Valley) to the north-east and Amounderness to the south-east. An active coastal trade from Furness not only accounts for mariners being ‘particularly numerous in eighteenth-century local records’ but it also linked the region directly to Liverpool, which was, one of the important destinations for vessels carrying Furness iron.23 Such links and a seafaring tradition evidently paved the way for some individuals to send their sons south to take advantage of the maritime and commercial opportunities afforded by a burgeoning Liverpool. Some of these sons would find their way into the slave trade. Prominent among them were John Goad, Moses Benson, Daniel Backhouse, James Penny and John Bolton, all of whom became substantial investors in the trade once they had accumulated sufficient capital. Their career paths conform to a more general pattern, superficial variations notwithstanding. Only a brief survey can be attempted here, although more detailed studies exist elsewhere for some of them.24

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John Goad, baptized in Roosebeck (close to modern-day Barrow) in 1707, belonged to an earlier generation than the other four and was therefore the first to move to Liverpool. It would be interesting to know whether his mother’s family connections with a Furness iron firm trading to Liverpool played a part in this. However, the earliest record of his activities there came later, in 1737, when he was captain in the West India trade. More voyages followed and, with time, the ability to invest in small ships. By 1752 Goad was taking out his first share in a Liverpool slave ship, the Ferret, with John Welch and Company. Other investments followed apace over the ensuing 25 years, so that by 1777 his name can be linked to 45 slaving ventures, the last few being investments continued in his name after his death in December 1772. His partnerships reveal the importance of regional ties, for they included other early participants in the Liverpool slave trade from north Lancashire, albeit from neighbouring Lonsdale rather than Furness. John Welch has already been mentioned, but there were others with whom he would form a more extensive and enduring trading relationship, notably George Hutton and Thomas Foxcroft, his associates in some 36 Liverpool slaving ventures, and to a lesser extent his good friend John Yeats; men all meriting further attention later.25 Of the subsequent generation from Furness, Moses Benson, Daniel Backhouse, James Penny and John Bolton all originated from Ulverston. The first three were close contemporaries, having been baptized between 1738 and 1741, while Bolton was about 15 years their junior. Their social backgrounds also show similarities. Benson was the son of a salt dealer, Backhouse a house carpenter-turned-innkeeper, Penny a mariner and Bolton an apothecary. Like Goad, they all needed to work their way up to becoming merchants, and while their routes differed in detail, other similarities are apparent. Benson and Penny both became captains in the 1760s, Benson in the West India trade for a prominent Lancaster merchant, Abraham Rawlinson, and Penny in the slave trade at Liverpool for Miles Barber, whose Lancaster origins have already been discussed. Benson also spent several years as Abraham’s agent out in Jamaica, while Bolton fulfilled a similar function in St. Vincent for his son, Henry Rawlinson, who had moved from Lancaster to Liverpool, and to whom Bolton had been apprenticed. And while Penny continued to prosper as slave-ship captain, commanding 11 voyages in all before turning merchant in the trade he knew so well, Benson and Bolton both progressed to trading in the West Indies on their own account. There they amassed considerable sums of money and valuable experience before returning home and setting themselves up as merchants in Liverpool, where their commercial enterprises would soon include the slave trade. Daniel Backhouse’s early career remains something of a mystery, but given that there is no evidence

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to suggest that he was ever a slave-ship captain it seems reasonable to assume that, like Bolton, he prospered through being apprenticed to a prominent merchant house. His father would have had the necessary funding, since he held sufficient real estate in and around Ulverston to raise a £200 mortgage soon after Daniel’s birth while continuing to ‘enjoy the said housing’ and ‘receive and take Rent Issues and Profitts thereof ’. Moreover, he was still able to pass on the property and land to Daniel when he died in 1762, which would have been a timely inheritance for the 20-year-old, who evidently continued to draw income from it over the coming years and, indeed, to develop the premises he had inherited in Daltongate.26 These four men’s commitment to the Liverpool slave trade is unquestionable, and partnership details only substantiate the importance and complexity of regional ties. Moses Benson, who entered the trade in 1775, can be associated with 67 slaving ventures in the period up to his death in 1806 and, in nearly half of these, his partners included James Penny and later his son, together with John Backhouse, another Liverpool merchant with northern connections.27 Penny himself had made around 43 investments by his death in 1799. A review of his partnerships reveals further north-Lancashire names, including John and Thomas Hodgson from Caton, who would have been well known to Penny since Penny and Thomas Hodgson were former employees of Miles Barber. More substantial still were John Bolton’s 71 investments in the Liverpool slave trade. These were focused in the last two decades before abolition and featured few large partnerships and many solo ventures. The slave ship Bolton’s ten African voyages between 1792 and 1803 seem to epitomize his prominence and success in the trade. The renowned firm of Tarleton and Backhouse, meanwhile, was the outfit through which Daniel Backhouse conducted his 82 slaving ventures between 1773 and 1796.28 The investments of this not always harmonious partnership, considered to be worth £85,000 in 1790 and the third largest in Liverpool,29 once again put a son of Furness at the forefront of Liverpool’s slave-trading community. Others from Furness evidently played a less prominent but hardly inconsequential role in the Liverpool slave trade. John Parker, one of William Davenport’s partners for 21 slaving voyages between 1768 and 1777, and who joined Daniel Backhouse and Thomas Tarleton in sending the Jenny to Africa in 1782, is probably the ‘John Parker of Liverpool, merchant, only son and heir of Hugh Parker of Ulverston’ mentioned in two local property conveyances following his father’s death in 1784, and who had been baptized in Ulverston in 1735.30 Other prospective mariners would also follow James Penny to become experienced captains, if not investors, in the Liverpool slave trade. Joseph Threlfall, for example, was

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active between 1786 and 1800 and occupies sixth place in Behrendt’s table of ‘leading slave-ship captains, 1785–1807’ with his 11 voyages. His final command was aboard the Alexander, carrying slaves from Bonny to Jamaica in 1800. What happened next is less clear. His signing of an indenture shortly after his arrival in Kingston, making over his house in Liverpool to his wife Nancy, may well suggest illness and subsequent death on the island and this would certainly explain his disappearance from the records. There can be little doubt concerning his Furness origins, however, since he had two sisters and a brother living near Ulverston when he wrote his will in 1798.31 Richard Hart might also have made Behrendt’s table if he had not perished aboard the Otter in the Congo River in 1803 while slave-ship captain for a sixth time. Hart also came from Ulverston. It is telling that his fellow townsman, John Bolton, had given him his first command, aboard the slave-ship Bolton. On Hart’s death, Robert Kitchen, his employer aboard the Otter and his executor, leased the house Hart had built in Ulverston to the town’s Canal Navigation Company.32 Furness’s involvement in the Liverpool slave trade seems hard to ignore. Key players from the Lune Valley have already been named in passing, but their part in linking rural north Lancashire to the Liverpool slave trade merits further attention. The first of these is important for his influence and for the scale of his investments. John Welch came from a relatively prosperous Caton family on account of his mother’s inheritance from her father, John Foxcroft. Welch’s first recorded venture in the slave ship Lively in 1737 was no doubt funded from a property sale he and his mother had made the year before. More ships followed and, before too long, he would be attracting other young men from the locality, eager, no doubt, to emulate his success in the trade.33 Another and still earlier link between Liverpool and the Lune Valley came with Henry Smith’s apprenticeship to Richard Gildart ‘as a factor or agent in merchandizing’ in 1716. Gildart owned several Liverpool slave ships at the time and quite probably it was this same Henry Smith who commanded Johnson Gildart’s slave ship Thomas between 1733 and 1736. Moreover, it may well have been this connection that introduced John Welch to the Liverpool slave trade, especially as he seems to have been well known to the Gildarts, assuming that he was the captain of that name who commanded their slave-ship Middleham in 1747 and 1752.34 Welch continued to invest heavily in the Liverpool slave trade, so much so that in the period 1750 to 1760 he was concerned with 47 ventures, 9 of these falling in a single year, 1754. Not surprisingly, this put him at the forefront of Liverpool’s slave-trading community at this time. It also enabled him to reduce his activities and spend more time back home with his relatives (he never married), who were now living in some style further up the valley, in Leck. Even so, his

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investments in the slave trade would continue until 1771, shortly before his death, by which time he had 82 investments to his name.35 Welch clearly drew George Hutton, from nearby Beetham in Westmorland, into the slave trade in 1753 when both men invested in the Barclay, the first of 17 ventures together. Thomas Foxcroft, of Thorntonin-Lonsdale, was next in line, investing in one slaving venture with John Welch and two with George Hutton in 1759. His family’s close ties with the Welch family, especially through his sister Agnes’s marriage to John Welch’s brother Robert in 1752, can easily explain Thomas’s arrival in Liverpool.36 It is intriguing that this was his only joint venture with his senior relative, yet he continued to trade with George Hutton in over 50 ventures, often joined by John Goad and sometimes by John Yeats who, like the Welch family, had close ties with the Lonsdale village of Leck. Another regular investor with Thomas Foxcroft from 1760 was Felix Doran. Although not of local origin, Doran had previously partnered John Welch and later, in 1781, his son, also named Felix, would marry Foxcroft’s niece Mary. Doran junior had picked up where his father had left off when he died in 1776, and continued to invest with Thomas Foxcroft. They were often joined by Foxcroft’s nephew, George Welch, and another relative, James Welch, until they all retired from the trade when their last three slavers, the Bloom, Bud and King Grey, returned to Liverpool in 1793. By this time, Thomas Foxcroft was 60 and had been concerned in 92 African ventures since starting out at the age of 26.37 Again, with Lonsdale, the extent of involvement and the importance of local ties are hard to deny. A little further south, in Amounderness (the area from Lancaster southward), another Thomas Hodgson, unconnected with the one mentioned earlier, played an equally important role in the Liverpool slave trade, only in his case he would be joined by his son, not his brother. In 1753, Thomas, aged 24 and already a merchant in Liverpool, inherited property from his father, William, an apothecary of Garstang where Thomas grew up. The property included estates in nearby Elswick and Bolton, close to Lancaster. Meanwhile, his mother was to enjoy the rents of another estate in Caton, which she had inherited from her brother, Thomas Leckonby.38 Although it is impossible to disentangle Thomas Hodgson’s earlier investments in the slave trade from those of one or maybe more contemporary Liverpool merchants bearing the same name, it seems likely that he was investing in Liverpool slave ships from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.39 Certainly, there were many slaving partnerships featuring a Thomas Hodgson from 1752, and the occasional ‘junior’ to suggest at least two active investors of this name in the third quarter of the century. The fact that Thomas (from Garstang) married Mary Bent of Warrington in 1759 indicates that he was probably the Thomas Hodgson who partnered Ellis Bent in the Lord

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Grey’s five slaving voyages during the 1760s. One assumes there would have been other ships and other partners, especially given his subsequent activity. However, it is only when his 23-year-old son, Ellis Leckonby Hodgson, joined him in 1786 that Thomas’s investments can be pinpointed with certainty. Together, they invested in over 50 slaving ventures with a range of partners, Bents and Earles included. In 1804, their slave ship the Mary Ellen was lost before reaching the Americas, though not without her cargo of 375 slaves reaching Havana in other ships. This was to be their last investment, for shortly after, in his 75th year, Thomas Hodgson died, leaving his son and Thomas Earle to administer his estate. His death proved a turning point, for Ellis did not continue in the trade.40 Two cousins who became captains in the Liverpool slave trade will provide the final example. Both were christened Gerrard after their maternal grandfather. Their fathers, William Backhouse and William Preston, were both born in Lancaster, although their families originated in Furness. William Backhouse, a brazier, married Cicely Tarleton, the daughter of a fellow brazier in Wigan, where the couple settled, even though their son, Gerrard, was christened in Lancaster in 1749. William Preston, meanwhile, married Cicely’s sister Elizabeth in Wigan shortly afterwards but stayed in Lancaster, where he progressed from mariner to merchant and where his son, Gerrard, was also christened in 1754. Both cousins were admitted freemen of Lancaster in 1779, by which time each was identified as mariner but Backhouse was described as ‘of Liverpool’ and Preston as ‘of Lancaster’.41 Gerrard Backhouse would already have been a slave-ship captain in Liverpool, for between 1773 and 1789 he made eight slaving voyages, the last three aboard the 200-ton Betty, newly built at Lancaster, in which he had shares. Gerrard Preston, meanwhile, was captain of the Lindow, a Lancaster West Indiaman, before taking up his first command of a Liverpool slave ship in 1786. The vessel’s owners included the familiar names of James Penny, Moses Benson and John Backhouse, men who would have known Preston through shared links with Furness and Lancaster’s mercantile community. They employed Preston as slave-ship captain seven times altogether before he turned merchant, six times aboard the Shirburn Castle and then, after its shipwreck in 1793, one last time aboard their Eliza. In 1800, his firm, Preston and Winder, was investing in the Westmoreland, Alexander and Urania bound for Africa.42 Yet again, regional links and local connections were at work in the Liverpool slave trade. Such close ties between Liverpool and north Lancashire had an impact when it came to fitting out slave ships for Africa. In the first place, they would have facilitated Lancaster merchants’ purchase of specialized goods

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for the trade, understandably centred on the larger port, such as the beads supplied by William Davenport or the brass by Ralph Fisher. Indeed, this, and sometimes the need for additional crew, explains why some Lancaster slave ships cleared via Liverpool and became absorbed in the larger port’s statistics.43 In the second place, and perhaps less predictably, such ties encouraged the manufacture of certain goods in north Lancashire or thereabouts for the Liverpool slave trade. Two such examples were the ‘Guinea kettles’ being cast in 1744 by the Backbarrow Iron Company in Furness, and Kendal cottons, a coarse woollen cloth popular in the Guinea trade.44 More detailed accounts exist for the operation of connections between Liverpool and north Lancashire in the case of two gunpowder manufactories established in the area, one at Sedgwick near Kendal in 1764 and another at Low Wood, close to Backbarrow, in 1798. Thomas Wakefield, already a producer of Kendal cottons, was the driving force behind the first enterprise. His existing links with Liverpool’s mercantile community presumably made him aware of the market for gunpowder, particularly ‘African powder’ for its slave trade, which was often in short supply. The importance of African powder to the concern is strongly suggested by the fact that one of the partners, the only nonlocal one, who set up the gunpowder manufactory at Sedgwick was James Hayes, a Liverpool merchant who invested in the slave ship John between 1763 and 1766. The existence of a Liverpool contact obviously paid off for Wakefield, since Strickland and Company was ‘signing a 21-year lease in December 1774 for a magazine on the Cheshire side of the Mersey owned by Liverpool Corporation’.45 The second gunpowder manufactory established at Low Wood shared many of the characteristics of its predecessor. The instigator, Christopher Wilson, was also a Kendal merchant and, indeed, the son of one of Wakefield’s close associates. Christopher would have had first-hand knowledge of the Liverpool slave trade from his uncle, Thomas Parke. Originally from Swaledale in Yorkshire, Parke had advanced from linen draper to investor in over 60 slaving ventures, mainly with the Heywoods and sometimes with the Hindes, before retiring from the trade in 1792. Moreover, it was one of Parke’s former slave-ship captains, Joseph Fayrer, also with northern connections, who joined Wilson and two other partners and with his experience and friends in the slave trade, became the company’s all-important representative in Liverpool.46 Indeed, in February 1800 he told a third partner, Dave Baker, at Low Wood, ‘I plainly see not a single barrel woud be sold if I … was not on the spot’. As well as dealing with customers, Fayrer oversaw the dispatch of raw materials from Liverpool to Ulverston. In February 1800 he wrote, ‘have put on board the Dove 8 hhds [of brimstone] along with 80 bags of Petre and 12 Tons

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of Coals’, a practice which echoed the earlier enterprise’s use of coasters to Sandside, near Milnthorpe. He also advised Barker on market conditions, sometimes instructing him to refrain from making powder and at other times to produce more, as in April 1800, when he urged the sending of ‘all the African Powder you dare venture by the Dove’ and ‘would have you … go on with making at Least 200 Barrels more African powder as soon as you can’. Among Fayrer’s customers fitting out ships for Africa in 1800 were many of the big merchant houses of the day, including Joseph Ward, John Shaw, Thomas and Ellis Leckonby Hodgson, who spent £1,302, £1,535 and £2,000, respectively, on Low Wood gunpowder.47 Fayrer’s work, however, would soon pass to Preston and Winder, who were already agents for the company. He had been tempted into commanding the Hodgson’s slave ship Annabella, but it would prove a fatal move. Fayrer died at Cape Coast Castle in January 1801, aged 55.48 Miles Barber’s extensive ownership of slave ships at Lancaster and then Liverpool represented only one side of his involvement in the trade. Instructed in his father’s will to ‘go into the world to imploy and improve himself till … twenty-five’, he set up a slave factory at the Isle de Los just north of the Sierra Leone River in 1754. Described later by Smeathman, this comprised ‘a sort of dockyard’, supplied with ‘blacksmiths, armourers, coopers [and] carpenters’, complete with ‘a house for sick slaves’. Barber proceeded to develop this side of his slaving business, alongside his shipping interests, until he had another 11 such establishments along the African coast. His own slavers were frequent visitors during the 1760s and 1770s, as doubtless were those of his fellow traders at Lancaster and at Liverpool. They would certainly have encountered some familiar faces there, as Barber employed some of his trusted slave-ship captains as African agents, including James Penny and Thomas Hodgson. That during the 1780s Barber was reckoned to be selling around 6,000 slaves a year to the Americas, 4,000 of these from the Isle de Los, gives some indication of the scale of his African operations.49 Moreover, his example was not lost on his fellow Lancastrian captain and African agent, Thomas Hodgson. In addition to their extensive shipping interests in the Liverpool slave trade, Thomas and his elder brother, John, took over Barber’s slave factory on the Isle de Los when he retired in 1793.50 The selling of slaves in the West Indies bears further witness to the close links between Liverpool and Lancaster. Captain Brighouse, for example, on arrival at St. Kitts aboard the Preston in 1781 and following his owners’ instructions, had ‘put his Cargoe of Negroes into the Hands of Messrs. John Satterthwaite & Co for Sale’. The owners were the Earles, Thomas Parke,

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the Heywoods, William Davenport and John Copland, and the vendors Satterthwaite and Robinson of Lancaster and St. Kitts. A few months later, Captain Forsyth repeated the procedure by selling the Mars’s cargo with the same firm for the same Liverpool merchants. John Satterthwaite would have been well known to the Liverpool slave-trading community through John Backhouse, his brother-in-law and the frequent slave-trading partner of Moses Benson, James Penny and the Hodgson brothers, and Satterthwaite was indeed investing in Backhouse’s slaver, the Stag, at this time. Neither was John Satterthwaite the first in his family to sell Guineamen cargoes on behalf of Liverpool merchants. His father Benjamin had evidently been in the same line of business when selling the Charming Nancy’s cargo of slaves in Barbados for William Davenport in 1757, under the firm Law, Satterthwaite and Jones. The Hinde family provide a further example. In 1792, the Lancaster merchant, John Rawlinson, congratulated Joshua Hinde, resident in Grenada, on his having so many ‘handsome commissions on African cargoes’ from Liverpool and expressed his pleasure on hearing that Samuel’s cousin, Thomas Hinde, had ‘offered his Guarantee’.51 Once again, local networks were important, in this instance in providing trusted trading partners across the Atlantic. Many of those who moved south from Lancaster and its environs to participate in the Liverpool slave trade retained a desire to return to their native area on retiring or semi-retiring from the trade. Even those who did not return provided for their relatives and often funded projects back home. This attachment to the region of their birth resulted in a wider distribution of the wealth derived from their slave-trading interests in Liverpool. While it is, of course, impossible to isolate wealth from the slave trade alone, it is equally the case that it played a far from insignificant role in the fortunes of the individuals concerned. A prime consideration was the accumulation of property and land, with the most successful setting themselves up in large country residences. John Welch, for example, returned to his native Lune Valley, amassing large amounts of property between Lancaster and the tiny village of Leck, where continued improvements to the family home transformed it from High House to Leck Hall. George Hutton and John Yeats were doing something rather similar in and around Beetham in Westmorland while Thomas Hodgson, on returning to his native Lune Valley at Caton, took up residence at Escowbeck, a fine country house with extensive grounds on the edge of the village. Thomas Hinde, meanwhile, bought up extensive estates in and around Dolphinholme, near his home town of Lancaster, making one of these, Undercroft, his country seat. A little further afield,

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John Bolton purchased Storrs Hall, turning it into a magnificent country residence on the shores of Windermere, not far from his native Ulverston. Even those who remained in Liverpool influenced their native area through their heirs and beneficiaries. Thomas Foxcroft, for example, made over his considerable estate to his nephew, the Reverend Thomas Hammond Foxcroft, who resided at the family home at Hallsteads in his native Thornton-in-Lonsdale.52 Others were a little more modest, as circumstances dictated. Captain Joseph Fayrer, for instance, built the less extravagant but still imposing Harmony Hall at Milnthorpe in Westmorland before his last, ill-fated African voyage. Gerrard Backhouse, meanwhile, took up the life of a country gentleman in neighbouring Heversham, where he lived with his wife and sister. Then there was Captain Richard Kendall, who retired to his native valley, purchasing an estate at Caton Green with fine views across the River Lune.53 Nor were investments confined to land and property. The Hodgson and, later, the Hinde brothers, even while still merchants in Liverpool, were putting money into water-powered textile mills in the villages where they would ultimately settle. John and Thomas Hodgson built the Low Mill at Caton in 1784 and the Hindes developed a worsted mill at Dolphinholme nine years later. Thomas Hodgson’s commemorative plaque in the local church aptly sums up the former enterprise: ‘After passing the early part of his life in foreign climes he was for many years an eminent merchant in Liverpool and founder of the cotton and silk works in this his native place’. Daniel Backhouse, meanwhile, although staying in and around Liverpool, never relinquished his ties with Ulverston. In 1792, he led a group of Liverpool merchants in subscribing to a canal scheme to turn Ulverston into a port, aimed chiefly at promoting Furness’s expanding iron trade. Together, they put up £1,200, or nearly a third of the capital, and among the names appearing alongside his own were three fellow investors in the Liverpool slave trade, William Pole, Peter Baker and Thomas Clarke.54 It has been customary to conceive of the slave trade in terms of a given port. This approach is entirely appropriate in reflecting a port’s activities in relation to the trade and, in the case of Liverpool and Lancaster, aptly distinguishes a large slaving port, which came to dominate Britain’s premier league, from a much smaller one, which at best topped its first division for a time. Even so, it can sometimes be advantageous to step outside this more compartmentalized view of the slave trade. The aim here has been to look at the relationship between two regions to see how the Liverpool and Lancaster slave trades interacted and, indeed, how the Liverpool slave

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trade reached out to and was touched by the somewhat larger geographical area around Morecambe Bay. This approach has suggested how some of the expertise already built up in the slave trade at Liverpool was made available to Lancaster’s pioneering operators and how, in return, a number of Lancaster’s most committed investors and captains in the slave trade moved south to benefit from the greater opportunities afforded by the larger port. A second group has been identified, featuring young men from rural north Lancashire, especially from the districts of Furness and Lonsdale, who first entered the slave trade at Liverpool. Moreover, it has transpired that, taken together, these groups accounted for some of Liverpool’s leading operators in the slave trade. Also significant, it has been argued, are the partnerships they formed within Liverpool’s mercantile community, for these invariably reflected their northern connections, suggesting not only the importance of trusted trading partners but also their ability to recruit others from their locality to join them. Familiarity, where possible, it seems, was equally important in determining their choice of captains. The existence of close ties between members of Liverpool’s slave-trading community and north Lancashire can be seen to have promoted the supply of certain trade goods for Africa. The importance of local contacts when buying and selling slaves in Africa and the West Indies has also been demonstrated. Finally, it has been shown how wealth from the Liverpool slave trade was dispersed as its participants from north Lancashire maintained strong links with their native area, many returning home to retire. A broader perspective has revealed some strong links between the Liverpool slave trade, Lancaster and its environs. The extent of north Lancashire’s involvement in the Liverpool slave trade no doubt reflects one of the defining features of the region, Morecambe Bay. With its seafaring tradition and its transatlantic port of Lancaster, the region was outwardlooking and its people were well aware of the commercial opportunities of maritime trade. Moreover, they were well equipped to embrace them. Notes

1. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, Davis Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). 2. St. John’s, Lancaster, monumental inscription. 3. M. Elder, The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth–Century Lancaster (Halifax, 1992), 205–6. 4. This point in stressed by M. M. Schofield, ‘Lancashire Shipping in the 18th Century: The Rise of a Seafaring Family’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 (1991), 2; and in M. Robinson, ‘An Intercourse of Trade: Coastal Shipping in the Northwest, 1700–1750’, Centre for North–West Regional Studies, Regional Bulletin, 13 (1999), 35.

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5. Elder, Slave Trade, 33. 6. For shipping, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. For Preston origins, see Lancashire Record Office (hereafter Lancs. RO), WRW/A, 1756 (Henry White’s administration bond). 7. For his marriage to Mary Haydock (née Cawthorne), see Lancs. RO, ARR11; as freeman, see The Rolls of Freeman of the Borough of Lancaster, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1935), 90. 8. For Lancaster port interests, see Lancaster Public Library (hereafter LPL), Port Commission Minute Book I, 30 April 1750, 6 February 1752. For the African Company, see The National Archives (hereafter TNA), T 79/29. 9. Elder, Slave Trade, 147–50; and Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 10. I am indebted to Stephen Behrendt for this information. 11. For more on Thomas Hinde senior’s involvement in the Lancaster slave trade, see Elder, Slave Trade, 140–41. 12. Liverpool Record Office (hereafter LRO), Freeman Register Book 1733– 1812, Committee Book of the African Company of Merchants Trading from Liverpool, 1750–1820. 13. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. For Jane, see Elder, Slave Trade, 141. 14. See Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; and Elder, Slave Trade, 104, 154. 15. LPL, PT 8847. 16. Samuel Greg received £10,000 on marrying Elizabeth’s sister Hannah in 1789, M. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill (Cambridge, 1986), 17. 17. Probably no relation to James, Kendall being a common surname locally. 18. For Richard Kendall’s captaincies of Agnes I and II and Alithea, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. For his baptism, see Hornby Parish Registers, 30 November 1743; for his marriage to Margaret Wright, see Lancs. RO, ARR11. As freeman, see The Rolls of Freeman of the Borough of Lancaster (RSLC, 1935), 87. For rented property, see Guildhall Library, Royal Exchange insurance policy, 8 March 1776. For John and Anthony Kendall’s baptisms, see St Johns Parish Registers, 4 July 1770, 24 August 1783. 19. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Although Richard Kendall had a son, Richard, baptized in 1773, he would have been too young to command all but the last of these voyages, assuming he reached adulthood, and his father was clearly still active at this time. 20. LPL, PT8847. 21. For his appearance in the crew list, see Muster Rolls, quoted in Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 (1991), 100. For his captaincies, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 22. For the two sons’ deaths, see Lancaster Gazette, 14 May 1803; C. Fleury, TimeHonoured Lancaster (Lancaster, 1891), 536 (for 1814 read 1804). 23. J. D. Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution: An Economic History of Furness and the Town of Barrow (Barrow, 1958), 32, 85. 24. For John Goad, see Schofield, ‘Lancashire Shipping’. For John Bolton, see B. M. Santer, ‘John Bolton a Liverpool West-India Merchant 1756–1837’ (unpublished thesis, Birmingham University, 1954), and Sir C. Jones, John Bolton of Storrs (Kendal, 1959). For James Penny, see A. N. Rigg, Cumbria, Slavery and the Textile Industrial Revolution (Kirkby Stephen, 1994).

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25. Schofield, ‘Lancashire Shipping’, 4–11, 25, and Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Goad is associated with 45 ventures altogether, investments in his name continuing after his death until 1777. 26. For Richard and Daniel Backhouse’s Ulverston property, see Cumbria Record Office (hereafter CRO) (Barrow), BPR 31/S3 and BD/HJ/340/1/2. 27. John Backhouse, Penny and Benson invested in 29 slaving voyages between 1787 and 1799, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 28. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Daniel Backhouse does not appear to be closely related to John Backhouse. 29. P. D. Richardson, Introduction to American Material from the Tarleton Papers in the LRO (Wakefield, 2006), 18–19. 30. The probability of this match is enhanced by the single plausible entry, ‘John Parker, merchant, Drury Lane’, for this name in Gore’s Liverpool Directory of 1767. For Parker’s baptism, see C.W. Bardsley and L.R. Ayre, Registers of Ulverston Parish Church (Ulverston, 1886); and for land conveyances, see CRO (Barrow), BDB/42/67–8, wherein his father is variously described as shoemaker and merchant. For Parker’s investments in the slave trade, see Eltis et al., TransAtlantic Slave Trade. 31. As leading slave-ship captain, see Behrendt, ‘Captains in the British Slave Trade’, 105. For Alexander’s voyage, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and for his indenture and will see LRO, 920 MD 35–41, copies at CRO (Barrow) BDX 413. 32. For Hart’s death, see Behrendt, ‘Captains in the British Slave Trade’, 138. For details of an earlier voyage to the Congo in command of the William, see F. Wilkins, Manx Slave Traders (Kidderminster, 1999), 99. 33. Welch’s father, Henry, received £5,000 and gave up his trade as ironmonger on marrying Elizabeth Foxcroft in 1712, see J. D. Marshall (ed.), Autobiography of William Stout (Manchester, 1967). For 1736 property sale, see ‘A History of the Parish of Tunstall’, Chetham Society, 104 (1940), 84; and for 1737 investment, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 34. Smith’s family was well established in Arkholme and he was christened at Melling on 16 October 1698 (Melling Parish Registers). For his apprenticeship, see CRO (Kendal) WDB 56/1/1; and for shipping details, see Eltis et al., TransAtlantic Slave Trade. 35. See Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 36. For Robert Welch’s marriage to Agnes Foxcroft at Thornton-in-Lonsdale, see Parish Registers 16 May 1752. For earlier links, see n. 33. 37. A detailed account of their investment in the Bloom in 1784 is given in G. Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers (Liverpool, 2004), 605–7. James Welch’s precise position in the family needs establishing, but he was obviously closely related to George Welch and his uncle, Thomas Foxcroft. He was a frequent investor with both men and commanded their slaver, Rose, 1765–71. He made two more investments in the Bud after the others retired. For Felix Doran and Mary Foxcroft’s marriage, see Thornton-in-Lonsdale Parish Registers. For the Yeats family of Leck, see E. Garnett, Dated Buildings of South Lonsdale (Lancaster, 1994), 105. For slaving investments, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 38. Lancs. RO, WRW/A 1753.

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39. Other merchants of the same name include Thomas Earle’s partner in a Liverpool bead company and sugarhouse, cited in G. Read, ‘Introduction to the Earle Collection’ (Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool), who may/may not have been the merchant who died in 1773 (Lancs. RO, WCW, 1773). 40. For Thomas Hodgson’s marriage, see Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser, 21 September 1759, for his will, see Lancs. RO, WRW/A 1804, and for shipping details, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 41. St. Mary’s Lancaster and Wigan Parish Registers; The Rolls of Freeman of the Borough of Lancaster, 87, 90. 42. As slave-ship captains, see Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. For Preston’s command of the Lindow, see Lancaster Maritime Museum, Seamen Sixpences, 1779/80, and for Preston and Winder’s slave-ship investments, see Lancs. RO, DDLO/2/5/9 and DDLO/23. 43. Elder, Slave Trade, 49, 53, 211. 44. A. Fell, Early Iron Industry of Furness and District (London, 1968), 239; and J. V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland (Cambridge, 1981), 143. 45. J. Satchell and O. Wilson, Christopher Wilson of Kendal (Kendal Civic Society, 1988), 16–17, 23; R. Vickers, ‘Kendal Bankers, Lakeland Bankers and the Liverpool Connection’, Centre for North-West Regional Studies Regional Bulletin, 13 (1999), 41; and Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 46. Satchell and Wilson, Christopher Wilson, 15–16, A. Palmer, ‘Low-Wood Gunpowder Works’ (unpublished thesis, Chorley College, 1998), 1, 26; and Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 47. Lancs. RO, DDLO, Box 2 4/1, 7, Box 23, 5 (Pocket Book). 48. Palmer, ‘Low-Wood’, 1, Lancs. RO, DDLO, Box 2, 5 (3 October 1800), and R. K. Bingham, The Church at Heversham (Milnthorpe, 1984), 72. 49. Uppsala University Library, Smeathman Diary, envelope 2, MS D26; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (London, 1997), 339; Elder, Slave Trade, 59–60, 150; House of Lords Record Office, Parliamentary Papers, 1789, XXIV, 633. 50. B. L. Mouser (ed.), A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793–1794 (Bloomington, IN, 2002), 41n. 51. Lancaster University Library, John Satterthwaite’s Letter Book, 30 June 1781, 4 December 1781, Elder, Slave Trade, 77–78, 81–82. 52. For John Welch, John Yeats and Thomas Foxcroft, see TNA, PROB 11/1063, PROB 11/1549 and PROB 11/1497; for George Hutton and Thomas Hodgson, see Beetham and Brookhouse Church Monumental Inscriptions, respectively; for Thomas Hinde, see Lancs. RO WRW/A, 1829; and for Bolton, see Jones, John Bolton. 53. For Joseph Fayrer, see Bingham, Heversham Church, 72; for Gerrard Preston and Richard Kendall, see Lancs. RO, WCW, 1803 and WRW/L, 1826, respectively. 54. For Hindes and Hodgsons’ mills, see Elder, Slave Trade, 188–89; for Daniel Backhouse’s canal investment, see Marshall, Furness, 89.

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6

The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Ethnicities in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica Trevor Burnard

O

u r k now ledge of the Atlantic slave trade has expanded considerably in recent years.1 We know with great precision the numbers of Africans shipped across the Atlantic and the numbers who arrived in the Americas. We also have a fairly good idea about where in Africa these people originated. Our understanding of the African side of the equation has especially increased, making it impossible to dismiss the significance of Africa and African agency in the Atlantic slave trade as cavalierly as we were accustomed to do.2 But one area of the transformation of Africans into African–American slaves remains relatively little understood. We still know little about the process by which Africans were sold, were bought by merchants and planters and were sent from ships to farms, pens and plantations. As a result of our lack of attention to how Africans were sold on arrival in the Americas, we have overestimated the extent to which Africans from concentrated communities in Africa were able to recreate ethnic bonds in America that resembled those that they had left behind in Africa. Although abundant evidence exists that there were sufficient commonalities between Africans involved in the Atlantic slave trade for slave cultures that were distinctly related to specific African cultures to develop in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what current scholarship on the movement of Africans to the Americas underestimates is the extent to which the process by which Africans were bought by planters and placed on agricultural properties made it likely that slave populations would be heterogeneous groupings of slaves from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. In this article, I examine the ways by which Africans were purchased in seventeenth-century Jamaica with particular reference to how Africans

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from various embarkation points in West Africa were distributed among Jamaican slave populations.3 I show that Africans coming to Jamaica on Royal African Company ships came from a variety of African regions, making the Jamaican slave population ethnically diverse, although not so ethnically diverse as to prevent slaves from being able to develop cultures heavily influenced by a shared African inheritance. More importantly, I demonstrate that the ways that slaves were purchased led to a significant degree of randomization in how slaves were placed on plantations, making it unlikely that more than a few slaves on any one plantation came from the same slave ship and very likely that slave populations contained a mixture of peoples from different African regions. In addition, I suggest that the structure of slaveholding in Jamaica, especially the relatively small number of slaves owned by any one slaveholder and the extent of flux within the slaveholding population, meant that slaves faced considerable turmoil in their living arrangements, constraining their ability to develop strong communal ties on plantations. Finally, I contrast the historiography on the migration of Africans to the Americas with the historiography of the migration of Europeans to the Americas in order to suggest that we should pay more attention to the difficulties that Africans face in transplanting their cultural forms in the Americas when discussing the former historiography and stress more strongly in the latter historiography the commonalties in background and inheritance that unified the dominant European population and which allowed it to recreate in the Americas the cultural and institutional forms that they had left behind in Europe. As this summary of my argument suggests, I am more sympathetic than is usual in recent scholarship to the previously influential but now out of favour interpretations about the creation of Afro-Caribbean culture put forward by M. G. Smith, Orlando Patterson and especially by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price.4 These scholars suggested that the trauma of the Middle Passage and the historical discontinuities which slavery produced made it very difficult for African cultural practices to be transmitted intact from Africa to the Americas. All of them considered Afro-Caribbean culture to be the result of creative adaptations made by isolated, atomized, African slaves to the environment they found themselves in on arrival in the Americas. Mintz and Price in particular stress the ethnic heterogeneity of Caribbean slave populations. In their 1976 interpretation of how AfroCaribbean culture evolved, they advanced the theory that Africans arrived in the Americas as part of a slave trade that was notably heterogeneous. They insisted, much more strongly than is common in contemporary scholarship, that ‘no group, no matter how well-equipped or how free to choose, can transfer its way of life and the accompanying beliefs and values intact, from one locale to another’. They argued that Melville J. Herskovits

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was incorrect in suggesting that West Africans shared a certain number of underlying cultural assumptions and understandings, in the sense that European colonists to the America did, to the extent that Africans in the Americas had a common generalized heritage drawn from membership in a culturally unified social and economic system. The most that could be said in regard to shared African inheritances in the New World was that Africans had a common underlying grammar of culture that enabled them to respond, albeit in different ways, to similar sets of widespread underlying principles. That shared response to common problems was weakened, they suggested, by the circumstances through which Africans arrived in the Americas. They emphasized the initial cultural heterogeneity of the enslaved as a result of randomization inherent within the Atlantic slave trade. They argued that recently arrived Africans ‘tended to be tribally heterogeneous aggregates of individuals’. In short, the Africans who reached the New World did not comprise from the outset groups, but were ‘crowds, and very heterogeneous crowds at that’, who found it difficult, in the face of overwhelming European power, to form communities that replicated the social structures that they had been accustomed to in Africa.5 Few scholars would now accept Mintz and Price’s suggestion that Africans did not share a culture on arrival in America and that essentially new African-American identities emerged in the Americas out of disparate African elements and European influences.6 As a number of historians have demonstrated, the larger implications of ‘randomization’ as advanced by Mintz and Price do not hold up. John Thornton argues that even if slaves in the Americas came from a variety of regions of West Africa, the cultural differences between these regions were not that pronounced. In his view, randomization did not occur in the Middle Passage, partly because slave ships customarily drew their cargo from only one or perhaps two ports in Africa, and partly because the number of distinct cultural zones in West Africa was small. African culture in Lower Guinea in particular, from whence most slaves to British America originated, was quite culturally homogeneous. The result was that the slave populations on early plantations were probably from only a few national groupings. These groupings formed a base from which ‘elements of African culture could be shared, continued and developed in America and transmitted into the next generation’.7 Other historians have shown that the trauma of the Atlantic slave trade was insufficient to limit to any notable degree the extent of African cultural transfers by African slaves to the Americas. Sweet, for example, characterizes seventeenth-century Brazilian slave culture as ‘philosophically and structurally’ to be ‘essentially Central African, with a variety of specific ethnic practices and beliefs … resonating in the slave community, much as they did in Central Africa’.8 Warner-Lewis stresses that we can

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talk about a multitude of Central African influences that can be traced in Afro-Caribbean culture to the present day, while Eltis follows a number of scholars in asserting that both Barbados and Jamaica slave cultures were heavily Akan in the formative years of the late seventeenth century.9 Other historians see Igbo influences as especially strong in Jamaica.10 Yet if we might want to discard the ‘strong’ interpretation of the failure of African cultures to graft on to America put forward by Mintz and Price, the analysis advanced below posits that the ‘weak’ interpretation of Mintz and Price was fundamentally correct insofar as the conditions of slave arrival and disbursement favoured strongly patterns of ‘randomization’ within slave populations. In this respect, this article dissents from current orthodoxies that argue, in the words of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, that ‘preferences among both sellers and buyers [in the purchasing of Africans on arrival in the Americas] tended to cluster rather than fragment arriving Africans.11 The first fact to establish in order to see whether patterns of slave-trading led to considerable concentration of slaves from the same African nations on seventeenth-century Jamaican plantations is a rough approximation of the areas of Africa from which the initial slave population hailed. The African origins of Jamaican slaves varied over time. As in North America, the first slaves in Jamaica were what Ira Berlin calls ‘Atlantic Creoles’, small in number but disproportionately culturally influential.12 Unfortunately, these charter slaves in Jamaica were the slaves owned by Spanish owners present at English arrival. We have very little information about where in Africa these slaves came from,13 except that we know that they fought ferociously against the English soldiers who were attempting to quell Spanish resistance after the English conquest of the island and that they formed the basis of the first Maroon societies in the Jamaican interior.14 These slaves may have had a disproportionate influence on the formation of slave culture, but evidence to either support or refute this assertion is absent. Given that little evidence survives to suggest that the English soldiers who first settled Jamaica in the late 1650s acquired for their own use appreciable numbers of slaves previously owned by the Spanish, it seems unlikely that these slaves formed the role in Jamaica that Atlantic Creoles played in British North America, where the numbers of slaves arriving before 1700 were so small as to make the influence of Atlantic Creoles very important. Nor is it likely that the first slaves purchased by the English from English slavers to serve on developing farms, pens and plantations were Atlantic Creoles, as Berlin defines them. The numbers involved were small by later standards but were still considerable for the mid-seventeenth century. Eltis suggests that 22,300 slaves arrived in Jamaica in the first 20 years of English settlement, with 11,031 arriving between 1662 and 1670, when Jamaica changed from a military settlement into a civil society committed to planting.15 Even

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though Jamaica was relatively slow in developing a fully fledged plantation culture, plantation agriculture and the values associated with the plantation, values that Berlin asserts ‘conceded everything to the slave owner and nothing to the slave’ and which severely reduced the liminal space in which quintessentially liminal people such as Atlantic Creoles flourished, were in place in Jamaica from soon after English settlement. Slaves such as Anthony Iland, an Anglicized and Christianized Atlantic Creole in Barbados who successfully sued for his freedom in 1654, and Anthony Johnson, a slave who was also an independent farmer in the fledgling community on Virginia’s eastern shore, do not seem to have existed in seventeenth-century Jamaica.16 At first glance, what is striking about slave arrivals in Jamaica in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century is that slaves came from a variety of different regions in Africa and also that the relative share of slaves arriving in Jamaica that came from particular regions was constantly changing. As Philip Morgan suggests, ‘the aggregate picture masks a fluid, evanescent reality’, requiring us to take a ‘dynamic, diasporic approach’ to how slaves were sent across the ocean to Jamaica.17 Overall trends mask considerable variations over time. In the first quarter century of English settlement, 60 per cent of slaves embarked to Jamaica from ports in the Bight of Biafra. Although Biafra was to become again an important source of supply of slaves in the last 15 years of the slave trade, its importance in the seventeenth century faded quickly. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, fewer than 2 per cent of African slaves to Jamaica were Biafran. In their place came slaves from the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa. In the 1680s and 1690s, these regions accounted for between three-quarters and fourfifths of all slaves coming to Jamaica. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, slaves from the Gold Coast became the most likely slaves to be shipped to Jamaica. Slaves from this region accounted for 45.7 per cent of all slaves shipped to Jamaica in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, with a further 33.8 per cent of slaves arriving from the culturally similar region of Benin. At no time in the first 75 years of English settlement did an overwhelming majority of slaves arriving in Jamaica originate from a single region of Africa, as tables 6.1 and 6.2 show. The overall impression is of rapidly changing provenance zones. Impressions, however, may mislead. David Eltis, drawing on John Thornton’s work, suggests that apparent cultural heterogeneity in slave arrivals masks an underlying tendency for a clustering of slave arrivals in Jamaica from a few regions in Africa. He argues that there was a good deal of homogeneity in the provenance zones of slaves sent to Jamaica, with 62 per cent of slaves before 1700 arriving from the adjacent Lower Guinea regions of the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. These were regions that

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Table 6.1.  African region of departure of slaves arriving in Jamaica, 1655–1725 (as percentage of total number in sample).

Year

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward Coast

West SouthGold Bight of Bight of Central east No. in Coast Benin Biafra Africa Africa sample

1655–65

0

0

0

0

16.7

66.3

17.0

0

3,627

1666–75

0

0

0

24.1

21.8

54.1

0

0

1,986

1676–85

3.9

1.7

0

15.5

37.9

18.9

22.2

0

22,173

1686–95

7.0

1.2

0

3.0

41.5

8.1

39.1

0.1

21,030

1696–1705

7.3

0.6

0

26.9

32.7

20.8

11.6

0

18,514

1706–15

2.1

0

0.5

57.9

30.7

0.6

8.7

0

30,334

1716–25

8.8

2.2

2.1

37.1

33.9

0.7

12.8

2.0

23,984

1655–1725

4.9

1.0

0.5

27.4

31.9

17.4

16.5

0.4

130,699

Note: Number excluded = 112,414. Source: Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Table 6.2.  African region of departure of slaves arriving in Jamaica in Royal African Company Ships, 1674–1708.

Year 1674–1708

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

5.8

0.7

Windward Coast 0

West SouthGold Bight of Bight of Central east No. in Coast Benin Biafra Africa Africa sample 12.2

42.0

11.5

27.7

0

48,534

Source: Calculated from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Thornton considers to be culturally homogeneous, with all the peoples in the area speaking mutually understandable dialects of the Kwa language group. Good transportation networks brought these peoples into close economic and cultural accommodation, an accommodation heightened by the great extent of migration within West Africa. Africans were a mobile people who constantly left settlements and moved from frontier to frontier, trying to secure a livelihood through extensive exploitation of the land through shifting cultivation and pastoralism. Moreover, the dominance of what Eltis calls slaves from the Akan/Aja cultural region of Lower Guinea was more pronounced than it seems because he argues that a preponderance of slaves shipped after arrival in Jamaica to Spanish America were slaves from Upper Guinea, Biafra and Angola. He estimates that for every slave

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sold to Spanish America from the Gold Coast–Slave Coast regions, another six were sold from other regions, especially Angola. Thus, he thinks it is misleading to assume that because nearly 30 per cent of slaves arriving in Jamaica between 1676 and 1700 were from West Central Africa, slaves from Angola were heavily represented within Jamaican slave populations. Most Angolans, he believes, were quickly re-shipped after arrival to Spanish America in order that planters in Jamaica could receive their first preference of slaves, which was slaves from the Akan/Aja regions of Lower Guinea. The result, he argues, was that nearly 80 per cent of slaves on late seventeenth-century Jamaican slave plantations were from the Gold Coast or Benin. Nearly two out of three slaves arriving in Jamaica in this period, Eltis concludes, came from a narrow stretch of the African coast between Cape Coast Castle and Ouidah, which was only 200 miles (322 kilometres) long.18 Evidence from an analysis of purchasers of slaves from the Royal African Company, 1674–1708, suggests that Eltis overstates his case. It is true, as Eltis argues, that slave traders did attempt to funnel slaves from Upper Guinea, Biafra and Angola to Spanish buyers. It was an article of faith among Royal African Company factors that ‘Angola, Gambia & Bite Negroes are not acceptable to our Planters’, but that in trade with the Spanish ‘those Negroes will then turn to account’.19 Several concrete examples exist of almost complete shipments of slaves from Angola being sold to Spanish buyers.20 But if slaves from these less desirable regions were over-represented in resales of slaves from Jamaica to Spanish America, this overrepresentation did not mean that Spanish buyers bought slaves exclusively from these regions, or that Jamaica planters were so averse to purchasing slaves from these areas that their slave forces were overwhelmingly from the Gold Coast or Slave Coast. The Spanish buyer who was most active in the Jamaican slave market in the mid-1680s was Don Alexander Oliver. He bought 866 slaves from the Royal African Company in 1685 and 1686 in eight shipments. Of these shipments, four, containing 378 slaves, came from the Bight of Biafra, one of 279 slaves was from Angola and two, one of 128 slaves and one of three slaves, were from Senegambia. The final shipment was 78 slaves from Benin. If we add to these sales large purchases made by three Spanish buyers in the same period, the picture is of variegated regional origins of African slaves sold to Spanish America from Jamaica. Sir James Castillo bought 233 slaves originating from a ship coming from Benin, while Don Juan Genes bought 136 slaves from Senegambia and Don Juan Espino purchased 46 slaves from Biafra. Viewed in one way, these purchases confirm Eltis’s point – three-quarters of slaves sent to Spanish America in the mid-1680s came from the less-favoured Biafran, Angolan and Senegambian regions. Viewed another way, however, these figures suggest roughly equal numbers

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of slaves by region going to Spanish America: 33.2 per cent from Biafra, 24.3 per cent from the Slave Coast (or Benin), 21.8 per cent from Central Africa and 20.8 per cent from Senegambia. In addition, planters were willing to buy from these supposedly less favourable regions just as readily as they bought slaves coming from the Gold Coast or Slave Coast. The number of slaves bought by large Spanish buyers for the Spanish American market between 1684 and 1686 from Biafra, Angola and Senegambia was only a fraction of the number sent from these areas to Jamaica. Nearly 2,500 slaves arrived in Jamaica from Angola in these years, of which only 11.6 per cent can be traced to buyers from Spanish America. Spanish buyers accounted for larger percentages of slaves coming from Biafra – 28.6 per cent – and from Senegambia – 31.8 per cent – but in both cases, Jamaica planters were prepared to buy slaves from these regions as easily as they were prepared to buy slaves from Benin or the Gold Coast. In May 1686, for example, the ship Mary arrived from Senegambia with 185 slaves. Don Alexander Oliver bought three slaves from this ship but all of the other 31 purchasers were Jamaican planters and merchants, including some of the most frequent purchasers of slaves in the Jamaican market, such as Colonel Edward Stanton, a planter from St. Thomas, and Port Royal merchants Smith Kelly, Henry Ward, Charles Sadler and Charles Whittle.21 Similarly, in January 1680, the ship Sarah Bonadventure from Angola sold its 470 slaves solely to Jamaican residents, with St John’s planter Colonel John Cope, Port Royal merchant and officeholder Sir Francis Watson, and Royal African Company factor Hender Molesworth among the six purchasers who each paid £220 to buy six men and four women.22 Slave-purchasing patterns indicate that while merchants and planters may have expressed a preference in principle for slaves to come from the Gold Coast–Slave Coast, in practice they got their slaves from wherever they could. The records of the Royal African Company between 1674 and 1708 allow us to identify individual purchasers of slaves.23 In some cases, we are able to match up the purchases of slaves from ships belonging to the Royal African Company with slaveholdings as listed in inventories, so that we can be sure of tracing the regions in Africa from which the majority of slaves noted as belonging to slave owners at death came. This matching up of slaves in inventories with slave-purchasing lists from the Royal African Company allows us to make guesses about the regional origins of slaves on individual slaveholdings. The results of these investigations are tabulated in Table 6.3. They note slave purchasers who listed slaves in their inventories similar in number to those they purchased from the Royal African Company and who, like Samuel Long and Charles Modyford, had sufficiently large slaveholdings that it can be certain that the slaves they purchased were put to work on their plantations.

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery Table 6.3.  Purchases of slaves from the Royal African Company, by number of purchases and region of African embarkation.

Name

No. of No. of Seneslaves purchases gambia

Gold Coast

Bight of Benin

Bight West of Central Biafra Africa Africa

Robert Hewitt

19

4

0

2

2

7

0

8

Sir Thomas Lynch

21

5

0

2

7

12

0

0

Henry Fenwick

23

5

0

4

0

19

0

0

William Whalley

37

4

0

10

20

7

0

0

Philip Vickery

19

3

0

10

9

0

0

0

Dennis McCragh

31

5

0

14

13

4

0

0

John Woolly

10

3

0

5

3

2

0

0

Thomas Fuller

36

10

0

0

20

16

0

0

Judith Freeman

29

6

0

5

7

12

5

0

Andrew Orgill

63

10

0

18

13

17

7

8

Sir Henry Morgan

67

9

0

14

20

28

0

5

John Wilmot

31

6

0

10

9

7

5

0

John Banfield

39

9

5

14

20

0

0

0

Edmund Duck

35

4

0

8

7

18

0

0

Samuel Long

56

3

0

20

0

22

14

0

Charles Modyford

48

4

0

12

6

30

0

0

Robert Phillips

24

4

0

6

8

6

5

0

Robert Norris

14

3

0

4

4

6

0

0

George Reid

24

5

0

5

0

10

0

9

John Tillie

20

6

1

0

17

2

0

0

Abraham Alvarez

38

12

0

15

1

14

8

0

William Gent

20

5

0

6

0

3

7

4

704

125

6

184

186

242

51

34

Total Source: See text.

What seems clear is that few planters stocked their plantations with slaves from just one region of Africa. Only Thomas Fuller, of the slave purchasers profiled in Table 6.3, specialized in slaves from certain places, and even he divided his purchases almost equally between slaves from Benin and Biafra. Every other purchaser bought slaves from several regions of Africa, suggesting strongly that what motivated them to purchase

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from any ship was not the national reputation of the slaves that the ship carried but the availability of slaves. Slaves were in such short supply for purchasers, given the avid desire for slaves that was present in Jamaica from the 1670s onwards, that purchasers were happy to receive any slaves available.24 What concerned them more, as Galenson shows in his analysis of patterns of purchase during sales, was the quality of the merchandise they were receiving.25 Every purchaser studied above bought slaves from at least two regions of Africa with 17 of 21 buying slaves from at least three regions. Only three purchasers – Fuller, Henry Fenwick and Philip Vickery – bought slaves from just two regions. Most slaves came from Benin, Biafra and the Gold Coast, which is hardly surprising given slave-trading patterns in the 1670s and 1680s, but there was no clear pattern in the proportions of slaves bought by purchasers from each region. Most purchasers bought almost equal numbers of slaves from the three most popular regions of origin with only Fenwick, who bought 19 slaves from Biafra against four from the Gold Coast, and John Tillie, who purchased 17 slaves from Benin, one slave from Senegambia and two slaves from Biafra, concentrating on one region only. Which region was most favoured varied: nine purchasers bought most slaves from Biafra; for seven, the most popular region was the Gold Coast; and five purchasers favoured slaves from Benin. The end result, however, was that it was likely that each plantation of any size was likely to have relatively equal numbers of slaves from the three main regions of slave provenance in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. This mixing of Africans in the first generation of settlement is exactly what physician and Royal Society fellow Hans Sloane and a French musician named Baptiste found in 1688, when they visited a sugar plantation in the interior of Jamaica and watched a dozen Africans make music that was variously from the Angola, Papaw and Coromantee regions of Africa. Richard Cullen Rath has analysed Sloane’s lengthy discussion of this music and Baptiste’s careful transcriptions of the musical notations of each song as evidence of how pidginization (a precondition for later Creole cultural formations) operated in a period when migrants from different linguistic regions needed temporary contact languages and cultures to meet narrow and specific communication needs. What Sloane’s recounting of his experience also shows are the actual ways in which Africans from separate African areas of embarkation were placed together. The ethnic mix he described, for example, was exactly that which existed on John Hunt’s plantation, where slaves were equally divided between Coromantee, Papaw and Angola.26 The pattern of slave-purchasing reinforced these trends. The purchasers analysed here were wealthy enough not to have to buy slaves as individuals – purchasers bought only one slave in 20 of 125 sales, with John Tillie

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and Abraham Alvarez accounting for half of these single slave purchases. Most often they bought slaves in parcels of about five slaves, meaning that most Africans would have someone on the plantation who had been their shipmate.27 The average number of slaves bought per purchase was 5.6, with the median being five slaves. The ways in which slaves were sold meant that even if sizeable numbers of slaves on any slaveholding came from a common region of embarkation in Africa, the likelihood that more than four to six slaves would have a shared background, either in Africa or as shipmates on vessels making the Middle Passage to the Americas, was slight. Few planters bought more than relatively small parcels of slaves from any one slave-trade shipment, especially in the first quarter-century of English settlement. In the 1670s, the average number of slaves bought per purchaser was two, with even the top decile of purchasers buying on average only seven slaves at each purchase. Purchasers who bought 14 or more slaves in any purchase bought only 13.9 per cent of slaves bought in the 1670s.28 The percentage of slaves bought by the largest buyers and the percentage of slaves sold in large parcels of 14 or more slaves increased markedly over time, especially from the 1690s, with nearly one-third of slaves purchased in the 1700s bought in parcels of 14 or more slaves. But this change in market purchasing patterns does not mean that it became customary for planters with large slaveholdings to buy large numbers of slaves from any one shipment and then dispatch those slaves direct to their plantations. When slaves were bought in large parcels, they were either dispatched to Spanish America or were bought by merchants specializing in the slave trade who bought slaves wholesale and then sold them on, probably in parcels of one or two slaves only, to planters at a retail price. The men who bought the greatest number of slaves from the Royal African Company and who, from the 1690s, were increasingly likely to buy large numbers of slaves from individual ships, were most often Port Royal or Kingston merchants. Except for Peter Beckford, sr, a planter-merchant who established the greatest fortune ever created in Jamaica, a fortune that was to be the basis for four generations of Beckford wealth and power in the island, the purchasers from Jamaica who bought 200 or more slaves from the Royal African Company were merchants. Smith Kelly, provost marshal of the island and Port Royal merchant, bought 604 slaves in 19 sales between 1682 and 1693. Moses Cordosa, a Jewish merchant who specialized in buying low quality slaves that he resold, bought 506 slaves at 40 sales between 1674 and 1686. Henry Ward bought 401 slaves between 1675 and 1692. All of these slaves were resold on the developing retail market: when Ward died in 1693 his inventory of £2,804 sterling listed him as owning just one male slave.29

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These pioneers of the domestic slave trade in Jamaica were not particular about the region of origin in Africa of the slaves they bought. Both Ward and Kelly, for example, bought slaves from all regions of Africa. In 21 purchases between 1674 and 1686, Ward bought 97 slaves from the Gold Coast, 38 slaves from Biafra, 21 slaves from Angola, 41 slaves from Benin, and 31 slaves from Senegambia. Kelly also bought slaves from throughout Africa. Looking just at the slaves he bought in 14 shipments between 1681 and 1690, he bought slaves from the Gold Coast, Biafra, Benin, Senegambia, and Angola. Statistically, he bought the most slaves from West Central Africa, but that was mostly due to his purchase of 190 slaves from one shipment – his largest purchase by some margin in this period. He was partial to slaves from Benin, buying 114 slaves from that region in 6 shipments, but also bought 39 slaves from the Gold Coast, 18 slaves from Senegambia and 10 slaves from Biafra. What they did with these slaves after purchase is unclear, but it seems likely that they kept them at urban yards in Port Royal and resold them. It is possible that they bought slaves from so many regions so that they could satisfy planters’ prejudices about which kind of Africans were most desirable, but it is just as likely that they bought slaves with relatively little reference to where they came from, judging it more important to be continually active in the slave market so that they had a ready supply of slaves available for purchase than risk having no slaves available for resale. Certainly, there was little distinction in price for slaves from different regions. Ward bought 21 Gold Coast slaves in 1675 for £498, or £23.71 per slave and the same number of slaves from Biafra in the same year for £490, or £23.33 per slave. Two years later, he bought 18 slaves from Senegambia for £424, or £23.56 each. These figures suggest that there was little premium built into slave sales for discrimination by region of embarkation. So it proves, at least for sales of slaves between 1675 and 1686 from the Royal African Company. It is difficult to make accurate comparisons between shipments because the quality of the shipments varied considerably, with some slave ships containing more of what was euphemistically called ‘refuse’ slaves than other ships. But if we look only at the first ten sales of slaves listed in slave purchase lists, sales that were virtually guaranteed to be of slaves that were adult healthy men and women, we find no difference by region of embarkation.30 In 30 shipments between 1676 and 1686, the average price of healthy adult males varied between £18 and £24 per slave, except for two shipments in 1681 and 1682 from the Gold Coast and Benin respectively where the average price dipped to £14 and £16.50. Variations in price occurred from year to year, but not according to the region of embarkation of slaves. For example, between 1677 and 1680 11 cargoes of slaves arrived from the Gold Coast, Biafra, Angola and Benin. Apart from one anomalous shipment from Biafra

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in 1679 when early sales fetched £38 per slave, the average price of slaves was either £22 or £23 in each cargo. In 1680, for example, Colonel John Cope, Captain John Tolderby and Sir Francis Watson each paid £220 for parcels of six men and four women from a ship with slaves from Angola. In the same year, Watson bought nine men and nine women from Biafra for £396, or £22 each. Six months later, Nicholas Wilkes bought five men and two women from Benin for £154, or £22 apiece. In 1685 and 1686, the average price was slightly lower, with four of nine ships selling slaves at an average price of £20 and the other five selling slaves at £22 each. The four ships with the lower average price came from Angola and Senegambia, with two ships from Biafra. Of the five ships with the higher average price, two came from Biafra, two came from Benin and one came from the Gold Coast.31 All the evidence so far presented suggests that even if planters believed that slaves from some parts of Africa (notably the Gold Coast) were better for their purposes than were slaves from other parts of Africa (notably Biafra and Angola) they did not act on their preferences.32 Occasionally, wealthy planters bought sizeable parcels of slaves from a single shipment, who could have formed a national bloc on a plantation. Thus, Samuel Long, who died in 1684 with 288 slaves, bought 24 slaves from Biafra in one shipment in 1675. Henry Archbould, a prominent planter in St. Andrew, bought 21 slaves from the Gold Coast in 1677. Valentine Mumbee, a large slaveholder from Clarendon Parish, bought 25 slaves from Senegambia in 1694.33 But even planters with large slaveholdings tended to buy slaves from a number of ships and tended to purchase slaves from a variety of regions of Africa. Peter Beckford, sr, for example, bought 189 slaves from the Royal African Company in 14 shipments, the largest shipment being for 26 slaves. He bought 76 slaves from the Gold Coast, 66 slaves from Benin, 25 slaves from Angola and 22 slaves from Biafra. Three-quarters of his slaves came from the Akan/Aja region of West Africa that Eltis considers to be the seed-bed of African culture in Jamaica, meaning that it was possible for a common culture to be established on his plantations; but against this needs to be considered the relatively small number of slaves that were sometimes purchased from any one ship who were then sent to the several properties that Beckford owned. Beckford bought slaves in either parcels of 20 or more (five shipments) or in very small parcels of one or two slaves (eight shipments). Of a slave force that numbered probably in the hundreds, it is unlikely that more than 25 slaves on any estate shared a common history of enslavement. Other slave forces were more diverse than Beckford’s. The best guide we have to ethnic diversity in a slaveholding region at a given point of time is a census of St John Parish in central Jamaica taken in 1680. This census,

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combined with data from the Royal African Company records, allows us to identify the slave purchases of 11 men resident in the parish. These men bought 299 slaves from five different regions of Africa. These slaves can stand as proxy for the 698 slaves owned by individually named residents in St John in 1680. The greatest number, 128, came from the Gold Coast, with a further 54 from Benin. Thus the percentage of slaves from Lower Guinea was 61 per cent, lower than the 80 per cent of slaves that Eltis estimates came from this region for the late seventeenth century. A sizeable minority of slaves – 81, or 27.1 per cent – were Biafran, with 19 slaves from Senegambia and 17 from West Central Africa. Individual plantations varied in where their slaves came from. Nearly two-thirds of Lieutenant Whitgift Aylmer’s 49 purchases came from the Gold Coast, but neither Colonel John Cope nor Captain William Bragg bought from that region. Cope’s slaves came mostly from Biafra and Bragg’s from Benin. Major Richard Guy’s slaves came almost equally from Biafra and the Gold Coast. By contrast, Major Thomas Ayscough bought 24 slaves from the Gold Coast, 12 from Benin, 13 from Senegambia and six from Biafra. Thus, the regional origins of slaves of the first Jamaican sugar planters were heterogeneous.34 Unfortunately, it is impossible to test how diverse were the African backgrounds of slaves on individual slaveholdings in the seventeenth century because lists of slaves in inventories – the only source we have about slaveholding structure in the seventeenth century, apart from the censuses of St John and Port Royal from 1680 – virtually never make reference to the African nation that planters thought slaves came from. Only 15 slaves were given ethnic monikers in lists of slaves taken before 1706, making analysis impossible. Matters improve from the 1720s, when more slaves have an ethnic marker associated with their names. Between 1723 and 1735, 320 slaves are referred to by African ethnic identifier. These identifiers are the only indicators of regional origin of Africans that we have for slaves before 1750 and are thus useful guides to ethnic breakdown on plantations. The data presented below needs to be treated with caution, however, because the compilers of lists of slaves were not concerned with identifying slaves by African origin and made such identification only to distinguish between slaves who had the same first name. Consequently, only a fraction of slaves listed in inventories are identified by ethnic background. Moreover, the ethnic monikers given reflect planter understandings of where slaves came from, and planters tended to lump slaves from several different ethnicities into one single national category. These figures below do not, therefore, correspond to what slaves themselves might have thought to be their ethnic origin. Moreover, the figures presented below come from a period when slavery was well established in Jamaica.35 The period between 1706 and 1725 was the period in which Akan/Aja dominance was most pronounced

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in Jamaica, with 48.7 per cent of slave arrivals emanating from the Gold Coast and 32.1 per cent coming from the Slave Coast.36 We can discern the places of origin of 320 enslaved persons noted with an ethnic moniker in inventories made between 1723 and 1735. An analysis of these ethnic monikers shows that while nearly two-thirds of slaves came from Lower Guinea (with more coming from Benin or the Slave Coast than from the Gold Coast), significant minorities came from West Central Africa and Biafra. Hardly any slaves came from Upper Guinea or from South East Africa. Three ethnic designations accounted for 64 per cent of slaves. There were 85 slaves designated as Papaw, implying that slaves came from the coastal regions from the port of Ouidah in present day Benin west to the river Volta. Another 68 slaves were described as Coromantee, meaning that they hailed from the Gold Coast (Coramantee being a shorthand for Gold Coast slaves from present-day Ghana, named after the entrepôt where the British had established a slave-trading factory). There were 52 slaves from the Congo, a large African kingdom south of the river Congo in South Central Africa, to which number should also be added seven slaves designated as being from Angola, an area usually associated in the European mind with the Congo.37 Too much reliance should not be placed upon this analysis, as most slaves listed in inventories were not identified by African place of origin. However, the evidence suggests that while there were sufficiently large numbers of slaves in Jamaica who came from culturally adjacent regions, such as Lower Guinea and Congo–Angola, to create viable versions of African cultures in the New World, there was also a considerable number of slaves within the slave population who would have resisted groups of slaves from any one African nationality attempting to assert a cultural dominance over them based on specific cultural inheritances. That African slaves were so divided by ‘nation’ that they would not combine against whites was a comforting myth that whites employed to reassure themselves that numerically dominant slaves would not rise up against them. Charles Leslie noted that plantations were tense places, because Africans ‘from many different nations’ could not ‘converse freely; or if they could, they hate each other so mortally, that some would rather die by the Hands of the English, than join with other Africans in an attempt to shake off their Yoke’. Leslie overstated the extent to which African slaves did not share enough linguistic commonalities to create a mutually understandable pidgin Creole. His blithe belief in African tribal tensions preventing resistance was found wanting in Tacky’s revolt in 1760, which, although led by Akan slaves who wanted to replace white rule with an Akan kingdom, attracted support from Africans of many ethnic designations.38 Nevertheless, his observation that plantations were composed of Africans ‘from many different nations’ was essentially correct.

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Of course, even if plantations or local plantation areas in Jamaica did have the sort of concentrated groupings of slaves from culturally similar areas of Africa that was enjoyed by slaves in places like Bahia, where the provenance of slaves was overwhelmingly from one region of Africa (Congo–Angola in this case),39 creating coherent cultural units based on shared language, shared kinship links and shared political and social understandings would have been greatly hampered by the conditions of slavery under which Africans found themselves after arrival. The major problem was not planter hostility to Africans practising elements of their old culture in the New World, as occurred quite systematically in mid eighteenth-century British North America following the adoption of paternalism as a conscious strategy of slave control by southern planters.40 Jamaican planters were not concerned to eliminate African cultural practices among their slaves (they would have found the task impossible), other than their determination to try to root out what they considered to be the subversive influence of obeah.41 The overall attitude of Jamaican planters towards the cultural practices of their slaves was wary indifference. Slaves could do as they pleased when they finished their labours for their masters, as long as their activities did not result in collaboration or resistance.42 What really caused slaves problems was the continual flux and uncertainty of the Jamaican slave system, which was much more unstable, especially in the seventeenth century, than has commonly been appreciated by scholars who have based their assumptions on studies of large absenteeowned eighteenth-century plantations, where the death of an owner seldom involved much change for slaves. This absence of change was certainly not the case in the seventeenth century. Slaveholdings were often small, at least by comparison with eighteenth-century slaveholding sizes, if not by the standards of everywhere else in the British Atlantic world, save Barbados, meaning that many slaves lived in surroundings where they would have had few, if any, countrymen with whom to compare their conditions. More importantly, mortality was so prevalent within the white population that the composition of slaveholdings was constantly shifting, leading, for many slaves, to sale, movement and disruption. Jamaican slavery in the seventeenth century was different from what it was to become in the eighteenth century, when the majority of slaves lived on very large slaveholdings of 100 or more slaves. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, few Jamaicans were well enough established to own sugar plantations with full complements of slaves. Table 6.4 lists the proportion of slaves by size of slaveholding as detailed in inventories. It shows that before 1690, 54 per cent of slaves lived in slaveholdings with fewer than 50 slaves and 32 per cent on slaveholdings that contained no more than 20 slaves. Of course, this means that a majority of slaves lived

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in what were by North American standards large slaveholdings – 50 per cent of slaves lived in slaveholdings with more than 40 slaves.43 But it does mean that the customary experience for African slaves in Jamaica was not to live on a large sugar estate among hundreds of slaves, as was to become normative by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Nearly 1 in 5 slaves lived in a slave unit with fewer than 12 slaves and 17 per cent lived in slaveholdings with fewer than 10 slaves, the same proportion that lived on large slaveholdings where they had 100 or more slaves. These slaves on small slaveholdings may have found it especially difficult to maintain linkages with their African roots. Table 6.4.  Proportion of slaves noted in inventories by size of slaveholding, 1674–1690. Size of slaveholding

Number of slaves

Percentage of slaves

1–4

385

5.8

5–10

763

11.4

11–20

1,002

15.0

21–50

1,467

21.9

51–100

1,630

24.4

101d

1,444

21.6

Source: Inventories, IB11/3/1–3, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica.

One reason why the large plantation populated by more than 100 slaves took a long time to become established in Jamaica is that the process of plantation-building was often interrupted by death. Although white mortality in the late seventeenth century was not as bad as in the first half of the eighteenth century, when white Jamaicans suffered crisis-level mortality every year, the demographic experience of late seventeenth-century Jamaica was horrific by the standards of Britain and other parts of the British Atlantic empire. I have examined white mortality elsewhere and have concluded that the result was fragmented family formations, few children, truncated marriage patterns and a high likelihood that slaveholdings would be broken up by the early death of the owner, with slaves dispersed among a small number of heirs, who themselves died within a few years of inheritance, or sold to other white Jamaicans.44 The death of an owner meant not just dislocation for white family members: it led to slaves being dispersed and embryonic community structures being broken up. The fate of the slaves of James Harding, a planter from St Andrew who died in 1690, is instructive about how disruptive for slaves the white mortality regime was. Harding

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bought 89 slaves from the Royal African Company. At his death he was the owner of 114 slaves. In his will, he split these slaves between his wife, who received three slaves, his son and his son-in-law. His son-in-law owned a plantation on the central parish of Vere, meaning that nearly half of Harding’s slaves had to move away from St Andrew. Following the death of Harding’s son in 1692, the remaining slaves left in St Andrew were given to Harding’s daughter, who herself died in 1693. The new owner of these slaves was the infant orphaned daughter of Harding’s daughter, who married in 1712 Richard Elletson (1681–1743), one of the wealthiest slave owners in St Andrew. Thus, Elletson became by 1712 the fifth owner of a portion of Harding’s slaves, and Harding’s slaves became incorporated into a slave labour force that amounted to 398 slaves by Elletson’s death. If any of Harding’s slaves was still alive in 1743, they faced further disruption, as Elletson’s slaves were divided between plantations in St Andrew and St Mary, with 30 slaves being reserved for his widow.45 The obstacles placed in the path of African slaves wanting to recreate African cultures in Jamaica were thus considerable. The most significant obstacle came from whites, whose slave-purchasing patterns made it hard for large numbers of slaves from specific regions of Africa to congregate, and whose tendency to sell slaves, to move slaves from plantation to plantation and to die leaving few heirs, meaning the break-up of slaveholdings and the dispersal of slaves, aggravated the isolation, atomization and rootlessness that many Africans felt on arrival. The result was, as Mintz and Price argued, albeit in reference to how Africans came to the Americas rather than to their experience as slaves, a significant degree of ‘randomization’ in how slave populations were formed. Nevertheless, as a host of scholars have demonstrated, black Jamaicans were able to create a distinctive culture that drew extensively on African roots. The balance of opinion about the extent to which African–American cultures can be traced to specific African cultural inheritances has changed dramatically since Mintz and Price argued for essentially new African– American identities emerging in the Americas out of disparate African elements and European-based Creole cultures. The change was even more pronounced from 1971, when Edward Brathwaite argued that whites and blacks in early Jamaica developed, in uneasy union, a distinctive, creolized culture that was neither European nor African but distinctly Jamaican.46 In recent scholarship, the dominant argument has been, as Sweet argues, that ‘we should not start from a premise of creolization when analysing slave culture in the diaspora’ but that, ‘we should assume that specific African cultural forms and systems of thought survived intact’.47 In particular, the influence of ‘charter’ generations was paramount. The first groups who arrived in particular New World locations (and the tendency among

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scholars is to argue strongly that in most regions of the New World there was a dominant initial African culture, be it Angolan in Bahia and South Carolina, Akan/Aja in Barbados and Jamaica, Yoruba in Cuba and Trinidad, Dahomean in Haiti, Senegambian in Louisiana and Igbo in the Chesapeake) maintained a cultural edge in the formation of African–American cultures by ‘creating the first Afro–Creole languages to which newcomers had to adjust to a significant extent’.48 The ability of these initial groups to shape cultural practices and the extent of their cultural separateness from whites, especially in areas such as religion and family, meant, Gomez argues, that we need to examine early African–American cultures as extensions of African ethnic allegiances into the New World. It was only late in the eighteenth century that African–Americans began to define themselves by reference to a shared racial, rather than ethnic, identity. Even then, the concept of race ‘was Africanized in that a degree of unity was achieved against the interests of the host society’ and was shaped by the previous identification by ethnicity that had been a powerful urge among newly arrived Africans. Ethnicity, Gomez insists, had a direct and long-lasting impact on the self-perception of African–Americans. The emerging African–American identity largely consisted of inter-ethnic negotiations, reflecting the extent to which the African-born members of slave communities were able to impose their values on later-born Creoles.49 Much of this argument assumes the clustering of slaves in large plantations around members of their own nation, or tribe. Thornton is the most explicit in insisting that this clustering occurred, suggesting that distributions of slaves on surviving inventories indicate that ‘patterns of the slave trade and the distribution of slaves tended to produce sizeable blocs of slaves on one estate from the same nation’. He suggests that this clustering was especially common in Jamaica and Barbados, where slaves from Ouidah, designated as Papaw by planters, would have all come from neighbouring towns near Ouidah and, ‘unless they spent all their time at home, may well have known each other’, even if they had arrived from Ouidah on different ships at different times.50 He cites Sloane’s 1688 comment that, ‘when they die their country people make lamentations and mourning’ as evidence for the formation of national blocs on estates. Some support for the continuing importance of ethnicity as a marker of African identity in Jamaica comes a century later from the historian Bryan Edwards, who noted that ‘old-established’ Jamaican slaves, ‘when young people newly arrived from Africa, were sent among them, request … the revival and continuance of the ancient system [of receiving newcomers]’, in part to replace by adoption their dead children by another countryperson, in part to provide wives ‘from their own nation and kindred’ for their sons, and in part because ‘they expected to revive and retrace in the conversation

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of their new visitors, the remembrance and ideas of past pleasures and scenes of their youth’.51 Scholars of African-Jamaican life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been concerned to flesh out what types of ‘remembrances’ these Africans nostalgic for their old lives elicited from their adoptive kin. Mervyn Alleyne follows linguistic pioneers La Page and De Camp in stressing the primacy of Akan culture in the formation of the Jamaican Creole language and culture, and both he and Michael Mullin demonstrate an impressive array of Akan cultural survivals from the early eighteenth century. Douglas Chambers argues for a multitude of Igbo influences in Jamaica from the period late in the slave trade when Igbo were the dominant group imported into Jamaica. Maureen WarnerLewis amasses an impressive body of evidence that posits that Central African cultural practices were historically lengthy, significant and vibrant in Jamaica. What all are agreed upon, however, is that ‘the bulk of the slave population of late seventeenth-century Jamaica remain wedded to its African origins’.52 What is noticeable, however, about the recent scholarship on the cultural effects of African migration into the New World in the period of the Atlantic slave trade is how different it is from the recent scholarship on European migration into the New World. When David Hackett Fischer wrote a book on the ‘folkways’ established by the first English and Scottish settlers to British North America, in which he posited that elites in four regions of British North America replicated in specific and traceable ways regional cultures that they had left behind, he faced a barrage of criticism claiming that he was ‘reductive’ from experts on early English and Scottish migration to British North America.53 It is unlikely, however, given the tenor of the scholarship on African-American cultures discussed above, that Fischer would have suffered the same criticism if he had published first a proposed (and as yet unpublished) accompanying volume on the creation of distinct African–American cultures in British North America: his treatment of European cultures was similar to that now popular in scholarship on African–American cultures.54 Whereas scholars of the African–American experience in the Americas stress the extent to which African culture was able to be re-established remarkably completely in the New World, specialists on European migration to the Americas focus on the creative adaptations made by a diverse group of Europeans to the new environment they found themselves in and the resulting cultural heterogeneity that developed from these creative adaptations. In short, the impact of environment upon the formation of American cultural zones was at least as important as inherited cultural inheritances brought across the Atlantic.55 Alison Games’s interpretation of British migration to the Americas as leading to a cultural heterogeneity that eroded regional cultures

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and which brought peoples from remote parts of Britain into contact with each other is indicative of current trends in scholarship. She argues that Atlantic migrations made the Atlantic world a ‘hybrid and heterogeneous’ place where ‘even the most humble English inhabitant in the most remote colony found himself living in a world far more culturally complex than anything he would have experienced in England’. Jamaica was one of those culturally complex places. Indeed, it was one of the most cosmopolitan and polyglot places in seventeenth-century British America, full, as Burton evocatively declaims, of ‘the deracinated, the deranged, the debauched and the desperate’ from all areas of the British Isles, Ireland and other parts of the Caribbean, with a smattering of buccaneers from France, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany, as well as Portuguese-speaking Sephardic Jews from the Netherlands, via Brazil and Surinam.56 The differences between scholarship on European and African migrations is striking and surprising, given that by any standards the European migration to Jamaica was less diverse than that from Africa. European migrants came from a much narrower range of locations than did Africans: over 85 per cent came from England, with two-thirds of the English leaving from London and its adjacent counties and over 90 per cent from southern England.57 Moreover, the temporal conditions of slavery and master constraints on slaves were overwhelming, leading to huge psychological pressures on Africans trying to retain their sanity, let alone their culture, in a strange land where Europeans, not Africans, controlled all of the important institutions and where masters were able to, and did, interfere at will in slave lives. One does not want to overestimate the difficulties that Africans had in the New World. Even though slaves were grievously mistreated, masters did not root out, as a previous generation of scholars assumed, slaves’ deeply held African beliefs and values. Indeed, in Jamaica there is not much evidence that masters tried to make Africans less African. Yet just as we need to question whether the cultural homogeneity that Thornton posits for West Africa was as strong as he suggests,58 we also need to pay more attention when investigating the formation of African–American cultures in places like Jamaica to the constraints placed upon the development of specifically African cultures by the distribution of slaves on to plantations and by the practices that masters employed to acquire Africans and transform them into slaves. Randomization was a more substantial feature of the Atlantic slave trade and the placement of Africans upon Jamaican plantations than is usually thought.

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Notes

1. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). For recent work that stresses the significance of Africa in the creation of an American Atlantic world, see James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); and Maureen Warner–Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Kingston, 2003). 2. For representative works, see John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1992); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727–1892 (Oxford, 2004); Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison, WI, 1988) and Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic history: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 102 (1999), 333–55. 3. This extends previous research on related topics. See Trevor Burnard, ‘Who Bought Slaves in Early America? Purchasers of Slaves from the Royal African Company in Jamaica, 1674–1708’, Slavery and Abolition, 17 (1996), 68–92; and ‘E Pluribus Plures: African Ethnicities in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Jamaica’, Jamaican Historical Review, XXI (2001), 8–22, 56–59. For slavepurchasing patterns later in Jamaican history, see Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan, ‘The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVIII (2001), 205–28. My analysis of Jamaican slaveholding patterns is based on evidence drawn from a database of 8,610 inventories taken in Jamaica, 1674–1784, of which 629 inventories taken between 1674 and 1690 are principally used in this study. The ports of embarkation of slaves bound for Jamaica in Royal African Company ships are derived from Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 4. M. G. Smith, ‘The African Heritage in the Caribbean’, in Vera Rubin (ed.), Caribbean Studies: A Symposium (New York, 1957), 38–39; Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (London, 1967); Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African–American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, 1976, reprinted 1992). 5. Mintz and Price, Birth of African–American Culture; Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston, 1941, reprinted 1958). 6. For a sensitive appraisal of Mintz and Price and their critics, see David Northrup, ‘Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1600–1850’, Slavery and Abolition, 21 (2000), 1–20. 7. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 192–96. Not all scholars accept Thornton’s sweeping assumptions that broad cultural homogeneity existed within large territorial areas. Northrup (‘Igbo and Myth Igbo’) is especially dismissive. For works that posit greater linguistic differences in West Africa than Thornton, see Joseph H. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa, 2nd edition (Bloomington, IN, 1966) and R. E. Bradbury, The Benin Kingdom and the Edo-Speaking Peoples

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160

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery of South-Western Nigeria (London, 1957). As my argument here is that there was more difficulty establishing African cultural identities on the American side of the Atlantic than scholars usually think, I have used Thornton’s ideas on the relatively easy transmission of cultural practices through large swathes of West Africa without considering his critics, in order to bias the argument against my propositions. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 228. Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), 255. Douglas B. Chambers, ‘“My Own Nation”: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora’, Slavery and Abolition, 18 (1997), 72–97. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 69. For Atlantic Creoles, see Ira Berlin, ‘From Creoles to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African–American Society in Mainland North America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LIII (1996), 251–88. No evidence exists for slave arrivals in Jamaica or in the Spanish Caribbean prior to 1700. David Eltis, ‘The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVIII (2001), 45. The best account of the Western Expedition to the Caribbean is S.A.G. Taylor, The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean (Kingston, 1969). For the formation of Maroon communities, see Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 67–80, and Kenneth Bilby, True–Born Maroons (Kingston, 2006). Eltis, ‘Volume and Structure of the Slave Trade’, 45; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery; Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 24–27, 29–32, 96. Philip D. Morgan, ‘Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments’, Slavery and Abolition, 18 (1997), 126. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 245–50; Thornton, Africa and Africans, 189–90; James Horn and Philip D. Morgan, ‘Settlers and Slaves: European and African Migrations to Early Modern British America’, in Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (eds), Creation of a British Atlantic World (Baltimore, 2004), 35–36; Philip D. Curtin, Why People Move: Migration in African History (Waco, TX, 1994). The National Archives (hereafter TNA), T 70/58/28, Royal African Company to Charles Chaplin, 23 February 1703. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 246 n. 91. TNA, T 70/942/76. TNA, T 70/942/110. For a description of these records see Burnard, ‘Who Bought Slaves?’, 69–70. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London, 1957), 308–10. David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge, 1986), 71–92. Another possible interpretation is that purchasers deliberately bought slaves from different regions in order to make sure that there was limited ethnic concentration on plantations. As an anonymous writer argued in 1694, ‘the safety of the Plantations depends upon having Negroes from all parts of Guiny, who not understanding each other’s languages and

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26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

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Customs, do not, and cannot agree to Rebel, as they would do … when there are too many Negroes from one Country’. Anon., ‘Some Considerations Humbly Offered, against Granting the Sole Trade to Guiny …’, [ca. 1694] British Library, Harleian Mss., 7310/240, cited in Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972), 236. Against this has to be placed the numerous assertions by planters that their first preference was for Gold Coast slaves: ‘Gold Coast Negroes are deare bought … and allways the best in Esteem in all the Ilelands’. Urban Hall to Nathaniel Samson, 23 January 1700, TNA, T 70/57/152, cited in Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 252. On balance, it seems that whatever participants said about their preferences, the determining factors in any purchase was the condition of the slave combined with the availability of slaves for sale. Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christopher and Jamaica …, 2 vols. (London, 1707), I, xlvii–lvii; Richard Cullen Rath, ‘African Music in Seventeenth–Century Jamaica: Cultural Transit and Transmission’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, L (1993), 700–26. See also Kay Dian Kriz, ‘Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Han Sloane’s “Natural History of Jamaica”’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LVII (2000), 57–60. For the importance of shipmates, see Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean, 38–40. This assumes that every one who bought slaves in this period was a potential buyer of slaves between first and last entry into the market. Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean, 71–72. Inventories IB/11/3/27; Burnard, ‘Who Bought Slaves’, 73–77. For evidence that high-quality slaves sold first in any sale, see Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves, 74–76. The 30 slave sales come from TNA, T 70/937–942. For a detailed discussion on the relative merits as slaves of Africans from various tribal groupings, see James Knight, ‘A History of Jamaica’, British Library, Add Mss 12,418, ff.80. TNA, T 70/936/45; T 70/937/83; T 70/947/22. ‘The Account of the Families both whites and Negroes in the Parish of St. John’s Jamaica’ [c.1680], TNA, CO 1/45/109. For difficulties in reconciling European notions of African identity with African notions of African identity, see Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Ethnic Designations of the Slave Trade and the Reconstruction of the History of Trans-Atlantic Slavery’, in Paul E. Lovejoy and David Trotman (eds), Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London, 2002). This period was also the period when we know least about the regions of origin of slaves arriving in Jamaica. Between 1706 and 1735, we know the places of origin of just 33.9 per cent of the 194,675 slaves arriving in Jamaica. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Other ethnic monikers that were given to seven or more slaves were Ebo (19), Fantee (14), Nago (11), Mocco (11), Chamba (10), and Wawee (7). By way of comparison, 57 slaves were designated as being Creole and 27 slaves were described as being Indians, presumably either from the Mosquito Shore, which was part of Jamaica’s jurisdiction, or from British North America.

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38. Rath, ‘African Music in Jamaica’; Craton, Testing the Chains, 132–39. 39. Sweet, Recreating Africa. 40. For the adoption of paternalism, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 284–96. 41. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 149; Richard D. E. Burton, Afro–Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 20–33; Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 273. Obeah was first banned in Jamaica in the immediate aftermath of Tacky’s Revolt in 1760. ‘An Act to Remedy the Evils Arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves’, 1 Geo. III, c22. 42. Indifference did not mean ignorance. As Mullin shows in his analysis of runaway advertisements in Jamaica, planters were perfectly well aware of the places of origins of their African slaves. They chose, however, not to emphasize this feature of their slaves’ lives, concentrating instead on describing Africans by reference to their colour or their free or non-free status. Mullin, Africa in America, 27–28; Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 130–31. 43. For size of slave units in the American South, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. 44. Trevor Burnard, ‘“The Countrie Continues Sicklie”: White Mortality in Jamaica, 1655–1780’, Social History of Medicine, 12 (1999), 45–72; Burnard, ‘A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica’, Journal of Social History, 28 (1994), 63–82. 45. Burnard, ‘Who Bought Slaves’, 84–85. 46. Mintz and Price, Birth of African American Culture; Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 (Oxford, 1971). For a recent consideration of the utility of creolization as an organizing device for understanding the transmission of African culture to the New World, see O. Nigel Bolland, ‘Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History’, in Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (eds), Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture (Kingston and Oxford, 2002), 15–46. 47. Sweet, Recreating Africa, 229. 48. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 169. 49. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 12–13, 194. 50. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 198. Hall and Daniel Littlefield also assume clustering of Africans on plantations as a result of patterns of distribution and marketing in the slave trade: Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 69; Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, LO, 1981). See also Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Françaises (XVII–XVIII siècles) (Basse Terre and Fort-de France, 1974), 59, for similar arguments on the populating of plantations in Saint-Domingue. 51. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 4 vols. (London, 1801), II, 155. 52. Mervyn Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture (London, 1988); R. B La Page and D. De Camp, ‘Jamaican Creole’: Creole Language Studies (New York, 1960); Barbara Lalla and Jean D’Costa, Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican

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53.

54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

African Ethnicities in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica

163

Creole (Tuscaloosa, 1990); Mullin, Africa in America; Chambers, ‘My Own Nation’; Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean; Burton, Afro-Creole, 19. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989); ‘Forum: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, XLVIII (1991), 224–308. As Nicholas Canny points out, the criticism of Fischer was partly due to a shift of emphasis among early Americanists, away from a tendency to treat colonial British America as an extension of seventeenth-century English society to a more comparative treatment of British America as one colonization effort among several European adventures in the Atlantic. Nicholas Canny, ‘Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America’, Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 19. The strongest and most influential statement of this widely held position is Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988). Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 192–93, 207; Games, ‘Migration’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (London, 2002), 32; Burton, Afro-Creole, 14–15. Trevor Burnard, ‘European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, LIII (1996), 782–83. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 183–91; Northrup, ‘Igbo and Myth Igbo’, 5–6.

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7

The Wealth and Social Aspirations of Liverpool’s Slave Merchants of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century David Pope

I

n h is accoun t of the slave trade Eric Williams emphasized the extraordinary profits generated by the trade and, more specifically, its contribution to the growth and prosperity of Liverpool.1 However, his approach to the latter was very generalized; he did not analyse in any depth the degree of financial success of the individuals who invested in the Liverpool slave trade. This paper attempts to rectify this omission. To do so it draws on sources and methodologies used by others to calculate the wealth of certain groups of eighteenth-century British people and apply them to estimate the wealth of Liverpool slave merchants.2 Extension of the methodology also allows us to explore how that wealth was used to shape the lives of the offspring of slave merchants. In recent years emphasis has been placed on the social uses of wealth generated by the slave trade. For instance, in one recent book the significance of profits made from the slave trade to ‘the urban renaissance’ in Bristol in the period c.1689–1820 has been stressed.3 More broadly, the accumulation of wealth through the slave trade and the spending thereof is related to the ‘rise of gentility’ and the growth of consumerism in the eighteenth century, which have been of considerable interest to historians in recent decades.4 The purposes of this paper, which is very much a preliminary study, are to attempt to assess the extent of the wealth of Liverpool slave merchants and to examine how far their spending of it enabled them to satisfy their social aspirations, and thereby shed light on the broader national picture and possibly also on the issue of how far profits from the slave trade

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contributed to and sustained Liverpool’s growth. For the purposes of this study discussion of the aspirations of the slave merchants is confined to:

1. The acquisition of property, for example, a grander house in a more fashionable location, possibly suburban or even rural, and/or land either locally or further afield, ideally a substantial landed estate; 2. A successful marriage, perhaps to a daughter of a landed gentleman, a professional person, or an officer in the armed forces, thereby reflecting enhanced social status; and 3. The advancement of the children of the marriage, for example, by providing an education for their sons at a university; by the entry of sons into one of the professions, or, as officers, into one of the armed forces; and by the marriage of children into the landed or professional classes, or to military or naval officers or to their sons and daughters.5 The study focuses on the 201 slave merchants identified as having been Liverpool’s leading merchants of the period 1750–99, and was partly made possible by the increased availability of contemporary registers of baptisms, marriages and burials kept by a wide range of Christian denominations.6 Before examining the wealth and social aspirations of the leading Liverpool slave merchants of the period 1750–99 and the degree of success in achieving them, a survey of their socio-economic origins would be helpful, in order to gain some indication of the bases from which they started. Mainly from a search of parish registers, especially baptism registers, and probate records, the occupations of 130, or 64.7 per cent, of the fathers of the 201 individuals have been discovered, as set out in Table 7.1. The picture provided by these statistics is somewhat mixed, though the overall impression given by them is that fathers were men of some property or at least of some trade or skill; there seems to be little, if any, evidence that the slave merchants came from the ranks of the labouring poor. Indeed, nearly half the fathers are known to have left wills or, if they died intestate, letters of administration of their estates were granted.7 This is not necessarily evidence of great wealth, but it does suggest at least possession of some property, though some of it may have been acquired from successful sons. Overall, it is difficult to make definite generalizations about the socio-economic backgrounds of the leading slave merchants, since the occupations of more than one-third of their fathers have not been discovered. Furthermore, the evidence is biased towards merchants of an urban rather, than a rural, background. This is partly a reflection of the evidence of the surviving baptism registers, those of the Liverpool

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Table 7.1.  Occupations of fathers of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants, 1750–99 (by number and percentage distributions). Boatbuilder

Plasterer

1

10

Porter

1

Roper & victualler

1

Potter

1

Shipwright/ship carpenter

2

Shearman dyer

1

Shoemaker

1

Tailor

1

Chandler & soap boiler

1

Tanner & currier

1

Mariner

Maritime

1

14 7.0% (10.8%)

Apothecary

4

Draper

1

Grocer

4

Grocer & merchant

2

Innkeeper/innholder

2

Army officer

Ironmonger

1

Dissenting minister

1

Mercer

2

Lawyer

2

Craftsmen &c.

21 10.4% (16.2%) 1

Merchant

45

MD

1

Trade

61 30.3% (46.9%)

Physician

1

Rector

2

Surgeon

1

Professions &c.

9 4.5% (6.9%)

Barber

2

Blacksmith

2

Bread baker

1

Carpenter

1

Esquire

2

Clay tobacco pipe manufacturer

1

Gentleman

9

Cooper

2

Yeoman

11

Cork Cutter

1

Gentry &c.

25 12.4% (19.2%)

Linen weaver

1

Maltster

1

Unknown

71 35.3%

Mason

1

Husbandman

Total

3

201

Source: See text and appendices. Note: This table gives two sets of occupational distributions. The first set refers to the percentage distribution of fathers’ occupations by known and unknown categories (i.e. 201 occupations). The second set, in brackets, refers to percentage distributions based on known occupations only and covers 130 individuals.

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churches, unlike those of many other parishes, being excellent in terms of the provision of the occupations of fathers of children baptized there. The distortion of the evidence is reflected in statistics depicting the places of birth of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants of the period 1750–99, calculated largely from baptism records. Of the 201 merchants, 84, or 41.8 per cent, are known to have been born in Liverpool or its surrounding parishes situated within the boundaries of the later county of Merseyside on the Liverpool side of the River Mersey. The occupations of the fathers of only three of these 84 men are unknown. By contrast, of the fathers of the 75 merchants whose birthplaces outside Liverpool and ‘Merseyside’ have been discovered – all of them in the British Isles and 30 of them in Lancashire – the occupations of 31 have not been ascertained. In addition, the occupations have been found of only five of the fathers of merchants whose birthplaces have not been discovered. Given the availability of the Liverpool Church of England registers from the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seems probable that most, if not all, of the merchants whose birthplaces have not been ascertained were not natives of Liverpool or of the districts immediately surrounding it. It may be tentatively suggested that a larger proportion of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants came from rural backgrounds than has hitherto been discovered. Overall, in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds, it may perhaps be suggested that few came from either a wealthy or a poor background. The argument that many of them did not come from a wealthy background is reinforced by the fact that 108 – more than half of them – had employment, generally not of a type to suggest great wealth, before becoming slave merchants. Of these, 80 were ships’ captains, 71 of them in the slave trade and 9 in other trades, before abandoning the sea for careers as slave merchants – these 80 captains comprising approximately 2 in 5 of the total 201 leading slave merchants.8 Of the 108, the remaining 28 comprise 5 shipwrights, 3 coopers, 3 sailmakers, 2 attorneys, 2 ironmongers, 2 plumbers and glaziers, a brazier, a chandler and grocer, a grocer and seedsman, a house builder, a joiner, a linen draper, a linen merchant, a tobacconist, a vintner, a wine merchant and a yeoman. Whatever their socio-economic backgrounds, investors in slave vessels undoubtedly entered the trade with a view to increasing their wealth and improving their lifestyles. It is impossible to ascertain the exact wealth of any of the members of the cohort of leading Liverpool slave merchants upon which this study is based. However, some indication of the wealth of many of them can be discovered in probate records. From August 1779 onwards executors and administrators seeking probate or letters of administration were required to make a declaration under oath of the value of the personal

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estate and effects of the deceased. This requirement arose from an Act of Parliament passed earlier in the same year, which, in order to help finance the contemporary war, raised levels of duties on stamped vellum, parchment and paper, including ‘For every Skin or Piece of Vellum or Parchment, or Sheet or Piece of Paper, upon which any Probate of a Will, or Letters of Administration for any Estate of or above the Value of One hundred Pounds, shall be ingrossed, written or printed, an additional Stamp Duty of Twenty Shillings; and a further additional Duty of Twenty Shillings where the Estate is of or above the Value of Three hundred Pounds over and above all other Duties now charged thereon’.9 Probate Duty, as this form of Stamp Duty was also known, had in fact been introduced in 1698, when from 1 August ‘the Sum of five Shillings’ was imposed on any document granting ‘Probate of a Will, or Letters of Administration, for any Estate above the Value of twenty Pounds’.10 The values at which varying levels of probate duty were payable under the 1779 Act are too imprecise to have any great value. However, during the ensuing four decades changes to the levels of probate duty were made on a number of occasions, in 1783, 1789, 1795, 1804 and 1815, with increasingly sophisticated scales of duties so that, for example, from the time of the implementation of the new rates of duty under the 1789 Act onwards, it is possible to place the values of the personal estates and effects of 94 of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants who left wills or for the administration of whose estates letters of administration were granted, into broad categories, though those of another 8 such individuals are too imprecise for inclusion, the scales ending at a value of £5,000 and above under the 1789 Act and at £10,000 and above under the 1795 Act (see Table 7.2).11 These statistics suggest that in terms of their personal estates and effects Liverpool’s leading slave merchants enjoyed mixed fortunes, and that participation in the slave trade did not guarantee vast wealth. Few of the leading Liverpool slave merchants in these terms achieved enormous wealth, approximately three-quarters of the individuals in the sample of 94 leaving under £10,000 and more than half of them (58.5 per cent) leaving under £5,000. Personal estates of the levels achieved by Daniel Backhouse (under £70,000), John Bolton (under £180,000), Thomas Earle (under £70,000), William Earle (under £45,000), Thomas Leyland (under £600,000) and William Pole (under £80,000) appear to have been exceptional. Nevertheless, even the figures in the middle ranges enabled individuals to live in very comfortable circumstances, as is evidenced by the inventory drawn up on 4 February 1819,12 prior to the granting of letters of administration of the estate of James Gregson, who died on 20 July 1817. The value of Gregson’s personal estate and effects was declared to be under £4,000, its exact value according to the inventory being £3,654 7s. Lack

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Table 7.2.  Values of personal estates and effects of 94 leading eighteenth-century Liverpool slave merchants. Value

No. of persons

Percentage of total

under £300

12

12.8%

£300–£999

8

8.5%

£1,000–£1,999

12

12.8%

£2,000–£4,999

23

24.5%

£5,000–£9,999

17

18.1%

£10,000–£14,999

6

6.4%

£15,000–£19,999

3

3.2%

£20,000–£24,999

3

3.2%

£25,000–£29,999

1

1.1%

£30,000 and upwards

9

9.6%

Total

94

Source: See text and appendices.

Table 7.3.  From the inventory of the estate of James Gregson, 4 February 1819. £

s

d

Furniture China and Glass

237

1

0

[31] Pictures

472

3

6

Wine &c.

177

5

0

Plate [including silver] &c.

292

13

1

[149] Books and sundry pamphlets

157

18

6

Linen Credits Cash on hand, Policy stamps & in the Bank of Leyland & Bullins

21

0

0

1,374

17

2

921

8

9

3,654

7

0

Source: See text.

of space forbids the inclusion of the complete inventory, which itemizes a wide range of furnishings and other consumer goods. Table 7.3 shows the recapitulation at the end of the inventory. The premises in which Gregson had resided comprised a dining room, a back room, a drawing room, a best bedroom, a breakfast room and room over the kitchen, an attic over the breakfast room, a closet adjoining, Mr

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James’s Room, a front attic, a kitchen, a back kitchen and a garden and yard. Clearly, earnings from the slave trade enabled Gregson and others like him to enjoy the benefits of what has been termed the consumer revolution and, with his library and wine cellar, to aspire to the lifestyle of a gentleman. At the time of his death James Gregson was resident in Rodney Street, Liverpool, a street of fashionable Georgian houses located at the time of its first development in the 1780s on the south-eastern fringes of the built-up area of the Borough of Liverpool.13 A characteristic of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Liverpool was the migration of many merchants from the centre of the town to its outer fringes or beyond its borders into the surrounding rural townships, a development similar to that which occurred in Bristol, London and elsewhere at approximately the same period.14 A comparison of the addresses of the residences of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants recorded in the local street directories of 1777 and 1800 indicates how these merchants in the last quarter of the eighteenth century were migrating from the old centres of population in the town centre to the suburbs and out-townships. Of the 187 leading slave merchants listed in the 1777 directory, only one is described as resident in one of the outtownships, William Gregson, Esq. of Everton. By contrast 20, or more than a quarter, of the 76 leading slave merchants listed in 1800 were resident in the out-townships or, like Richard Wicksted, a resident of Chorlton, Cheshire, further afield, as shown in Table 7.4. In addition to these 20 individuals, a further 19 were resident in 1800 at addresses located on or near to the fringes of the Borough of Liverpool, on its north-eastern side adjacent to the largely rural Township of Everton, and at the eastern end of Mount Pleasant. The migration of Liverpool businessmen and others to Everton and its attractions was commented upon by John Aiken in 1795 in his account of the area within 30 to 40 miles (48 to 64 kilometres) of Manchester:15 Everton, now entirely joined to Liverpool by buildings, forms, as it were, a new town, and is a favourite residence to those whose occupations do not oblige them to be near the centre of business … The village of Everton is situated on an agreeable eminence about a mile north-east from the town of Liverpool, and commands an extensive prospect of the mouth of the river, opening into the estuary of Bootle bay, and of the Irish channel, as well as of the opposite coast of Chester, and the northern part of Wales. This village has of late years become a very favourite residence, and several excellent houses are built along the western declivity of the hill. About half way on the descent

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Table 7.4.  Residences of 20 leading Liverpool slave merchants, 1777–1800. 1800

1777

Backhouse, Daniel (1741–1811)

Everton

Paradise Street

Backhouse, John (1757–1841)

Wavertree

Church Street

Blundell, Jonathan (1723–1800)

Wavertree

Water Street

Brooks, Joseph (1746–1823)

Everton

Fazakerley Street

Dickson, William (1740–1802)

Walton Breck

Clayton Square

Earle, Thomas (1754–1822)

Brook Farm

King Street

Earle, William (1721–1800)

Everton

None

Gregson, William (1721–1800)

Everton

Everton

Hardwar, Henry (1715/16–1802)

Wavertree

Fleet Street

Harper, William (1749–1815)

Everton

Parker Street

Hinde, Thomas (1757–1829)

Everton

None

Hodgson, Ellis Leckonby (1763–1831) Everton

None

Johnson, Robert (1757–1825)

Wavertree Lane

None

Mason, Edward (1735/6–1814)

Edge Hill

Mason Street

Parke, Thomas (1729/30–1819)

Highfield

Water Street

Pole, William (1736/7–1820)

Wavertree

Old Churchyard

Rigby, James

West Derby Breck

None

Shaw, John (1743–1807)

Everton

None

Tarleton, John (1755–1820)

Finch House West Derby Hanover Street

Wicksted, Richard (1744–1835)

Chorlton Cheshire

Sparling Street

Source: See text.

from Everton to Liverpool is a district of the town called Richmond, forming a pleasant and respectable neighbourhood, and uniting in an eminent degree the conveniences of a town residence, with those of a country situation. Investment by slave merchants in housing and other forms of property including land, both in Liverpool and elsewhere, was not uncommon and its existence raises doubts about the value of the statistics relating to wealth derived from probate records, which record only the values of personal estates and effects and not those of real estate. Altogether 73, or 36.3 per cent, of the 201 leading slave merchants and another 20 individuals who, in the period 1750–99, invested in vessels which between them made between

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11 and 17 voyages in the slave trade, are known to have possessed at some time or other property – houses and/or land – in the British Isles outside the boundary of the Borough of Liverpool, in one of the neighbouring townships or further afield. The properties of 57 of these 93 merchants were located in the former areas; another 13 individuals had properties situated locally and further afield, some of them concurrently, others not; the estates of the other 24 were situated outside the boundaries of the later County of Merseyside on the Liverpool side of the River Mersey.16 The properties included a number of country mansions and estates, some local, for example, Walton Hall owned by Thomas Leyland, and others further afield, such as Moses Benson’s Lutwyche Hall, Thomas Clarke’s Peploe Hall and John Sparling’s Petton Park, all in Shropshire. Some of the estates and properties outside Merseyside possessed by Liverpool slave merchants were located in areas where their proprietors or at least their families originated, and they may have been acquired by inheritance. For example, Thomas Backhouse, son of John, a native of Milnthorpe, William Dickson, a native of Kirkham, Joseph Fowden, born in Manchester but a descendant of a family resident in Cheadle, Cheshire, Christopher Hasell, a member of the Hasell family of Dalemain, Cumberland, and Thomas Staniforth, a native of Sheffield, all possessed property in places where they were born, or had family connections.17 Although some of the properties may have been inherited, it nevertheless appears that profits from the slave trade enabled a number of investors in the trade to acquire land and/or a house, if not a mansion, in a rural or semirural setting, or, perhaps more accurately, to contribute to the acquisition of such property, since a number of the proprietors were relatively minor investors in the slave trade, while others, although they were leading slave merchants, had diverse business interests during their careers. However, to calculate the value of the properties of the leading Liverpool slave merchants and the wealth derived therefrom is a difficult task, perhaps an impossible one, and certainly beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, some indication of the value of such properties may be obtained from the Land Tax Assessments of 1798. From a study of them one historian, Lee Soltow, has argued that nationally in England and Wales ‘the mean property value was £1.75 in taxes, roughly the equivalent of £20–£40 in rent, or £400–£800 in value’.18 A search of the returns for Liverpool and its neighbouring townships, those within the later County of Merseyside on the Lancashire side of the Mersey and neighbouring Ditton where Ralph Fisher was known to have had property, revealed that at least 18 Liverpool slave merchants, listed in Table 7.5, each owned properties, including land, houses, offices and warehouses, with a value of more than £1.75 in taxes.19

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Table 7.5.  Values of properties owned by slave merchants in Liverpool and surrounding townships, 1798. Name

Liverpool

Townships

Total

s

d

£

s

d

£

s

d

Birch, Joseph

8

1½

3

3

10½

3

12

0

BLACK, Patrick

1

8

2

14

3

2

15

11

BROOKS, Joseph

10

2½

3

1

5

3

11

7½

CASE, George

4

0½

2

5

4

2

9

4½

CLARKE, Thomas

7

5½

3

4

6

3

11

11½

EARLE, Thomas

6

5½

3

4

3

3

10

8½

Falkner, Edward

6

0½

7

6

5.4

7

12

5.9

FISHER, Ralph

7

2

4

8

5¾

4

15

7¾

HARPER, William

7

6

HEYWOOD, Benjamin

2

5

3

2

12

9

4

16

8

4

16

8

LEYLAND, Thomas

5

6½

1

14

9

2

0

MASON, Edward

8

1

2

8

0

2

16

PARKE, Thomas

9

2½

10

10

5½

10

19

8

Ryan, Thomas

2

0

3

17

3

3

19

3

SPARLING, John

8

3½

1

14

4

2

2

10

10½

2

3

7

2

14

5½

1

4

2

12

2

2

13

6

19

13

11

19

13

11

STANIFORTH, Thomas TARLETON, John TARLETON, Thomas

3½ 1

7½

Notes: Surnames in capitals are those of merchants in the cohort of leading slave merchants. Most of the data relating to Liverpool refer to buildings. The data for townships refer to buildings and land. In both cases, some were occupied by the individuals named and others were rented by other people. Source: Land Tax Assessments, 1798.

Assuming that Soltow’s tax, rent and land values are accurate and universally applicable across England and Wales, the rent and land values of the 18 individuals listed in the above table range from £23 to £46, and £460 to £921, in the case of Thomas Leyland (the lowest values), to £225 to £450, and £4,502 to £9,004, in the case of Thomas Tarleton (the highest values). Although much more rigorous research is needed before an accurate assessment of the extent and value of the investment of Liverpool slave merchants in land and other forms of property can be made, it is evident

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even from relatively cursory research that such investment by some of them was at least quite considerable. Indeed, the tax liability of Thomas Parke and Thomas Tarleton, outlined in Table 7.5, places them in the top 2.7 per cent of the country’s land tax payers, while Edward Falkner appears among the top 8.5 per cent and the other individuals appear in the top 20 per cent. Furthermore, the figures in the table may not represent their total liability, as they are not based on a survey of the entire country.20 The aspiration of enhanced social status is to be seen not only in the desire to possess a grander house and/or land but also in the marriages of a number of the leading slave merchants. Of the 201 leading Liverpool slave merchants on whom this study is centred, 173 or approximately 86 per cent of them are known to have married, some of them more than once, though for present purposes only their initial marriages are taken into account; another 22 remained single throughout their lives. Whether the remaining six married has not been ascertained. Regarding those who married, there is evidence to suggest that many of them postponed marriage until their late twenties, or later. Altogether the ages at marriage of 139 leading slave merchants have been discovered, the actual dates of their marriages being known, as well as their dates of birth and/or baptism or, where a baptism has not been discovered but an individual’s age is known from another source, such as a monumental inscription or a death notice in a newspaper, the dates of their births are known to at least within a year. Almost half of the 139 married after the age of 29 – altogether, 68 – and more than a quarter between the ages of 25 and 29, both figures inclusive. A delay in marrying by many is perhaps not surprising, given that some 40 per cent of the leading slave merchants had previously been ships’ captains who spent a great deal of time away from home. Nevertheless, it is possible that in a number of cases the motive for the individual’s delay in marrying was his desire to set himself up in life before doing so. Regarding the geographical origins of the 173 first brides of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants, generalizations are difficult to make. If the geographical distribution of the places where the marriages took place is calculated, it is found that 107, or about two-thirds (61.8 per cent), of the 173 ceremonies were performed in Liverpool and its neighbouring parishes, suggesting that most of the brides were local residents and probably of local origin. Of the other 66 marriages, the places where 26 of them were performed have not been discovered, while the other 40 were celebrated in a wide range of places, most of them in the north of England and the Midlands, and 18 or 10.4 per cent of the total number of marriages in Lancashire. From an examination of the residences of the 173 brides, a not dissimilar picture emerges, though, given that 62, or 35.8 per cent, of the residences are as yet unknown, a less clear-cut one; approximately 2 in 5

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of the brides were residents of Liverpool and its neighbouring parishes. The north of England and the Midlands, especially Liverpool and its immediate hinterland, dominate as regards the places of marriage and tend to do so as regards the places of residence. This dominance is partly explicable by reasons of geography and probably also by the close contacts that Liverpool merchants had with these regions, at least with the maritime, commercial and industrial centres located therein. Turning to the socio-economic backgrounds of the 173 brides of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants, it is again difficult to generalize, as the occupations of nearly half their fathers have not been discovered. This is partly as a result of the inadequacies of many contemporary parish registers for the purpose of identifying occupations. The evidence is distorted towards the occupations of fathers of brides born in Liverpool, occupations of a more commercial and maritime nature than would be found in many other places. The breakdown of the occupations is shown in Table 7.6. Although the picture provided by these statistics is incomplete, it can be concluded that at least a substantial minority of the leading slave merchants, some 44 per cent, married as their first wives women of a background similar to their own, a maritime, trade or craft background; as some of the merchants married before or shortly after entering the slave trade, it is not surprising that they at least married women from their own social circles. Further research may well reduce the number of unknown occupations of fathers of brides and, given that the places of origin and residence of a significant minority of brides are unknown, it may be that, if found, they would be discovered in rural localities. Certainly, it is unlikely that many of the brides whose places of origin and residence have not been discovered were born in Liverpool, given the degree of completeness of Liverpool’s baptism registers. Although the social aspirations of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants are to be seen in the marriage into the landed and professional classes of a small number of them, such aspirations are perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the careers, education and marriages of their offspring. Between them, the 201 leading Liverpool slave merchants are known to have fathered 914 children altogether, 439 sons and 475 daughters, including a small number of illegitimate children. Whether these children constitute all their offspring is unknown, though it does seem probable that they comprise the vast majority of them, given the availability of contemporary Liverpool baptismal and burial records. Of the 914 children, 262, or 28.7 per cent, of them – 147 of them sons and 115 of them daughters – died before the age of 21, mostly as babies, infants or young children, and are, therefore, for present purposes largely irrelevant. These statistics of infant, child and youthful mortality may underestimate the number of deaths

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery Table 7.6.  Occupations of the fathers of the first brides of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants.

Blockmaker

Cabinetmaker

2

Mariner

10

1

Cooper

4

Maritime

11 6.4% (11.5%)

Cooper white

1

Cutler Master

1

Gunsmith

1

Sail canvas maker

1

Apothecary & merchant

1

Banker

1

Broker

1

Butcher

1

Grocer

3

Attorney at law

1

Hatter

1

Clergyman

3

Grocer & merchant

2

Doctor of Medicine

2

Haberdasher

1

Professions &c.

6 3.5% (6.3%)

Innkeeper

1

Ironmonger

1

Esquire

8

Mercer & draper

1

Gentleman

3

Yeoman

2

Merchant

35

Sawyer & timber merchant

1

Tobacconist

2

Woollen draper

1

Trade Brazier & pewterer

53 30.6% (55.2%) 1

Skinner Craftsmen &c.

Gentry &c.

1 12 6.9% (12.5%)

13

7.5% (13.5%)

Customs officer

1

Others

1 0.6%

Unknown Total

(1.0%)

77 44.5% 173

Source: See text and appendices. Note: This table gives two sets of occupational distributions. The first set refers to the percentage distribution by known and unknown categories (i.e. 173 occupations). The second set, in brackets, refers to percentage distributions based on known occupations only and covers 96 individuals.

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Table 7.7.  Occupations of the sons of leading Liverpool slave merchants. Banker

5

Sailmaker

2

Bookseller & stationer

1

Seaman

1

Broker

3

Seaman (2nd mate)

1

Broker & merchant

3

Shipbuilder/shipwright

Corn merchant

2

Maritime

10 4.1% (4.9%)

Draper

1

Insurance broker

1

Army officer

13

Ironmonger

5

Manufacturer later army

1

Mariner & merchant

1

Judge

1

1

Lawyer

5

Royal Navy officer

3

Mercer & draper Merchant

85

Attorney at law

4

Barrister

6

Clergyman

3

Surgeon

Merchant & salt proprietor

1

Professions &c.

Merchant later civil service

1

Plumber and glazier & Merchant

1

Sailmaker & merchant

1

Stock and share broker

2

Merchant & banker

Wine merchant Trade & manufacturing

5 123 50.2% (60.6%)

Mariner

2

Mariner (Captain)

2

2

15

2 49 20.0% (24.1%)

Baronet

1

Esquire

3

Gentry

12

Gentry

16 6.5% (7.9%)

Brazier

1

Consul

2

Customs officer

1

Magistrate

1

Others

5 2.0% (2.5%)

Unknown Total

42 17.1% 245

Source: See text and appendices. Note: This table gives two sets of occupational distributions. The first set refers to the percentage distribution by known and unknown categories (i.e. 245 occupations). The second set, in brackets, refers to percentage distributions based on known occupations only and covers 203 individuals.

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of offspring before the age of 21, since in the case of 47 of the sons, no evidence of a career, profession, or other form of employment, or other evidence of possible entry into adulthood, has as yet been found, suggesting that a number of them may have died as youngsters, but no evidence of their deaths or burials has yet been discovered. Similarly, no evidence that 70 of the daughters actually survived into adulthood has been traced, though no doubt many of these did, while others of them may have died as children. Of the sons of the leading Liverpool slave merchants, 244 certainly reached adulthood and the occupation of another who died before the age of 21 is known. Of the 245 sons, we know the occupations for 203. A breakdown of these occupations is given in Table 7.7. Although approximately half of the sons went into trade and manufacturing, only a tiny minority entered the maritime occupations, in which many of their fathers had commenced their careers. It is also significant that one in five of the sons made careers for themselves in the professions or the armed forces, evidence that some of the slave merchants were at least mingling with members of what were regarded by contemporaries as superior social groups. That many of the sons who entered the professions or armed forces had attended Cambridge or Oxford universities is further evidence of a rise in social status. In total, 31 major and medium-scale investors in the Liverpool slave trade, 21 of them among the leading 201, are known to have sent sons to Cambridge or Oxford. They are listed in tables 7.8 and 7.9.21 Evidence relating to the socio-economic backgrounds of the spouses of the sons of the leading slave merchants reinforces the opinion that a number of the merchants did experience a rise in social status. Of the 244 sons known to have reached the age of 21 or older, 157 married and 66 died unmarried; whether the other 21 married or not is as yet unknown. We know the occupations of the first fathers-in-law of 113 of the 157 who married. These are shown in Table 7.10. These statistics show a similarity to those of the occupations of the sons of the leading slave merchants, in that maritime occupations figure hardly at all. Also significant are the 57 fathers-in-law who are classed as gentry or professional people, though some caution is needed in drawing conclusions from this evidence, since the use of terms such as ‘esquire’ and ‘gentleman’ is imprecise and they may, in fact, be appended to the name of a businessman. For example, Margaret Drinkwater, who married John Pemberton, son of Arthur Heywood, a deceased Liverpool slave merchant, at Prestwich on 17 April 1797, was described at the time of the marriage as the ‘daughter of Peter Drinkwater, Esq. of Irwell House, near Manchester’.22 In fact, though living as a country gentleman at the time of his daughter’s marriage,

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Table 7.8.  Sons of Liverpool slave merchants, 1750–99, who attended Cambridge University. Name

Father

Matric.

College

Career

BACKHOUSE, Thomas Henry

Johnc

Mich. 1807

Trinitya

Clergyman

BENT, Ellis

Robert

Easter 1800

Peterhouse Barrister

BENT, Jeffrey Hart

Robert

Mich. 1800

Trinity

Birch, Thomas Bernard

Joseph

Mich. 1808

Jesus

Barrister

Blundell, William

Bryan

Mich. 1790

Sidney

Clergyman

BROOKS, Jonathan

Joseph

Easter 1797

Trinity

Clergyman

Buddicom, Robert Pedder

Robert Joseph

Mich. 1802

Pembrokea

Clergyman

Caldwell, George

Charles

Lent 1792

Pembrokea

Clergyman

CLEMENS, Thomas Crowder

James

Mich. 1781

Trinity

Barrister

EARLE, Charles

William c

Mich. 1817

Trinity

EARLE, Richard

Thomasc

Mich. 1815

St Johns

Barrister

Hinde, Thomas

Thomas

Mich. 1817

Trinity

Clergyman

HODGSON, Charles

Ellis Leckonbyc

Mich. 1820

Magdalene Clergyman

HODGSON, George

Ellis Leckonbyc

Mich. 1824

Magdalene

INGRAM, John

Francisc

Mich. 1784

Trinity

Lawyer

Jamesb

Judge

Barrister

Thomas

Mich. 1799

Trinity

TARLETON, John Collingwood

John

Mich. 1810

St Johns

WELCH, Robert Henry

George

Mich. 1808

Trinity

Barrister

WELCH, Thomas Robinson

George

Mich. 1814

Queens

Clergyman

PARKE,

Notes: Surnames in capital letters indicate the sons of leading slave merchants. The remaining names are the sons of smaller investors in the trade in the period 1750–99, whose vessels made between 11 and 17 voyages in the trade. a Later migrated to another college b Later Baron Wensleydale. See H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. 42, 648–49. c invested in vessels which between them made 50 or more voyages in the slave trade.

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Table 7.9.  Sons of Liverpool slave merchants, 1750–99, who attended Oxford University. Name

Father

Matric.

College

Career

ASPINALL, James

John Bridged

24 Oct. 1816 St Mary Hall Clergyman

Blundell, Thomas

Jonathan

22 Jan. 1777 Brasenose

Clergyman

BOATS, Henry Ellis

Williamd

28 Oct. 1782 Magdalen

Merchantb

Brancker, Henry

Peter Whitfield 11 May 1836 Wadham

Clergyman

Brancker, James Aspinall

Peter Whitfield 20 Apr. 1837 Wadham

Gentleman

Brancker, Peter Whitfield

Peter Whitfield 19 Apr. 1834 Jesus

Clergyman

CASE, James

Georged

28 Apr. 1813 Brasenose

Clergyman

DAWSON, Frederick Akers Johnd

1 Feb. 1814

Clergyman

Falkner, Thomas Tarleton

Edward

10 Oct. 1810 Brasenose

GREGSON, William

Johnd

11 Nov. 1806 Brasenose

Barrister

Henderson, Gilbert

Gilbert

24 Feb. 1814 Brasenose

Barrister

HODGSON, Thomas Bent Ellis Leckonbyd 25 May 1810 University

Lawyerc

NEILSON, John Backhouse William

16 Dec. 1828 New Inn Halla

Stock and share broker

NEILSON, William

10 Oct. 1817 Brasenose

Landed gentleman

William

Brasenose

PENNY, Benjamin

James

23 May 1798 Brasenose

Clergyman

SHAW, Thomas

John

12 Oct. 1815 Brasenose

Gentleman

SPARLING, William

John

22 Oct. 1794 Oriel

Landed gentleman

TARLETON, Banastre

John

3 Nov. 1771 University

Army

TARLETON, Clayton

John

18 Oct. 1779 Oriel

Merchant

TARLETON, John Edward Thomasd

19 Nov. 1802 Brasenose

Clergyman

TARLETON, Thomas

John

4 Nov. 1771 Brasenose

Merchantb

TARLETON, Thomas

Thomasd

17 May 1794 Oriel

Army

Source: See text. Notes: Surnames in capital letters indicate the sons of leading slave merchants. The remaining names are the sons of smaller investors in the trade in the period 1750–99, whose vessels made between 11 and 17 voyages in the trade. a Migrated to Balliol b Later landed gentleman c By 1851 Registrar of Deeds for the West Riding of Yorkshire d invested in vessels which between them made 50 or more voyages in the slave trade.

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Table 7.10.  Occupations of the first fathers-in-law of 157 sons of the leading Liverpool slave merchants. Banker

4

Aristocrat

1

Cotton manufacturer & landed gentleman

1

Baronet

1

Esquire

14

Cutler

1

Gentlemen

1

Druggist

1 1

Gentleman ex-ironmonger

1

Grocer & merchant Marble merchant

1

Gentry

Merchant

32

Sailcloth manufacturer 2 & merchant Trade & manufacturing

43 27.4% (38.1%)

21

Governor of Maryland

1

Plantation owner

1

Gentry

41 26.1% (36.3%)

Blacksmith

1

Mariner (Captain)

3

Brazier

1

Mariner (other)

4

Cabinetmaker

1

Shipwright

1

Coastwaiter

1

Maritime

8

5.1% (7.1%)

Tanner

1 5

Army officer

5

Others

Attorney

3

Unknown

44 28.0%

Clergyman

5

Doctor of Medicine

3

Total

157

Professions &c.

3.2% (4.4%)

16 10.2% (14.2%)

Source: See text. Note: This table gives two sets of occupational distributions. The first set refers to the percentage distribution by known and unknown categories (i.e. 157 occupations). The second set, in brackets, refers to percentage distributions based on known occupations only and covers 113 individuals.

Drinkwater had previously been in business as a cotton manufacturer.23 He resembled many of Liverpool’s eighteenth-century merchants who acquired landed properties. The occupations of the first husbands of the daughters of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants of the period 1750–99 show more clearly the links between the slave merchants and the professional and landed classes, especially in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are listed in Table 7.11.

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Table 7.11.  Occupations of the first husbands of the daughters of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants of the period 1750–99. Agent & merchant

1

Barrister

Banker

1

Clergyman

1

Beer brewer

1

Lawyer

1

Broker

2

4

31

Broker & merchant

1

Doctor of medicine/physician

Builder

1

Professor

1

Cotton broker

1

Royal Navy officer

1

Haberdasher

1

Surgeon

Ironmaster

1

Professions &c.

Ironmonger

1

Merchant

70

Salt proprietor

1

Silk weaver & manufacturer

1

Stationer

1

Tobacconist & merchant

1

Watchmaker

1

Trade & manufacturing

86 42.8% (43.8%)

Mariner (Captain)

6

Maritime

6 3.0% (3.1%)

Army officer Attorney/solicitor

14 8

5 66 32.8% (33.7%)

Baronet

1

Esquire

11

Gentlemen Landed gentry Landed proprietor Gentry

3 16 1 32 15.9% (16.3%)

Bookkeeper

1

Brazier

1

Customs officer

3

Maltster

1

Others

6 3.0% (3.1%)

Unknown

5 2.5%

Total

201

Source: See text. Note: This table gives two sets of occupational distributions. The first set refers to the percentage distribution by known and unknown categories (i.e. 201 occupations). The second set, in brackets, refers to percentage distributions based on known occupations only and covers 196 individuals.

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Of the 201 daughters known to have wed, 66, or 32.8 per cent, of them married a professional person or an officer in one of the armed forces. A further 32, or 15.9 per cent, married gentry, although the loose use of the words ‘esquire’ and ‘gentleman’ may exaggerate their number. Nevertheless, it is possible that almost half the daughters of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants who acquired husbands married members of the professions, the armed forces and the landed classes. Given that the occupations of 44, or more than a quarter, of the first fathers-in-law of the sons of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants have not been identified, it is possible that, if discovered, they may reveal that a similar proportion of the sons married daughters of members of the same three social groups. Hitherto in this paper discussion has centred on a cohort of 201 investors in the Liverpool slave trade. As the number of voyages financed or partly financed by individuals within the cohort ranged from probably 18 to probably more than 150, this approach is open to criticism. However, a more refined approach, subdividing the cohort into various subgroups, leads to not dissimilar results and reveals few, if any, significant differences between members of different groups. If the cohort is divided into two groups, one consisting of the individuals who invested in 50 or more slaving voyages, and the other group containing the rest, it is discovered that:

1. 50.5 per cent of the sons of the first group and 50 per cent of the sons of the second group went into trade (primarily) and manufacturing; and 29 per cent of the sons of the first group and 24.6 per cent of the sons of the second group entered the professions or the armed forces, or became gentry; 2. 32.3 per cent of the first fathers-in-law of the sons of the first group and 23.9 per cent of the first fathers-in-law of the sons of the second group are known to have been in trade or manufacturing; and 33.8 per cent of the first fathers-in-law of sons in the first group and 38.0 per cent of the first fathers-in-law of sons in the second group are known to have been professionals or members of the armed forces or gentry; 3. Of the daughters of leading slave merchants known to have married, 44 per cent of those of fathers in the first group and 41 per cent of those of fathers in the second group are known to have married men who were in trade or manufacturing; while 47.6 per cent of the daughters of fathers in the first group and 50.5 per cent of those

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of fathers in the second group are known to have married members of the professions or of the armed forces, or gentlemen. Taking those members of the cohort of 201 leading slave merchants whose investment in slaving vessels was or appears to have been confined to the period 1751–98, it would again appear that differences between the major and medium investors, the major investors having financed or helped to finance 50 or more voyages in the slave trade, are insignificant in respect of:

1. The occupations of their sons: 51 per cent of those of the major investors and 45.1 per cent of those of the medium investors entered trade and manufacturing; and 25.5 per cent of the sons of the major investors and 29.6 per cent of those of the medium investors entered the professions or the armed forces, or became gentlemen; 2. The occupations of fathers-in-law of sons: 24.1 per cent of those of sons of major investors and 25 per cent of those of the sons of medium investors were in trade and manufacturing; and 31 per cent of those of sons of major investors and 41.7 per cent of those of sons of medium investors were gentlemen or members of the professions or the armed forces; and 3. The occupations of the husbands of married daughters: 37.8 per cent of the daughters of fathers in the group of major investors and 43.6 per cent of those of fathers in the medium investors group married men in trade and manufacturing; and 45.9 per cent of the daughters of fathers in the group of major investors and 50.9 per cent of those of fathers in the medium investors group married professional people, members of the armed forces, or gentlemen. All these results suggest that even medium-scale investment in the Liverpool slave trade could lead to profitable results and economic and social advancement. However, it must be stressed that, although many of the slave merchants and their families mingled with and moved into the professional and landed classes, a substantial number of them remained dependent on trade for their wealth, though how far wealth generated by the slave trade continued to support Liverpool’s economic activity into the nineteenth century is beyond the scope of this paper. It should also be noted that investment in the slave trade did not guarantee financial success. Of more than 1,350 investors in Liverpool slaving vessels in the period 1750–99 who have been identified, the vast majority were small investors, who quickly disappeared from the trade,

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although some of these did enjoy successful mercantile careers away from the slave trade. Even some of the leading investors in the Liverpool slave trade were ultimately unsuccessful in this business. At least ten of the leading investors are known to have gone bankrupt: Miles Barber in 1777; John Dobson in 1778; Thomas Dunbar in 1774; Robert Green in 1778; Richard Middleton in 1784; John Roberts in 1783; Samuel Sandys in 1777; Gill Slater in 1793; Andrew White in 1777; and William Woodville in 1774.24 Although all these bankruptcies were not necessarily the result of problems in the slave trade, they all, with the exception of that of Thomas Dunbar, coincided with the cessation of the interest in the slave trade of the individuals concerned, though Barber and Woodville were later to reenter the slave trade, Barber in 1785 and 1786, by which latter date he had migrated to London, and Woodville in 1782, but for only one year. Two further points of qualification must be made regarding the slave trade and its role in enabling social advancement, namely, that the wealth of individuals who appear in the cohort of 201 leading slave merchants was not solely derived from the slave trade; and that social advancement in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Liverpool was achievable through other economic activity. Neither of these points can be explored in depth in this paper; a few examples will have to suffice. The direct trade between Liverpool and the West Indies, though indirectly dependent upon the slave trade, for example as a supplier of slaves to work the plantations in the Caribbean islands, was a major area of investment for individuals such as Daniel Backhouse, Moses Benson, John Bolton, Thomas Falkner, William Harper, John and Patrick Kewley, William Neilson, Gill Slater and John Tarleton and his sons Clayton, John and Thomas. Edward Mason, who abandoned the slave trade in about 1785, was a major investor in Liverpool’s corn and timber trades during the 1780s and early 1790s, in particular in partnership with Cornelius Bourne.25 Members of the Earle family had trading links with Italy.26 John Sparling and his partner William Bolden were for many years prominent in the Virginia trade.27 A notice of his death which appeared in the Liverpool press described John Backhouse as ‘an eminent Virginia merchant, of this town’.28 Members of the Heywood family, Francis Ingram and Thomas Leyland went into banking, no doubt investing some of their profits from the slave trade therein.29 Roger Fisher, his son John and Edward Grayson were leading Liverpool shipbuilders.30 Much more research into the diversity of the economic interests of Liverpool’s slave merchants is needed in order to assess more accurately the significance of the slave trade in the creation of their wealth, as well as the wealth of the town in general, although how far such research would enable an accurate assessment to be made is debatable, given the limited amount of financial evidence which is available.

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Even a relatively cursory survey of the careers of contemporary Liverpool merchants who were not engaged in the slave trade or were only minimally engaged therein, makes clear that many such merchants accumulated sufficient wealth to enable them to acquire property – a house in a more salubrious part of Liverpool and district, or further afield – and in many cases land locally, or elsewhere. In addition to the 93 slave merchants who acquired property and to whom reference has already been made, a further 171 Liverpool businessmen, mostly merchants but also including people engaged in other activities to be found in a successful port, such as shipbuilding and the ancillary shipping trades, are known to have acquired property similar to that purchased by leading slave merchants. Of these 171 persons, no evidence of investment in slave vessels has been found for 98 of them; of the other 73, 49 invested in vessels which between them made 5 or fewer voyages in the slave trade, and 17 financed or helped finance between 6 and 10 voyages in the trade. The level of investment in the slave trade of the other seven individuals has not been determined on account of the possible duplication of their names with those of other individuals. The properties of these 171 people range from a house in Everton to a country mansion such as the salt merchant Nicholas Ashton’s Woolton Hall, or that of the Jamaica merchant Thomas Hayhurst (later France), Bostock Hall in Cheshire.31 Finally, 43 merchants who evidently never or only minimally invested in slaving vessels, sent sons to either Cambridge University, or Oxford. That a number of Liverpool’s slave merchants had a range of business interests and that many other of the port’s merchants were successful in trade illustrate the difficulties involved in drawing firm conclusions about the wealth and social aspirations of the slave merchants. Clearly, wealth was acquired through investment in the slave trade, although with a few exceptions not to an extraordinary degree, as is implied by Eric Williams. Many of the leading slave merchants appear to have been born in relatively humble, though not poor, circumstances, out of which they were able to climb. The use of their wealth, for example, in the acquisition and furnishing of property, often in suburban or rural areas, was typical of many in trade and manufacturing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was symptomatic of the contemporary ‘pursuit of status’ among the middling ranks, as was their desire to raise not only their own status but that of their children, for example through the education of their sons at one of the universities and the marriage of their daughters into the professional and landed classes. However, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to calculate the extent of the wealth of individual slave merchants, and to assess what proportion of it was used for social purposes. Clearly, more research in these areas is needed, as is also true of the question how far the wealth

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was derived from the slave trade. Some indication of the diversity of the commercial interests of Liverpool slave merchants can be gained from the lists of weekly imports published in the contemporary Liverpool newspapers and from a survey of their ship-owning interests, for example by searching the local shipping registers, the muster rolls, and the lists of arrivals and sailings printed in the Liverpool press.32 More detailed analysis of the range of business activities of the investors in the Liverpool slave trade may reveal, as the present writer suspects, that among them there were several who were solely, or at least primarily, slave merchants with little or no other investment elsewhere. Until such a cohort can be identified, categorical statements of the links between wealth generated by the Liverpool slave trade and social expenditure will be impossible; and even if such a cohort were established, it is doubtful that exact measurements of the links would be possible.

Appendices Although Appendices 2 and 3 are self-explanatory, the methods and sources used to produce Appendices 1 and 4, the first of which lists Liverpool’s leading slave merchants of the period 1750–99 and the second those who owned property, require some explanation. That the 201 individuals listed constituted these merchants was ascertained through the identification of the owners of the vessels that sailed from Liverpool to Africa during this period. This seems to be the only means of producing anything like a comprehensive list of local slave merchants and an account of the extent of their involvement in the trade, the slave trade being one in which the owners of vessels and the merchants who utilized them were generally the same people. Details of voyages from Liverpool to Africa are traceable in a range of sources, including the contemporary local newspapers, the Registers of Mediterranean Passes, the Liverpool muster rolls, the Naval Office Shipping Lists and various lists of vessels employed in the trade dating from the eighteenth century. All of these were searched, both independently of and in conjunction with the published Atlantic slave trade database of voyages.33 From their commencement the two principal eighteenth-century Liverpool newspapers Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser and Gore’s General Advertiser each week printed news of shipping at sea and abroad and lists of sailings from and arrivals at the port of Liverpool. Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser ceased publishing lists of sailings in 1759, during the Seven Years’ War, at the request of local ship owners, who feared that the availability of such news would assist enemy privateers, but the publication of lists

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of sailings recommenced in 1765. The Registers of Mediterranean Passes record the proposed destinations of vessels for which such passes were issued in order to provide protection from molestation by Algerine pirates in the western Mediterranean and neighbouring waters.34 The Liverpool muster rolls which survive from 1772 until 1835, are a record of the service of seamen on board locally owned shipping. They were compiled with a view to calculating the amount of money or ‘seamen’s sixpences’ payable into the hospital and pension fund originally set up in 1695 for seamen disabled while serving in the Royal Navy, and extended in 1747 to merchant seamen. Each muster roll records the place of arrival of a vessel.35 The surviving Naval Office Shipping Lists record the entry and clearance of vessels at colonial ports with the names of the places of arrival and sailing – the system which required the reporting of a vessel at the local Naval Office and the recording of her entry or departure, aimed at helping to enforce the Navigation Acts and the Laws of Trade.36 Lists of vessels employed in the Liverpool slave trade in various years are available, most of them dating from the period from the mid-1780s to the later 1790s and associated with the abolition campaign and the regulation of the trade from 1788 onwards. They are to be found in various Parliamentary Papers, both of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, among the Board of Trade and Treasury Papers in the National Archives, in Lord Liverpool’s papers, in the Holt-Gregson Papers in the Liverpool Record Office, and in several local publications, such as those of Gomer Williams – for the period 5 January 1798 to 5 January 1799 – and ‘a genuine “Dicky Sam”’ – for the year 1799.37 Few of these sources provide comprehensive details of the ownership of slaving vessels, although a number of those that do not, such as the Registers of Mediterranean Passes and the muster rolls, do at least specify that a vessel was owned at Liverpool. Identification of owners of slaving vessels was made through the contemporary local shipping registers – the plantation registers before 1786 and the statutory shipping registers from August 1786 onwards – and Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, which survives from 1764, although it was not published annually until 1776, and essentially involved the accumulation and sorting of evidence relating to many hundreds of vessels and their ‘careers’.38 As the statutory shipping registers supply details not only of a vessel’s ownership and command at the time of registration but also of changes of ownership and command thereafter, and also as changes of names of vessels after their initial registration were forbidden under the 1786 Ship Registry Act, identification of the registration and ownership of slave vessels in the period from August 1786 was straightforward. However, for the period before the introduction of general ship registration in 1786 it is not possible

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to acquire a complete and totally accurate picture of the ownership of local slaving vessels. The Liverpool Plantation Registers, which were kept in accordance with legislation passed in 1696 that virtually confined the colonial trades to British-owned and British-built shipping, and required the registration of vessels employed in these trades, are incomplete. The surviving volumes cover the periods 28 April 1744 to 24 December 1773 and 10 August 1779 to 19 November 1784. The gaps in the Plantation Registers in the 1770s and 1780s can be partly filled by identifying Liverpool vessels in the surviving volumes of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, though these almost invariably name only one owner. Liverpool vessels can occasionally be identified in extant Naval Office Shipping Lists, which record details of owners of vessels as recorded on their certificates of registry, though not always complete details or details of changes of ownership. They may also be identified in the various lists of vessels employed in the trade in the 1780s, though these often record the name of a ‘firm’, such as Baker and Dawson or William Gregson and Co. rather than the names of all the individual owners. Another difficulty relating to the plantation registers is that the system of plantation registration, unlike the later general system, did not require the recording in the register book of changes of ownership of a vessel during the currency of a certificate of registry, though a complete change of ownership required a vessel’s re-registration. That an individual remained an owner or part-owner of a vessel that made more than one voyage in the slave trade during the currency of a certificate of registry, may be ascertained in one or more of several ways:

1. By his having been sole owner. 2. By his remaining an owner at a vessel’s subsequent registration. 3. By his being named in the Liverpool newspapers’ lists of imports as the owner or one of the owners of a vessel’s return cargo. 4. By his being named in a newspaper advertisement for the sale of a vessel. 5. By his appearing as an owner in the ‘List of Guineamen belonging to Liverpool in the year 1752 with the Owners’ and Commanders’ names …’, originally published in Williamson’s Liverpool Memorandum Book in 1753.39 Given this difficulty relating to possible changes of a slaver’s ownership during the currency of a certificate of plantation registry, voyages made

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by slavers owned or partly owned by an individual have been categorized as having been undertaken either definitely, or possibly under the person’s ownership or part-ownership. Thus, in the period 1752–95, vessels owned or partly owned by Williams Boats, who heads the list of leading Liverpool owners of local slavers compiled by the methods indicated above, definitely made 145 voyages from Liverpool to Africa, and probably made another dozen voyages in the trade. Another difficulty relating to the production of a list of leading slave merchants is that certain names appear in the various shipping records at different periods within the overall period under review, sometimes at widely separated periods, suggesting they may have been names of more than one individual. Generally, biographical details gleaned from elsewhere enable such duplication of names to be explained. For example, references to Felix Doran before 1777 clearly refer to the man of this name who died in 1776, and those after 1776 to his son of the same name, who was born in 1758. Where there was significant doubt, as, for example, with Thomas Johnson, of which name there were concurrently several men, the name concerned was excluded from the list of leading Liverpool slave merchants. Overall, in the period 1750–99, 3,809 voyages from Liverpool to Africa have been discovered. Of these 3,646, or 95.7 per cent, were undertaken by Liverpool-owned vessels. The ownership of these vessels is known to have been shared by somewhere between 1,350 and 1,400 investors, an exact figure being impossible to calculate, as some individual names may refer to more than one person. Of these investors, 201 form the cohort upon which this study is based. The criteria for inclusion in the cohort were a) ownership or part-ownership of slaving vessels on at least 18 voyages, definite and possible, in the period 1750–99; and b) residence in Liverpool for part or all of the period in which individuals invested in slavers. Major investors who were not Liverpool residents but who would otherwise have been included, such as Robert Brade of Dominica, Thomas Dixon of Chester and Charles Forde of Manchester, have been omitted, as the study is essentially an examination of the social aspirations of Liverpool residents. By contrast, individuals such as Robert Bent of Warrington, Moses Benson of Jamaica and William Neilson of Tortola and Dominica, whose initial investment in Liverpool slavers was made while they were resident elsewhere, but who later settled in Liverpool, have been included. Despite the gaps in the evidence relating to the ownership of vessels, it seems probable that the cohort of 201 individuals includes the vast majority, if not all, of the leading local slave merchants of the second half of the eighteenth century, though the nature of the evidence used in the compilation of the cohort, prohibits the calculation of the extent or value of

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the investment of its members in individual vessels. It is also worth pointing out that even if the list of leading merchants had been calculated on the basis of the number of voyages known to have been definitely made by vessels owned or partly owned by individuals, 162, or 80.6 per cent, of the 201 men would still have appeared in a list of the top 201 Liverpool slave merchants. Even allowing for a certain degree of inaccuracy, it is likely that the other 40 individuals would still figure at the very least among the 250 or so leading Liverpool slave merchants. Although the list of leading Liverpool slave merchants probably contains the majority of such merchants, it understates the degree of investment in slaving vessels of some individuals. Besides the limitations of the evidence relating to the period under review, a number of the investors, such as the Cunliffes, James Gildart and the Heywoods, were engaged in the slave trade before 1750, and others continued to be involved after 1799, some until abolition. The personal details of the leading Liverpool slave merchants were assembled from a search of a considerable number of contemporary registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, and a range of other sources. In recent decades most of the registers of baptisms, marriages and burials of Church of England, Catholic and Protestant nonconformist places of worship in Great Britain have been deposited in local record offices, generally in the office serving the area in which a church or chapel is or was situated. Thus the Liverpool Record Office holds nearly all the extant registers originally kept in places of worship located within the city’s boundaries from the seventeenth century onwards. In addition to the originals housed in Record Offices – most of them now available only on microfilm or microfiche – the registers of many churches have been transcribed and published by local historical and parish record societies. Many registers are also available in microform through the family history centres of the Church of Latter Day Saints.40 Other sources used for the production of Appendix 1 and for the chapter as a whole, include:41

1. Transcriptions of monumental inscriptions, including those on graves in all the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Liverpool burial grounds; 2. Trade directories, the earliest printed in Liverpool dating from 1766 and others appearing at regular intervals thereafter; 3. Probate records, wills, letters of administration and act books recording the granting of probate and administration. 4. Apprenticeship registers, notably those that record the payment of

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stamp duty on indentures introduced by an Act of Parliament of 1694 and continued by later legislation into the early nineteenth century. 5. Registers of freemen of Liverpool and other towns and, as regards the former, associated documentation; 6. Registers of Lancashire freeholders qualified to vote in parliamentary elections; 7. The Liverpool Corporation Lease Registers, which, as well as describing properties leased, record the ages and places of residence of the people for whose three lives plus 21 years properties were leased; 8. Land tax assessments for Liverpool and neighbouring townships made in 1798 in compliance with the Land Tax Act of the previous year; 9. Works of a specifically genealogical and antiquarian nature such as Burke’s Landed Gentry, first published in 1837–38, and Foster’s books of Yorkshire pedigrees; 10. Family histories such as those of the Gildart and Staniforth families; and 11. Newspapers. Liverpool’s earliest surviving newspaper, Williamson’s (later Billinge’s) Liverpool Advertiser, dates from May 1756, after which date there are only two years, 1803 and 1809, for which no editions of any Liverpool newspaper survive, though in other years there are gaps in the runs of individual papers. Besides Williamson’s, the papers that survive from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries include: Gore’s General Advertiser, founded in December 1765; two papers entitled the Liverpool Chronicle, surviving from the periods 1767–69 and 1804–7; the Liverpool Courier, established in 1808; the Liverpool Mercury, first published in 1811; the Albion, which first appeared in 1827; and the Liverpool Journal, founded in 1831. Except for the Chronicle, these newspapers continued to be published into the second half of the nineteenth century – weekly until the 1840s or later – and all printed announcements of marriages and deaths and occasionally births. These announcements are especially useful in identifying marriages of local people performed in churches other than local ones. Besides the Liverpool newspapers and those of other towns such as Chester, Lancaster, Manchester and Preston, which have occasionally been consulted, a helpful source of biographical details of Liverpool people, certainly of wealthier ones, is the Gentleman’s Magazine, a monthly publication founded in 1731

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193

and in production until 1907, which provides details of births, marriages and deaths of ‘eminent persons’. Identification of the properties and their occupiers listed in Appendix 4 was made mainly through the contemporary Liverpool directories, probate records, the registers of Lancashire freeholders, especially those of the townships in the neighbourhood of Liverpool for the years 1794 and 1795, the Land Tax Assessments of 1798, various editions of Burke’s Landed Gentry and a wide range of histories and antiquarian accounts of Liverpool and its surrounding townships.42 The list does not include properties outside the British Isles owned by Liverpool slave merchants. John Tarleton (1718–73), for example, by his will, dated 20 January 1770, left his ‘Estate in the Island of Carriacou in America being about Five Hundred and nine Acres of Land with the buildings I have erected there, the Negroes and all the Stock I have thereon’, his ‘house or store in the Town of Grand Acre in the said Island of Carriacou’ and ‘his House and Stores in the Town of St. George in the Island of Grenada’ to his eldest son Thomas (1753–1820).43

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Miles William John John

Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Ulverston, Lancashire Liverpool Liverpool West Derby Skerton, Lancashire Edinburgh Ulverston, Lancashire Warrington, Lancashire

Armitage, Robert (1689–1766)

Aspinall, James (1729–88)

Aspinall, James (1760–1814)

Aspinall, John Bridge (1759–1830)

Aspinall, William (1761–1814)

Backhouse, Daniel (1741–1811)

Backhouse, John (1717–76)

Backhouse, John (1757–1841)

Backhouse, Thomas (1754–95)

Baker, Peter (1731–96)

(1733–95)c

(1745/6–1811)a

Benson, Moses (1738–1806)b

Bent, Robert (1744–1831)c

Begg, William

Barber, Miles

Hugh

Ireland

Milnthorpe, Westmorland James John

Ribby, Lancashire

Abram, Ralph (1746/7–1813)a

John

Richard

James

James

James

James

Richard

Name

Place of birth

Name

3

2

1

Merchantd

Yeomand

Innkeeper and

Merchant e

Merchant e

Gentlemand

Yeomane

Yeomand

1783–98

1775–99

29

67

66

43

1763–86 1779–99

53

20

79

8

100

1767–88

1780–85

1780–99

1750–71

1773–99

22

1790–99

Plumber & Glazier and

79

1788–99

80

1787–99

Merchantd

26

9

21

A

6

1765–87

1750–56

1786–99

Period

5

Plumber & Glazier and Merchantd

Plumber & Glazier and Merchantd

Mariner

Occupation

Father

4

Appendix 1.  Liverpool’s leading slave merchants, 1750–99.

0

22

79

80

37

23

21

C

8

0

2

4

13

2

0

1

17

29

69

70

56

55

20

80

25

0 100

0

0

0

11

14

B

Voyages

7

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav195 195

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Bryan James Abraham Peter Thomas Edward

Perth Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Ellel, Lancashire Ulverston, Lancashire Tarvin, Cheshire Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool

Black, Patrick (1728–1816)a

Blundell Bryan (1720–90)

Blundell, Jonathan (1723–1800)

Blundell, Richard (1721–60)

Blundell, William (1714–66)

Boats, William (1716–94)a

Bolden, William (1730–1800)

Bolton, John (1756–1837)

Bostock, Robert (1743–93)a

Brancker, Peter Whitfield (1750–1836)a

Bridge, John (1714–63)a

Brooks, Joseph (1746–1823) Dumfriesshire Stalmine, Lancashire?

Brown, Thomas (? –1778)a

Butler, Christopher (1736/7–1822)

Brown, Joseph (? –1789)

Whitehaven, Cumberland Caleb

Birch, Thomas (1725/6–82)a

Jonathan

William

Bryan

Bryan

Bryan

Andrew

Name

Place of birth

Name

3

2

1

4

Merchantd

Cooperd

Apothecary

Apothecaryd

Currier and tanner

Barber

Merchantd

Merchantd

Merchantd

Merchantd

Clay Tobacco Pipe Manufacturer

Occupation

Father

5

1766–99

1763–75

1753–75

1770–90

1750–68

1784–99

62

14

21

43

12

23

27

30

1787–99 1769–93

15

145

8

13

56

32

21

31

A

6

1767–75

1752–95

1751–64

1752–62

1751–80

1752–76

1754–81

1762–82

Period

7

8

8

4

30

5

33

1

5

0

4

12

16

19

34

41

18

B

Voyages

70

18

51

48

45

24

32

30

19

157

24

32

90

73

39

39

C

8

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav196 196

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Place of birth

Name

4

5

Liverpool Liverpool

Chaffers, Edward (1734–1810)

Clarke, Thomas (1753–1813)

Thomas William William

Ormskirk, Lancashire Liverpool Liverpool

Crosbie, James (1714–55)a

Crosbie, John (1716–91)a

Merchantd

Merchantd

Grocere

1751–71

1751–61

1753–66

68

7

23

73

1760–86

Cropper, Edward (1704–76)a

Chandler and soap

James

Liverpool

Copeland, John

32

(1727–92)a

47 1750–72

Thomas

Liverpool

Cooke, Charles (1724–98)a

boilerd

1773–99

John

Weobley, Herefordshire

Colley, James Eckley (1750–1800)a

20

1750–69

35

61

24

52

37

101

16

32

25

A

6

1786–99 1753–85

Cork cutter

Grocer and merchantd

1764–76

1777–99

1762–77

Isle of Man

John

Carpenter and shipwrighte

Husbandman

Esquiree

Clemens, James (1718/19–96)a

Clay, Robert (1705/06–83)a

William

Heysham, Lancashire

Caton, Joseph (1731–1803)a William

Thomas

Huyton

Case, Thomas (1731–90)

1769–99

John

Prescot

Case, George (1747–1836) Mercerd

1769–77

Thomas

Huyton

Case, Clayton (1739–76)

1750–65

Period

1753–86 Esquiree

Occupation

Father

Dumfriesshire

Name

3

Carruthers, James (c.1718–86)a

Campbell, George (? –1769)a

2

1

7

8

14

15

11

11

8

2

7

21

0

8

3

14

8

19

11

B

Voyages

82

22

34

84

40

49

42

41

61

32

55

51

109

35

43

33

C

8

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Liverpool? London

Davenport, Christopher (1730–93)

Davenport, William (1725–97)

Davies

Davies

Foster

Lawyer and landed gentlemand

Lawyer and landed gentlemand

Merchantd

Clergyman (Rector)

26

21

1750–60 1753–77

21

21

1750–60

1750–60

Merchantd

1783–92

Felix

Liverpool

Doran, Felix (1758–1827)c

1758–78 1758–76

Dissenting minister

Ireland

Joshua

1750–68

Doran, Felix (1708/09–76)a

Dobson, John (1730/1–96)

Yeomand

Thomas

Ainsdale

Dobb, William (1704/05–68)a

21

27

55

33

31

1782–99

John

Kirkham, Lancashire

Dickson, William (1740–1802)

Apothecary

24

1781–99

Dickinson, Thomas (1744/5–1803)a

41 33

James

Innholdere

1782–99

Denny, Plato

(1734–1802)b

Millom, Cumberland

William

1764–89

Liverpool

Cunliffe, Robert (1719–78)

Ellis

Merchantd

Denison, William (1729/30–1809)a Ulverston, Lancashire

Newmarket and Etwall, Derbyshire

Cunliffe, Foster (1685/6–1758)

Foster

13

1763–82

112

Liverpool

Cunliffe, Ellis (1717–67)

James

64

1757–74

Merchantd

A

6

Mariner

Occupation

5 Period

1772–95

Liverpool

Crosbie, William (1744–1821)

William

4 Father

Dawson, John (? –1812)a

Liverpool

Crosbie, William (1733/4–1800)

Name

3

110

Place of birth

Name

1750–85

2

1

7

0

42

6

40

1

7

3

14

4

45

10

8

8

8

5

15

B

Voyages

21

69

61

73

32

31

36

55

116

155

36

29

29

29

18

79

C

8

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4

Liverpool Liverpool

Earle, William (1759–1839)

Falkner, Thomas (1719–85)

Grayson, Anthony (1710–64)a

Beckermet, Cumberland

William

Roosebeck, Lancashire

Goad, John (1707–73)b

Gorrel, John (? –1761)

Richard

Liverpool

Gildart, James (1711–90)a

Anthony

Yeoman or husbandman?d

Husbandmand

Merchantd

Mariner (Captain)e

1753–66

1750–64

1752–76

1750–78

10

26

16

22

14

Charles

Liverpool

Gardner, Henry (1748–1846)

1772–98

20

1770–88

Boatbuilderd

Liverpool

Galley, John (1744–89)

Thomas

85

1759–92

Gentleman

Thornton in Lonsdale, Yorkshire

Foxcroft, Thomas (1733–1809) George

1756–76

Fisher, Roger (? –1777)

18

104

Joseph

Liverpool

1782–99

Fisher, Ralph

24

1766–91

Shoemakerd

(1746–1803)a

Shipwrightd

Roger

Fisher, John (1740–91)

Liverpool

10

1760–75

59

88

64

11

Finch, Michael (? –1775)a

1780–99

1753–88

1779–99

1750–69

A

6

19

Grocer and merchant

Merchantd

Merchantd

5 Period

1750–77

Peter

William

John

Liverpool

Earle, William (1721–88)a

Merchantd

William

Liverpool

Occupation

Father

Earle, Thomas (1754–1822)

Name

3

Sir George Baronet and army officer

Place of birth

Name

Dunbar, Thomas (? –1776)

2

1

7

14

16

24

15

4

3

6

2

3

1

12

4

8

25

9

24

B

Voyages

24

42

40

37

18

23

91

20

107

25

22

23

67

113

73

35

C

8

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav199 199

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Hugh William

Beckermet, Cumberland Preston, Lancashire Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool

Grayson, Edward (1719–85)

Green, Robert (1712/13–99)

Gregson, James (1757–1817)

Gregson, John (1755–1807)

Gregson, William (1721–1800)

Gregson, William (1735–1809)

Grimshaw, Robert (1720–81)a

4

Benjamin Thomas

Liverpool Lancaster

Heywood, Benjamin Arthur (1755–1828)

Hinde, Thomas (1757–1829)a  c

Benjamin

Drogheda

Heywood, Benjamin (1722/3–95)

Benjamin

John

Drogheda

Bootle or Everton

Heywood, Arthur (1719–95)

Harper, William

Merchantd

Merchantd

Merchant

Merchant

24

50

1779–88 1784–99

32

29

52

12

39

10

19

57

104

1750–85

1750–75

1784–99

1750–60

Hardwar, Henry (1715/16–1802)

(1749–1815)b

1778–99

1752–75

1780–99

1750–93

98

94

1778–99 1778–99

77

13

A

6

1757–76

1764–76

Hammond, Benjamin (1743–1803)a Burton Smithies, Yorkshire Benjamin Yeoman

5 Period

1750–66

Mason

Barber

Porter

Merchantd

Merchantd

Yeoman or husbandman?d

Occupation

Father

Haliday, William (1725/6–96)

John

William

William

Edward

Anthony

Name

Place of birth

Name

3

2

1

7

0

6

31

28

0

13

0

9

2

3

48

1

1

22

10

B

Voyages

24

56

63

57

52

25

39

19

21

60

152

99

95

99

23

C

8

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Isaac Nehemiah Henry William

Liverpool Brookhouse, Caton, Lancashire Church Minshull, Cheshire Garstang, Lancashire Brookhouse, Caton, Lancashire Liverpool Walton on the Hill Manchester

Hodgson, Ellis Leckonby (1763–1831)

Hodgson, John (1736–1813)

Hodgson, Thomas (? –1773)

Hodgson, Thomas (1729–1803)

Hodgson, Thomas (1739–1817)

Holland, Francis (1745–1800)a

Holland, Nehemiah (1713–86)a

Holme, Peter (1730/1–79)a

John

Lancaster

Jackson, William (1746/7–99)a

Plastererd

Maltsterd

1778–97

1760–99

William

Oulton, near Wakefield, Yorkshire

Ingram, Francis (1739–1815)c

23

105

32

1753–76

George

Overthwaite, Beetham, Westmorland

Hutton, George (1729–1802)

Gentlemand

39

1777–93

21

25

45

7

2

0

31

B

Voyages

0

3

35

2

24

17

0

5

see note

107

71

54

Houghton, John (1744/5–1832)a

1755–76

1781–95

1767–96

1751–99

1771–96

1786–99

A

6

26

Grocerd

Husbandmane

Mariner shipwright and merchant

Apothecaryd

Merchantd

Occupation

5 Period

1750–77

William

Isaac

Thomas

Name

4 Father

Place of birth

Name

3

2

1

23

108

67

41

50

38

25

50

138

73

54

C

8

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John John

West Auckland, Co. Durham Liverpool

James, William (1734–98)

Jenkinson, William (1726–93)a

4

5

10 52

1760–74 1750–57 1783–99

Unknowne Unknowne

Liverpool or Toxteth Park Ballatoar, parish Ballaugh, John Isle of Man Ballatoar, parish Ballaugh, John Isle of Man

Kennion, John (1725/6–81)

Kewley, John (1739–1800)

Kewley, Patrick (1744–1813)c

1750–75

Physician

Knight, John (1708/09–74)

John

1758–67

Kitching, John (1726/7–87) Liverpool

8

1763–69

Kilner, Samuel (? –c.1776)a

88

12

40

1784–99

Herle

22

6

Isle of Man

Marinerd

1750–65

Kennedy, Robert (1714–80)

Thomas

Liverpool

24

1769–76

Kendall, Thomas (1706–64)

Carpenterd

Robert

Undermillbeck, Westmorland

12

Kendall, James (1733–78)a

1769–86

Richard

Liverpool

Kaye, John (1733/4–86)a

Draper ex cooperd

1786–99

Johnson, Robert (1757/8–1825)

28

26

1755–77

139

A

6

Jennings, Robert (1714/5–88)a

1758–78

Period

16

Marinerd

Occupation

Father

1759–81

Name

Place of birth

Name

3

2

1

7

5

26

7

10

0

5

15

2

15

11

12

0

9

16

B

Voyages

114

19

18

40

57

25

24

21

35

24

28

35

32

144

C

8

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Charles William

Liverpool

Lowe, James (1719–79)a

Martin, Charles (1714/15–75)b

Mason, Edward (1735/6–1814)

James

Arrad, Lancashire Church Green, Lymm, Cheshire

Penny, James (1741–99)a

Percival, James (1756–1806)

James

Edward

Haysom, Rainford

Parr, Edward (?–1761)b

Mariner

Gentleman

1787–92

1783–99

1750–68

1764–82

Merchant

Parker, John (1740–95)

Robert

1755–92

Parke, Thomas (1729/30–1819)

Marinerd

43

42

22

25

72

32

1763–78

James

Nottingham, Alexander (1737–81)a Liverpool

20 17

Neilson, William

(1754–1817)c

1750–58

1790–98

39

14

21

8

33

54

43

Nicholas, Richard (? –1774)a

William

Gretna

Blacksmithd

1784–99

1769–85

1763–84

1763–76

1758–77

1782–99

1758–86

A

6

32

Edmund

West Derby

Molyneux, William (1760–1827)

Blacksmithd

Marinere

Occupation

5 Period

1783–99

Edmund

West Derby

Joshua

Molyneux, Thomas (1753–1835)

Middleton, Richard (1746/7–97)

Linen weaver

Robert

Knowsley

Leyland, Thomas (1752–1827)

Cockerham, Lancashire

Merchant

Richard

Liverpool

Name

Lace, Ambrose (1727–94)a

4 Father

Place of birth

Name

3

2

1

7

0

0

29

4

8

12

9

2

0

0

13

2

14

11

0

15

B

Voyages

43

42

51

29

80

44

26

34

20

39

27

23

22

44

54

58

C

8

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4

5 Period

Robert

Kendal, Westmorland

Rutson, William (1738–93)

John Thomas

Liverpool

Rowe, William (1718–99)

Charles

James

Rumbold, Thomas (1723/4–91)

Warrington, Lancashire

Roberts, John (1716–95)b

Rigmaiden, Thomas (1746?–1803)a

Rigg, William (1768/9–1822)

Shearman dyerd

Mariner and merchant

Surgeon

Mariner (Captain)

Mariner (Captain)d

56 42

1780–93

37 1753–82

1753–76

17

45

1777–99 1760–80

23

1792–99

35

1760–95

Ironmongerd

Rigby, Peter (1725–94)

Edmund

19

1790–99

Rigby, Jamesa Liverpool

34

1762–92

Edward

Liverpool

Rice, William (1720–91)a

Roper and victuallerd

28

1783–99

Thomas

Liverpool

Ratcliffe, Jonathan (1753–1821) Merchantd

32

37

32

1753–72 1753–78

Merchantd

19

1767–90

21

Belfast?

Samuel

Merchant

1750–98

Pringle, Hugh (1720/1–84)

Liverpool

Powell, Richard (1731–94)

William

Merchant

1753–70

Liverpool

Pole, William (1736/7–1820)

William

32

23

A

6

Pownall, William (1718–68)

Liverpool

Pole, Charles (1735/6–1804)a

1769–99

Occupation

Father

Pickop, Thomas (1730/1–1822)

Name

3

1756–87

Place of birth

Name

Perkins, John (1716/17–90)a

2

1

7

7

0

9

5

23

11

7

4

0

5

0

14

0

11

13

9

13

B

Voyages

47

79

48

24

49

23

40

19

48

28

43

50

41

32

28

32

32

C

8

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London

Spencer, Lawrence (1722–99)

John

Beaumont Cote, Bolton le Richard Sands, Lancashire

Sparling, John (1731–1800)

Yeoman

Bread Baker

1750–61

1767–93

1784–99

John

Liverpool

Smale, John (1747–1802)a

19

29

34

41

1758–93 Doctor of Medicined

Adam

Chesterfield, Derbyshire

Mercer

33

1773–99

Slater, Gill (1737–1802)

Samuel

21

1796–99

11

Liverpool

Shaw, Samuel (1718–81)

Thomas Pottere

20

17

1754–77

Liverpool

Shaw, John (1743–1807)

Francis

1787–99

1758–76

66

1765–95

Simmons, John (1711/12–80)a

Edinburgh

Shand, Charles (1772–1832)

Patrick

Tailor

51

1750–77

81

Tarbolton, Ayrshire

Sellar, Robert (1757–1812)

Edward

Yeomand

1750–78

Liverpool

Seddon, Edward (1699–1771)b

Seaman, Thomas (1739/40–97)a

Richard

Barton, parish Bradley, Staffordshire

Savage, Richard (1714–93)a

41

1771–78

Merchantd

William

Lancaster

Sandys, Samuel (1732/3–1819)

A

6

10

Cooperd

Occupation

5 Period

1750–76

John

4 Father

Sanders, James (1709/10–88)a

Liverpool

Salthouse, John (1718/19–97)

Name

3

36

Place of birth

Name 1751–76

2

1

7

11

2

0

9

11

38

0

0

0

14

0

27

13

8

38

B

Voyages

30

31

34

50

22

119

33

21

20

31

66

78

54

18

74

C

8

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Samuel John

John John

Darnall, Sheffield Tynan, Co. Armagh Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool

Staniforth, Thomas (1735–1803)

Stronge, Matthew (1721/2–73)a

Tarleton, Clayton (1762–97)

Tarleton, John (1718–73)

Tarleton, John (1755–1841)

Tarleton, Thomas (1753–1820)c

4

5

Liverpool Liverpool

Trafford, Richard (1732–83)

Trafford, William (c.1730–67)

Ward, Joseph

Ward, Robert

John John

Colton, Lancashire Liverpool

(1759–1830)a

Grocer

Grocer

1786–99

1777–99

28

50

9

1750–64

James

Flixton, Lancashire

Unsworth, Levinus (1703–1757)

(1742–1812)a

21

1766–87

Tuohy, David (1734/5–88)a

24 51

Merchantd

Merchantd

1754–68

Edward

Edward

Edward

1754–67

1765–76

Liverpool

Trafford, Henry (1737–98)

12

22

1750–63

Townsend, Richard (? –c.1771)a Merchantd

29

1759–86

Tomlinson, John (1734–1803)

Chorley parish Wrenbury, William Cheshire

19

1760–76

90

24

64

13

71

A

6

Taylor, Joseph (? –1780)b

1773–99

1750–74

1786–99

1750–70

1757–98

Period

79

Merchantd

Merchantd

Merchantd

Merchantd

Rector

Gentlemand

Occupation

Father

1773–99

Thomas

John

Name

Place of birth

Name

3

2

1

7

0

6

9

0

2

16

4

11

10

8

1

12

24

0

0

14

B

Voyages

28

52

25

25

62

34

20

23

41

43

79

90

38

64

19

80

C

8

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Richard Thomas

Nantwich, Cheshire

Willding, Richard (1743/4–1820)a  c Leyland, Lancashire Liverpool Middleton, Warwickshire Thomas

Wicksted, Richard (1744–1835)

Williamson, John (1722?–81)

Willoughby, Rothwell (1729–64)

Wilson, Edward (?–1804)

Wilson, Charles (1744/5–97)a

Thomas

Childer Thornton, Cheshire

White, John (1716–81)a

Merchantd

Yeomand

Gentlemand

46

31

1780–99 1770–92

12

16 1754–62

1750–59

27

21

1762–97 1777–90

28

1750–76

23

1769–78

White, Andrewa Yeoman?

9

1750–59

Whaley, William (? –c.1765) John

37

21

1765–99

‘Gentleman’d

1783–92

29

Welsh, James (1736/7–99)a

Littledale in Caton, Lancashire

Welch, John (? –1771)a  c

Gentleman/Esquired

1780–99

36

Henry

Caton, Lancashire

Welch, George (1757–1812)

Yeomane

1750–70

Robert

Moreton, Cheshire

Webster John (1746–1835)a

17

A

6

1768–99

Occupation

5 Period

Watts, George Warren (1735/6–1801) William

4 Father 10

Name

3

1751–76

Place of birth

Name

Ward, Thomas (? –1772)

2

1

7

9

0

6

8

1

3

37

11

13

4

26

0

3

20

12

B

Voyages

55

31

18

24

28

24

65

34

22

41

62

21

32

37

22

C

8

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4

Gentleman

Occupation

Father

5

1752–65

1763–82

Period

14

23

A

6

7 B

8

1

Voyages

22

24

C

8

Columns 6–8 (voyages). A = definite; B = possible; C = total. It was impossible to calculate accurate figures for Thomas Hodgson (d.1773) and for his namesake (1729–1803). The total number of voyages financed or partly financed by the former probably totalled fewer than 30.

Column 5 (period). Each period refers to the first and last years in which vessels in which an individual invested, sailed in the slave trade; an individual may not have been engaged in the Liverpool slave trade as an owner of vessels in every year of a period.

Column 4 (father). d  left a will; e  died intestate and letters of administration of his estate were granted; for fuller details see Appendix 3.

Column 2 (place of birth). Place names in italics are those of locations within the boundary of the former County of Merseyside on the Liverpool side of the River Mersey, many of them now within the City of Liverpool

Column 1 (name). Where a date of birth is described as one of two years, it was either calculated from an age at death or it indicates that a baptism took place so early in a year that a birth may have occurred in the previous year; a  for all or, more commonly, part of his career a captain in the Liverpool slave trade; b  formerly a captain either in a trade other than the slave trade or it is unknown in which trade(s) he commanded vessels; c  for part of his career as an investor in Liverpool slaving vessels a non–resident of Liverpool or its immediate neighbourhood.

Notes:

Thomas

Richmond, Yorkshire

Wycliffe, Thomas (1728–1809)

Name

3

William

Place of birth

Name

Woodville, William (1736/7–1815)a Liverpool

2

1

208

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Appendix 2.  Liverpool’s leading slave merchants 1750–99 who are known to have left wills, or who died intestate and letters of administration were granted for the administration of their estates. 1

2

Name

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate

Abram, Ralph, of Liverpool, Gentleman W 28 Apr. 1814 27 Sep. 1813 late Merchant

£15,000

Armitage, Robert, of Liverpool, Esquire W

21 Mar. 1766

Aspinall, James, of Liverpool, merchant W

14 Apr. 1788

£1,000

Aspinall, James, of Liverpool, merchant W 22 Apr. 1814 31 Mar. 1814

£10,000

Aspinall, John Bridge, of Bath

W 6 Sep. 1830 24 June 1830

£6,000

Aspinall, William, of Liverpool merchant

W

£30,000

Backhouse, Daniel, of Everton near Liverpool, merchant

W 15 Feb. 1812 23 Nov. 1811

Backhouse, John, of Liverpool, merchant

A

Backhouse, John, of Wavertree, Gentleman

W 20 June 1850 5 Aug. 1841

Backhouse, Thomas, of Giggleswick, Esquire

W

15 Dec. 1795b

£300

Baker, Peter, of Mosley Hill within Wavertree, Esquire

W

7 Mar. 1796

£9,500

Begg, William, of Liverpool, merchant

W

24 Oct. 1811

£12,500

Benson, Moses, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 29 Nov. 1806

Birch, Thomas, of Liverpool, Esquire

A

1 Nov. 1782

£300

Black, Patrick, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 14 Mar. 1817 19 Dec. 1816

Blundell, Bryan, of Liverpool, merchant W

7 May 1814

£70,000

28 Mar. 1776 £1,500

£8,000

20 Nov. 1795 £100–£300

Blundell, Jonathan, of Blackleyhurst, Lancs, Esquire

W

4 June 1801

Blundell, Richard, of Liverpool

W

6 Aug. 1760

Blundell, William, of Liverpool merchant

W

2 Apr. 1771

£10,000

Boats, William, of Liverpool, merchant W 4 July 1795 £10,000

Bolden, William, of Liverpool, Esquire W 12 June 1800 Bolton, John, of Liverpool, and Storrs Hall, Westmorland, merchant

W 12 May 1837 2 June 1837b £180,000 a

Bostock, Robert, of Bootle, merchant

A

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav208 208

6 May 1826

£450

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The Wealth and Aspirations of Liverpool’s Slave Merchants 1

2

209

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate

Brancker, Peter Whitfield, of Liverpool, W Esquire

17 Feb. 1836

£25,000

Bridge, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

15 Apr. 1763

Brooks, Joseph, of Everton, Esquire

LA

Name

17 Nov. 1831

£50

Brown, Joseph, of Liverpool, Gentleman W

7 May 1789

£1,000

Brown, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant W

7 May 1778

Butler, Christopher, of Liverpool, merchant

W 13 Feb. 1823 14 Jan. 1823

Campbell, George, of Everton, merchant

W

13 July 1769

Carruthers, James, of Liverpool, Esquire W

26 Jan. 1786

Case, Clayton, of Liverpool

W

19 June 1779

Case, George, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

7 Dec. 1836

£3,000

£1,000 £12,000

Case, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

LA

5 Feb. 1808

£100

Caton, Joseph, of Liverpool, merchant

W 16 Feb. 1804 27 Sep. 1803

£300

Chaffers, Edward, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W 15 Dec. 1810 23 Aug. 1810

£25,000

Clarke, Thomas, of Peploe, Salop, Esquire

W

4 Dec. 1813

£3,000

Clay, Robert, of Liverpool, merchant

A

19 May 1783

Colley, James Eckley, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 23 Dec. 1800 11 Dec. 1800b

£5,000

Copeland, John, of Liverpool, Esquire

A

7 Jan. 1793

£5,000

Cropper, Edward, of Liverpool, draper and mercer

W

15 Aug. 1776

Crosbie, James, of Liverpool, merchant

£300

W

14 Nov. 1755

Crosbie, John, of Liverpool, Gentleman W

26 Dec. 1791

£1,000– £2,000

Crosbie, William, of Liverpool, Esquire W

6 Apr. 1801

£1,000– £2,000

Crosbie, William, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W 9 Aug. 1821 29 Jan. 1821

Cunliffe, Sir Ellis, of St George, Hanover Square, Baronet

W 28 Nov. 1767

Cunliffe, Foster, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 19 May 1758

Cunliffe, Sir Robert, of Chester, Baronet

W 27 Nov. 1778 31 Oct. 1778

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav209 209

£4,000

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210

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

1

2

Name

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate £5,000

Davenport, Christopher, of Liverpool, Bachelor

A 6 June 1794

Dawson, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W 14 Dec. 1812

Denison, William, of Dennison Street, Liverpool, Gentleman

W

1 Apr. 1809

£3,500

Denny, Plato, of Liverpool, merchant

W

21 Aug. 1802

£600– £1,000

Dickinson, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W

4 Jan. 1804

£2,000– £5,000

Dickson, William, of Anfield within Walton and Liverpool, Esquire

W 26 Apr. 1802 5 Apr. 1802

£1,000– £2,000

Dobb, William, of Liverpool, merchant W

16 Apr. 1768

Dobson, John, of Liverpool, merchant

23 Sep. 1820

LA

Doran, Felix, of Liverpool, merchant

W

31 July 1776

Doran, Felix, of Liverpool

W

23 Jan. 1828

Dunbar, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W 1 Oct. 1777

Earle, Thomas, of Spekelands within West Derby, Esquire

W 2 Nov. 1822 9 Sep. 1822b

Earle, William, of West Derby, Esquire W Earle, William, of Everton, Esquire

27 Dec. 1790

W 27 Apr. 1839 6 May 1839b

Falkner, Thomas, of Liverpool, Esquire W 14 May 1785 23 Apr. 1785 Finch, Michael, of Douglas, IOM, late of Liverpool, mariner

W

22 Oct. 1775a

Fisher, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

1 July 1791

Fisher, Ralph, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 4 Feb. 1804 16 Nov. 1803

Fisher, Roger, of Liverpool, shipwright W

£50 £450

£70,000a £5,000 £45,000a £1,000

£5,000 £15,000

7 Apr. 1777

Foxcroft, Thomas, of Liverpool, Esquire W 25 May 1809 13 May 1809

£3,500

Galley, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W 19 May 1789

Gildart, James, of Whiston parish Prescot, Esquire

W

13 Nov. 1790

Goad, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

20 Mar. 1773

Gorrel, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

8 Mar. 1761

Grayson, Anthony, of Liverpool, merchant

W

12 Jan. 1765

Grayson, Edward, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W

5 May 1785

£1,000

Green, Robert, of Liverpool, brazier

W

10 Oct. 1799

£600

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav210 210

£5,000

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The Wealth and Aspirations of Liverpool’s Slave Merchants 1

2

Name

211

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate

Gregson, James, of Liverpool, merchant A

4 Feb. 1819

£4,000

Gregson, John, of Liverpool, banker

A

10 Jan. 1822

£18,000

Gregson, William, of Everton, Esquire

W

28 May 1801

£10,000

Gregson, William, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W 11 July 1809 16 June 1809

£12,500

Haliday, William, of Liverpool, merchant

W 23 Jan. 1798

Hammond, Benjamin, of Liverpool

W

20 May 1803

£2,000

Harper, William, of Davenham Cottage, Cheshire, Esquire

W

28 Dec. 1815

£7,000

Heywood, Benjamin, of Liverpool, merchant

W

11 Apr. 1796

£10,000

Heywood, Benjamin Arthur, of Manchester, banker

W 28 Jan. 1829 14 Jan. 1829

£90,000

Hinde, Thomas, of Undercroft in Ellel parish Cockerham, Lancs, Esquire

W 12 Aug. 1830 28 Apr. 1829a

£300

Hodgson, Ellis Leckonby, of Snydale, Yorkshire, Esquire

W

7 June 1831

£300

28 May 1813a

£600 £20

Hodgson, John, of Caton, tow and flax W spinner

£100 b

  ditto

LA

7 Mar. 1836

Hodgson, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

A

13 Nov. 1773

Hodgson, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W

24 Aug. 1804

£1,000– £2,000

Hodgson, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W

14 Feb. 1820

£4,000

Holland, Francis of Wavertree near Liverpool, Gentleman

W 31 Dec. 1800 11 July 1800

£600

Holme, Peter, of Greenbank parish Childwall, Esquire

W 22 May 1780 31 Jan. 1780

£300

Houghton, John, of Wavertree, Esquire W

30 Apr. 1832

£8,000 £2,000

Hutton, George, of Liverpool, bachelor

A 21 May 1802

Ingram, Francis, of Wakefield, Esquire

W

25 Mar. 1816b

£1,500

Jackson, William, of Liverpool, merchant

W 22 Mar. 1800 22 Nov. 1799

£5,000

James, William, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 16 Feb. 1798

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

1

2

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate

W

24 Oct. 1796

£2,000– £5,000

Jennings, Robert, of Liverpool, mariner W

19 Oct. 1792

£2,000– £3,000

Kaye, John, of Liverpool, linen draper

W

29 June 1786

£1,000

Kendall, James, of Liverpool, merchant

A

30 Apr. 1778

Kendall, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W

3 Jan. 1765

Kennion, John, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

12 Dec. 1785

£1,000

Kewley, John, of Liverpool

W

27 Jan. 1802

£100– £300

Kewley, Patrick, of Liverpool, merchant W

13 Oct. 1813

£10,000

Name Jenkinson William, of Liverpool, merchant

Kilner, Samuel, of Liverpool, mariner

A

7 Aug. 1776

Kitching, John, of Great Crosby, Gentleman

W

18 June 1787

Knight, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W 13 Dec. 1774 21 Oct. 1774

Lace, Ambrose, of Liverpool

W

23 Mar. 1795

Leyland, Thomas, of Walton Hall parish W 26 Oct. 1827 11 Jan. 1828 Walton on the Hill, Esquire Lowe, James, of Liverpool, merchant

W

25 Sep. 1780

Martin, Charles, of Liverpool, merchant W

11 Dec. 1775

£1,000

£600– £1,000 £600,000 £300

Mason, Edward, of Edge Hill in West Derby, merchant

W 20 Dec. 1814 5 Nov. 1814

£20,000

Middleton, Richard, of Liverpool

W

13 Feb. 1797

£600– £1,000

Molyneux Thomas of Walton [on the Hill] Lancs

W 14 Aug. 1835 21 July 1835

£25,000

Molyneux, William, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 22 Nov. 1827 29 Sep. 1827

£35,000

Neilson, William, of Liverpool, merchant, and Newbie, Dumfriesshire

W

12 Jan. 1819

Nicholas, Richard, of Liverpool, merchant

W

30 July 1774

Nottingham, Alexander, of Liverpool, merchant

W 20 Dec. 1781 29 Mar. 1781

Parke, Thomas, of Highfield House near W Liverpool, Esquire

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18 July 1820b

£100

£300 £5,000

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2

Name

213

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate

Parr, Edward, of Liverpool Mariner

W

Penny, James, of Liverpool, merchant

W 10 Oct. 1801 23 Sep. 1799

27 Nov. 1761 £10,000

Percival, James, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W 20 Oct. 1806 2 Aug. 1806

£1,500

Perkins, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

6 Dec. 1790

£5,000

Pickop, Thomas, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W 3 Mar. 1823 5 Oct. 1822

£10,000

Pole, Charles, of Liverpool, merchant

W

not proved; died insolvent and indebted to his brother William (qv)

  ditto

LA

30 Dec. 1826

Pole, William, of Wavertree, Esquire

W 24 Jan. 1821 4 Dec. 1820

£50 £80,000

Powell, Richard, of Manchester, Esquire W 23 Sep. 1794 Pownall, William, of Liverpool, Esquire A

4 May 1768

Pringle, Hugh, of Summer Hill, Lancs

W 6 Nov. 1784

Ratcliffe, Jonathan, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W

9 Feb. 1821

£1,500

Rice, William, of Liverpool, merchant

W

1 Aug. 1791

£1,000– £2,000

Rigby, Peter, of Liverpool, merchant and ironmonger

W 4 July 1795

5 Oct. 1795b

Rigg, William, of Liverpool, merchant

A

17 Apr. 1822

£800

Rigmaiden, Thomas, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W

9 Apr. 1803

£2,000– £5,000

Rowe, William, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W 16 Feb. 1808 29 Oct. 1800

£5,000– £10,000

Rumbold, Thomas, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

5 Mar. 1792

£5,000

Sanders, James, of Liverpool, mariner

W

20 Aug. 1788

£1,000

28 Feb. 1793

£5,000

Savage, Richard, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

Seaman, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W 29 Nov. 1797

Seddon, Edward, of Liverpool, timber merchant

W

8 Jan. 1772

Sellar Robert, of Liverpool, merchant

W

20 Jan. 1813

£45,000

Shand, Charles, of Liverpool, merchant W

20 Sep. 1832

£18,000

Shaw, John, of Everton, Esquire

W 2 Aug. 1808 5 Mar. 1808

£3,500

Shaw, Samuel, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 10 Dec. 1781

Simmons, John, of Liverpool, merchant W

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13 Nov. 1780

£300

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1

2

Name

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate

Slater, Gill, of Liverpool, merchant

W 27 Oct. 1802

Smale, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W 28 Jan. 1803

Sparling, John, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 21 May 1800

Staniforth, Thomas, of Liverpool, Esquire

W 9 Mar. 1826 23 June 1804

Stronge, Matthew, of Liverpool, merchant

W

£300b

4 Apr. 1774

Tarleton, Clayton, of Liverpool, Esquire W 15 June 1798 10 Oct. 1797 Tarleton, John, of Liverpool, merchant

£5,000

W

£8,000

20 Sep. 1773

Tarleton, John, of Grove Terrace, Lisson W 23 May 1842 Grove, Middlesex Tarleton, Thomas, of Bolesworth Castle, W Cheshire, Esquire

21 Sep. 1820

£7,000

Taylor, Joseph, of Liverpool

W

9 Oct. 1780

£300

Tomlinson, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W 14 Dec. 1804 10 Oct. 1804

Townsend, Richard, of Liverpool, mariner

W

Trafford, Richard, of Over Darwen, Esquire

W 22 June 1787

Trafford, William, of Liverpool, merchant

W

21 Sep. 1767

Unsworth, Levinus, of Liverpool, merchant

W

28 May 1757

12 Apr. 1771

Ward, Joseph, of Liverpool, merchant

W 24 Dec. 1812 18 June 1812

Ward, Robert, of Liverpool, and Liscard, Cheshire, Esquire

W

26 Feb. 1831

Ward, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

A

25 June 1772

Watts, George Warren

A 19 Sep. 1801

Webster, John, of Poulton cum Secombe, Cheshire, Esquire

W

Welch, George, of Leck parish Tunstall, W Lancs, Esquire

30 Dec. 1812

£10,000 £300

£10,000 5 Nov. 1835

£1,500

27 Nov. 1812

£5,000

£2,000– £5,000

Welch, John, of Leck, merchant

W 16 Mar. 1780

Welsh, James, of Liverpool, druggist

W

12 June 1799

Whaley, William, of Liverpool, grocer and merchant

W

19 Sep. 1765

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£5,000– £6,000

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2

Name

215

3

4

5

PCC

Chester

Personal estate

White, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

24 June 1784

£1,000

Wicksted, Richard, of Chorlton Hall parish Backford, Cheshire, Esquire

W

9 July 1835

£5,000

Willding, Richard, of Llanrhaidr, Denbighshire

W 6 July 1821

Williamson, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

16 Apr. 1785

£10,000

Wilson, Edward, of City of Chester, Esquire

W 19 Mar. 1804 20 Feb. 1804

£10,000

Woodville, William, resident in the W District of St Lazaro out of the Walls of the City of Havana

£12,000

20 Jan. 1835

£4,000

Notes: Column 2 W = Will; A = Administration (the individual died intestate); LA = Limited Administration i.e. a grant restricted to specified property, usually land. Column 3: PCC = Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Column 4 (Chester).  Unless otherwise stated a will was proved or letters of a­ dministration were granted in the Chester Consistory Court. If marked a the grant was made in the Archdeaconry of Richmond. If marked b the grant was made in the Prerogative Court of York. Column 5 (personal estate).  The amounts are those of the personal estates and effects of the individuals listed, as declared under oath from 1779 onwards, for purposes of stamp duty, also known as probate duty, by the executors or administrators, before probate or administration was granted in the Chester Court and as recorded at the end of or on the back of a will, or in accompanying documentation; such details are not always recorded with the grants made in the Canterbury or York Courts. Figures given in column 5 in italics suggest that the estate was valued under the sum indicated (e.g. £15,000 equals ‘under’ £15,000), whereas those in bold (e.g. £15,000) suggest the estate was valued above the sum indicated. A precise valuation of the estate is given in normal type. value of the estate as sworn before the grant was made in the York Court i.e. the value of the personal estate and effects in the Province of York.

a

value of the personal estates and effects as found in the Legacy or Death Duty Registers which commenced in 1796 (The National Archives, class IR26).

b

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Appendix 3.  Fathers of Liverpool’s leading slave merchants, 1750–99, who left wills, or who died intestate and letters of administration were granted for the administration of their estates. 1

2

Name

3 Date

Aspinall, James, of Liverpool, merchant

W

14 Apr. 1788

Backhouse, James, of Milnthorpe, Gentleman

W

13 June 1728*

Backhouse, John, of Liverpool, merchant

A

28 Mar. 1776

Backhouse, Richard, of the parish of Ulverston, Yeoman

A

11 Mar. 1762*

Barber, Miles, of Lancaster, innkeeper

W

5 Mar. 1753*

Benson, John, of the Gill in the Town of Ulverston, W Yeoman

5 Dec. 1767*

Bent, John, of Warrington, merchant

W

14 Feb. 1774

Blundell, Bryan, of Liverpool, merchant

W

13 Feb. 1756

Boulton, Abraham, of Ulverston, apothecary

W

22 Nov. 1764*

Bridge, Edward, of Liverpool, cooper

W

26 Aug. 1758

Brooks, Jonathan, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

9 Feb. 1787a

Case, John, of Prescot, Gentleman

W

3 Sep. 1766

  ditto

LA

23 Aug. 1825

Case, Thomas, of Redhazels, Esquire

A

5 Dec. 1748 and 2 Feb. 1770

Chaffers, William, of Liverpool

A

9 Oct. 1776

Clarke, John, of Liverpool, grocer

W

28 May 1792

Copland, James, of Liverpool, chandler and soap boiler

W

13 Apr. 1747

Cropper, Thomas, of Ormskirk

A

19 June 1705

Crosbie, James, of Liverpool, merchant

W

14 Nov. 1755

Crosbie, William, of Liverpool, merchant

W

17 July 1732

Cunliffe, Foster, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

19 May 1758a

Davenport, Davies, of Capesthorne, Cheshire

W

28 Apr. 1758a

Denison, William, of Dalton in Furness

W

25 Oct. 1740*

Dobb, Thomas, of Formby, Yeoman

W

30 Mar. 1730

Doran, Felix, of Liverpool, merchant

W

31 July 1776

Earle, John, heretofore of Liverpool but late of Prescot, merchant

W

17 Dec. 1759

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2

Name

217

3 Date

Earle, William, of West Derby, Esquire

W

27 Dec. 1790

Fisher, Joseph, of Liverpool, shoemaker

W

22 Apr. 1765

Fisher, Roger, of Liverpool, shipwright

W

7 Apr. 1777

Foxcroft, Thomas, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

13 May 1809

Galley, Thomas, of Liverpool, boatbuilder

W

6 Feb. 1770

Gardner, Charles, of Liverpool, mariner

A

9 Dec. 1754

Gildart, Richard, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

23 Feb. 1770a and 3 Nov. 1780a

Goad, William, of Roosebeck, Yeoman

W

27 Oct. 1710*

Grayson, Anthony, of Yotenfewes parish St Bridget, W Beckermet, Cumberland

4 Oct. 1748*

Heywood, Benjamin, of Liverpool, merchant

11 Apr. 1796

W

Hinde, Thomas, the elder, of Lancaster, Esquire

W

29 Mar. 1798*

Hodgson, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W

24 Aug. 1804

Hodgson, William, of Garstang, apothecary

W

18 June 1753*

Holland, Henry, of Walton [on the Hill], Lancs

A

9 Nov. 1723

Holme, William, of Manchester, grocer

W

2 May 1741

Hutton, George, of Overthwaite, Westmorland Gentleman

W

25 Sep. 1736*

Ingram, William, of Oulton, Yorkshire, maltster

W

28 July 1753b

Jackson, John, of Lancaster, plasterer

W

12 Mar. 1784*

Jenkinson, John, of Liverpool, mariner

W

15 June 1759

Kaye, Richard, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W

10 Apr. 1777

Kendall, Robert, of Bellsfield, Undermillback parish W Windermere, carpenter

18 Feb. 1778*

Kendall, Thomas, of Liverpool, mariner

W

24 Oct. 1706

Kewley, John, of Ballatoar parish Ballaugh, IOM

A

2 June 1789d

Lace, Joshua, of Liverpool, mariner

A

9 Dec. 1734

Molyneux, Edmund, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W

17 June 1779

Nottingham, James, of Liverpool, Gentleman

W

7 Feb. 1785a

  ditto

W

17 June 1790

Powell, Samuel, of Liverpool, merchant

W

19 Oct. 1745

Ratcliffe, Thomas, of Walton on the Hill, Gentleman

W

9 May 1793

Rice, Edward, of Liverpool, victualler

W

7 Jan. 1729

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1

2

Name

3 Date

Rigby, Edmund, of Liverpool, ironmonger

W

17 June 1758

Rigg, James, of Liverpool, mariner

W

1 Feb. 1786

Rutson, Robert, of Kirkby Kendal, shearman dyer

W

3 Oct. 1760*

Salthouse, John, of Liverpool, cooper

W

3 Apr. 1736

Sandys, William, of Lancaster, merchant

W

21 Dec. 1748*

Savage, Richard, of Barton parish Bradley, Staffs, Yeoman

W

14 Feb. 1718c

Shaw, Thomas, of Liverpool, Gentleman

A

21 Dec. 1790

Slater, Adam, of Chesterfield, Doctor of Medicine

W

12 Aug. 1758a

Staniforth, Samuel, of Darnall, Gentleman

W

25 Feb. 1749b

Tarleton, John, of Liverpool, merchant

W

20 Sep. 1773

Tarleton, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W

20 July 1731a

Trafford, Edward, of Liverpool, Esquire

W

5 and 23 Sep. 1763

Webster, William, of Moreton, Cheshire, Yeoman

A

30 Apr. 1774

Welch, Henry, of Littledale in Caton

W

4 Apr. 1733*

Welch, Robert, of Leck, Esquire

W

1 May 1775*

  ditto

W

16 Mar. 1780a

Wicksted, Thomas, of Nantwich, Gentleman

W

3 July 1788

Wilding, Richard, of Leyland, Yeoman

W

25 Oct. 1769

Williamson, Thomas, of Liverpool, merchant

W

16 May 1724

Notes: Column 2 W = Will; A = Administration (the individual died intestate); LA = Limited Administration i.e. a grant restricted to specified property, usually land. Column 3 (Date).  Unless otherwise stated a will was proved or letters of administration were granted in the Chester Consistory Court, or if marked * in the Archdeaconry of Richmond; the other symbols indicate that the grant was made in another court: a  Prerogative

Court of Canterbury;

b

Prerogative Court of York;

c

Lichfield Court;

d

Court at Kirk Patrick, Isle of Man (IOM).

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219

Appendix 4.  Ninety-three individuals identified as having possessed property outside the Borough of Liverpool In the following table, surnames in capital letters are those of members of the cohort of leading slave merchants of the second half of the eighteenth century; the others are those of medium-scale investors who financed or partly financed between 11 and 17 voyages. Some of these latter, for example Henry and John Clarke and James and William Dickson, jr, were more extensively involved in the slave trade than their exclusion from the cohort would suggest, and their involvement continued during the early years of the nineteenth century. In italics are the locations of properties situated outside the boundaries of the later County of Merseyside on the Lancashire side of the River Mersey. Where known, names of houses and properties and, if relevant, of the hamlets in which they situated, are given, followed by the names of the township in which they were situated. As is clear from a number of the entries in the Land Tax Assessments of 1798, ownership of property within a township was not necessarily confined to or may not even have included a house or property named. ARMITAGE, Robert (1689–1766)

Ireland

ASPINALL, James (1660–1814)

West Derbyb

ASPINALL, John Bridge (1759–1830) West Derbyb; Cleonghar Hall Cheshire; Bath ASPINALL, William (1761–1814)

Fazakerley

BACKHOUSE, Daniel (1741–1811)

Evertona

BACKHOUSE, John (1757–1841)

Wavertreea

BACKHOUSE, Thomas (1754–95)

Giggleswick Yorkshire; Milnthorpe and Preston Patrick both Westmorland

BAKER, Peter (1731–96)

Carnatic Hall Mossley Hill Wavertreec; Garstonc; Little Wooltonb

Barton, Thomas (1753–99)

Evertonb; Sandhills Kirkdaleb; Walton on the Hillb

BENSON, Moses (1738–1806)

Lutwyche Hall Shropshire

BENT, Robert (1744–1831)

Toxteth Parkb; Harpenden Hertfordshire

Birch, Joseph (1755–1833)

Walton on the Hilla; Red Hazels near Prescot

BLACK, Patrick (1728–1816)

West Derbya

BLUNDELL, Jonathan (1723–1800)

Wavertree

BOLTON, John (1756–1837)

Storrs Hall Westmorland

BOSTOCK, Robert (1742–93)

Bootleb; Kirkdale

Bourne, Cornelius (1747–1806)

Stalmine Hall Lancashire

Bridge, James (1741–91)

Everton

BROOKS, Joseph (1746–1823)

Evertona; West Derbyb

BUTLER, Christopher (1736/7–1822) Toxteth Park; Stalmine Lancashire CAMPBELL, George (?–1769)

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St Domingo Estate Everton

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

CASE, George (1747–1836)

Crontona; Evertonb; Rainhillb; Walton Priory Walton on the Hill

CASE, Thomas (1731–90)

Red Hazels near Prescot; Wavertree

CATON, Joseph (1731–1803)

Garstonc

CHAFFERS, Edward (1734–1810)

Evertonb

Clarke, Henry (1771–1823)

Belmont Cheshire

Clarke, John (1769–1829)

Ashfield House West Derby

CLARKE, Thomas (1753–1813)

Stand House Wavertreea; Childwall; West Derbya; Peploe Hall Shropshire

CLEMENS, James (1718/19–96)

Ashfield West Derby

COLLEY, James Eckley (1750–1800)

West Derbya

DAWSON, John (?–1812)

Carnatic Hall Mossley Hill Wavertree

DICKINSON, Thomas (1744/5–1803) Evertona Dickson, James (1774–?)

Everton

DICKSON, William (1740–1802)

Anfield Lodge Walton on the Hill; Greenhalgh with Thistleton and Kirkham both Lancashire

Dickson, William (1775–1847)

Anfield Lodge

DORAN, Felix (1758–1827)

Anfield Lodge; Kirkby Lonsdale Westmorland

EARLE, Thomas (1754–1822)

Spekelands West Derbya; Allerton

EARLE, William (1759–1839)

Evertonb; West Derby

Falkner, Edward (1750–1825)

Fairfield Hall West Derbya; Rainhill

FISHER, John (1740–91)

Evertonb

FISHER, Ralph (1746–1803)

Ditton Lodge Ditton a Lancashire

Fowden, Joseph (1752–1808)

Birtles; Schools Hill; Cheadle Moseley all Cheshire

GILDART, James (1711–90)

Finch House West Derby; Whiston

GREGSON, John (1755–1807)

Everton; West Derbyb

GREGSON, William (1721–1800)

Evertonb; West Derbyb

HALIDAY, William (1725/6–96)

Anfield Walton on the Hill c; Everton

HARDWAR, Henry (1715/6–1802)

Wavertree

HARPER, William (1749–1815)

Evertona; West Derbyb; Davenham Hall Cheshire

Hasell, Christopher (1739–73)

Dalemain Cumberland

Henderson, Gilbert (1757–1841)

St Anns Hill Walton Breck Walton on the Hill

HEYWOOD, Benjamin (1722/3–95)

West Derbya

HEYWOOD, Benjamin Arthur (1755–1828)

Claremont Manchester

Higginson, William (1725–88)

Sefton; Netherton; Lunt

HINDE, Thomas (1757–1829)

Undercroft in Ellel Lancashire

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The Wealth and Aspirations of Liverpool’s Slave Merchants

221

HODGSON, Ellis Leckonby (1763–1831)

Evertona; Stapleton Park and Snydale Hall both Yorkshire; Portman Square London

HODGSON, Thomas (1729–1803)

Evertonc

HOLLAND, Francis (1745–1800)

Wavertree

HOUGHTON, John (1744/5–1832)

Wavertree

JAMES, William (1734–98)

Finch House West Derby

JOHNSON, Robert (1757–1825)

Wavertree; London

Jones, John Chambres (1749/50–1833) Bryneisteddfod Denbighshire KENNEDY, Robert (1714–80)

Greenan House and Dalyerrock both Ayrshire

KITCHING, John (1726/7–87)

Great Crosby

Lake, William Charles (1753–1836)

Birkenhead Priory Cheshire; Castle Godwyn Gloucestershire

LEYLAND, Thomas (1752–1827)

Walton Hall Walton on the Hill; Fazakerley Hall Fazakerley; Knowsleyb

MASON, Edward (1735/6–1814)

Edge Hill West Derbya

Matthews, Joseph (1769–1823)

Elm House Wavertree

Molyneux, Edmund (1759–1816)

Kirkdalea; West Derbya

MOLYNEUX, Thomas (1753–1835)

Newsham House West Derbya

PARKE, Thomas (1729/30–1819)

Crontonc; Garstona; Highfield West Derbya; Allertonb; Toxteth Parkb

POLE, William (1736/7–1820)

Wavertree

PRINGLE, Hugh (1720/1–84)

Summer Hill Thingwall Much Woolton

Ratcliffe, Thomas (1730/1–93)

Walton on the Hill

RIGBY, James

West Derby Breck Walton on the Hill

Ryan, Thomas (1737/8–1802)

Kirkbya; West Derbya

SAVAGE, Richard (1714–93)

Bradley Staffordshire; Altcar Downholland and Aughton all Lancashire

Evertona; West Derbya; Ditton Lancashirea Everton; Edge Hill West Derby St Domingo Estate Evertona; Petton Park Shropshire STANIFORTH, Thomas (1735–1803) Broad Green Hall Childwallb; West Derbya; Balderton and Newton parish Middle Shropshire; Darnall and Attercliffe parish Sheffield; Catcliffe and Tinsley parish Rotherham TARLETON, John (1755–1841) Evertona; Robyc; Finch House West Derbya; London TARLETON, Thomas Aigburth Garstona; Grange and Bolesworth Castle both Cheshire (1753–1820) TRAFFORD, Richard (1732–83) Over Darwen Lancashire SHAW, John (1743–1807) SLATER, Gill (1737–1802) SPARLING, John (1731–1800)

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Twemlow, Thomas (1755–1826)

Liscard Cheshire

WARD, Joseph (1742–1812)

Summer Hill Thingwall Much Woolton; West Derbya

WARD, Robert (1759–1830)

Liscard Cheshire; Belmont near Hawkshead Lancashire

WEBSTER, John (1746–1835)

Upton Hall; Moreton; Poulton cum Seacombe all Cheshire

WELCH, George (1757–1812)

Leck parish Tunstall Lancashire

WELCH, John (?–1771)

Leck parish Tunstall Lancashire

WHALEY, William (?–c.1765)

Upholland; Eccleston near Chorley both Lancashire

WICKSTED, Richard (1744–1835)

Chorlton Hall Backford Cheshire

WILLDING, Richard (1743/4–1820)

Llanrhaiadr Hall Denbighshire

WILLIAMSON, John (1722–81)

West Derby; Walton on the Hill; Roby; Everton

Notes: a  The individual is listed in both the Lists of Lancashire Freeholders of 1794–95, generally in both years, and in the Land Tax Assessments of 1798 with property in this township. b  The individual is not listed in the Lists of Lancashire Freeholders of 1794–95 but does appear in the Land Tax Assessments of 1798 with property in this township. c  The individual is listed in the Lists of Lancashire Freeholders of 1794–95, generally in both years, but does not appear in the Land Tax Assessments of 1798 with property in this township. Sources: Details of some of the individuals in the list of property owners are to be found in the following works: Hughes, Liverpool Banks ( Joseph Birch, George and Thomas Case, William Gregson, Thomas Leyland, Thomas Parke and Thomas Staniforth); H. O. Aspinall, ‘The Aspinwall and Aspinall Families of Lancashire’, Parts VII and VIII, The Genealogist, New Series, XXXIV (1918), 9–28 and 88–102; Clement Jones, John Bolton of Storrs, 1756–1837 (Kendal, 1959); Godfrey W. Mathews, ‘John Bolton, a Liverpool Merchant, 1756–1837’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 93 (1941), 98–115; T. Algernon Earle, ‘Earle of Allerton Tower’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 42 (1890), 15–76; George Chandler, Four Centuries of Banking …, Vol. 1 (London, 1964) (for the Heywoods); M. M. Schofield, ‘The Virginia Trade of the Firm of Sparling and Bolden, 1788–99’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 116 (1964), 117–65; W. H. Chippindall, A History of the Parish of Tunstall (Manchester, 1940), 80–85 (for George and John Welch); see also n. 15.

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223

Notes

1. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1964). 2. T. G. Burnard, ‘“Prodigious Riches”: The Wealth of Jamaica Before the American Revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, LIV (2001), 506–24; Lee Soltow, ‘The Distribution of Property Values in England and Wales in 1798’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXXIV (1981), 60–70. 3. Madge Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port (London and New York, 2001). 4. See, for example, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982). 5. For discussion of ‘the pursuit of status’ more generally, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance; Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), chapter 9. 6. For an explanation of how the 201 leading slave merchants were identified and a brief account of the main sources used in researching this paper, see the introduction to the appendices. Appendix 1 comprises a list of the leading slave merchants, together with some biographical details of them. 7. See Appendix 3. 8. For details, see Appendix 1. For Liverpool slave captains, see Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 (1991), 79–140. 9. 19 Geo III, c 66. 10. 9 & 10 Will III, c 25. 11. 23 Geo III, c 58; 29 Geo III, c 51; 35 Geo III, c 30; 44 Geo IIII, c 98; 48 Geo III, c 149, and 55 Geo III, c 184. For discussion of and examples of the use of probate duty records, see William D. Rubinstein and Daniel H. Duman, ‘Probate Valuations: A Tool for the Historian’, The Local Historian, 11 (1974), 68–71; Barbara English, The Great Landowners of East Yorkshire, 1530–1910 (New York, 1990); William Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution (London, 1981) and Rubinstein, Wealth and Inequality in Britain (London, 1986). The eight individuals, who were excluded, are Jonathan Blundell, John Copeland, John Fisher, William Gregson, James Penny, John Perkins, Thomas Rumbold and Thomas Seaman (see Appendix 2 of this paper, which lists all the leading Liverpool slave merchants of the period 1750–99 who are known to have left wills or, if they died intestate, for whom letters of administration were granted for the administration of their estates). 12. Lancashire Record Office (hereafter Lancs. RO) WCW. 13. Gore’s Liverpool Directory 1816; Liverpool Mercury 25 July 1817; Edna Rideout, ‘Rodney Street, Liverpool’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 83 (1931), 61–96. 14. Dresser, Slavery Obscured, 111–16; G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), 102–5. 15. J. Aiken, A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round Manchester (London, 1795), 359, 376. For a number of views of Everton in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see [William Gawin Herdman],

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224

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery Herdman’s Liverpool (with an introduction by William Jackson (Liverpool, 1968) and [H. S. and H. E. Young], Bygone Liverpool. Illustrated by Ninety-Seven Plates Reproduced from Original Paintings, Drawings, Manuscripts and Prints with Historical Descriptions by H. S. and H. E. Young and a Narrative Introduction by Ramsay Muir (Liverpool, 1913). A list of the 93 owners and their properties is contained in Appendix 4. For Dickson, see R. Cunliffe Shaw, Kirkham in Amounderness: The Story of a Lancashire Community (Preston, 1949), 330. For Hasell, see E. M. and M. M. Schofield, ‘A Good Fortune and a Good Wife: The Marriage of Christopher Hasell of Liverpool, Merchant, 1765’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 138 (1989), 85–111. For Staniforth, see F. M. H., Staniforthiana: Or Recollections of the Family of Staniforth of Darnall, in Yorkshire (Bristol, 1863). Soltow, ‘Distribution of Property Values’, 64. The National Archives (hereafter TNA), IR 23/40 (townships) and 41 (Liverpool). Calculated from the statistics of the distribution of land tax liability contained in Soltow, ‘Distribution of Property Values’, 64. Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxoniensis: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715– 1886 … (Oxford, 1891); J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis: A Biographical List of all Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge from the Earliest Times to 1900, Part 2, 1752–1900, 6 vols (Cambridge, 1940–54). Billinge’s Liverpool Advertiser, 24 April 1797. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: from the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, vol. 16 (Oxford, 2004), 929. For discussion of the difficulty of defining words such as ‘esquire’ and ‘gentleman’ as used in the eighteenth century, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (London, 1989), 65–67. An Alphabetical List of Bankrupts from the First of January, 1774, to the Thirtieth of June, 1786, inclusive, with the Dates of the Certificates and Superdires to those who have Received Them (London, 1786); A List of Bankrupts, with their Dividends, Certificates, &c. &c. for the Last Twenty Years and Six Months, viz from January 1, 1786, to June 24, 1806, Inclusive … (London, 1806). Evidence of the activities of these individuals is to be found in the lists of imports published in the contemporary Liverpool newspapers. T. Algernon Earle, ‘Earle of Allerton Tower’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 42 (1890), 15–76. M.M. Schofield, ‘The Virginia Trade of the Firm of Sparling and Bolden, 1788–99’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 116 (1964), 117–65. Gore’s General Advertiser, 29 March 1776. George Chandler, Four Centuries of Banking …, vol. 1 (London, 1964); John Hughes, Liverpool Banks & Bankers 1760–1837 (Liverpool, 1906) R. Stewart-Brown, Liverpool Ships in the Eighteenth Century … (London, 1932). For Woolton Hall, see S. A. Harris, ‘Robert Adam (1728–1792), Architect, and Woolton Hall, Liverpool’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 102 (1950), 161–81. I have extensive material derived from these and other sources which may

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33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

225

enable me to provide some indication of the diversity of the business interests of eighteenth-century Liverpool merchants. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). The Registers of Mediterranean Passes, together with indexes of them, are housed in the National Archives (ADM 7). The volumes of them up to 1784, with an explanatory introduction by David Richardson, are also available on microfilm produced by Microform Limited of East Ardley (Wakefield). Nicholas Cox, ‘Sources for Maritime History (II): The Records of the Registrar-General of Ships and Seamen’, Maritime History, 2 (1972), 168–88. See also Ralph Davis, ‘Seamen’s Sixpences: An Index of Commercial Activity, 1697–1828’, Economica, New Series, XXIII (1956), 328–43; Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the 17th and 18th Century (Newton Abbot, 1962, new impression 1972); and Behrendt, ‘Captains in the British Slave Trade’, 79–140. The Naval Office Shipping Lists, housed in the National Archives, mainly in Classes CO and T, have been microfilmed by the aforementioned Microform Limited. F. E. Sanderson, ‘Liverpool and the Slave Trade: A Guide to Sources’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 124 (1972), especially 170–72; Gomer Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade (London, 1897; reprinted New York, 1966), 681–84; A genuine ‘Dicky Sam’, Liverpool and Slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool–African Slave Trade (Liverpool, 1884; reprinted Newcastle, 1969), 120–29. Rupert C. Jarvis, ‘Ship Registry – to 1707’, Maritime History, 1 (1971), 29–45; ‘Ship Registry: 1707–1786’, Maritime History, 1 (1971), 151–67, and ‘Ship Registry – 1786’, Maritime History, 4 (1974), 12–30. The Plantation and statutory shipping registers are housed in the Merseyside Maritime Museum; copies are also available on microfilm in the Liverpool Record Office. A transcript of the registers for the period 1786–88 is contained in Robert Craig and Rupert Jarvis, Liverpool Registry of Merchant Ships (Manchester, 1967). For the founding of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, see Charles Wright and C. Ernest Fayle, A History of Lloyd’s from the Founding of Lloyd’s Coffee House to the Present Day (London, 1928), 84–87. The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century volumes of Lloyd’s Register (1764, 1768, 1776, 1778–84, 1786–87, 1789–1816 and 1818–35) and Lloyd’s List (1741, 1747–53, 1755, 1757–58, 1760–77 and 1779–1826), which latter have also been used to identify Liverpool slave voyages, were reprinted by the Gregg Press Limited (London) in 1963 and 1969 and are available in the Liverpool Central Library. A copy of this list is to be found in Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 675–77. So many registers of baptisms, marriages and burials have been consulted during a period of many years that it is impossible to itemize them in an article of this length. Registers and other sources, available for consultation at family history centres of the Church of Latter Day Saints, are listed in the Family History Library Catalog on the church’s website (www.familysearch.org), which also includes the International Genealogical Index, compiled mainly from many hundreds of baptism and marriage registers. Of the sources listed in this paragraph, the following are available in the

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Liverpool Record Office: on microfilm – the transcriptions of monumental inscriptions, the trade directories and the local newspapers, and, in their original form, the Corporation Lease Registers (352CLE/CON) and the Freemen’s Registers and associated documents (352CLE/REG). The registers of freemen of Chester and Lancaster have been reprinted in J. H. E. Bennett (ed.), The Rolls of the Freemen of the City of Chester, Part I, 1392–1700, Part II, 1700–1805 (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vols. 51 and 55, 1906 and 1908); T. Cann Hughes [ed.], The Rolls of the Freemen of the Borough of Lancaster, 1688 to 1840, Part I, A–L (inclusive), Part II, M–Z (inclusive) (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vols. 87 and 90, 1935 and 1938). The lists of Lancashire freeholders are housed in the Lancashire Record Office (QDF), as are the wills proved in the Diocese of Chester north of the River Mersey (WC and WR). Wills proved in the southern part of this diocese are kept in the Cheshire Record Office; those proved in other dioceses are generally held at one of the County Record Offices situated within a diocese. Wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are housed in the National Archives and copies may be downloaded via the Internet. Wills proved in the Prerogative and Exchequer Courts of the Archdiocese of York are stored at the Borthwick Institute of the University of York. The registers of apprenticeships are housed in the National Archives (class IR1); they are in two series, one for London and one for the rest of the country; most of the 32 volumes of the latter, covering the periods May 1710–January 1725, November 1728–November 1731, April 1741–December 1745, and October 1750–September 1808, have been consulted. The land tax assessments for 1798 are housed in the National Archives (class IR23); for discussion of them, see Soltow, ‘Distribution of Property Values’, 60–70; Joseph Foster, Pedigrees of the County Families of Yorkshire, 4 vols. (London, 1874–75). Charles R. Gildart, The Gildart-Geldart families (1962); F. M. H., Staniforthiana. For an example of the use of many of these sources, see David J. Pope, ‘Liverpool’s Catholic Mercantile and Maritime Business Community in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, Part 1, Recusant History, 27 (2004), 244–79, and Part 2, Recusant History, 27 (2005), 383–414. For a comprehensive introduction to genealogical sources, see Mark D. Heber, Ancestral Trails: The Comprehensive Guide to British Genealogy and Family History (Stroud, 1997, paperback edition 2000). 42. Lancs. RO, QDF 2/37 and 43; TNA, IR 23/40 (townships) and 41 (Liverpool). 43. Lancs. RO, WCW.

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8

‘Cemented by the Blood of a Negro’? The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool Jane Longmore

I

n August 2000 Liverpool City Council issued a formal apology for the role of the town in the eighteenth-century slave trade. This may not have been merely a laudable act of retrospective atonement for a painful aspect of the city’s history, it was also recognition of the extent to which the town, as well as individual merchants, appeared to have benefited from the ‘African trade’. There was a tacit sense of unease that Liverpool owed more to the trade than the gaining (and losing) of a number of individual family fortunes. This chapter aims to explore the extent to which this sense of unease was justified by examining the cultural, physical and economic impact of the slave trade on late eighteenth-century Liverpool. Liverpool’s half century of heavy involvement in the slave trade generated a complex cultural legacy. The moral censure of the ‘Liverpool men’ by evangelicals and Dissenters was to shape subsequent perceptions of the town’s eighteenth-century merchants as brutal and boorish.1 In 1823, for example, James Cropper wrote of slavery’s ‘dreadful and pernicious effects, as well on the master as on the slave, and even on the moral character and habits of the community at large’.2 This theme has been repeated by historians: in 1952 S. G. Checkland was to argue that the attitudes of Liverpool’s commercial elite had been degraded by involvement in slaving (and privateering); and I. C. Taylor reinforced this argument twenty years later by suggesting that the construction of high-density working-class housing was directly linked to Liverpool’s experience of the slave trade.3 More recently, Jon Stobart has argued that the late eighteenth-century

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Liverpool elite was so self-conscious about its reputation for inhumanity that it distanced itself from the slave trade by deliberately embracing a more cultivated image. He asserts that this was embodied in the establishment of cultural institutions, such as the Lyceum Library, the Botanic Garden and the Liverpool Institution, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.4 It is understandable that the descendants of the eighteenth-century mercantile elite wished to deny any connection between their own ancestors and such a discreditable activity. One such writer in 1853 labelled the slave trade ‘an odious and inhuman source of emolument’ but added, consolingly, that ‘London, Bristol, and other seaport towns of England were more or less engaged in the traffic, and must share in the odium’.5 He veered between fascination for the lurid details of slave ship mutinies and of branding irons (on sale in Liverpool when he was a boy) and a dismissive assertion that wealth gained from the slave trade was rarely passed down as far as the third generation.6 With similar sensibilities, possibly heightened by the carnage of the Western Front, Arthur Brocklebank claimed in March 1917 that ‘my firm are about the only really old one in Liverpool that never had anything to do with the Slave Trade’.7 Participation in the slave trade had created a negative image of eighteenth-century Liverpool. It appeared to lack the gentility of spa towns such as Bath or the intellectual life of the metropolis. More problematically, this negative interpretation was to be compounded by the influx of post-Famine Irish immigrants in the 1840s and by the increasing squalor and overcrowding of the Victorian city. By the twentieth century Liverpool had gained the deeply unflattering designation of ‘the black spot on the Mersey’. Yet few contemporaries had such qualms about this branch of commerce. Even one of the most trenchant critics of the town, the author of a history published in 1795, levelled his criticisms against the predominance of the commercial spirit rather than attacking the slave trade itself. He described eighteenth-century Liverpool as ‘a wild barren waste … arts and sciences are inimical to the spot, absorbed in the nautical vortex, the only pursuit of the inhabitants is commerce’.8 He added the sarcastic observation that ‘the liberal arts are a species of merchandise in which few of the inhabitants are desirous to deal, unless for exportation’.9 This is a crude caricature: in fact, Liverpool experienced the same type of cultural change as other Georgian provincial towns, as is indicated in Peter Borsay’s major study of the English urban renaissance.10 This cultural vitality was epitomized by the employment of one of the leading architects of the day, John Wood of Bath, to remodel the centre of commercial activity, the Exchange, in 1748–54. There was also a flurry of interest in the arts in the 1760s and early 1770s. A Society for the Promotion and

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 229 Encouragement of Art and Design in Liverpool was established in 1769. It was to hold an exhibition five years later, although admittedly still rather provincial in tone: one of the more eclectic exhibits was a portrait made entirely of human hair.11 The society fell into abeyance during the commercial crisis of the American War, revived in 1783, but closed again in 1794 as a result of another economic downturn.12 Music and drama were also popular: the huge Theatre Royal, opened in 1772, was one of the most expensive provincial theatres in Georgian England, while a Music Hall, which accommodated 1,400 people, opened in 1786. On the literary front, the first of the gentlemen’s subscription libraries in England had been founded in Liverpool in 1758 and became the Liverpool Library in 1769. The Lyceum should be seen as the successor of these earlier foundations rather than a self-conscious statement of civility by former slave traders.13 Contemporaries noted a powerful connection between Liverpool’s commercial growth and the construction of an impressive number of religious and charitable institutions: Successful commerce has been the fruitful source of wealth; what has been received in one hand has been liberally distributed with the other, in the erection of structures for the furtherance of grateful devotion, and of mansions for suffering humanity.14 This was an alternative form of cultural capital, one more appropriate to the concerns of this ‘nautical vortex’. In 1748, as Liverpool outstripped Bristol in the slave trade, the huge Liverpool Infirmary was opened to serve not only the town but, unusually, ‘all parts of this nation and Ireland;’ seven of the eleven original trustees were slave traders, as listed in the Liverpool Memorandum Book of 1752.15 A Seaman’s Hospital, a Lunatic Asylum and a Public Dispensary followed, adding to the charitable facilities. There was also provision for the spiritual needs of the town. Eyes’ map of 1765 provides visual testimony of the number, and more significantly, the diversity of churches and chapels in Liverpool during the era of the slave trade: five Anglican churches, seven Dissenters’ chapels, one synagogue and one Roman Catholic chapel are depicted. The prevailing metropolitan definition of civility did not fit this dynamic, provincial port where the more practical concerns of body and soul took priority over those of the mind. The alternative cultural mores of eighteenth-century Liverpool were shaped (and would continue to be shaped) by the limited leisure time of its mercantile community and by their consequent preoccupation with this life (or their reward in the next). There is no evidence that the existence of so many charitable and religious institutions was a conscious attempt by a slave-trading community to atone

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for its engagement in the traffic of human souls, although the shares and annual subscriptions which funded their construction and running costs must have been derived in part from the profits of the trade. Yet the cultural energy of the eighteenth-century town, defined in charitable and spiritual terms, was remarkable. It has been obscured by the subsequent, negative portrayal of the ‘Liverpool men’, which became the dominant image as their twentieth-century descendants tried to distance themselves from the town’s participation in the slave trade. None of this is to deny the influence of the slave trade on eighteenthcentury Liverpool but to suggest that its impact is more subtle than the suggested dehumanizing of the mercantile elite. Two major aspects of this impact will be examined: the relationship between slave-trade profits and the construction of the rapidly expanding town and the influence of the slave trade on its occupational structure. Recent work has emphasized the important links between transatlantic slavery in the eighteenth century and the socio-economic development of British ports involved in the trade. Madge Dresser, for example, has stressed the significance of the relationship between the slave trade and the economy of eighteenth-century Bristol, focusing in particular on urban development and on craft industries in Bristol and its surrounding region.16 She demonstrates connections between the development of the fashionable Queen Square in the early eighteenth century and Bristol’s growing reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent slaving port.17 Fortunes made in the slave trade were invested in country properties such as Arnos Court, two miles (3 kilometres) from the town centre, or the renovation of existing country houses such as Cleve Hill to the north-east of Bristol.18 Dresser also tries to disentangle the complex business interests of Bristol merchants in order to demonstrate the inter-relationship between the slave trade and emerging industrial concerns, such as glass-making, sugar-refining and copper-smelting. By the mid-century Bristol had been overtaken by Liverpool as Britain’s leading slaving port: slavers accounted for approximately one-seventh of the tonnage clearing from Liverpool in the 1750s and over half of the British ships said to be trading to Africa in 1750 were from Liverpool.19 By the 1790s slaving had reached its peak with 134 ships measuring 34,966 tons clearing from Liverpool to the coast of Africa in 1799. Thereafter the tonnage declined to 17,806 in 1807. Of course, tonnage figures alone give a rather misleading picture of the extent of investment in the slave trade: at the height of the slave trade in 1790 it was estimated that capital totalling £1.4 million was invested.20 Although there is disagreement as to the profitability of the trade,21 contemporary estimates suggested that Liverpool would lose heavily by its abolition. As the struggle for

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 231 abolition intensified, increasingly ludicrous claims were made regarding the possibility of economic ruin for Liverpool, although, privately, there was a growing acceptance of the anti-slavery argument of the liberal political economists that higher labour costs could be counterbalanced by increased productivity.22 This shift in attitudes was eased by the fact that most of the leading traders had a mixture of commercial interests, including significant trade with North America, and were able to make a relatively smooth shift away from the slave trade when abolition became a legal reality in 1807. Thomas Leyland is a good example. This Liverpool merchant had five ships engaged in the slave trade in 1789–90,23 as well as interests in Europe and North America and long-established trading links with Ireland. His major slave-trading concerns through the 1790s and early 1800s appeared to be no barrier to the establishment of a banking partnership with the abolitionist William Roscoe in 1802, although its dissolution in 1806 may have been linked to tension over Roscoe’s anti-slavery stance. Another banking partnership was established with Richard and Christopher Bullins, providing one of the forerunners of the future Midland Bank. Although slavery had provided one of the cornerstones of his business career, abolition did not dent Leyland’s success: on his death in 1827 he left a fortune of £600,000.24 Setting aside the debate about its profitability, it is undeniable that the slave trade was an important part of the economic life of the late eighteenth-century port. Contemporaries shared this view: an oft-quoted attack on Liverpool’s role in the slave trade occurred after the opening of the Theatre Royal in June 1772. After he had been hissed for (reputedly) being drunk on stage, the actor, George Cooke, told the audience that ‘there is not a brick in your dirty town but what is cemented by the blood of a negro’.25 How much truth was there in this insult? At a general level, it is clear that the slave trade was far from being the only source of commercial profit in Liverpool: merchants often had a mixture of interests in the African, North American, European and coasting trades. It is also obvious that the profits derived from trade would be reinvested in other commercial ventures, although the tangled mercantile interests of late eighteenthcentury Liverpool make it almost impossible to trace the lines of investment of the profits from specific trades. The problems of pinpointing exactly who was involved in the slave trade and the extent of their involvement have been considerably eased by the recent compilation of the Atlantic slave trade database. It has been suggested that this provides details of over 90 per cent of the voyages which left British ports, including 4,051 voyages starting from Liverpool in the eighteenth century.26 Patterns of ownership can be assembled from this database and checked against other sources,

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such as the ‘List of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa belonging to Liverpool, June 24, 1752’, found in a rare survival of a gentleman’s pocketbook, The Liverpool Memorandum Book. This list records 101 names and includes most of the leading merchants of the mid eighteenth-century town (including 12 members of the Corporation), although it is worth noting that there were slave traders in Liverpool who were not members of the Africa Company.27 The database can also be cross-referenced with the various biographical notes collected by local historians, such as Holt in the 1790s and Underhill in the late 1820s.28 The recent discovery of the large collection of papers relating to the Earle family has helped to shed further light on the complexity and fluidity of mercantile partnerships within the slave trade. For example, the instructions, dated 22 May 1751, to the young William Earle, captain of the Chesterfield, indicate that it was a slave ship jointly owned by William Whalley, Robert Hallhead, John Williamson, John Clayton, William Davenport, Piers Lee and Edward Lowndes.29 Fifteen years later William Earle was a full partner with William Davenport, Peter Holme, Thomas Hodgson, Ralph Earle, Thomas Earle and his brother-in-law, John Copeland, in a trading venture selling beads and other goods bartered for slaves. Copeland was captain of the Calypso, used by the partnership for trading in Africa in the early 1760s. William’s brother, Ralph, also had a share in a sugar refinery with Jonathan Blundell, Peter Holme, Thomas Hodgson, Patrick Black and Thomas Lickbarrow, according to articles of partnership dated April 1763.30 Further business interests are revealed in Gore’s Liverpool Directory for 1766: Ralph Earle is listed as a timber merchant and William as a merchant and ironmonger. Thus, the partnerships of the Earle family involved both overlapping and distinct membership, while their business profits were derived from a combination of interests in the timber and slave trades and associated industries, such as the production of metal goods and sugar-refining. All of the above partners (except William Davenport) were named in the ‘List of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa belonging to Liverpool, June 24, 1752’, helping to confirm its accuracy. The list is therefore a useful starting point for investigating the relationship between the slave trade and the physical development of Liverpool in a period of rapid growth. Relatively little research has focused on how contemporaries met the challenge of housing all of the additional inhabitants of late eighteenth-century Liverpool. The population virtually quadrupled from 5,714 in 1700 to about 22,000 by 1750;31 further spectacular growth then took place in the final quarter of the century, from 34,407 in 1774 to 88,358 in 1801. Were Liverpool homes built in this period ‘cemented by the blood of a negro’?

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 233 The extent of any explicit link between the slave traders identified in the list and speculation in building has been explored by matching the names of those merchants involved in the slave trade with references in the archives of the corporation estate. The Corporation of Liverpool was the ground landlord of approximately 900 acres (365 hectares) of central and south Liverpool, the site of much of the expansion of the eighteenthcentury town. Although a serious fire in the Town Hall in 1795 destroyed many of the early leases, a huge collection of counterpart leases, often surrendered when leases were renewed or reversions sold, remains in the Liverpool Record Office.32 In addition, the tireless efforts of Charles Okill, an early nineteenth-century town clerk, to bring order to these records resulted in a series of meticulous street registers, recording the sequence of leases for every block of land on the estate.33 This extremely large collection of leasing documents, covering much of the central area, allows some conclusions to be drawn about the links between the slave trade and the construction of housing to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding town. Preliminary correlation of the street registers and leasing documents with the records of the slave trade reveal that the majority of active slave traders do not appear to have been drawn into building speculation, although other merchants were clearly involved.34 The explanation may be fairly simple: slave-trading partnerships required large sums of capital and this investment remained tied up for the relatively long duration of slaving voyages (12–24 months). Other merchants had more flexible reserves of capital and were possibly able to invest more easily in property speculation, although it is also evident that such speculation gave a safe rather than an exciting rate of return. Merchants preferred to invest in sugar-houses, distilleries, breweries, glass-houses and pot-houses rather than urban infrastructure or house-building. Investment in land was a different matter. Blocks of land on the corporation estate were enclosed and leased from the 1690s onwards. Landholding in the fields of both the corporation estate and the freehold area to the north of the town appeared to be a common part of the portfolio of Liverpool merchants. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact use of these holdings, although it was probably agricultural. A view of the town and harbour taken from the south in 1770 shows fields in the foreground with a cluster of untidy haystacks, a group of haymakers and a loaded haycart.35 Substantial merchants, including many slave traders, leased these large blocks of land, often retaining their holdings until the demand for housing triggered development. William Goodwin, listed as a slave trader in 1752, was typical of such investors, leasing two fields totalling almost 5 acres (2 hectares) to the south of the town in 1740. Resignation from the town

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council in February 1770 may have marked his retirement from active business and possibly triggered his decision to assign the two fields to developers in June 1773. It is interesting that Goodwin himself played no role in the speculative development of the land and the construction of the houses. Other slave traders of the 1740s and 1750s, such as Edmund Ogden and Thomas Mears, also leased large blocks of land after they had retired from active business, suggesting that land was regarded as a solid investment of surplus funds in contrast to the more speculative ventures of their mercantile careers. Foster Cunliffe, Sons and Co., who were leading slave merchants in the 1750s, held three fields to the north of the town located in the area of the original town fields.36 The Cunliffes, who also had interests in the Virginia and West Indian trades, were pillars of the Liverpool community. Foster Cunliffe had been Mayor in 1729 and was described as ‘benevolent’ by one local historian; his son, Ellis, was MP for Liverpool between 1754 and 1767 and President of the Infirmary in 1757; his other son, Robert, was Mayor in 1758.37 Despite the considerable wealth amassed from their trading ventures, they do not appear to have become involved in building speculation, with only one known exception. Sir Ellis Cunliffe leased a plot of unbuilt land on the south side of the Old Dock from the Corporation in 1758; within two years a warehouse and three houses had been erected on this ground. John Parr, a slave merchant and gunsmith, leased two fields adjoining Copperas Hill totalling nearly 3 acres (2 hectares) in 1764. The lease was renewed in 1768 and 1772, but the ground was still unbuilt when he died in October 1798. It was sold for £2,000 to Jonas Bold, another Liverpool merchant, in 1801 and then resold four years later for a higher price (£3,262 10s) to a group of solicitors acting as property developers.38 There is an intriguing exception to this arms-length relationship with building speculation. It appears that slave traders were willing to diversify and use their business links to engage in speculative building during downturns in the economic cycle.39 Cornelius Bourne, Joseph Rathbone, Edward Mason and James Greetham had interests as timber merchants and, hence, worked closely with shipwrights, boatbuilders, joiners and carpenters. This allowed them to move easily between engagement in the timber and slave trades, shipbuilding and building speculation, with local joiners playing a particularly pivotal role as sub-contractors to other building craftsmen. Mason was involved in about six slave-trading partnerships between 1766 and 1773, Bourne is recorded as a partner only in the latter year. There is no record of Rathbone or Greetham being involved directly in the slave trade. As war loomed with the American colonies, the four timber merchants were the developers who bought the two fields from Goodwin for £1,540 in 1773, possibly holding them in the same

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 235 proportions (one-sixth, one-third, one-sixth and one-third respectively) as their business partnership. Within six months they had agreed with the Corporation that they would build houses and make a street 12 yards (11 metres) wide through a designated part of the two fields. It was a slow process, going beyond the dissolution of the partnership in 1791. Building continued for nearly 30 years, by which time 15 substantial houses had been constructed fronting Great George Street.40 In this instance, the buildings had been cemented partly by the profits of the slave trade and partly by those derived from the timber trade and shipbuilding. There were other examples of a coincidence between the onset of a recession and the use of profits from the slave trade to meet the increasing demand for housing in the last quarter of the century. John Sparling and his partner William Bolden began as merchants trading to Virginia in the 1750s, importing tar, turpentine and tobacco and exporting salt, woollen goods and hardware. Between 1768 and 1773 they joined a number of slave-trading partnerships, using ships constructed either in Liverpool or in North America. They began to speculate in land for building in south and east Liverpool in the years leading up to the recession during the American War of Independence. Once again, building speculation may have offered an alternative form of investment as the slave trade came to a standstill. Sparling was involved in a total of 22 recorded slave voyages,41 and these would undoubtedly have provided some of the capital for the construction of the small houses lining Norfolk Street and Lime Street. These were, however, exceptions, which may have been linked to periods of commercial difficulty. It appears that the majority of slave traders were not interested in diversifying into this type of speculation, especially while they were still active in business. Investment in their own residences was another matter. As in Bristol, slave traders invested in the aggrandizement of their personal property. Arthur and Benjamin Heywood, Henry Hardwar and Thomas Seel, all of whom appeared in the list of Africa merchants in 1752, built magnificent homes in Hanover Street. This was Liverpool’s most fashionable street in the 1740s and 1750s, as is shown in a later drawing by W. G. Herdman. Seel acquired the lease of land adjoining Hanover Street in 1743 and built an impressive, stone-fronted house with extensive gardens to the rear.42 Henry Hardwar was granted a lease of a new house ‘by him built in Hanover Street’ in January 1751.43 The Heywood brothers had been left a large fortune after their father’s death in 1725. Arthur arrived in Liverpool in 1731 and was apprenticed for five years to John Hardman of Allerton Hall; Benjamin arrived ten years later and served his apprenticeship with James Crosbie. Both Hardman and Crosbie were listed as Africa merchants

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in 1752. Although the Heywoods clearly possessed inherited wealth, they may also have used some of their profits from the slave trade to build their matching houses in Hanover Street in 1759 (as well as marrying a pair of sisters).44 At this stage they were in the midst of a sequence of eight slave voyages, lasting from 1753 to 1764, in partnership with John Penkett. They went on to found a banking business, supporting F. E. Hyde’s argument that banking and insurance concerns were a major by-product of Liverpool’s involvement with the slave trade.45 The development of the insurance infrastructure was particularly important given the amount of capital tied up in slaving voyages. It is no coincidence that five out of the six insurance offices listed in The Liverpool Memorandum Book in 1752 were run by Africa merchants. Later in the century, merchants with interests in the slave trade purchased country estates in Lancashire, Cheshire and beyond. Perry’s map of 1769 showing the environs of Liverpool includes country seats within a 5-mile (8-kilometre) radius of the town. Thomas Leyland, who was highly active in the slave trade after 1775, moved to Walton Hall, north of Liverpool, after his retirement from business. When Sparling retired in 1796 he purchased the St Domingo estate in the nearby village of Everton and remodelled the existing house into an impressive mansion.46 It is, however, impossible to assess the exact extent to which the proceeds of the slave trade rather than other commercial interests funded this process of gentrification. The case of John Blackburne indicates the need for caution. Blackburne had a house in Hanover Street, as well as a country estate at Orford Hall, near Warrington. Yet, despite his appearance in the list of 1752, he was not the lead partner in any of the voyages listed and probably derived the bulk of his fortune from the salt trade and his salt works in Liverpool. The immediate impact of the slave trade may have been far greater on less affluent citizens of Liverpool, notably the thousands of workers who were involved in manufacturing goods for the African trade, building and supplying the slave ships, and providing their crews. Although Liverpool was later to become a predominantly commercial and distributive centre, the eighteenth-century town had a surprisingly large manufacturing sector. Recent work on the parish registers and probate records of the community has revealed employment typical of both a port and a town, and suggests that from the 1700s, Liverpool was ‘a town with an enclave of high-class craftsmanship’.47 This multi-occupational structure persisted throughout the period; indeed, there is evidence that the number of craftsmen was demonstrating a relative increase in the second half of the eighteenth century. Langton and Laxton noted this trend in their study of parish registers in Liverpool in this period:

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 237 Liverpool shifted significantly towards being a major manufacturing town during the early canal age, of which it was a leading promoter, and then back again to a more monolithic seaport by the early nineteenth century.48 They calculated that 57.8 per cent of the occupations listed in 1,922 baptism entries between 1765 and 1766 were in manufacturing, using the categories established in the 1861 census. This dropped to about 25–30 per cent by 1810, while the percentage of ‘labourers’ increased from 10 to 30 per cent in the same period.49 There has been virtually no analysis of the causes or consequences of this fairly dramatic shift in the occupational structure of Liverpool during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Is it possible to argue that the rapid rise and fall of Liverpool as Britain’s leading slaving port in this period contributed to these fluctuations in patterns of employment? Tables 8.1 and 8.2 give an indication of the scale and rapid growth of the slave trade in proportion to the overall tonnage of the port. Table 8.1.  Number of vessels belonging to the port of Liverpool and total tonnage figures. Year

Number of vessels

Tonnage

1565

12

225

1701

102

8,619

1787

445

72,731

1790

504

80,003

1800

796

140,633

Source: Data collated from Liverpool Record Office, 942 HOL/10, 297, and from notes on the history of Liverpool attributed to James Williamson and begun in 1783, Liverpool Record Office, 352 CLE/TRA 3/1, 275.

Of course, crude tonnage figures reveal little about either the nature or the value of these cargoes. Despite the fact that slaving ships constituted only a relatively small proportion of Liverpool’s total tonnage, the value of the cargoes was high and became more so towards the end of the century as the size of the vessels increased.50 Slave ships left Liverpool carrying substantial quantities of manufactured goods, in contrast to the high volume of raw materials from the hinterland, such as coal and salt, carried by other vessels owned by the port. Although it is impossible to identify the exact provenance of these manufactured goods, there is an undeniable link between the slave trade and the local production of high-value items such

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery Table 8.2.  Number of ships trading from Liverpool to Africa and total tonnage figures. Year

Number of ships

Tonnage

1709

1

30

1730

15

1,111

1737

33

2,756

1753

72

7,547

1755

41

4,052

1760

74

8,178

1761

69

7,309

1772

100

10,150

1779

11

1,205

1790

91

17,917

1791

102

19,610

1799

134

34,966

Source: Data collated from Liverpool Record Office, 942 HOL/10, 297, and from notes on the history of Liverpool attributed to James Williamson and begun in 1783, Liverpool Record Office, 352 CLE/ TRA 3/1, 275.

as guns and copperware, as well as those of lower value, such as bottles of beer, clay pipes and earthenware. The surviving records of a number of Liverpool slave traders provide an indication of the range of commodities required for the slaving voyage. In the 1780s and 1790s the records of Robert Bostock, a relatively small operator, and of Thomas Leyland, who was involved in more substantial undertakings, listed similar items in their cargo inventories.51 Bostock sailed a number of his own vessels, agonizing endlessly about the financial risks of being a sole proprietor, and kept precise records of payments. His invoice for merchandise shipped on board the sloop Kate in the mid-1780s totals £1,865 13s 2d, with most spent on fabric and a significant amount (£213 10s 4d) paid for ‘guns, cutlasses and swords’. Although there is a reference to ‘purchasing goods in London and Manchester’, this probably applied to the imported Indian textiles and home–produced fabric, rather than the earthenware, glass, clay pipes, knives and iron bars included in the invoice.52 Table 8.3, a summary of items in a cargo list for a Lancaster slave ship in 1792, demonstrates that Bostock was shipping a standard range of goods to exchange for slaves in West Africa.

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 239 Table 8.3.  Expenditure on cargo for the voyage of the Hope from Lancaster to Africa, 1792. £

s

d

Metal goods

498

3

1

Textiles

413

17

0

Guns

337

18

6

Beads

212

10

11

Knives and iron

137

14

7

Silk or cotton squares

102

10

0

Salt

80

1

9

Earthenware

39

3

4

4

12

0

Bracelets

Source: Figures aggregated from M. Elder, The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth-Century Lancaster (Halifax, 1992), Appendix A, 211–12.

Leyland’s vessel sailed in 1798 and was carrying over £8,000 worth of goods. His account book for the voyage of the Lottery in 1798 provides details of this considerable initial outlay.53 Once again, the largest proportion of expenditure was on extensive quantities of textiles, with ‘India’ goods brought from London. Other significant items listed were barrels of gunpowder, copper and brass goods, particularly the large brass pots or neptunes for cooking or boiling salt water, bottles of beer and spirits, various caps and felt hats, and boxes of clay pipes. The lesser group of textiles, referred to as ‘Manchester goods’, was probably shipped to Liverpool, although the large number of woollen and linen drapers listed in the directories might provide some indication of the distribution network. Supplying the extensive cargo and fitting out ships setting sail for the coast of West Africa would therefore have provided employment for numerous craftsmen. It is, however, difficult to piece together the extent of this ‘enclave of high-class craftsmanship’, as no business records survive for the majority of these concerns. Visual sources provide an indication of these embryonic forms of manufacturing industry. For example, the earliest view of Liverpool from the south-west, drawn and engraved by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck of London in 1728, identifies a copperas-house, a glasshouse and a sugar-house. Chadwick’s map of 1725 shows the location of this glass-house near the wet dock and also features the Blackburne family’s salt works. Other records

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confirm the importance of these ventures in terms of exports: a case in the Palatinate court of Lancaster, dated 1 February 1745, records that the late Arthur Hamilton was a merchant ‘of very great dealings’, who ‘frequently exported great quantities of glass from Liverpool’.54 T. S. Willan’s heroic analysis of the records of the English coasting trade also notes the carriage of salt, glass and earthenware from Liverpool in the 1740s.55 By 1765, the growth in the number of manufacturing concerns was marked. John Eyes’ map shows three glass-houses, two silk mills, two breweries, one sugarhouse and one salt-house, at least 13 roperies, three white roperies, one dye-house, one pot-house and about 12 ship- or boat-builders’ yards. Other sources relating to the workforce add more texture but present problems of interpretation. Liverpool has ten editions of Gore’s Directory between 1766 and 1800, but these cover only a small fraction of the total population. The 1766 Directory, for example, lists only 1,134 names of ‘merchants, tradesmen and principal inhabitants’ out of a total population of about 30,000. The problems of using this type of source are well rehearsed but, nonetheless, the sequence of directories is of value in illustrating the existence and relative importance of branches of manufacturing. The growth in the following categories between 1766 and 1769 is apparent (1769 figures in brackets): 2 (4) silk weavers; 2 (4) pipe makers; 6 (7) hat makers; 8 (9) sugar bakers; 14 (16) potters; and 13 (23) watch makers; 1 (3) iron founders; 2 (4) glass-houses and 3 (4) gunsmiths. In addition, a brass foundry and a copper works are listed in 1769. The latter had opened in January 1768, with disastrous consequences for the vegetation of the adjoining gardens.56 After a legal case, it was moved 1 mile (1.6 kilometres) southwards in 1771. By 1792, the copper works had 35 furnaces worked by 80 men and supplied brass and battery wares for the slave trade.57 In addition, there was an increasing demand for the sheathing of slave ships with copper to prevent infestations by a tropical wood-boring parasite. It is unsurprising that the first vessel to be sheathed in Liverpool in 1778 belonged to a slave trader, William Boats.58 As the directories claimed to list only the ‘principal inhabitants’ it is difficult to gain a picture of other trades needed in a growing port and employing large numbers of skilled craftsmen. Even the more accurate representation provided by the first official census in 1801 is unhelpful, since it gives limited quantitative information about occupations. There are hints that those listed in the directories were only the most significant master craftsmen. William Turton, for example, who was listed as a gunsmith, appears in the 1801 census living on the south side of the Old Dock in a house with five males and 60 females in 26 families.59 Was this a craft workshop for the manufacture of guns? Further figures of craftsmen (if not women) emerge from a list of freemen voters in 1784, with a high number

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 241 involved in ship- and boat-building – 145 shipwrights, 48 boat-builders, 106 ropers, 101 coopers, 36 blockmakers and 25 sailmakers.60 Most would have obtained their freedom through apprenticeship and those listed would therefore have been masters or journeymen, with numbers of additional apprentices. Finally, slave ships required crews who would have been drawn from the 20–30 per cent of Liverpool’s workforce who were described as ‘mariners’ in the early eighteenth-century parish registers.61 William Moss’s Liverpool Guide of 1796 is oddly dismissive of the manufacturing capacity of late eighteenth-century Liverpool, noting: The principal manufactures, therefore, are chiefly confined to what is necessary to the construction and equipment of ships: the number of shipwrights, only, is said to exceed 3000. Yet Moss then proceeds to list the salt works, ‘several’ cotton mills and sugar-houses, two or three iron foundries, pipe manufactures, a ‘small’ glass-house, ‘extensive’ watch-making and ‘a great many’ windmills.62 It is tempting to conclude that the scale of the shipbuilding industry had restricted Moss’s appreciation of the range of other manufacturing concerns in Liverpool. Writing in 1792, Holt provided a little more detail of the shipbuilding industry. He noted the existence of nine shipbuilding and three boatbuilding yards, adding that there had been a ten-fold increase in the rents by the Corporation landlord over the preceding 30 years. He also claimed that about 30 vessels were built each year, the most common size being 300 tons, and a special feature being the ‘lodging of slaves for African vessels’.63 Evidence relating to eighteenth-century merchant shipbuilding is extremely scarce but a rare example emerges from the letter books of the slave trader, Robert Bostock. In December 1791 he refers to the construction of his new ship, a large vessel capable of holding 210 slaves and built in Quirk’s Yard.64 Other sources suggest quite extensive shipbuilding activity, which compared favourably with the major output of the east coast ports.65 While some of the craft industries, such as pottery and pipe-making, were also serving a rapidly expanding home market – Liverpool acted as the commercial entrepôt for an increasingly heavily populated hinterland 66 – the range of manufacturing concerns closely resembled those of other eighteenth-century slaving ports, such as Bristol and Glasgow, and shipbuilding centres, such as Hull.67 Yet most of these concerns, including shipbuilding, were to disappear from Liverpool in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with only the sugar-refining industry surviving this transition. Liverpool became a specialized commercial and distributive centre and was unable to retain the type of mixed economy that existed

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in ports such as Glasgow. The loss of craft-based production in Liverpool weakened the occupational structure of the port and rendered the workforce more vulnerable to the vagaries of trade cycles. In contrast, Glasgow’s craftbased workforce was able to retain its shipbuilding industry and to diversify into iron and steel production. Why did these manufacturing concerns fail in Liverpool? Previous explanations have ranged across the trend towards specialized centres of production (e.g. the Potteries for ceramics and St. Helen’s for glass), the rising cost of coal in the 1790s (given as the reason for the closure of the copper works), the relentless growth of the dock estate (suggesting that shipbuilding yards were forced across the river to Birkenhead, where Laird began building iron ships in 1828), and the arrival of cheap, unskilled Irish labour from 1798.68 Hyde analysed the particular decline of shipbuilding from a high point in 1800 and claimed that after 1815, merchant capital sought cheaper suppliers on the east coast or overseas in Canada.69 Oddly, the impact of the rapid rise and fall of the slave trade on the occupational structure of Liverpool has not been given much consideration, despite the fact that a significant number of craftsmen and tradesmen were involved in building, repairing and fitting out the vessels for the slave trade, as well as supplying items for the cargoes. According to evidence provided to the parliamentary commissioners appointed to consider all matters relating to trade and foreign plantations in 1787, the balance between these two activities was approximately 33: 66 per cent, although it has been more difficult, until recently, to establish total numbers of workers employed in supporting this trade.70 The Atlantic slave trade database has transformed our knowledge of the relationship between the slave trade and shipbuilding in Liverpool: the ‘place of construction’ listed for almost half of the ships used in 4,051 recorded slaving voyages from the port between 1701 and 1800 is given as Liverpool. By comparison, only 267 of the 2,042 slaving voyages recorded from Bristol between these dates refer to local construction of the vessel.71 The slave trade therefore played a crucial role in the growth of the domestic economy of Liverpool. Although the long-standing coastal trade in the staple raw materials of the Lancashire and Cheshire hinterland provided underlying security for the port, the slave trade generated additional employment for thousands of craftsmen, tradesmen and sailors. The lull in the African trade in 1775 was a clear illustration of this dependence: an attempt by merchants to reduce the wages of sailors employed on the slave ships met with fierce resistance. Violent riots, including a cannon attack on the Exchange, had to be subdued by troops called from Manchester.72 Similarly, an indication of the importance of the slave trade to the craftsmen is evident after the Act of 1788 imposed a limit on the number

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 243 of slaves to be carried in slave ships. Contemporary calculations in the Holt papers, dated 1790, suggest that about 10 per cent of the seamen, tradesmen and labourers involved in the building and fitting of ships had been laid off as a result. This total of 1,007 people included shipwrights, boatbuilders, coopers and house carpenters, as well as small numbers of plumbers and glaziers, braziers, block and pump makers, anchorsmiths, ironmongers, sailmakers, ropers and white coopers. A fairly crude aggregation would suggest that about 10,000 tradesman, craftsmen and seamen or about 1 in 8 of the population (plus their families) were reliant on the trade by 1790.73 This is in keeping with David Richardson’s estimate that, at the height of Bristol’s involvement, 40 per cent of the income of the town was derived from the slave trade.74 The heavy reliance of all of these workers on the slave trade was given forceful expression in the series of petitions against abolition submitted to Parliament in April and May 1789. These petitions reflected Liverpool’s dominant role in the trade by the 1790s: in comparison with the single petitions from Lancaster, Bristol, Glasgow and Birmingham, there were 12 petitions from Liverpool. This may have been an orchestrated opposition campaign – a number of the petitions share the same phrases – but the range of interests represented in the petitions give a rare insight into the crucial relationship between the slave trade and manufacturing in late eighteenth-century Liverpool. Manufacturers of and dealers in iron, copper, brass and lead ‘so connected with the building of and supplying the outset and cargoes of the many ships employed in the African trade from the said port’ complained that ‘thousands of industrious artificers will thereby be reduced to a most distressing situation, perhaps be sent forth solitary wanderers into the world, to seek employment in foreign climes’. Similar claims were made by the sailmakers, joiners, shipwrights ‘who for numbers vie with all other trades in the said populous sea port’, ropemakers, coopers, blockmakers and bakers. The petition of the gunmakers of Liverpool is particularly interesting. It notes the ‘essential’ role of small arms in the cargoes of slave ships and adds that thousands of workmen are dependent on this trade ‘in time of peace’.75 The petitions had a clear propaganda dimension, but they are still of value in indicating the nature and scale of the contribution of the slave trade to the rise (and fall) of Liverpool’s early manufacturing sector. The picture is, of course, complicated by other factors, such as the decline of trade with North America during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Liverpool watchmakers, for example, supplied the North American market: according to one estimate, 5,000 watches were made in Liverpool and district in 1792 and the war must have disrupted this trade.76 The bankruptcy of the Islington China Manufactory in 1800 and the Flint Mug

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Works in 1808 probably reflected the damage to this trade during wartime: previously such goods had been manufactured in great quantities for export, often decorated with images of ships, local events or even slave-trading.77 Conversely, twenty-three years of war may have rescued the gunmakers, as suggested above, while the late eighteenth-century copper industry was able to shift from the slave trade to supplying the needs of the navy.78 The latter was possibly another factor in the relocation of the copper works from Liverpool to Neath, close to the coalfields of South Wales, in 1794.79 In fact, the economic turbulence of wartime may have masked the decline of some of the industries associated with the slave trade, such as pipe-making. In the 1790s there were seven pipe manufacturers in Liverpool, employing about 60 male workers and an equal number of female finishers. Holt wrote, ‘besides home consumption tobacco pipes are articles of exportation to every part of the world but chiefly to Africa’.80 The pipemakers hung on grimly, submitting yet another anti-abolition petition in 1804, but their fortunes must have plummeted in the wake of abolition in 1807.81 Although the alarming figures provided by the anti-abolition lobby must be treated with caution, they offer a further indication of the links between the slave trade and the occupational structure of the port. Calculations made in 1790 suggested a total loss of £7.6 million over twenty years in terms of lost profits for merchants, reduced income for craftsmen such as boatbuilders, carpenters, braziers, sailmakers, blockmakers and ropers, and declining rentals for houses occupied by the 3,853 seamen employed in the slave trade (on the slightly dubious assumption that these men and their families would have to leave the port in search of alternative work).82 Of course, there is a danger that the focus on the economy of the port alone ignores the critically important relationships between Liverpool and its region. Jon Stobart has recently redressed this balance in his study of the economy of the north-west region, demonstrating that Liverpool acted as the commercial focal point for a network of towns and smaller villages in the eighteenth century.83 Yet, once again, the importance of the slave trade in determining the fate of early industrial enterprises has been overlooked. The copper industry offers a good example. There were close links between the slave trade and copper works based in Warrington, Cheadle (Staffordshire) and Holywell (Flintshire).84 A Swedish visitor to the copper works at Holywell in Flintshire in 1754 described the hammering of copper rods and other items specifically for the trade with West Africa.85 Similarly there has been little attempt to estimate the role of the slave trade in building the infrastructure of the Lancashire textile industry. One of the major items in the cargo list of any slave ship was textiles. Holt’s figures indicate that slave ships were carrying a substantial volume of international cloth, but ‘Manchester goods’ were competing strongly with

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 245 Indian textiles. The term was used broadly to cover textile manufacture across south-west Lancashire, with linen and cotton being particularly important in Leigh, Wigan and districts, and in the villages around Manchester. It is therefore no surprise that in addition to the petitions submitted by the Liverpool craftsmen in 1789 against the abolition of the slave trade there was one from the ‘manufacturers of goods in the town and neighbourhood of Manchester’, which asserted that ‘many thousand women are constantly employed’ in making goods for the African trade.86 There were also connections between the expanding Staffordshire pottery trade and the slave trade. Large quantities of Staffordshire pottery had begun to be exported via Liverpool after transport links improved with the opening of the Weaver Navigation in 1733. Although much of this output went to the North American market, where there was a large demand for Staffordshire cream-coloured ware, Joseph Bird of Liverpool listed in ‘the Company of Merchants trading to Africa’ in 1752 took large consignments of Staffordshire pottery between 1734 and 1760.87 The evidence for such links is, of course, fragmentary, but it suggests that there are elements of truth in earlier generalizations about the relationship between the slave trade and the onset of industrialization in Lancashire.88 The outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars may have masked some of the difficulties which would have been faced by the textile and metal–working industries, including armaments production, after the abolition of the slave trade. The steady expansion of the home market may also have helped to absorb the ‘African’ output of the lesser industries. Moreover, one industry both pre-dated and survived the period of the slave trade. Sugar-boiling had begun in Liverpool in the 1660s, exploiting the opportunities offered by the decline of the flourishing Dutch sugar-refining industry.89 In this instance, industrial and commercial partnerships overlapped, with Liverpool slave traders often having shares in sugar-houses. For example, Samuel and Edmund Ogden appear in the ‘List of Merchants Trading to Africa’ in 1752: Ogden and Company’s sugar-house was listed in a rental of 1750 as located in Hanover Street.90 By 1766, Gore’s Liverpool Directory listed five sugar-houses in Pluckington’s Alley, John Street, Redcross Street, Haymarket and Castle Street. Sugarrefining was to outlive its association with the slave trade and maintain a presence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Liverpool. Interestingly, this undermines the argument that the growth of the commercial infrastructure of docks and warehouses created an anti-industrial ethos, which accounted for the decline of the craft sector. The full economic impact of the slave trade on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Liverpool will never be entirely disaggregated

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from other economic indices. Leading merchants were able to anticipate abolition and transfer investment from the slave trade to new trades and new markets. Cotton imports were to increase nine-fold between 1800 and 1850, a new source of prosperity symbolized by the founding of the American Chamber of Commerce in Liverpool in 1801. The East India Company monopoly was broken and the Indian market opened in 1813. But, while the larger slave traders had wider interests or had already begun to diversify in the 1790s, the small craftsmen may have lacked the flexibility to move into alternative commercial ventures. Amid the commercial confusion of wartime, their fortunes counted for little but, for many of the population, the slave trade had been a major part of their livelihood. Abolition therefore marked a major fault line for the potters, glassmakers, pipe makers, copper workers and especially the shipbuilders. For Liverpool the era of the skilled craftsman had passed and the monooccupational structure of the nineteenth-century port came into being. Fetching and carrying replaced manufacturing. While the wider north-west region may have benefited from the early stimulus to industrial production provided by the slave trade, it is less clear that Liverpool derived entirely positive gains from its participation in the slave trade. Apart from the fortunes gained (and lost) by individual merchants and the flow of funds into charitable and religious buildings, the legacy of the slave trade for Liverpool was more questionable. The identification of the ‘Liverpool men’ with this increasingly disreputable branch of commerce created a deeply negative image of eighteenth-century Liverpool, which was to be further compounded by the squalor and poverty of the Victorian city. More subtly, the fledgling manufacturing base of the town was too tightly linked to the dramatic rise of the slave trade. Abolition broke this link and destabilized the manufacturing sector, leaving Liverpool with the predominantly semi-skilled and unskilled workforce which was to lie at the heart of so many of its future problems in industrial relations.

Notes

1. For example, J. Corry, A History of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1810), 92, condemns Liverpool merchants of the 1760s as having ‘vulgar, unrefined amusements’. 2. Merseyside Maritime Museum (hereafter MMM), D/CR/12/15, 6, Cropper Papers. 3. S. G. Checkland, ‘Economic Attitudes in Liverpool 1793–1807’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, V (1952), 58–75; I. C. Taylor, ‘The Court and Cellar Dwelling: the Eighteenth-Century Origin of the Liverpool Slum’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 122 (1971), 81, n. 49. 4. J. Stobart, ‘Culture versus Commerce: Societies and Spaces for Elites in

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

Eighteenth-Century Liverpool’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28 (2002), 471–85. R. Brooke, Liverpool as it was During the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century (Liverpool, 1853), 233. Brooke, Liverpool as it was, 236. Liverpool Record Office (hereafter LRO), 942 BIC/1, 35, T. H. Bickerton Papers: letter from A. Brocklebank to T. H. Bickerton, 31 March 1917. This may not have been the case: there are references to William Brocklebank, sole owner of three ships which undertook a total of four slaving voyages to the West Indies between 1799 and 1807, in D. Eltis, S. D. Behrendt, D. Richardson and H. S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). J. Wallace, A General and Descriptive History of … Liverpool (Liverpool, 1795), 170, 283. Wallace, General and Descriptive History, 284. P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989). LRO, 920 MAY, Mayer Papers, box 9. H. Smithers, Liverpool, its Commerce, Statistics and Institutions (Liverpool, 1825), 331–36. T. Kelly, A History of Adult Education in Great Britain (Liverpool, 1970), 86. Smithers, Liverpool, 16. LRO, 614 INF 5/1, Liverpool Infirmary: Report and Subscription Book, 1748–1780; Auditors’ Report, 1748–49, f. 25. M. Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port (London and New York, 2001). Dresser, Slavery Obscured, 105–08. Dresser, Slavery Obscured, 110–16. Dresser (Slavery Obscured, 36) notes that out of the total of 134 ships, 75 were from Liverpool, 47 from Bristol, 6 from Chester, Lancaster or Plymouth, and 6 were ‘presumed’ from London. LRO, 942HOL/10, 444. See, for example, the debates on the profitability of the Liverpool slave trade in the Journal of Economic History, vols 41 (1981), 43 (1983) and 45 (1985). D. Turley, Slavery (Oxford, 2000), 148–49. See Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. J. Hughes, Liverpool Banks and Bankers (Liverpool, 1906). Quoted in R. Muir, Bygone Liverpool (Liverpool, 1913), 59. Muir took this quotation from Mathews’ Anecdotes of Actors. It appears to have been a standard insult in slaving towns: Dresser (Slavery Obscured, 96), records an almost identical quotation relating to Bristol. Eltis, et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 7–8. For example, there are 17 additional names on the following page of the memorandum book in a list of owners of vessels trading from Liverpool to the coast of Africa in December 1752. Held at the LRO as 942 HOL and 942 UND respectively. MMM, D/Earle/1/1. MMM, D/Earle/4/1–2, Partnership Papers, 1763–1836.

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31. C. Chalklin, The Rise of the English Town 1650–1850 (Cambridge, 2001), 33. 32. LRO, 352CLE/CON/2, Counterpart and surrendered leases of Corporation property, 17th to 20th centuries, broken series 357–952 and 22–11516. The existing sequence of these documents was broken in a move from Toxteth Branch Library, where they had been held for many years. They are currently awaiting further cataloguing at LRO. 33. LRO, 352CLE/CON/5/21–35, Street Registers, compiled by Charles Okill between 1819 and 1822. 34. This is discussed more fully in J. Longmore, ‘The Development of the Liverpool Corporation Estate 1760–1835’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, 1983), chapter 6. 35. LRO, Local Illustrations Collection 294, A View of the Town and Harbour of Liverpool, taken from the Bowling Green, near the Public Walk, 1770. Coloured lithograph by Edward Rooker, after Michael Angelo Rooker. 36. Indicated on Charles Eyes’ map of 1785. 37. LRO, MD 72, Correspondence received by Foster Cunliffe when Mayor of Liverpool 1729–30; 942UND/3, Underhill Papers: ‘Biographies of Eminent Persons’. 38. LRO, 352CLE/CON 3/1, Lease Register, 1669–1741. 39. Christopher Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England (London, 1974), 264, notes that capital may have moved into building speculation in 1776–77 due to the stagnation of foreign trade. 40. LRO, 352CLE/CON/2, bundle 609B, Great George Street. 41. After the war Sparling invested in four sole-owner voyages and two partnerships, culminating in the capture of the Mermaid by the French in 1794. 42. H. Peet, Thomas Steers. The Engineer of Liverpool’s First Dock (London, 1932), 20, claims that this house was designed by the Liverpool dock engineer, Thomas Steers, in about 1740. R. Muir casts some doubt on the date of the house, suggesting that it was built between 1730 and 1740 (Muir, Bygone Liverpool, 92), which would have been during the lifetime of Seel’s father. Samuel Seel, also a merchant, died in March 1746, aged 37, and was buried in St Nicholas Church. 43. LRO, 352MIN/COU 1/1/10, Town Books, vol.10, f. 464, 4 January 1751. 44. The Heywoods took out separate leases of their shares in a yard, warehouse and other buildings on the East side of Hanover Street and Gradwell’s Weint, purchased from Sir Ellis Cunliffe, from the Corporation on 6 June 1759. An entry in the Town Books refers to them building ‘two good houses to the front of Hanover Street’, LRO, 352 MIN/COU 1/1/11, Town Books, vol. 11, f. 110, 6 June 1759. 45. F. E. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey 1700–1970 (London, 1971), 18. Hyde notes that merchants founded 10 out of the 14 banks of importance in late eighteenthcentury Liverpool. See also Hughes, Liverpool Banks and Bankers. 46. M. M. Schofield, ‘The Virginia Trade of the Firm of Sparling and Bolden of Liverpool, 1788–99’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 116 (1965), 117–65. 47. D. E. Ascott, F. Lewis and M. J. Power, Liverpool, 1660–1750: People, Prosperity and Power (Liverpool, 2006), 37–62. 48. J. Langton and P. Laxton, ‘Parish Registers and Urban Structure: The Example

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 249 of Eighteenth-Century Liverpool’, Urban History Yearbook (Leicester, 1978), 82. 49. Langton and Laxton, ‘Parish Registers and Urban Structure’, 84. 50. LRO, 942/HOL, 301, lists the outlay on ships and cargoes employed in the African slave trade from the port of Liverpool in March 1790. According to Holt’s figures, the largest trader, John Dawson, owned 19 ships, with an average of just over £10,000 invested in each vessel. 51. LRO, 942/HOL, 301 and 372, list vessels trading to Africa from 1787 to 1790. Bostock appears to have had three small vessels of 50, 50 and 45 tons, carrying a total of 210 slaves. Leyland had four ships totalling 701 tons in 1790. 52. LRO, 387 MD, Letter Book of Robert Bostock, 1779–90, 23–27. 53. LRO, Hq 326.1 TEA, Account book of the voyage of the Lottery, 1798–99. 54. The National Archives, PL6/76/32, Palatine Chancery Court, 1 February 1745. 55. T. S. Willan, The English Coasting Trade, 1600–1750 (Manchester, 1967, 2nd edition), 183. 56. LRO, 352 MIN/COU 1/1/11, Town Books, vol. 11, f. 463, 6 July 1768. A petition from John Critchley, gardener, claimed that he would be ruined by the new copper-smelting and refining house. 57. W. H. Chaloner, ‘Charles Roe of Macclesfield, 1715–81, Part 2’, Transactions of the Antiquarian Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 63 (1954), 52–86. 58. J. Harris, Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France (Aldershot, 1992), 192–93. 59. P. Laxton, ‘Liverpool in 1801: A Manuscript Return for the First National Census of Population’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 130 (1981), 90. 60. British Library, An Alphabetical List of the Freemen who Voted at the Contested Election, for Members of Parliament to Represent the Borough of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1784). 61. F. Lewis, ‘The Demographic and Occupational Structure of Liverpool: A Study of the Parish Registers, 1660–1750’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 1993), 66, figures 3–4. 62. W. Moss, The Liverpool Guide (Liverpool, 1796), 93–94. 63. Moss, Liverpool Guide, 229. 64. J. A. Hodson, ‘The Letter Book of Robert Bostock, 1789–92’, Liverpool Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee Bulletin, 3, Nos. 1 and 2 ( July–October 1953). This shipyard is listed in Gore’s Directory (1796) as being on the west side of King’s Dock. 65. R. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London, 1962), 70, n. 1 gives the following figures for total tonnage of ships built in 1790–91: London 16,372, Newcastle 12,444, Whitby 11,945, Hull 8,193, Liverpool 6,710 and Bristol 3,071. 66. J. Stobart, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Revolution? Urban Growth in North-West England 1664–1801’, Urban History, 23 (1996), 47. 67. Dresser, Slavery Obscured, 101, states ‘distilling, glass-making, sugar-refining and slave trading, then, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship’. T. M. Devine and G. Jackson (eds), Glasgow. Volume 1: Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester, 1995), 7, lists sugar-houses, distillers and glassmakers established in late seventeenth-century Glasgow; G. Jackson, Hull in the Eighteenth Century (1972), passim.

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68. G. Timmins, Made in Lancashire: A History of Regional Industrialisation (Manchester, 1998). 69. Hyde, Liverpool and the Mersey, 39. It should be pointed out that this argument is somewhat undermined by the fact that plantation-built vessels had been cheaper through the eighteenth century: R. Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London, 1962), 66–68. 70. LRO, 942HOL/10, 352–53. Mr Tarleton, a leading Liverpool slave trader, was giving evidence. 71. Eltis et al., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Liverpool was noted as the place of construction for vessels in 1,766 out of 4,051 recorded slaving voyages from the port between 1701 and 1800. Exact percentages are impossible to calculate due to multiple references to the same vessel and the omission of place of construction in numerous references. 72. Brooke, Liverpool as it was, 326–47. 73. LRO, 942HOL/10, 309. 74. Figure based on D. Richardson, ‘Slavery and Bristol’s “Golden Age”, Slavery and Abolition, 26 (2005), 49. 75. British Library, British Parliamentary Papers, Journal of House of Commons, vol. XLIV, 20 November to 10 December 1788, ff. 279, 294, 352, 380–83. 76. LRO, 942HOL/10, Holt and Gregson Papers, 215. 77. LRO, 942ENT/1, Peter Entwistle collection: Typescript history of the Liverpool Potteries, 8, 11, 313. 78. H. Hamilton, The English Brass and Copper Industries to 1800 (London, 1967, 2nd edition). 79. Chaloner, ‘Charles Roe’, 73. 80. LRO, 942 HOL/10, 221. My italics. 81. LRO, 942 ENT/9, Entwistle collection, 114–17. 82. LRO, 942HOL/10, Holt and Gregson Papers, 307. 83. J. Stobart, The First Industrial Region: North-West England c.1700–60 (Manchester, 2004). 84. J. Harris (ed.), Liverpool and Merseyside (London, 1969); K. Davies and C. J. Williams, The Greenfield Valley (Holywell, 1986, 2nd edition), 8, notes the strong connection between these Flintshire copper works and the Liverpool slave trade. 85. Davies and Williams, Greenfield Valley, 34. 86. British Library, British Parliamentary Papers, Journal of House of Commons, vol. XLIV, 20 November to 10 December 1788, f. 383. 87. L. Weatherill, The Pottery Trade and North Staffordshire 1660–1760 (Manchester, 1971), 93. 88. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). 89. J. D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires. Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 1990), 134. 90. LRO, Plumbe Rental, 1750. The rental also lists a glasshouse in Hanover Street owned by Green, Ogden and Co. There is evidence of a strong nonconformist dimension among the early sugar bakers: Daniel Danvers and Samuel Ogden were both founder members of Benn’s Garden Chapel in 1727. LRO, 288ULL 2/1/36 Records of Benn’s Garden Chapel, Liverpool, certificate for pew granted to Daniel Danvers, sugar baker, 1 March 1727; 288 ULL 2/1/117 Certificate for

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The Impact of the Slave Trade on Eighteenth-Century Liverpool 251 pew granted to Samuel Ogden, sugar baker, 1 March 1727. Danvers also held land in Toxteth Park, a nonconformist enclave, as did another member of the Benn’s Garden Chapel, Nathaniel Litherland, LRO, 920MD 388, Rental of lands owned by Molyneux family in Liverpool and Toxteth Park.

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9

Commerce, Civilization and Christianity: The Development of the Sierra Leone Company Suzanne Schwarz

S

i e r r a Leon e in the late eighteenth century exhibited the sharp confrontation of abolitionist and anti-abolitionist attitudes characteristic of metropolitan debate. The formation of a colony for freed slaves in the midst of a slave supply region on the Upper Guinea Coast of Africa was an ambitious and progressive experiment in abolitionist economics and morality. In common with Liverpool, the settlement exposed the ‘fault lines between the older slave trade and newer abolitionist mentalities’.1 This conflict, however, was intensified by the distinctive mix of vested interests in and around the colony. Abolitionist sympathizers were brought into direct contact with slave ship captains and indigenous and European traders on the coast, and their mutual suspicion generated conflict. The resettlement of over 1,100 self-liberated slaves in 1792 added further complexity, as they were receptive to ‘revolutionary republican ideas spreading from France and the Americas …’.2 The name of the principal settlement, Freetown, was a self-conscious expression of the colony’s abolitionist identity, but it also reflected the desire of the former slaves to make their children ‘free and happy’.3 The Sierra Leone Company, launched at a time when British participation in the slave trade was at its height and Liverpool was at the very centre of these activities, mounted a dual attack on the slave trade and

 I am very grateful to Professor Robin Law and Professor Bruce L. Mouser for their helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. The research on which this chapter is based was assisted by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research.

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plantation slavery. Throughout the period of its operation, the Company competed with slave traders on the West African coast, not only to secure cargoes of legitimate produce but to win hearts and minds and change the outlook of indigenous and European traders resident upon the coast towards the transatlantic slave system. These attempts to reform trading practices and to transfer British value systems to the West African coast form part of what Drescher has characterized as the ‘historical geography of abolitionism’s confrontation with the older mentality of toleration’.4 As a central aim of the Company was to undermine the economic arguments deployed in defence of the trade, its policies had potentially far-reaching implications for Liverpool and other slave-trading ports. Furthermore, Company plans to persuade Africans to abandon slave-trading in favour of legitimate alternatives were being tested out in a supply area dominated by Liverpool traders.5 Recent scholarship has explored the nature of the relationship between Company policy and British anti-slavery thought.6 The practical implementation of the Company’s economic ideas in the particular circumstances of Sierra Leone repays detailed attention, however, as it sheds light on the complexities of abolitionists’ interaction with African and European slave traders. Company schemes constituted one of the first tangible manifestations of abolitionism in Africa, anticipated the ‘New Africa’ policy of Thomas Fowell Buxton and set the agenda for early Victorian debate on the elimination of the slave trade and the regeneration of Africa.7 The main focus of this chapter is an assessment of several strategies deployed in Sierra Leone to implement the ideals of commerce, civilization and Christianity in the period leading up to abolition in 1807. This draws primarily on the published Company reports and the expansive journals of Zachary Macaulay, one of the Company’s administrators in Sierra Leone between 1793 and 1799. The Sierra Leone Company, incorporated in 1791, aimed to undermine the transatlantic slave trade by substituting from Africa a legitimate commerce in agricultural produce and raw materials. The directors were confident that the impact of this policy on the abolition of the slave trade was ‘unquestionably sure’. They acknowledged that although their plan of encouraging cultivation and commerce ‘may not at once cut up by the roots this inhuman traffic, it tends to divert the stream that waters it, and destroy the principles from which it derives its nutriment’.8 Legitimate commerce was seen as an effective means of regenerating Africa, and a suitable vehicle for the spread of Christianity and ‘European light, knowledge and improvement’. The import of African produce cultivated by free labour was also seen as a means of promoting an anti-slavery ideology in Britain. The Company intended to supply African goods free from the taint of slavery,

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which would enable consumers to boycott West India produce and make informed choices of conscience about household purchases.9 Company policy sheds light on the contested relationship in abolitionist historiography between capitalism and humanitarianism.10 The Company illustrates the convergence of economic, religious, moral and humanitarian concerns, which Engerman and Eltis have identified as a ‘striking aspect of the anti-slavery creed’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.11 Commerce and Christianity, intertwined with the ethic of benevolence, were key components of the Company’s plans to redeem Africa from the misery inflicted by the slave trade. While the directors’ use of economic strategies to weaken the market in slaves was pragmatic, their underlying inspiration was primarily humanitarian and religious.12 The purchase of shares was presented as an ethical investment, and a practical mechanism through which ‘those who feel for the wrongs of Africa’ could compensate her for the ‘injuries she has so long been sustaining at our hands’. Company literature drew on Christian imagery of sacrifice and atonement to explain their objectives.13 Their heavy capital expenditure was presented to shareholders as a sacrifice worthy of the noble aims of the Company: it was ‘the price paid for the civillization [sic] that is now begun in Africa: it has been sacrificed to that cause, which the Sierra Leone Company have considered as their own, the cause of Christianity and Freedom and Civilization among the race of Africans’.14 The failure of the Company and the transfer of the colony to Crown control in 1808 have perhaps obscured the practical and symbolic importance that leading abolitionists attached to this African ‘experiment’.15 In his history of abolition in 1808, Thomas Clarkson considered that Sierra Leone was ‘worth all of the treasure which has been lost in supporting it’, as it had begun the process of ‘reformation to this injured continent’.16 The colony could trace its origins to Granville Sharp’s utopian, yet short-lived, scheme for a ‘Province of Freedom’ in Sierra Leone. Several hundred black loyalists, who migrated to Britain after securing their freedom by fighting for the British in the American War of Independence, were among 411 settlers who set sail for Sierra Leone in 1787. Braidwood has demonstrated convincingly that although the Treasury financed the scheme, the Black Poor played an active role in determining the nature and scope of the Sierra Leone venture. The evidence indicates that the earlier historiographical picture of a racist deportation of the Black Poor engineered by the British government is no longer tenable. Delays in embarkation from Britain meant that the settlers arrived at Sierra Leone during the rainy season and this, combined with administrative inefficiency and the inadequate provision of food and shelter, contributed to very high levels of mortality among the settlers. The destruction of

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Granville Town in December 1789 by a neighbouring Temne ruler resulted in the dispersal of the remaining settlers and the collapse of the settlement. Sharp failed in his attempts to obtain further government support to reestablish the settlement in 1790, but he secured the support of a number of abolitionist sympathizers. The incorporation of the St George’s Bay Company as the Sierra Leone Company in June 1791 resulted in some notable changes to the original vision of a ‘Province of Freedom’. Sharp’s radical system of self-government was abandoned, and the former slaves who arrived from Nova Scotia in 1792 were granted only limited autonomy in a system of government comprising European administrators appointed by a board of 13 Company directors in London.17 Many of the new directors shared in the type of Evangelical religious mindset that emphasized the importance of an active Christian benevolence. Leading proponents of Company policy in the 1790s, including Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, were among the influential network of people who met at the Clapham home of Henry Thornton to discuss matters of social, moral and religious reform.18 Among the first directors chosen in 1791 were some founder members of the London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, including Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp and Phillip Sansom. William Wilberforce, the leading parliamentary advocate of abolition, was also one of the first directors. The composition of the Court of Directors indicates that policy was also developed by practical men of business rather than only by those traditionally portrayed as the ‘Saints’ in abolitionist historiography.19 The diverse interests of the directors are reflected in the presence of two naval officers on the Board, both of whom had served on the West African coast. Sir Charles Middleton was a naval officer appointed as a commissioner at the Board of Admiralty in 1794, and Sir George Young was appointed as a rear admiral in July 1794. The intention to develop the settlement on a profitable basis is reflected in the appointment of Henry Thornton, a prominent banker and MP, as Chairman.20 One of the first tasks was to translate enthusiasm for the Company’s policies into practical financial support. Investment capital was raised from shareholders, numbering just under 2,000, who were geographically dispersed in England and Scotland. Significant numbers of shareholders were concentrated in the emerging industrial areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The purchase of three shares by J. Hawes, a London sugar refiner, may have reflected an entrepreneurial interest in alternative sources of sugar imports. Women comprised 8 per cent of shareholders, and this was an important way of engaging women in a form of abolitionist protest that linked the market and morality. By emphasizing the material benefits that would accrue from opening up ‘a continually increasing market for the

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sale of British industry’, as well as the scope for the import of valuable raw materials, the directors displayed awareness of the demands of a developing industrial economy and linked abolition to national economic interests.21 The composition of the shareholders suggests that while the Company was presented as a good business opportunity, wider moral considerations informed individual investments. The Company enjoyed the support of leading abolitionist thinkers and activists including Hannah More, Sir William Dolben, Josiah Wedgwood, John Newton and Dr Peter Peckard, whose essay title on the legality of slavery inspired Thomas Clarkson’s lifelong commitment to abolition. William Rathbone and John Yates, abolitionists linked to the Roscoe circle in Liverpool, were among the original subscribers to the Company.22 Thomas Walker, central to the organisation of popular abolitionist protest in Manchester, held five shares. Conscious that West India interests might try to subvert their moral objectives, the directors attempted to ‘prevent the intrusion of improper persons into the Company’.23 In explaining their economic policies to shareholders in 1791, the directors assumed a tone of moral assurance. They explained how developing a ‘just and honourable commerce with the extensive Continent of Africa’ would bring ‘various blessings and comforts’ to both Britain and Africa. The report of 1794 looked forward to a time when ‘the Africans who have been long habituated to European articles shall find that nothing will be taken in return but the produce of their land or labour’.24 This principled stance was not always easy to implement in practice. Conditions at Freetown and in the hinterland of Sierra Leone forced Company administrators to adjust their ideals to take account of local African customs on the use of different forms of slave labour. Some flexibility of approach was required, as it was not possible for Company employees to impose European patterns of control on a reluctant local population. It is apparent that Company officials adopted two policies of administration on the West African coast. They were able to impose their will to a greater extent on the settlers at Freetown, but, with fragile defence capabilities, they needed to tolerate practices among the Bullom and Temne peoples that offended their abolitionist sensibilities. In response to instructions from the directors, Thomas Clarkson produced an influential report on the economic potential of Sierra Leone in 1791. Clarkson’s interest in legitimate trade with Africa was longstanding. Between 1786 and 1787, he had used his ‘water expeditions’ to slave-trading ports to build up a specimen chest of African produce.25 Illustrating his arguments with samples from Sierra Leone and other parts of Africa, Clarkson concluded that ‘no country presents a fairer prospect to the merchant than that which we have fixed upon as our establishment for the opening a very extensive and valuable trade’.26 He was confident that

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Sierra Leone could supply profitable cargoes of sugar, cotton, tobacco, rice, gums, peppers and spices, indigo, ivory and even whale oil. Clarkson advised the Company to pay most attention to sugar cultivation, as this would yield the greatest profit. He calculated that lower freight costs would give Sierra Leone sugar a competitive advantage over the East Indies, and cultivation by free men would bring substantial labour savings compared with West Indies sugar. These arguments predated James Cropper’s analysis of the potential value of East India sugar by three decades.27 Seen in the context of contemporary slave-sugar boycotts, Clarkson was recommending a scheme of cultivation which linked Company policy to popular antislavery protest in Britain. Clarkson based his calculations partly on the contemporary ideology that wear and tear on slaves made their labour more expensive than free-labour alternatives.28 Clarkson’s ‘plan of trade’ provided a blueprint for agricultural and trading practices in Sierra Leone, and the instructions which the directors subsequently sent to Company employees closely reflected his recommendations. The scheme necessitated appropriate investment in human capital including administrators, commercial agents, plantation overseers and, most importantly, a large body of settlers. Specific occupational skills were vital, but it quickly became apparent that the success of the colony was linked to the personal skills of Company officials and their ability to manage the settler population. Thomas’s younger brother John played an important role in securing the migration of over 1,100 black loyalists from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, and these former slaves constituted the vast majority of settlers until the arrival of the Maroons in 1800. Many of these secondgeneration slaves viewed their migration to Sierra Leone as a return to the Promised Land, and their expectations of civil and religious liberty did not accord closely with Company assumptions about their prospective roles in the settlement. As superintendent of the colony John Clarkson enjoyed a close relationship with the Nova Scotians, and his peremptory dismissal by the Court of Directors during a period of home leave in 1793 caused considerable disquiet. The directors were distrustful of Clarkson’s empathy with the settlers’ interests, and his inclination to ‘interpret instructions according to his own deeply held feelings rather than to the letter of their intentions’.29 The Nova Scotians, a major source of free labour in the colony, were accorded a pivotal role in Thomas Clarkson’s plan. He argued that with suitable instruction they could produce valuable export crops. The Governor and Council introduced prizes for crop cultivation and animal husbandry as a way of encouraging cultivation by the settlers, but it also reflected a spirit of agricultural innovation characteristic of late eighteenth-century Britain.30 There was considerable optimism that this ‘spirited cultivation’

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would persuade indigenous groups to cultivate their land, the produce of which could form a viable alternative to the slave trade. Macaulay attempted to build up personal contacts with local Africans as a means of disseminating Company ideas. In July 1797, for example, he invited King Tom, a local Temne ruler, to visit his farm in the mountains. He reported that the king was so impressed by the cultivation of sugar cane and coffee that it ‘seemed to excite a momentary conviction of the blessings of industry’.31 Thomas Clarkson also suggested that export crops could be increased by encouraging Africans in those places where Company vessels traded, ‘to let themselves out to work or to cultivate their own lands with a view of selling the produce to the Company’. The directors noted that a stagnation of the slave trade in 1795, combined with the prospect of abolition the following year, led some traders to give serious consideration to cultivation. In their view, this was clear evidence that Company policy would flourish when the slave trade was abolished.32 However, the anticipated impact of settler cultivation on indigenous Africans had not materialized by the end of the decade. Although there was some evidence of vigorous cultivation by a small proportion of settlers, the Company report of 1798 ascribed the disappointing progress to the indolence and backwardness of the Nova Scotians.33 This jaundiced view of the settlers’ character failed to acknowledge the difficulties of cultivation in and around the settlement, and the preference of many settlers to establish themselves as traders. In their report of 1798 the directors acknowledged how the settlers’ participation in trade was beneficial to the Company. They described how ‘the boats of the settlers, assisted by the small craft of the Company, have kept the colony supplied with cattle, sheep, yams, rice &c. procured chiefly in the Mandingo country …’.34 The limited success of schemes of cultivation led the Company to rely increasingly on large quantities of slave-produced rice from outside the colony. The first report to shareholders in 1791 readily accepted Clarkson’s assertions that valuable tropical crops grew ‘spontaneously’ and that cotton and other crops could be grown as export commodities.35 With this in mind, the directors explained in 1794 that it was part of their ‘original plan … to set on foot as soon as possible 2 or 3 plantations on their own account …’.36 They reasoned that successful cultivation by free indigenous labour in or near Freetown would undermine the economic logic for the export of slaves.37 Furthermore, these plantations were intended to challenge the system of plantation slavery by demonstrating that Africa could supply commodities in demand in Europe. One of the first plantations was established on the Bullom Shore, on the northern side of the Sierra Leone estuary. John Clarkson noted that as the soil was ‘tolerably adapted for sugar, a trial will be made, and, if it answers, we are promised more

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ground’. Watt, a former overseer in Dominica, was appointed manager and employed approximately ‘30 grumettas or free native labourers’.38 Macaulay paid regular visits to the plantation with Governor Dawes, and kept Thornton informed of the progress of cultivation. In June 1793 he noted that ‘everything seemed to thrive, particularly the rice and cotton’. He expressed some doubt about the viability of sugar cultivation as ants had ‘completely devoured the plant’ in some places.39 The Company report of 1794 claimed that the Clarkson Plantation was an innovative scheme, and ‘the first experiment of the kind which has been made in Africa …’ 40 Thornton expressed particular interest in the progress of the sugar cane, an interest linked to the high value of sugar exports to Britain and Clarkson’s estimate of profitability of between 100 and 300 per cent.41 The Company report of 1798 explained that 10 or 12 pounds (4.5–5.5 kilograms) of sugar had been extracted using a newly constructed sugar mill, and anticipated that larger quantities might be produced in the foreseeable future. By 1804, however, the directors had reluctantly accepted that sugar was not a viable crop as the expenses of cultivation were too high.42 They had also lost confidence in the prospects for cultivation by free African labour on the Bullom Shore, and attributed the failure of the plantation to the ‘indolence of the natives’ and the arbitrary withdrawal of labour by Africans. This explanation is one-sided, as it is clear that disagreements about wage levels for labour on the Bullom Shore had emerged as early as 1794. In a diary entry for 4 April 1794 Macaulay records that he was required to attend a palaver which had been called as a result of African dissatisfaction with levels of wages paid by the Company.43 The directors also admitted that West India planters had found difficulty in ‘accommodating their ideas and expences to a small plantation, or farm, worked by free people’. After the failure of cotton-planting on an experimental plantation at Thompson’s Bay in 1797, emphasis was placed instead on the cultivation of coffee.44 Clarkson’s optimistic report, on which the directors relied so heavily in the first decade of the Company’s existence, was written without first-hand knowledge of Africa. Undoubtedly, his researches on African productions and slave-trading practices were thorough by contemporary standards, but his reliance on travel accounts, botanical reports and the oral testimony of witnesses to the Parliamentary enquiry of 1790 had a number of important limitations.45 Reflecting Henry Smeathman’s earlier assessment of tropical abundance in Sierra Leone, Clarkson’s report showed little, if any, awareness of the practical difficulties associated with cultivation in Sierra Leone. Company plans to develop a self-sufficient settler population were hampered by a number of problems. The extent of cultivatable land was far less than originally anticipated, and was constrained by rocky land

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on the hillsides and the dangers of unlawful encroachment on neighbouring territory. Settlers were asked to accept plots only a fraction of the promised size, and their slow allocation necessitated reliance on Company work schemes. The settlers’ disappointment is reflected in a petition presented to the Court of Directors in October 1793. They complained that they had been unable ‘to make a Crop to support us next year’ as ‘the Rains is now set in and the Lands is not all given out yet so we have no time to clear any for this year to come’.46 Company directors were optimistic that Freetown could harness the trading potential of its hinterland and facilitate access to the natural resources of the interior through coastal and river trade. A key element in Clarkson’s plan was that an ‘extensive commerce’ with the interior could be developed by small craft navigating the river systems north and south of the settlement.47 This would ‘open an intercourse with a greater number of people within these limits than any other part of the coast of the same extent for the whole country from the Rionoones to Cape Palmes is more intersected with rivers than any other portion of it whatsoever …’.48 Clarkson advised the Company to explore trading opportunities in the waterways that flowed into the Sierra Leone estuary, and noted that trade in the Rio Nuñez and Rio Pongo would give access to the Gambia River and intermediate villages. Factories for collecting legitimate products were established in a number of locations. Macaulay established new personal contacts by travelling out to meet African and Afro-European traders in the colony’s hinterland. In June 1793, Macaulay and Dawes ‘set off with a view of paying our respects to some of the chiefs’. Their main objective was to secure the consent of Pa Cumba, a ruler of the Koya Temne, to establish a factory for the purchase of camwood, gum, copal and rice. Macaulay’s visit to William Ado, an elderly chief at Jenkins Town on the north-eastern corner of Sherbro Island, was intended to ‘acquaint myself with him and the other chiefs, to form connections with them, to pay the customs, to fix factories on a sure footing, to adjust differences, and to give them a thorough knowledge of the views and intentions of the Sierra Leone Company’. Macaulay was clearly encouraged by their reception and claimed that they had been offered more favourable terms of trade than neighbouring slavers. Goods collected from the factories were stored at Freetown, and the accidental destruction of the York, their principal store-ship, by fire in November 1793 was a major setback.49 In some instances, Company officials tried to build new trading relationships with indigenous merchants who already had long-standing bonds with Liverpool slave traders. In July 1793 Macaulay visited the Banana Islands and negotiated with William Cleveland, a leading AfroEuropean slave trader, for rice and camwood. Cleveland was educated in

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Liverpool and had traded over a number of years with Robert Bostock of Liverpool.50 In order to glean intelligence of trading areas, employees were sent on expeditions. Dawes and Macaulay, following Clarkson’s recommendations, placed particular emphasis on developing commercial contacts in the Rio Pongo and Rio Nuñez. These river systems were the location for a number of African, Afro-European and European slave traders and provided a point of contact for long-distance trade with the interior.51 Establishing contact with the Fula Empire of Futa Jallon was considered a particular prize, as it was an important source of supply for trade goods and slaves.52 In January 1794 James Watt was instructed by the Governor and Council to ‘open trade into Timboo the capital of the Foulah King’.53 In the course of the expedition, Watt explained the Company’s economic and moral objectives to headmen and traders in the Fula and Susu country. He explained to Alimamy Sadu, ruler of the Fula state at Timbo, that the Company would trade European goods for their cattle, rice and ivory but would not deal in slaves as ‘God said it was wrong’. In a discussion with the deputy king of Timbo, Watt provided an explanation of the Company’s anti-slavery policy of commerce and Christianity. Imposing British views of agricultural progress, Watt advised that they should develop the potential of their land by planting more cotton and learning to plough the ground with cattle.54 Watt’s successful expedition resulted in the visit of Fula ambassadors to Freetown in May 1794. In order to exploit the trade of the Fula caravans, it was decided that a factory should be located in the Rio Pongo. Captain Buckle reached agreement with Cumba Bali Damba of Dominguia for a factory under his protection at Tooka Kerren or Freeport in 1795. Its success was negligible, partly due to the refusal of its trader, Thomas Cooper, to conform with local commercial practice. More significantly, the factory engendered the concerted opposition of leading slave traders in the Rio Pongo, who were resentful of the threat which Company policy presented to their interests.55 Their opposition was manifested by a refusal to trade with any Fula merchants who supplied legitimate produce to Freeport. The directors were convinced that it was a slave factor in the Rio Pongo who was responsible for attacking a Fula caravan en route to Freeport with ivory, rice and cattle, and murdering its leader. This closed the path and interrupted the nascent trade in ivory.56 Macaulay instructed Watt and Company accountant, John Gray, to undertake an exploratory visit to the town of Furry Cannaba, a ‘Muslim Mandinka chief ’ resident in the area of the Kamaranka River to the southeast of Freetown.57 Both kept a journal between January and February 1795 and, during their journey, made notes on slave trading, natural resources, agriculture, the navigability of rivers and suitable locations for factories.

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They attempted to build up bonds of friendship with Furry Cannaba, and pointed out that Macaulay wished to agree terms for camwood, ivory and bullocks and the establishment of a factory under his protection. Gray reported that their expedition had been worthwhile, as they had ascertained that ‘camwood, ivory, cattle and the business of mat and basket making offer themselves as promising sources of gain’.58 A further weakness of Clarkson’s report was that it supplied little practical guidance on how Company traders should conduct business on the West African coast. Company trading ventures were affected by a range of problems similar to those encountered by slave traders, and the employment of former slave traders as commercial agents and captains was one way in which the Company tried to minimize risk. In common with slave-trading practice, Company officials attempted to send captains to areas with which they had some familiarity.59 The Governor and Council noted that Captain William Davies was familiar with the trade of the Windward Coast and the Gold Coast. Appointed to the command of the James and William, he was instructed in June 1793 to trade for ivory, pepper and gold dust on the Windward Coast.60 The Governor and Council also developed a strategy of employing a high proportion of Africans on trading vessels as a way of reducing mortality levels among Company employees. In issuing sailing instructions, Macaulay endeavoured to take account of regional African preferences for goods. This was not always successful. Captain King of the Naimbanna, instructed to trade for wax, hides, cattle and ivory in the Gambia River, returned in November 1793 with most of his original cargo, as he did not have a suitable assortment for trade.61 Macaulay admitted that the ‘superior skill’ of traders from the slave factory at Bance Island ‘in the assorting and disposing of their cargoes …’ contributed to their ability to out-compete Company traders.62 Consequently, Macaulay was keen to gather and record intelligence on regional African preferences. He noted in September 1793 that ‘In Calabar salt, copper rods and chintz &c. will buy ivory’.63 Appointed as supercargo on the Calypso on 1 June 1796, E. L. Parfitt was instructed to keep a journal of transactions during a voyage to Gabon.64 This journal covered the period from 17 June to 29 December 1796 and recorded intelligence on the identity and reliability of key traders in different localities, but also included frequent reference to their inability to trade due to a poor assortment of cargo.65 Parfitt also prepared a separate journal containing guidance notes on the conduct of trade in the area between Sierra Leone and Cape Lopez, including information on the trade goods necessary for dashes and the proper assortment of cargoes for specific types of trade. In trade among the forts of the Gold Coast, for example, he identified the different types of cloth in demand and drew sketches of

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the ‘most esteemed’ cloth. Bonny and Old Calabar were noted as places where palm oil was ‘in very great plenty’. Parfitt’s reports emphasize the fact that Company traders were working in direct competition for goods with slave ships on the coast. He explained how African traders preferred to trade in both slaves and ivory with slave ships, rather than just supply ivory to Company vessels.66 Parfitt also identified a number of problems that Company traders might face, including the need to take pawns in return for goods entrusted to African traders, and the possibility of escaped slaves boarding Company vessels. The potential collision between opposing views of the slave trade is reflected in his advice that Company employees should not express their views on abolition. He commented, ‘I do think it would be dangerous for a white person that is unconnected with the slave trade to press the abolition in conversation with the blacks at such places as Bonny and the Callabars …’.67 By 1797 Macaulay had reached the conclusion that the problems associated with the coasting trade outweighed the likely benefits. His comments, repeated verbatim in the Company report of 1798, emphasized the lack of skilful men for conducting the trade, the risks faced by the ships, the opposition of slave traders and its limited impact on civilization or ‘in counteracting the slave trade’.68 In their report of 1794, the directors were satisfied that Company officials had pursued their orders with ‘great spirit’. They expressed satisfaction that Company vessels had been effectively employed in the pursuit of trade, and although only a small quantity of African produce worth several thousand pounds had been sent to Britain, they were optimistic that considerable progress had been made in opening up trade.69 Reviewing the state of trade between 1798 and 1801, however, the directors noted the catastrophic impact of the European war and its spread to the West African coast with attacks by French privateers. Valuable import and export cargoes were lost to enemy action, and the resulting shortage of European trade goods meant that ‘Company servants had only scanty resources to work with’.70 These problems, combined with the French attack on the settlement in 1794, limited the Company’s commercial views. However, McGowan argues that an underlying problem was the Company’s failure to pursue longdistance trade as part of a consistent policy. Frequent changes in colonial management resulted in vacillation on the issue of whether the settlement should be mainly agricultural or commercial in focus.71 The directors were keenly aware that their commercial objectives, as well as their plans for civilization, were impeded by the continuing presence of slave traders on the coast. In their report to shareholders in 1804, they emphasized how the slave trade constituted one of eight key reasons for the limited progress of the settlement.72 Liverpool representatives were among those who had objected to proposals for a Company monopoly of

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trade at Sierra Leone and, as a consequence, the Company had to operate in competition with slave traders.73 Their presence in and around Freetown caused a number of problems. The Company report of 1804 explained that trade at Freetown was inhibited by the dangers posed to indigenous traders who were not able ‘to put into an intermediate creek … without imminent hazard of being seized and sold for slaves’.74 Macaulay was convinced that agents at Bance Island and Gambia Island attempted to prejudice local traders against the settlement.75 He was incensed by slave traders taking advantage of the Company’s reputation by stamping SLC on guns ‘for which they get a rapid sale and a double price in the Rio Nunez’.76 Company traders were often unable to compete effectively with slave captains for goods, as they were restricted in their ability to extend credit to African traders. Trading practices on the coast often tested the Company’s principles. For example, the Governor and Council resolved in October 1793 to discontinue the practice of lending goods to Africans as ‘no expediency remains for recovering the Company’s money except seizing the persons of the debtors an expedient it was better to avoid’.77 The profits of slave-trading proved irresistible to some Company officials and settlers, as well as a number of missionaries.78 Captain Davies was found guilty of purchasing children on the Grain Coast. The Governor and Council were unconvinced by his explanation that he intended to leave the two boys at Freetown so that they could be ‘educated and made free’.79 The Company also became embroiled in disputes linked to the slave trade, and the directors noted the repercussions of a quarrel over anchorage duties between King Tom and a Liverpool captain in February 1800.80 Company officials could not prevent slave-ship captains and crew from coming ashore at Freetown and, not surprisingly, their pro-slavery outlook provoked conflict. The most notable example of conflict arising from this collision of values was caused by Alexander Grierson, a Liverpool captain who specialized in trade in Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast. He threatened some of the Nova Scotians, ‘saying in what manner he would use them if he had them in the West Indies’. This caused a dispute which sparked two days of rioting in June 1794.81 The desertion of crew members in Freetown proved vexatious, as their inebriated and disrespectful behaviour was at odds with the Company’s moral objectives. The Fisher of Liverpool was prevented from sailing by the desertion of her crew in July 1792, and deserters from two Liverpool ships made their way to Freetown between 1796 and 1798.82 Despite their abolitionist principles, it was pragmatic for Company officials in a context of warfare and food shortages to maintain a working relationship with slave traders. Slave vessels, including the Peggy of Liverpool, were used to carry mail, and some crew members from Liverpool slavers were employed in the Company’s service.83

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Macaulay was aware that extending the Company’s influence depended on the cultivation of personal contacts with indigenous merchants. Macaulay’s attempt to secure African complicity in the development of legitimate trade is reflected in his negotiations in August 1797 with John Pearce, an important headman and Afro-European trader of Nalu descent and an ‘eminent trader in the Rio Nunez’. Macaulay’s main objective was ‘to detach him from the slave trade’ but, recognizing that a ‘direct proposition’ was unlikely to be successful, he resolved to wean him off the slave trade by cultivating a relationship based on legitimate trade. Macaulay proposed that Pearce should ‘build a salt house for the Company at his place whereby we should be able thro his medium to engross most of the ivory trade of that river’.84 Macaulay anticipated that Freetown’s entrepôt status would open up diverse forms of communication and provide a mechanism for promoting economic and cultural reform. In October 1793 he explained his intention of encouraging ‘as much as possible the natives themselves to bring their stock &c. to market’, as this would ‘increase the intercourse of the natives with the people of this place, which is desirable on many accounts’.85 This policy met with some success. By 1804 Freetown was described as a ‘place of considerable resort’ with between 100 and 200 Africans visiting the settlement each day from up to 100 miles (160 kilometres) distant.86 This policy did have its pitfalls however, as a number of grumettas belonging to local slave traders attempted to claim asylum in the settlement. Company officials, unwilling to offend local headmen and traders, were reluctant to offer protection to runaway slaves. Five grumettas belonging to Mr Harrocks, a slave trader in the Isle de Los, claimed sanctuary in Freetown in August 1793. Macaulay’s accommodation to local practice on the question of slavery is reflected in his insistence that the Company had no legal right to detain these slaves.87 The Company courted the goodwill of influential Africans by offering the opportunity for their children to be educated in England or, more typically, in Freetown. Although this was a persuasive strategy deployed by British slave merchants, the moral and religious schooling was intended to encourage their charges to subscribe to the Company’s reforming vision for Africa. Approximately 40 Africans were being educated in the colony in 1798, and the directors noted how their progress supported ‘the hope of their becoming the instruments of extensive benefit to Africa’.88 Some among the first generation of settlers were employed as teachers for African children, an approach which pre-dated Buxton’s plans for Africans to be educated by a ‘race of teachers of their own blood’.89 Although Thomas Clarkson’s report emphasized trading opportunities, he was also enthusiastic about the prospects for introducing civilization

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and Christianity in Africa. He explained how trade would be the means by which ‘the Civilization of this noble continent would be effected in time, & while there would be the greatest opportunity of diffusing far & wide the precepts of justice & extirpating the trade in men, a road would be opened to the Christian missionary to lay before unenlightened nations the gospel of reconciliation and peace’.90 There is no doubt that the Company aimed to spread Christianity in the wake of legitimate trading, and the policies pursued in Sierra Leone do not support Porter’s assertion that the Company displayed ‘no marriage of trade with religion, in either theory or practice’.91 A close interplay between commerce and Christianity is reflected in Macaulay’s deployment of missionaries in areas where he had built up trading contacts. Immediately after Macaulay had finalized trading terms with William Ado in July 1793, he sought his protection as landlord for a missionary and schoolmaster. Six weeks later Macaulay outlined proposals for a plantation and missionary station on a deserted island in the River Sherbro. He considered that the employment of between 50 and 100 Africans would justify the work of a missionary and schoolmaster, particularly as ‘Bob’s Island is within an hour or two hours row of many populous villages to which the missionary might occasionally migrate’.92 In June 1797 Macaulay proposed the establishment of five mission stations under the protection of influential traders. ‘Favourable openings’ for missionary work on the Bullom Shore through the influence of William Cleveland, William Ado and various other chiefs built on trading expeditions undertaken by Macaulay between 1793 and 1794. Following the establishment of a Company factory at Freeport, Macaulay explained how a stationary mission there offered the advantage of contact with Fula merchants.93 Company officials anticipated that the settlers could assist the evangelisation of Africans, and some former slaves supplied some of the earliest missionaries of African descent to indigenous Africans.94 This was a clear precursor of the Buxtonian plan that people of African descent, educated in the West Indies and Sierra Leone, would constitute ‘a body of men who will return to the land of their fathers, carrying Divine truth and all its concomitant blessings into the heart of Africa’.95 Macaulay also played a central role in the development of plans to send indigenous Africans to England for education with the intention of sending them back to Africa to preach Christianity in the Susu language.96 Returning to England in 1799, Macaulay brought with him 20 African boys for education at an academy near Clapham Common. The Reverend Henry Brunton, stationed as a missionary in the Rio Pongo for the Edinburgh Missionary Society in 1798,97 visited the Clapham Academy and used it as a means of furthering his study of the Susu language. His publication of A Grammar and Vocabulary

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of the Susoo Language in 1802 reinforced the views of Macaulay and other supporters of the Society for Missions to Africa and the East that Susu could form the basis of Christian conversion in large areas of territory to the north of Sierra Leone. As Mouser recognizes, the school was used ‘as a language laboratory for development of religious tracts in Susu/English format designed specifically for the purpose of spreading Christianity on the African continent’. The Reverend Melchior Renner and the Reverend Peter Hartwig, Lutheran ministers who were sent to Sierra Leone by the Society for Missions to Africa and the East in 1804, visited the school as part of their rudimentary training for their mission.98 The Company failed to implement its economic ideas effectively, and the colony was transferred to Crown control, which received Royal Assent just five months after the passage of the Abolition Bill in March 1807. After the affairs of the Company were wound up in 1807, the directors remained sanguine about their financial losses. Confident that their economic strategies were sound in principle, they asserted that they could have succeeded in more propitious circumstances. The balance of evidence, however, suggests that their idealism did not match their expertise in African affairs. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their economic policies were vitiated from the outset by their limited knowledge of African trading conditions. Company traders were new entrants to this commercial arena, and were attempting to compete with experienced practitioners in a trade that was among the most sophisticated and complex economic enterprises of the eighteenth century.99 Macaulay reached the conclusion by 1797 that ‘there is no doubt a good deal of apparent ground for inferring from what has already taken place, that a great part of the ill success of the Company’s commercial undertakings has arisen from their Gov & Council not being sufficiently commercial men …’.100 Parfitt’s report on trade in 1796 also illustrates how Company employees did not possess the level of accumulated knowledge and expertise which slave captains had amassed over a number of years. As a result, Company traders were frequently placed at a disadvantage in trade. Company officials in Sierra Leone made a sustained attempt to build up a knowledge base of trading contacts and customary practice on different parts of the African coast. Although they tried to imitate the commercial practices of slave traders, they were hampered by the problems of understanding and securing access to complex credit arrangements on different parts of the coast.101 Although comparatively little legitimate produce reached British shores and provided no practical challenge to West Indian exports, Company efforts were still regarded as symbolically important by abolitionist sympathizers. The first cargo of produce carried to Britain on the Amy in June 1793

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was greeted with enthusiasm, as it was ‘neither degraded with injustice, nor stained with blood’. The Company’s policy of supplying legitimate alternatives to slave-produced commodities was part of a wider abolitionist interest in ‘moralizing consumption’.102 After 1807, legitimate trade assumed a far more important role in Britain’s commercial relations with Africa. However, the impact of Company policy on levels of legitimate trade is difficult to gauge. After all, slave traders were already aware of the value of African raw materials as supplementary items of cargo. Liverpool’s continuing links with West Africa depended on several commodities that Clarkson had identified in his plan of trade. Liverpool traders imported supplies of palm oil from Sierra Leone in the early nineteenth century, and the area also became a ‘major exporter of timber to Liverpool’ between the 1820s and 1840s.103 Liverpool merchants’ adaptation of their African networks was, in contrast to the Sierra Leone Company, motivated by a pragmatic response to abolition rather than an ethical attempt to introduce an ‘honourable’ form of trade.104 Over a period of seventeen years Sierra Leone was a practical testing ground for a number of abolitionist ideas, even during the phase of retrenchment in campaigning activity after 1794.105 The Company launched a fundamental economic attack on plantation slavery and, although their attempts to establish sugar plantations were unsuccessful in practice, this should not obscure their radical aspirations to challenge a major source of colonial wealth. More ambitious still was the Company’s attempt to attack the transatlantic slave system at its roots within Africa, thereby interrupting slave supply to all national carriers. Macaulay and other Company employees tried to garner support for abolitionist policy among indigenous headmen and traders by regular face-to-face discussions about the evils of the slave trade and the benefits of suppression. These attempts to form partnerships based on legitimate trade were predicated on an understanding of the importance of African agency in slave supply, and predated European negotiations on slave-trade suppression with African rulers in the early to mid-nineteenth century.106 By 1840 Buxton argued that efforts to abolish the slave trade should focus on what could be achieved within Africa.107 In common with Macaulay, he emphasized the importance of developing partnerships with Africans and of making them ‘our confederates in the suppression of the slave trade’.108 The attempt to establish a new society for freed slaves was the most ambitious aspect of this African experiment and the one that generated the greatest disappointment. It is also the feature that has attracted most criticism from historians.109 The settlement tested the limits of freedom espoused by the Company’s abolitionist promoters, whose innate conservatism on issues of social hierarchy was reflected in their view that

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European moral superiority conferred a right to rule the former slaves. Adopting an authoritarian and paternalistic stance, Company officials dismissed the settlers’ requests for fuller participation in government as evidence of their ingratitude and ‘unjust pretensions’.110 The settlers were expected to subordinate their personal aspirations to the Company’s plans for the regeneration of Africa, an expectation which failed to take account of their confident self-image, common consciousness of black identity, and willingness to assert their rights as freemen. Even their Christian identity posed problems for Company administrators, who resented their antinomianism and their enthusiastic evangelical forms of worship. The issue of quit-rents or land charges was particularly contentious, as the settlers associated this with an insecure title and the first step to reducing them to a state of slavery.111 Growing tensions in the colony, culminating in rebellion in 1800, led the directors to articulate increasingly negative racial stereotypes of the settlers.112 Some of the settlers, so dismayed by their treatment, pleaded with John Clarkson to ‘leave us Not in the Wilderness to the Oppressing Masters …’.113 Despite these problems, the directors remained satisfied that they had accomplished a number of important objectives.114 They were confident that the colony had contributed to the abolition of the slave trade by ‘exposing its real nature before the view of a hesitating legislature, and detecting the artifices and misrepresentations by which the persons engaged in it laboured to delude the public’. They pointed out that costs of £1,200 incurred in presenting evidence to the House of Lords in 1799 had been spent judiciously. They argued that they had ‘clearly as well as formally established in evidence’ the evils of the slave trade and the likely benefits of abolition, and that they had been the ‘chief instruments’ in demonstrating that Africans were capable of moral, civil, economic and social improvement.115 The importance that Company directors placed on Macaulay’s first-hand testimony is reflected in a letter which Henry Thornton sent to Selina Mills on 25 May 1799. He apologized for detaining her fiancée in London following his return from Africa, but explained, ‘I expect he will be our chief evidence at the Bar of the house of Lords’.116 The directors were optimistic about future prospects for Sierra Leone, claiming that they had, in the face of mounting difficulties, established a colony ‘which by the blessing of Providence, may become an emporium of commerce, a school of industry, and a source of knowledge, civilization and religious improvement, to the inhabitants of that Continent’.117 The alarm that the Company created among vested interests in both Britain and Africa is a possible indicator of success. Hostile press reporting by pro-slavery defenders and confrontation with indigenous and European slave traders on the West African littoral suggest that Company policy was

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perceived as a threat. By gathering intelligence of slave-trading practices in Africa, Macaulay and other Company officials made a distinctive contribution to the accumulation of evidence deployed in the parliamentary and public campaigns in Britain. Thornton drew heavily on Macaulay’s extensive journals to compile the published reports, and was confident that this first-hand reporting carried the weight of authentic testimony.118 These reports came too late to exert any influence on the upsurge in popular campaigning, which recent historiography identifies as crucial to abolitionist success.119 Nonetheless the reports may, as the directors claimed, have made some contribution to changing popular perceptions of African savagery and economic backwardness. Hopes in the Company’s economic policies foundered just as abolitionist campaigning revived in the opening years of the nineteenth century.120 This may help to explain why their economic arguments were not transposed to political debate with any consistency or enthusiasm.121 However, the long-term legacy of Company ideas on anti-slavery thought can be traced in Buxton’s ‘New Africa Policy’. The Sierra Leone Company’s remedy for Africa was a clear precursor of Buxtonian policy, and depended on many of the same ‘specific steps’ which Buxton proposed almost fifty years later. Ideas for combining legitimate commerce, civilization and Christianity, popularized by Buxton and Livingstone in the mid-nineteenth century, lay at the heart of Sierra Leone Company policy as early as the 1790s.122 Notes

1. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery. British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke, 1986), 25, 58, 88; Drescher, ‘The Slaving Capital of the World: Liverpool and National Opinion in the Age of Abolition’, Slavery and Abolition, 9 (1988), 128–31. 2. Company officials were clearly not prepared to countenance republican sentiments among the new settlers. Bruce L. Mouser, ‘African Academy: Clapham 1799–1806’, History of Education, 33 (2004), 91. 3. Christopher Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children Free and Happy”: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s (Edinburgh, 1991), 37. 4. Drescher, ‘Slaving Capital’, 128. 5. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999). 6. Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists. London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement 1786–1791 (Liverpool, 1994), 1–3, 234–36, 239–41; Michael J. Turner, ‘The Limits of Abolition: Government, Saints and the “African Question”, c.1780–1820’, English Historical Review, 112.448 (1997), 319–57; Andrea Downing, ‘Contested Freedoms: British Images of Sierra Leone, 1780–1850’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 1998); Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford, 2002), 88–100.

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7. Gustav Deveneaux, ‘Buxtonianism and Sierra Leone: The 1841 Timbo Expedition’, Journal of African Studies, 5 (1978), 34–54. 8. Postscript to the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the General Court Held at London on Wednesday 19th of October, 1791 (London, 1791), 14. Very similar terminology was used in Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade and its Remedy (1839, 2nd edition, London, 1967), 7. 9. Clare Midgley, ‘Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture’, Slavery and Abolition, 17 (1996), 142–56. 10. For a review of the key features of historiographical debate, see Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 1–12. 11. Stanley L. Engerman and David Eltis, ‘Economic Aspects of the Abolition Debate’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone, 1980) 272–74, 281–83. 12. A. F. Walls, ‘A Christian Experiment: The Early Sierra Leone Colony’, Studies in Church History, 6 (1970), 108–11. 13. Postscript to the Report, 1791, 14–15. This approach was also characteristic of Buxton’s writings; African Slave Trade, 512–13. Anstey emphasizes the importance of redemption and atonement in evangelical theology; Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (London, 1975, reprinted Aldershot, 1992), 186–87, 193–94. 14. Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the General Court of Proprietors of the Sierra Leone Company on Thursday March 27th, 1794 (London, 1795), 61–62. This view is also reflected fourteen years later in the final report of the Company; Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, to the General Court of Proprietors, on Thursday the 24th of March, 1808 (London, 1808), 13–14. 15. Report, 1808, 3–4; P. E. H. Hair, ‘Henry Thornton and the Sierra Leone Settlement’, The Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion, 10 (1968), 6–11; Braidwood, Black Poor, 271, 274. 16. Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. A New Edition, With Prefatory Remarks on the Subsequent Abolition of Slavery (London, 1839), 492–93. 17. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London, 1962), 13–37; Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children”, 1–3; Braidwood, Black Poor, 129–275. 18. Ernest Marshall Howse traces the origins and ideals of the Clapham Sect thinkers of the late eighteenth century. He notes that ‘The Clapham Sect’ was a name popularized by Sir James Stephen in an essay in the Edinburgh Review in 1844. Ernest Marshall Howse, Saints in Politics: The ‘Clapham Sect’ and the Growth of Freedom (London, 1953), 10–27, 187–89. 19. Ellen Gibson Wilson, Thomas Clarkson: A Biography, 2nd edition (London, 1989, reprinted York, 1989), 26. 20. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. 38, 46–48; vol. 54, 632–33; vol. 60, 894–95. 21. Postscript to the Report, 1791, 4. These arguments were re-stated by Buxton in 1839, see Buxton, African Slave Trade, 273, 305, 309. 22. F. E. Sanderson, ‘The Liverpool Abolitionists’, in Roger Anstey and P.E.H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional

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Series, 2 (Liverpool, enlarged edition, 1989), 198–203, 206, 214, 216. 23. C. B. Wadström, An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa (London, 1795), 345, 350, 352–54. 24. Report, 1794, 44. 25. Clarkson, History, 153, 221, 225; Wilson, Thomas Clarkson, 19, 33, 47–48, 64, 68, 198. 26. British Library, Add Mss 12131, ‘Letter Addressed to the Chairman of the Sierra Leone Company by the Revd. Mr. Thomas Clarkson’, in Papers Relating to Sierra Leone, ff. 9, 12, 22. 27. James Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition, 1787–1832’, in Bolt and Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, 156. 28. Seymour Drescher, ‘Abolitionist Expectations: Britain’, Slavery and Abolition, 21 (2000), 43–47, 53–62. 29. Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children”, 9; Fyfe, History, 48–50. 30. The National Archives (hereafter TNA) CO 270/2, Minutes of Council, 24 May 1793. 31. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California (hereafter Huntington Library), Journal of Zachary Macaulay, June 1797–January 1798, MY 418 (22), entry for Wednesday 26 July 1797; Substance of the Report, Delivered, By the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, to the General Court of Proprietors, on Thursday, the 29th March, 1798 (London, 1798), 11. 32. Report, 1798, 12. 33. Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, to the General Court of Proprietors, on Thursday the 26th March, 1801 (London, 1801), 27–28; Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, To the General Court of Proprietors, on Thursday the 29th March, 1804 (London, 1804), 21–24. 34. Report, 1798, 5. 35. Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the General Court Held at London on Wednesday the 19th of October, 1791 (London, 1791), 23, 27. 36. Report, 1794, 46. 37. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 22. 38. This quotation indicates that Company officials did not understand the status of grumettas. They were not, as this quotation suggests, free persons. Report, 1794, 46–47; J. L. Hart, ‘Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson R.N. (Governor 1792)’, Sierra Leone Studies, 8 (1927), 107–8, 110–11; Christopher Fyfe (ed.), Anna Maria Falconbridge: Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone During the Years 1791–1792–1793 and the Journal of Isaac DuBois with Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (Liverpool, 2000), 103; TNA CO 270/2, Minutes of Council, 12 December 1792. 39. Suzanne Schwarz (ed.), Zachary Macaulay and the Development of the Sierra Leone Company, 1793–4. Part 1: Journal, June–October 1793 (Leipzig, 2000), 13. 40. Report, 1794, 46–49. A Danish plantation had been established six years earlier at Amanopa in the south-east Gold Coast. The aim of this plantation, named Frederiksnopel, was to ‘produce food crops, partly for local markets and partly for its own subsistence needs, and cash crops (cotton, indigo and tobacco) for export to Denmark’. Further plantations were established in the 1790s and

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

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in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Ray A. Kea, ‘Plantations and Labour in the South-East Gold Coast’, in Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to Legitimate Commerce. The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 1995), 126–30; George Nørregård, Danish Settlements in West Africa 1658–1850 (Boston, 1966), 172–85. British Library, Add Mss 12131, Clarkson, ‘Letter Addressed to the Chairman’, f.14; Midgley, ‘Sugar Boycotts’, 138. Report, 1798, 13; Report, 1804, 23. Huntington Library, MY 2, Diary of Zachary Macaulay, 1 August 1793–16 April 1794, 4 April 1794. Report, 1798, 8–12; Report, 1804, 21–24. One of the sources Clarkson consulted was Lieutenant John Matthews’ account of A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone published in 1788. He drew selectively on Matthews’ account for intelligence of plants and their uses in Sierra Leone. Clarkson noted, for example, that ‘the natives of Sierra Leon in their different Maladies have recourse to the Drugs of their own soil which Lieut Matthews says their woods & fields furnish them with in abundance’. Clarkson was undoubtedly aware that Matthews was an enthusiastic advocate of slavery. ‘Letter Addressed to the Chairman’, f. 10. Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children”, 36–40. Report, 1791, 27, 42, 53; Report, 1794, 43–44, 54. Despite the difficulties encountered by the Company, this assertion was repeated almost verbatim in the Company report of 1804. Report, 1804, 28–29. Suzanne Schwarz (ed.), Zachary Macaulay and the Development of the Sierra Leone Company, 1793–4. Part 2: Journal, October–December 1793 (Leipzig, 2002), 26–30; Report, 1794, 41. Bostock wrote to Cleveland on 19 June 1788 offering him various presents, including eight ruffled shirts made by his daughter. Liverpool Record Office, 387 MD 54, Letter Book of Robert Bostock, 1779–1790. Bruce L. Mouser, ‘Traders, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808’, Journal of African History, 14 (1973), 45–52; Mouser (ed.), Journal of James Watt. Expedition to Timbo Capital of the Fula Empire in 1794 (Madison, WI, 1994), xi. Winston McGowan, ‘The Establishment of Long-Distance Trade Between Sierra Leone and its Hinterland, 1787–1821’, Journal of African History, 31 (1990), 28–29, 33–35. TNA CO 270/2, Minutes of Council, 6 January 1794. Mouser (ed.), Journal of James Watt, 27, 33, 44, 86. Mouser, ‘Traders, Coasters, and Conflict’, 55–63; Fyfe, History, 66–67, 71, 93; Report, 1801, 39. Report, 1798, 6–7; Huntington Library, MY 418 (21), Zachary Macaulay, ‘Comments on the Health, Trade, Cultivation and Civilization of Sierra Leone, 1797’, 17–19. Fyfe, History, 58. British Library, Add Mss 12131, ‘Mr. Gray’s Journal in January and February 1795 To and From Furry Cannaba’, Papers Relating to Sierra Leone, ff. 43, 45, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60; ‘Mr. Watt’s Journal To Furry Cannabas Between the 31st January and 11th February 1795’, Papers Relating to Sierra Leone, ff. 76, 78–80.

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59. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), 134–35. 60. TNA CO 270/2, Minutes of Council, 18 June 1793. 61. Marion Johnson notes the importance of a suitable assortment of cargo tailored to demand on different parts of the African coast. Marion Johnson, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade and Economy of West Africa’, in Anstey and Hair (eds), Liverpool the African Slave Trade, and Abolition, 14–21. 62. Schwarz (ed.), Macaulay Part 1, 54. 63. Huntington Library, Diary of Zachary Macaulay, 24 September 1793. 64. TNA CO 270/4, Minutes of Council, 1 June 1796 and 30 December 1796. 65. British Library, Add Mss 12131, ‘Extract of a Diary Kept by E. L. Parfitt on Board the Sierra Leone Company’s Ship Calypso’, Papers Relating to Sierra Leone, ff. 133–56. 66. Mouser notes how ‘slave trading and commodities’ trade generally went handin-hand’. Bruce L. Mouser and Nancy Fox Mouser (eds), Case of the Reverend Peter Hartwig, Slave Trader or Misunderstood Idealist? (Madison, WI, 2003), 5. 67. British Library, Add Mss 12131, ‘Mr. Parfitts Information Respecting Trade Between Sierra Leone and Cape Lopaz, including the Islands St. Thomas &c.’, Papers Relating to Sierra Leone, ff. 87–89, 107, 129. 68. Macaulay, ‘Comments on the Health’, 20; Report, 1798, 8. 69. Report, 1794, 43. 70. Report, 1801, 29–31, 38. 71. McGowan, ‘Long-Distance Trade’, 36–41. 72. Report, 1808, 17–20. 73. Fyfe, History, 27; Braidwood, Black Poor, 243–46. 74. Report, 1804, 8–9. 75. Schwarz (ed.), Macaulay Part 1, 9, 17. 76. Schwarz (ed.), Macaulay Part 2, 5–6. 77. TNA CO 270/2, Minutes of Council, 29 October 1793. 78. The Company report of 1804 noted that a few Nova Scotians were employed as ‘servants or mechanicks at Slave Factories’, Report, 1804, 7; Fyfe, History, 94–95. 79. TNA CO 270/2, Minutes of Council, 4 November 1793. 80. Report, 1794, 99–101; Report, 1801, 10–11. 81. Between 1787 and 1798 Grierson captained seven Liverpool slave voyages. Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Captains in the British Slave Trade from 1785 to 1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 140 (1991), 126–27; Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children”, 42–43. 82. Hart, ‘Clarkson’, 21–22, 41, 57; Report, 1798, 1–3; Fyfe (ed.), Anna Maria Falconbridge, 96–97. When the Fisher left Liverpool in the command of Joseph Clark it had a complement of 29 crew members. Of these 12 deserted the ship. Eltis et al., TransAtlantic Slave Trade, voyage identity number 81453. Macaulay noted that some crew members from the Bell ‘belonging to Dawson of Liverpool … made their escape hither’; Macaulay, ‘Comments on the Health’, 7. 83. Schwarz (ed.), Macaulay Part 2, 3; Fyfe (ed.), Anna Maria Falconbridge, 96–97. 84. Huntington Library, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, June 1797–January 1798, entry for 10 August 1797. These negotiations were reported fully in the Company report of 1798; Report, 1798, 43–44.

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85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

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Schwarz (ed.), Macaulay Part 2, 5. Report, 1804, 8. Schwarz (ed.), Macaulay Part 1, xvi, 41–43. Report, 1798, 19, 50; Mouser, ‘African Academy’, 91. Buxton, African Slave Trade, 11. Clarkson, ‘Letter Addressed to the Chairman’, f. 20. Andrew Porter, ‘“Commerce and Christianity”: The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan’, The Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 597–608. Schwarz (ed.), Macaulay Part 1, 28–29, 53. Report, 1798, 53, 55; Journal of Zachary Macaulay, June 1797–January 1798, entries for 4 and 5 June 1797. Report, 1794, 68–69. Buxton, African Slave Trade, 11. Report, 1801, 21–22, 49, 53. The Company report of 1791 described how ‘on a former occasion the proprietors were informed that two missionaries were usefully employed in the Susoo country, in instructing the natives’. It was reported that Greig had been ‘murdered by some travelling Foulahs’ and that Brunton had returned home. He was praised for ‘his unweary exertions and great zeal’, which had ‘afforded much hope of benefit to those natives of Africa among whom he resided’; Report, 1801, 21–22. Mouser and Mouser (eds), Peter Hartwig, 15–19, 25; Mouser, ‘African Academy’, 87–103. Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1999), 101. Macaulay, ‘Comments on the Health’, 22. See, for example, Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review, 104 (April 1999), 333–55. Midgley, ‘Sugar Boycotts’, 141. Martin Lynn, ‘Trade and Politics in 19th-Century Liverpool: The Tobin and Horsfall Families and Liverpool’s African Trade’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 142 (1993), 99–103; Lynn, ‘Liverpool and Africa in the Nineteenth Century: The Continuing Connection’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 147 (1998), 27–54. Drescher, ‘Slaving Capital’, 130. Seymour Drescher, ‘Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade’, Past and Present, 143 (1994), 138, 165–66. Robin Law, ‘An African Response to Abolition: Anglo-Dahomian Negotiations on Ending the Slave Trade, 1838–77’, Slavery and Abolition, 16 (1995), 281–310. Kristin Mann, ‘The Original Sin: British Reform and Imperial Expansion at Lagos’, in Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt (eds), Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra) (Stirling, 1999), 169–73. Buxton, African Slave Trade, 5–7, 10–11, 271–73, 279, 301–9, 316, 342, 518. Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children”, 6–19; Turner, ‘Limits of Abolition’, 329–57. Report, 1801, 2–7. Report, 1798, 44–45; Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children”, 2, 4, 13. Report, 1801, 1–19. This issue is explored in Downing, ‘Contested Freedoms’.

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Fyfe (ed.), “Our Children”, 51. Hair, ‘Henry Thornton’, 8–10. Report, 1801, 32. Huntington Library, MY 845, Henry Thornton to Selina Mills, 25 May 1799. Report, 1808, 13–14. Report, 1794, 72. Walvin, ‘British Popular Sentiment’, 149–50; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 61. 120. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 6. 121. Walvin, ‘British Popular Sentiment’, 157; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 6, 169 n. 13. 122. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag. Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1992), 56. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

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10

Abolitionism in Liverpool Brian Howman

T

h e r e is a r a nge of v i ews concerning the role played by Liverpool abolitionists in the campaigns against slavery and the slave trade. It has been claimed that abolitionist activity in the town mirrored that elsewhere and that the campaign in Liverpool was ‘in miniature analogous’ to that in the rest of the country.1 Conversely, one could easily conclude that, especially prior to 1807, there was minimal abolitionist activity in the town and that, since most Liverpudlians’ livelihoods were linked in some way to the trade in slaves and slave-grown goods, any anti-slavery movements would easily be stifled. This is attested by J. Wallace, who stated in 1795, ‘Almost every man in Liverpool is a merchant, and he who cannot send a bale will send a band-box … almost every order of people is interested in a Guinea cargo’.2 Nevertheless, we can see that in the later campaign for emancipation, from the 1820s to 1834, there was a good deal of organized activity in Liverpool. The Liverpool Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (The Liverpool Society) was active from 1822 and operating in allegiance with, but independently from, the London Committee. As the number of women’s organizations across the country grew, the Liverpool Ladies’ AntiSlavery Association, an auxiliary to the national Anti-Slavery Society, was founded in the town in 1827, with James Cropper’s female relatives playing a central role in it.3 Pro-slavery advocates’ propaganda provides further evidence of the effectiveness of abolitionism from Liverpool in the later campaign. In 1825, Liverpool abolitionist James Cropper was charged by James McQueen (along with Thomas Clarkson and The Edinburgh Review) with making ‘calumnies and misrepresentations’ against the West Indian colonies.4 McQueen’s inclusion of Cropper’s name alongside Clarkson’s shows that not only was abolitionism formalized and coherent in Liverpool during the early 1820s but also that by the middle of the decade at least one of the town’s campaigners had achieved a high degree of prominence.

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National publication and recognition of an outspoken Quaker merchant with extensive East Indian interests, and the existence of the Liverpool Society and Ladies’ Association, do not necessarily indicate a bustle of abolitionist agitation in the town. They nevertheless suggest that Liverpool abolitionists, at least in the later campaigns, may have been more effective than previously credited, and indeed that the town had taken the lead to some extent as a centre of anti-slavery propaganda activity. It will therefore be important to ascertain whether there was any effective organized activity in Liverpool during the earlier campaigns against the slave trade, which paved the way for later abolitionists from the town to achieve the levels of prominence they did in the emancipation campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s. The anonymous author of the 1884 publication Liverpool and Slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool-African Slave Trade argues that there was very little abolitionist activity in the town during the first campaigns in the 1780s, and claims that perhaps only two abolitionists were active there in the very early years of organized anti-slavery. When the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’s 1787 list of names first arrived in Liverpool in 1788 (the year following its formation), only two Liverpool names, William Rathbone III and Dr Jonathon Binns, were added. The author implicitly supports this claim for a low level of activity by concentrating much of the chapter devoted to ‘The Abolition List – Liverpool Names …’ on the outpourings of Liverpudlian anti-abolitionists, which were mainly directed not at campaigners in the town, but rather at the Manchester Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.5 It seems that unlike their Liverpudlian counterparts, Mancunian abolitionists were making their presence felt across the region and further afield, and enjoyed considerable popular support in their home town. This was despite Manchester’s own obvious economic connections with the slave trade and slave-grown produce. The contrast seems very stark indeed; two Liverpudlians initially subscribed to the ‘abolition list’, while more than 10,000 people signed Manchester’s 1787 abolitionist petition to Parliament.6 Perhaps the successful mobilization of the pro-slavery lobby in Liverpool can account for the disparity between the two towns’ contributions to the first wave of organized agitation against the slave trade. An example of this opposition to abolitionism is the pamphlet published by the adopted Liverpudlian pro-slavery writer, Reverend Raymond Harris (the nom de plume employed by Spanish Jesuit émigré, Raimundo Hormoza) in March 1788.7 In June 1788, Harris received £100 from Liverpool Town Council, to which he had dedicated his Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave

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Trade. His claim, that the slave trade had ‘the positive sanction of the Divine Authority’, was a direct counter to those arguments used by abolitionists, whose opposition to slavery was underpinned by their Christian beliefs, so that his Scriptural Researches demanded a strong response. Within a year, six replies to Harris’s work had been published, including one rebuttal commissioned by the London-based Abolition Committee, and published anonymously by William Roscoe. This suggests that Liverpool abolitionists were comparatively thin on the ground and faced a stern challenge from the town’s pro-slavery lobby for popular support. However, there is also evidence (considered below) that there may have been considerably more abolitionist activity and open support for the anti-slavery cause in the town than considered by the author of Liverpool and Slavery. The 1788 list of subscribers to the Society for Abolition suggests that the early campaign did at least have some relatively prominent supporters in Liverpool. In addition to Rathbone and Binns, another six Liverpudlians (all members of the informal reform group known as the ‘Roscoe circle’) had also subscribed to the Society: Daniel Daulby, William Rathbone jr, William Roscoe, William Wallace, Reverend John Yates and an anonymous subscriber. We may safely conclude that this anonymous subscriber was Wallace’s son-in-law, the Scottish physician Dr James Currie, a former tobacco merchant in Virginia and another member of the Roscoe circle.8 Despite their unsuccessful attempts to form an anti-slavery society in Liverpool, and the fact that they were active agitators for reform and open subscribers to the Society for Abolition, members of the Roscoe circle were nevertheless often cautious about adopting a public anti-slavery stance.9 Although the detailed information about the trade that they passed on to the London Committee was considered useful, their reticence and the lack of petition signatories from Liverpool suggests that they did not receive a level of support comparable with that enjoyed by the abolitionist cause in Manchester. The obvious difficulties faced by those who wished to deprive the town of the profits from the lucrative African trade could well be expected to have produced muted and compromised arguments from the anti-slavery lobby in Liverpool. Indeed, for reasons of self-preservation (physical and economic), abolitionists were perhaps keen to avoid attracting attention to themselves in a town with such a numerous, active and potentially violent pro-slavery lobby.10 It ought to be noted here that although Liverpool’s reputation for disorder did not match that of Manchester, there were many instances of violence breaking out at elections and other political events in the town.11 In this context, it could be seen as a wise strategy not to argue too forcibly and publicly for anti-slavery policies in a town where profits from the African trade could be seen to represent ‘an influx of wealth which, perhaps, no

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consideration would induce a commercial community to relinquish’.12 As well as their disagreements with the Liverpool Corporation and opposition to slavery, the Roscoe circle were famed locally for their support of the French Revolution (for which they were dubbed ‘Liverpool Jacobins’), for the campaign to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, and for support of free trade with the East Indies.13 These reformist, free-trade positions could potentially have made the members of the circle vulnerable to attacks from various parties, who perceived their hitherto protected interests to be threatened by the group’s political agenda. For instance the Mayor and recorder for the town had 10,000 copies printed of an anti-Jacobin tract. This publication, which was known as ‘The Resolutions’, reflected similar loyalist sympathies to those expressed so violently in Manchester during the 1780s and 1790s. It implicitly encouraged Liverpudlians to carry out acts of violence against the town’s leading reformers. Evidence of popular enmity, or at least the attempt to mobilize such feelings, against the Roscoe circle in the area can be found in an unpublished political ballad, which also underlines the circle’s fame: But unluckily then in the Town Attorneys were great politicians And Quakers were men of renown And merchants were metaphysicians … A state without rulers they’d rule And vote me and a negro relations.14 By a relatively subtle combination and exaggeration of their anti-slavery, anti-authoritarian stances and involvement in local political affairs, the anonymous balladeer was attacking the political and ethical stances of Roscoe, the attorney in the ballad, and the father and son, William Rathbone III and William Rathbone IV, the Quaker merchants in the ballad, although the latter was later disowned by the sect. The verse also illustrates the author’s perceptions of his audience’s racist and anti-Dissenter views, and importantly its anti-Jacobinism, pandering to such fears and creating a view of the Roscoe circle as dangerous revolutionaries.15 Public arguments against the slave trade could potentially cause considerable trouble. As members of the social elite in a relatively small town, most of the chief local protagonists on both sides of the abolition debate would inevitably come across each other in the course of their everyday business. Recent work has suggested that the Liverpool slavetrading community was connected through a series of friendship links and we could perhaps argue that the town’s elite interacted with each other to some extent along similar informal lines. For instance, Roscoe’s business

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partner was Thomas Leyland, who had made his fortune in the slave trade. Roscoe was also a close associate of the Earle family, who were prominent Liverpudlian African traders.16 Further, Roscoe was involved with the Charitable Institution House. Its members included John Gladstone, a prominent defender of slavery and Chairman of the Liverpool West Indian Association, who would conduct a public debate on the question of slavery with James Cropper in the Liverpool press in 1823–24. Fellow subscribers to the Society for Abolition, William Rathbone III and his son William Rathbone IV, had social and formal business connections with members of both sides of the slave trade debate. William III was an active and prominent member of the local Quaker community. His son, William IV, in turn became a member of the Society of Friends, but broke from them after he publicly criticized religious intolerance on the part of other Quakers in 1801.17 Despite their open opposition to the slave trade, the Rathbone family’s shipping and commission business continued to owe a great deal of its success to trading in American cotton and they too were closely associated with the Earles, who regularly enjoyed the Rathbones’ famous hospitality.18 Similarly, Roscoe circle member and abolitionist James Currie, Liverpool’s ‘most popular physician’ and a nationally recognized writer on medicine, enjoyed a prominent position within local society and was even made a freeman of the borough in 1802 for his services to the town.19 It is interesting to examine Currie’s position in the early years of abolitionism, in order to gain some idea of the way the abolition debate was conducted in Liverpool and some inkling of the particular pressures to which abolitionists in Liverpool were subjected, pressures which perhaps prevented them from emulating their Mancunian counterparts’ success. We may perhaps question the level of his devotion to the abolitionist cause, as his connection to the Roscoe circle seems to have come about through his marriage to William Wallace’s daughter. Although Currie’s subscription to the Society for Abolition in 1788 amounted to £2 2s (only William Rathbone sr of the Liverpool subscribers contributed a higher sum), he made this contribution anonymously. Nevertheless, Currie anonymously published tracts against the slave trade and seemed concerned by the campaign’s lack of progress. The level of Currie’s prominence in abolitionist circles and commitment to the cause can perhaps be seen in his correspondence with William Wilberforce. Wilberforce certainly considered him to be an active and important figure in the movement; the MP reassured Currie over the progress of the campaign in 1790, and felt moved to chide him for his public, though anonymous, criticism of the government’s failure to abolish the slave trade in a pamphlet of 1793.20 Despite his local position (or perhaps because of it) and the cause’s

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hitherto slow progress, it seems that Currie was fairly optimistic about the prospects for abolition and felt secure about abolitionists’ social and political security in Liverpool, more so than many of his contemporaries would claim. In a private letter of 1788, Currie bemoaned the antagonism that the debate about the slave trade had caused in the town. Nevertheless, he felt that the debate was necessary, that frank discussion of the subject would bring about the slave trade’s abolition: ‘much good, I am persuaded, will be done by the discussion of the subject … Let there be but agitation of any question, and the interests of truth and virtue are promoted.’ 21 It is interesting that Currie expressed these views in a private correspondence. Perhaps the true extent of his optimism and confidence can be found in his anonymous subscription to the Society for Abolition, despite his assertion that the issue of abolition needed to be publicly discussed. The anonymous 1788 publication of ‘The African’, a sentimental poetic description of a dying slave, written by Currie and ‘tidied up’ by William Roscoe to render it publishable, is further evidence of Currie’s reluctance to publicize his anti-slavery views.22 Like Roscoe, Currie was a prominent man in Liverpool, who would certainly have been associated with participants in and supporters of the slave trade. He bemoaned the ‘unhappiness’ caused by the ‘struggle between interest and humanity’ in diplomatic terms, couched to cause no offence.23 His view of the state of the contemporary debate in Liverpool was at odds with the claim that there was very little activity in the early stages of the campaign against the trade and that Liverpudlian abolitionists were vulnerable to attack. It seems that the matter was being widely discussed and strong positions on both sides of the argument were being adopted, apparently with little or no untoward friction. It is telling that, although he condemned the trade in slaves as a ‘gross violation of the principles of justice’, Currie did not personally condemn those who made their living (either directly or indirectly) from it. For the same reason that he bemoaned their ‘unhappiness’, he regarded their position with a degree of sympathy, as well he might, since they were his neighbours, business associates and movers in the same social circles. It appears that Currie’s dedication to abolitionism did not quite run to open criticism of his fellow Liverpudlians, or that he was unwilling to compromise his own local position by extending his arguments to their logical conclusion. Either way, the evidence his correspondence provides was somewhat contradictory. He asserts that there was a lively and open debate in the town, bemoaned the campaign’s slow progress and criticized the government’s failings, but seemed reticent about making his own stance public and fell short of making a forcible and convincing argument for abolition. A complex picture is presented here of how abolitionists and

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the cause of abolitionism were received and perceived in Liverpool in the late 1780s. To clarify this picture, we need to take account of the activities of other Liverpudlian abolitionists. There were activists, who were not subscribers to the Society for Abolition in the late 1780s but who gained some degree of notice for their abolitionist stance: for instance, Reverend William Shepherd (a Unitarian minister who was absent from Liverpool during 1788); the radical blind poet, newspaper editor, bookseller and founder of the Liverpool School for the Blind, Edward Rushton; and the Anglican cleric, Reverend Henry Dannet. Dannet, like Roscoe, published a pamphlet in 1788 – but published it under his own name. It attacked Harris’s Scriptural Researches.24 For Dannet to put his own name to such a text may with some justification be deemed an act of considerable courage. As an Anglican priest, his living was in the gift of the strongly pro-slavery Liverpool Corporation, the common council of which had an overwhelming majority of lifelong members with a slave trading interest. This was the body to which Harris’s work was dedicated and who had paid him £100 for it. Despite this, however, Dannet does not appear to have suffered for openly publishing his pamphlet. Nor does he seem to have suffered by his association with the extreme radical Edward Rushton, whose plan to establish a school for the blind in Liverpool he helped bring to fruition. Perhaps Dannet’s position was protected to some extent by the anti-slavery views of the Bishop of Chester, Beilby Porteus, within whose diocese Liverpool still lay. Edward Rushton had been employed in the slave trade, and had contracted the ophthalmia that caused his blindness on his final voyage to the West Indies. According to his biographer, Reverend William Shepherd, there was an outbreak of the disease among the slaves on the Middle Passage and, since the other officers refused to enter the holds, Rushston treated the slaves himself. He returned to Liverpool completely blind, though his sight returned in one eye after a series of operations in 1805.25 While we may exercise some caution in accepting the complete veracity of Shepherd’s version of his associate’s life, it seems that, in common with fellow Liverpool trader-turned-abolitionist John Newton (who had long since left the town), Rushton’s experience of the trade led him to take up the anti-slavery cause. Both men, once invalided out of the trade, reflected with a good deal of regret on their involvement in it.26 Rushton wrote his first anti-slavery poem in 1782. Having for the most part lived in near poverty until the last few years of his life, he made no secret of his abolitionist position and seemed not to have suffered too severely for it, although his controversial opinions on other issues did cause him considerable trouble. It has been claimed that he escaped persecution because of his blindness,

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but this seems an unlikely expression of humanitarian sentiment on the part of the pro-slavery authorities. In any case, Rushton was no stranger to attention from the authorities. As a newspaper editor and writer, he had attracted censure with his outspoken views, particularly concerning the French Revolution. His brief spell as editor of the Liverpool Herald during the 1780s, characterized by his regular attacks on the national government and the Liverpool Corporation, came to an end after he wrote an imprudent article about the activities of the press gang in the town.27 Pressure was brought to bear on the paper’s proprietor and Rushton, who refused to print a retraction, was forced to resign from his position. Underlining his commitment and tenacity, Rushton then published a ballad about the press gang, ‘Will Clewline’, which was sold in the streets of Liverpool.28 Rushton’s abolitionist stance was considerably more forthright than that of many of the wealthier middle-class abolitionists. Indeed, William Roscoe censured him for his excessive zeal, claiming it was an unwise stance tactically and unjust to honest merchants who had much invested in the slave system. Such was Rushton’s disdain of his more celebrated colleagues’ timidity that he refused help from Roscoe and William Rathbone when he was experiencing severe financial difficulties in the 1790s. However, Rushton’s poem West Indian Eclogues, which, seemingly rather incongruously was dedicated to an even more moderate abolitionist, the anti-reformist Bishop of Chester, Dr Beilby Porteus (a ‘Wilberforce man’), attracted the attention and approbation of the more steadfast Thomas Clarkson. On his visit to Liverpool in 1787, Clarkson sought out Rushton and spent a number of hours in discussions with him.29 In common with other poetical works of this type, Rushton’s West Indian Eclogues describes a somewhat idyllic Africa, the home from which the slaves are taken. However, in West Indian Eclogues Rushton does not offer the more usual patronizingly benign racist view of the slaves as innocent, passive creatures, but invests them with full human agency and identity. This is a reflection of Rushton’s anti-racist stance, which, though his views were shared by a number of activists across the country and in his home region, separates him from many of his abolitionist allies. In a similar vein to the more celebrated William Cowper, rather than depict a docile, innocent people, Rushton portrays Africans as intelligent, eloquent, aware of their position and very much resentful of it. The Eclogues’ two central characters discuss how to achieve their freedom and their revenge.30 We can perhaps see some clever political manoeuvring on Rushton’s behalf in dedicating this work to such a conservative abolitionist as Porteus. In addition to using the bishop’s greater fame and political connections to gain a wider audience for his work, he may have been sending a message to the Liverpool Corporation (which had considerable power over Rushton’s

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friends, Dannet and Shepherd, since their parishes were in the Corporation’s gift), by claiming allegiance to a higher power in the local Anglican hierarchy, the head of the diocese. Despite some clear political differences, Rushton accorded Porteus high praise in the Eclogues’ explanatory notes. Explaining why his work was dedicated to Dr Porteus, he referred to the Bishop of Chester as ‘that most exemplary prelate’ and described Porteus’s work as: A discourse, in which the clearness of the understanding, is only to be surpassed by the goodness of the heart, of the preacher; a discourse which abounds in philanthropy, and enforces humanity upon the most powerful motives, because it is dictated by the genuine principles of the Christian Religion.31 However, he did take his dedicatee to task for his view of African moral and intellectual capabilities. In a sermon of 1783 Porteus argued: ‘Being heathens, not only in their hearts but in their lives, and knowing no distinction between vice and virtue, they give themselves up freely to the grossest immoralities, without being even conscious they are doing wrong’.32 Rushton cited this very extract to illustrate that the ‘desire of revenge is an impetuous, a ruling passion’ in the minds of the slaves. However, he countered the bishop’s more general racial position by referring to the courage of Jamaican slaves who fought for the British against the Spanish, their former masters, and stated ‘many instances might be adduced to show that some Negroes are capable of kind, nay even heroic actions’, before briefly recounting how his own life was saved at sea by a ‘brave’ and ‘generous’ African, who lost his own life in saving Rushton’s.33 In the light of these differing views of African humanity, perhaps the reference to the ‘genuine principles of the Christian Religion’ was a more barbed comment than it may first appear, subtly suggesting to the poem’s readership that adherence to Christian principles ought to lead to holding a view more akin to that of the radical Rushton than to the bishop’s racist and conservative position. Rushton did have direct experience of the trade and had had close contact with African people; Porteus had no such firsthand knowledge. A case could also be made for Rushton having recognized a residual deference towards traditional figures and institutions of authority among his potential readership. Dedicating his work to the Bishop of Chester could prevent that deference being antagonized or threatened. Rushton also wrote in praise of the American Revolution, but when he realized that the new republic was not about to set its slaves free he composed a poem, ‘American Independency’, which asked, ‘How can you

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enjoy peace, while one foot of your land is disgraced by the toil of a slave?’ He finished the poem with the assertion that, ‘Whate’er be man’s TENETS his FORTUNE his HUE, he is a man and shall be free’.34 There is no trace here of the sense of the African’s inferiority, which can be found in much of the work of Rushton’s abolitionist colleagues. It is interesting to compare Rushton’s view of American slavery with that of James Cropper, or at least with those arguments Cropper made in public. While Cropper’s public ambivalence towards American plantations left him open to accusations of hypocrisy from pro-slavery advocates, Rushton’s more forthright stance attracted criticism from within abolitionist ranks. Rushton’s arguments would perhaps appeal to an audience perceiving itself to be denied liberty, to radical republican revolutionaries, and in all likelihood to very few others, whereas Cropper’s commercial argument, which somewhat blurs the American question, was calculated to appeal to capitalist, especially industrial capitalist, self-interest. This leaves Rushton out in the cold to some extent and leads to the perhaps natural conclusion that his arguments were too extreme to attract much support. While this may be true of potential middle-class support, Rushton’s ideas were beginning to appeal to elements of the growing urban working class, who were also beginning to flex their political muscles. His consistent adherence to the principles of liberty and his tenacity in publishing his views mark him out as a significant contributor to the abolitionist campaign. Rushton’s non-racist outlook is further underlined by his support of the Haitian Revolution. His enlightened attitude is a stark contrast to that of abolitionists in the 1820s, who were prepared to pander to those who feared the existence of a free black population in the Caribbean, the futile attempt at prevention of which had cost the lives of many thousands of British soldiers.35 We can perhaps conclude that adherence to ideological principles, if not solely humanitarian factors, rather than economic expediency drove his motivation for abolition. Rushton’s position on American independence is an illustration of his strong commitment to the ideals of liberty, which could isolate him from conservatives and the majority of reformers alike. In 1796, he wrote to George Washington: It will generally be admitted, Sir, and perhaps with justice, that the great family of mankind were nevermore benefited by the military abilities of any individual, than by those which you displayed during the memorable American contest … By the flame which you have kindled, every oppressed nation will be enabled to perceive its fetters; and when man once knows that he is enslaved, the business of emancipation is half performed

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… But it is not to the Commander in chief of the American forces, nor to the President of the United States, that I have aught to address. My business is with George Washington of Mount Vernon in Virginia, a man who, not withstanding his hatred of oppression and his ardent love of liberty holds at this moment hundreds of his fellow being in a state of abject bondage … you who conquered under the banners of freedom … who are now the first magistrate of a free people are (strange to relate) a slave-holder … In the name of justice what can induce you thus to tarnish your own well-earned celebrity and to impair the fair features of American liberty with so foul and indelible a blot. Avarice is said to be the vice of age. Your slaves [might be] worth fifteen to twenty thousand pounds. Now, sir, are you sure that your unwillingness … to liberate your Negroes does not proceed from some lurking pecuniary considerations? … If this be the case, and there are those who firmly believe it is, then … [your] present reputation, future fame, and all that is estimable among the virtuous, are, for a few thousand pieces of paltry yellow dirt, irredemiably [sic] renounced.36 This letter provides ample evidence of Rushton’s commitment to ideas of liberty for all. He praises Washington for freeing America from Britain’s yoke, which was not a view likely to endear him to the social and political elite at home. He credits Washington with furthering the cause of liberty, telling him that his achievements would be an inspiration to oppressed peoples elsewhere in the world. However, in a relatively sophisticated argument and using some dramatic language, he separates Washington’s role in America’s War of Independence and his status as a slave owner and uses the former as a frame to emphasize the latter. By constantly juxtaposing his revolutionary credentials with his position as an oppressor, Rushton undermines Washington’s reputation, deeming it worth only the tainted financial gains to be made from his slave ownership. Having chided Washington and subtly warned him that the processes leading to his slaves’ emancipation were already under way, since the slaves were aware of their enslavement, Rushton then makes a calculatingly insulting accusation. Further dismissing Washington’s revolutionary kudos, Rushton claims that Washington and other like-minded Americans would ‘imitate’ the brutal oppression that the British government had shown revolutionary Americans, should the slaves in the South carry out their own revolt, which he obviously thought they would. Clearly, Rushton was opposed to the institution of slavery in the Caribbean and the mainland American plantations. Far from appealing to racist perceptions, Rushton attacks them, dismissing the notion that

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Africans were in some way inferior as a ‘subterfuge’, which he hoped was beneath Washington. There are also no ‘pecuniary considerations’ lurking within his arguments. There are no promises of increased productivity or prosperity, no appeals to the desires of the beneficiaries of free trade. Once again we can see that Rushton’s motivations did not rest on the preservation or promotion of his personal self-interest, but on the furtherance of his (we may say now) laudable political goals and genuine humanitarianism. By not moderating his arguments, he ensured that they would never be likely to achieve any success in converting to the anti-slavery cause those people who held broadly orthodox positions, and we may perhaps be justified in accusing Rushton of a certain amount of political naivety, or at least of lacking a little guile. However, given that he was an overtly radical, revolutionary republican, Rushton did not intend to appeal to orthodox thinkers in order to obtain some small concession. His opposition to slavery was part of a broader, clearly defined political stance, and his arguments took the form of well-considered polemic, which contrast quite starkly with many of his colleagues’ diluted, fudged, or commercially oriented positions. Further, Rushton’s choice of the Bishop of Chester as the dedicatee of West Indian Eclogues and his explanations for so doing suggest that he was far from lacking in political guile. Rushton’s solid commitment to ideas of liberty for all is further illustrated by his criticism of Thomas Paine. After Washington’s dismissal of his letter to him, Rushton wrote to Thomas Paine, suggesting that they campaign together against American slavery. He was to be disappointed once again, however, as Paine rejected the idea. While Rushton admired Paine’s publications and their contribution to the struggle for liberty, he concluded that despite his role in abolishing slavery in Pennsylvania in 1780, Paine’s commitment to freedom extended only to ‘white slaves’.37 Rushton’s criticism of this lack of commitment on Paine’s part adds to the sense of incongruity about his dedication of West Indian Eclogues to Beilby Porteus, whose disagreement with the author of The Rights of Man came from entirely the opposite political perspective. It is interesting to contrast this forthright public opposition to slavery with that of James Cropper. Cropper’s own comparatively steadfast antislavery stance was at least until the early 1830s tempered by his apparent relative tolerance of slavery on mainland American plantations. His position is also a little confused because of his argument that future freedom and prosperity, including that of the West Indian plantation workers, would be largely reliant on the Lancashire textile industry, which, of course, depended to a great extent on slave-grown cotton from the Unites States. Perhaps Rushton’s lack of social prominence protected him from censure to some degree – he was, after all, by no means a member of

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the town’s elite; or it could be the case that the Liverpool abolitionists’ vulnerability to attack and persecution has been overstated. Given the experiences of the Rathbones, who may have been protected by their social status, and Rushton and Dannet, who were clearly vulnerable, it seems likely that there is more than a kernel of truth in Currie’s claim that abolitionists could openly argue their case in Liverpool and enjoy a fair degree of security and safety. Despite this, the political climate in Liverpool gave the abolitionists what would seem to be a valid reason to exercise caution and restraint; their vulnerability to the powerful local supporters of slavery would appear to be obvious. Nevertheless, when Liverpool abolitionists, regardless of their social position, did make public their views under their own names, the consequences do not appear to have been too drastic. The lack of sanctions and censure directed at the town’s women anti-slavery poets, Eliza Knipe and Mary Birkett (discussed below), is further evidence that it was relatively safe for potentially vulnerable Liverpudlians to express their abolitionist sympathies. While the Liverpool Ladies Society was not as prominent or numerous as, for instance, their Birmingham counterparts, it was nevertheless an active, organized body, whose members were significantly engaged in the propaganda battle. They helped pack and distribute parcels of East Indies sugar in the boycotting campaign. Further, in the 1830s they were instrumental in the distribution of significant numbers of anti-slavery pamphlets across the country.38 Prior to the foundation of the Ladies’ Association in Liverpool in 1827, female activity was largely on an individual, ad hoc basis and for the most part took the form of publishing poems, which attacked slavery and the slave trade. Two examples are Eliza Knipe and Mary Birkett. That both these women were only temporarily residents of the town illustrates the growing levels of mobility for many of the middle classes during the late eighteenth century and Liverpool’s position as hub for much of this movement. Knipe’s chief contribution to this genre of literature was ‘Atoboka and Omaza; an African Story’. This formed part of her second published collection of poetry, Six Narrative Poems, which was published for subscription in London in 1787. Although Knipe was born in London, part of her upbringing took place in Liverpool.39 She was living in Liverpool at the time Six Narrative Poems was published and the fact that this collection was published in London is an indication that there was awareness in the capital of the potential for some level of support for the abolitionist cause in the port at the centre of the trade. The sufferings of black people were commonly used as a device to engender sympathy for the abolitionist cause among the mostly female readership of this genre of literature, the target audience foreshadowing the

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future importance of women in the anti-slavery movement.40 Published in the same year as Rushton’s West Indian Eclogues, Knipe’s Africans in ‘Atoboka and Omaza; an African Story’ are also depicted as noble and heroic and, importantly, as intellectually equal to Europeans.41 Mary Birkett, a Quaker of Irish stock, left Liverpool with her family at the age of ten. Although she only spent her early years in Liverpool, she is included here because her family background suggests that there was a certain amount of largely unrecognized anti-slavery sentiment in the town prior to the mobilization of organized support. Her Poem on the African Slave Trade, published in 1792 when she was seventeen years old, is critical of England’s involvement in the slave trade, contrasting that with Irish avoidance of the trade. She also argues for active resistance, echoing other women writers’ calls for a boycott of West Indian sugar, referring to it as a ‘blood-stain’d luxury’. She urges women to exert influence over their male relatives in order to persuade them to abstain from using sugar, and to act similarly themselves. In common with Knipe and Rushton, and opposing contemporary orthodoxy, Birkett portrayed African people as the Europeans’ intellectual and moral equals. She writes: Let Sordid traders call it what they will, Men must be men, possest with feelings still; And littler boots a white or sable skin, To prove a fair inhabitany within … … Man was his fav’rite work – he formed him free; His favr’rite work whate’er his colour be: And far more dark’s the sinful soul within, Than the poor harmless Negro’s sable skin 42 Moira Ferguson claims that Birkett’s Poem on the African Slave Trade recognizes the ‘oppression and rights of the colonised other, especially the rights to resist and the need for practical action’.43 As Cropper would do in the 1820s, Birkett ties together oppression of African and Irish people, laying the blame at the same English cause. We need to beware of drawing concrete conclusions from these poets about the strength of anti-slavery sentiment in Liverpool during the very early campaigns. However, their connections with the town, though perhaps tangential, provide us with an illustration of broader sympathies with the cause. These two women spent parts of their formative years in the town and, either at first hand or through their families, would have been familiar with the slavery debate. It is unlikely that the families of Birkett or Knipe were entirely isolated in their views. Indeed, the evidence clearly

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suggests that a significant number of Liverpudlians were opposed to the slave trade and they were beginning to make their voices heard. It is significant that these calls for liberty and humanity, alongside Edward Rushton’s West Indian Eclogues, come from members of society who were marginalized because of their sex, or because of poverty. These were people whose experiences of oppression came at first hand. While their direct impact on the anti-slavery campaigns was little more than peripheral, they were important for more than just illustrating local discontent with or opposition to the slave trade and slavery. While the abolitionist movement was led by elite figures such as Clarkson and Wilberforce and, locally, by members of the Roscoe circle, the groundswell of support among the masses was in large part the result of grass-roots activity, which featured contributions to both sides of the debate from common people, who were addressing people like themselves. As Tim Burke asserts, ‘Abolitionism was steered by aristocratic Tories … and well connected Whigs … but the contribution to its momentum by the works of “commoners” … should not, perhaps, be underestimated’.44 We could be forgiven for concluding that the abolitionist campaign had gained the support of significant numbers of Liverpool’s enfranchised elite, when Roscoe was elected in 1806 to be one of the town’s two MPs, standing against two incumbent, anti-abolitionist MPs, Bamber Gascoyne and Banastre Tarleton, and pledging a commitment to the gradual abolition of the slave trade. However, this does not necessarily indicate a large groundswell of support for abolitionism; those entitled to vote (approximately 3,000) represented a small minority of Liverpool’s populace and Roscoe’s victory was in any case due, at least in part, to some ‘prodigious bribery of the electorate’. Whereas Tarleton’s and Gascoyne’s friends expended approximately £4,000 and £3,000 respectively, Roscoe’s supporters’ expenditure ran to around £12,000.45 Roscoe gained further support as Gascoyne’s supporters reacted to the violence and disorder in the town carried out by supporters of Tarleton. They split their votes between Roscoe and their preferred candidate in an attempt to prevent Tarleton’s election.46 Roscoe also gained support due to the controversy surrounding Tarleton’s multiple switching of his party allegiance. The Account of the Election describes how Tarleton lost much of his support because of his party political about-turns. This ‘was a crime in [his supporters’] eyes never to be forgiven, and they resolved at any price to prevent the possibility of his re-election’.47 It would seem that ‘any price’ included the election of Roscoe. Propaganda from the election campaign criticized Tarleton’s fluid allegiances:

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Mr Banastre, who has had the honour of plying his tricks before the Imperial Parliament of Great Britain, flatters himself that his unrivalled exertions will obtain their patronage and favour … He will, to the astonishment of his audience, turn his coat sixteen times in a minute … He will, by his extraordinary powers, display the manner in which, in the Summer of 1802, without any visible means, he led by the nose six hundred persons in a populous town in the North.48 The Account of the Election explained the outcome of polling in Liverpool: That Mr Roscoe was a new candidate. That Mr Roscoe was an amiable man. That he was supported by all the Sectarists in Liverpool. That his friends expended in his cause between 11 and 12 000 l. and therefore he was at the head of the poll. That General Gascoyne has served the town faithfully Ten Years. That his friends are rather sparing of their cash. That he is supported by the Corporation, whose interest is in the decline, and therefore he was second in the Poll. That General Tarleton has supported the trade of Liverpool for sixteen years. That he was guilty of recovering his senses a little time before Mr Pitt’s death. That therefore his quondam friends became his bitterest enemies. That some of his supporters are more ready to promise than to pay, and therefore he lost his election.49 Roscoe hardly referred to the slave trade or abolition throughout the campaign; indeed, his backers included a number of freemen of the African Company. His victory should not lead us to conclude that the pro-slavery lobby did not still enjoy considerable popular support at this time. Roscoe voted for abolition in Parliament in 1807, but upon his return to Liverpool he was attacked by a mob, including some unemployed seamen, who were keen to remind him of his election pledge to vote for abolition only by gradual stages.50 It would be erroneous to conclude that Roscoe’s election in 1806 indicates that public opinion in Liverpool concerning the slave trade had undergone a reversal. If opinions among the 3,000 or so enfranchised elite experienced a sea change, which led to the election of a wellknown abolitionist, then the change did not last very long. The following year, Tarleton rejoined Gascoyne as one of Liverpool’s two Members of Parliament. It seems much more likely that the issue of slavery was not key

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to the 1806 election, that the view of Liverpudlians on the slavery question remained largely the same – divided. Perhaps it was generally believed that the battle to maintain the slave trade was to all intents and purposes lost by 1806. In any case, Liverpudlian merchants tended to spread their investments among diverse ventures and the loss of the slave trade would not be (nor, indeed, was it) too painful for the majority of them. In the light of the evidence considered in this chapter, we can see that the support for abolitionism in Liverpool has been largely underestimated. A fairly significant level of support, or at least tolerance, for the anti-slavery cause may be discerned in the town at the time of the earliest stirrings of organized abolitionism. This can be seen even among Liverpool’s enfranchised elite during the Parliamentary elections of 1806. However, it was only when abolition became organized and formalized in Liverpool in the 1820s that the town was able to achieve any significant national prominence in the anti-slavery movement. By then abolitionists in Liverpool were to a great extent at the forefront of the national campaign, with Cropper perhaps the most active of them and his family carrying out much of the leg work in the propaganda battle. Given Cropper’s contributions and his growing influence within the anti-slavery movement, and the Liverpool Society’s status and autonomy, there could certainly be no notion of a ‘miniature analogy’ with the rest of the country when discussing the activities of Liverpool’s abolitionists during the second campaign. Although the town’s centrality in the later campaign cannot be questioned, there was virtually no organized activity there before the 1820s. However, it would also be erroneous to conclude that even prior to 1807 there was minimal or ineffectual abolitionist activity per se in Liverpool. As is stated above, abolitionists in the town operated in a manner specific to themselves and their locality. Despite the lack of a formal anti-slavery organization, Liverpool abolitionists debated the issue of slavery openly in the town, provided valuable information to the national committee and published forthright and sophisticated arguments against the trade. Individual Liverpool abolitionists made important practical and intellectual contributions to the early campaign against the slave trade – albeit often covertly and anonymously – though occasionally with significant risks to their own well-being – which paved the way for the town to assume a more central, leading role in the campaigns for emancipation up to 1834. Notes

1. J. Tripp, ‘Liverpool Movement for the Abolition’, Journal of Negro History, 13 (1928), 265–85, cited in F. E. Sanderson, ‘The Liverpool Abolitionists’, in R. Anstey and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Liverpool, The African Slave Trade, and

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Occasional Series, 2 (Liverpool, enlarged edition, 1989), 197. J. Wallace, A General and Descriptive History of the Ancient and Present State of the Town of Liverpool … Together with a Circumstantial Account of the True Causes of its Extensive African Trade (Liverpool, 1795), 229–30. Declaration of the Objects of The Liverpool Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 25 March 1822, Merseyside Maritime Museum (hereafter MMM), D/ CR/11/15; C. Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London, 1992), 47. J. McQueen, The West India Colonies; the Calumnies and Misrepresentations Circulated against them by The Edinburgh Review, Mr Clarkson, Mr Cropper, &c. &c. Examined and Refuted (London, 1825). Anonymous, Liverpool and Slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool–African Slave Trade (Liverpool, 1884, reprinted 1984), 76–77. H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1994), 90. R. Harris, Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade, Shewing its Conformity with Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion Delineated in the Sacred Writings of God (Liverpool, 1788), in P. Kitson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 2, The Abolition Debate (London, 1999), 283–323. G. Chandler, William Roscoe of Liverpool 1753–1831 (London, 1953), 65; Sanderson, ‘Liverpool Abolitionists’, 198–99. D. Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London, 1991), 161–62; Introduction to Harris, Scriptural Researches, in Kitson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 281; and Sanderson ‘Liverpool Abolitionists’, 1989, 198. J. Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London, 1992), 302. A. Bryson, ‘Riotous Liverpool’, in John Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History 1790–1840 (Liverpool, 1992), 98–135. F. E. Sanderson, ‘The Structure Of Politics in Liverpool’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 127 (1978), 78–79. ‘The Liverpool Slave Trade’ in The Commercial World and Journal of Transport, 4 March 1893, 8–10, cited in E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1944, reprinted, 1964), 64. I. Sellers, ‘William Roscoe, the Roscoe Circle and Radical Politics in Liverpool, 1787–1807’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 120 (1968), 45–48, 51. Unpublished ballad (no date), uncatalogued item in Roscoe papers, cited in Chandler, William Roscoe, 52; B. Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization (London, 1984), 30–31. Fladeland, Abolitionists, 31, Fladeland, Abolitionists, 19. J. Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London, 1997), 95. Introduction to The Rathbone Papers, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool Library; Sanderson, ‘Liverpool Abolitionists’, 200–1, 232–33; Chandler, William Roscoe, 408.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav294 294

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Abolitionism in Liverpool

295

19. P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (London, 1989), 639; Sanderson, ‘Liverpool Abolitionists’, 203–4. 20. William Wilberforce, personal correspondence to James Currie, 11 November 1790 and 13 April 1793, cited in J. Pollock, Wilberforce (London, 1977), 104, 123. 21. Personal correspondence of James Currie, cited in Anonymous, Liverpool and Slavery, 89–90. 22. J. Currie and W. Roscoe, ‘The African’, published anonymously as ‘The Negroe’s Complaint’ in The World (1788), amended and published as ‘The African’ in Carlton-House Magazine (April, 1793), reprinted in A. Richardson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, Volume 4: Verse (London, 1999), 99–100. 23. Fladeland, Abolitionists, 24. 24. H. Dannet, A Particular Examination of Mr. Harris’s ‘Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave-Trade’ (Liverpool, 1788). 25. M. Royden, Pioneers and Perseverance: A History of the Royal School for the Blind, Liverpool 1791–1991 (Liverpool, 1991), 26–28; B. Hunter, Forgotten Hero: The Life and Times of Edward Rushton, Liverpool’s Blind Poet, Revolutionary Republican & Anti-Slavery Fighter (Liverpool, 2002), 6–7, 102–3; W. Shepherd, The Life of Edward Rushton (Liverpool, 1824), x, xii–xiv, 164–65; Sanderson, ‘Liverpool Abolitionists’, 204–7. 26. Richardson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 30; B. Martin and M. Spurrell (eds), The Journal of a Slave Trader ( John Newton), 1750–1754, with Newton’s Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, 1788 (London, 1962), 99. 27. Unfortunately, there are no known surviving copies of the paper. 28. Hunter, Forgotten Hero, 59; Royden, Pioneers and Perseverance, 30; Shepherd, Edward Rushton, xv–xxiv, cited in Sanderson, ‘Liverpool Abolitionists’, 205. 29. Hunter, Forgotten Hero, 31–32; Royden, Pioneers and Perseverance, 30; Shepherd, Edward Rushton, xv–xxiv. 30. E. Rushton, West Indian Eclogues (1787), reprinted in Richardson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 31–54. 31. Rushton, Explanatory notes to West Indian Eclogues, 1787, in Richardson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 59–60. 32. B. Porteus, ‘Civilization, Improvement, and Conversion of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands Recommended. Preached Before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, February 23, 1783’, cited by Rushton in Explanatory notes to West Indian Eclogues, 1787, in Richardson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 61–62; and in R. Hodgson, The Works of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, vol. II, (1823), 396–98. 33. Rushton, Explanatory notes to West Indian Eclogues, 1787, in Richardson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 59–62 34. E. Rushton, ‘American Independency’, in W. Shepherd (ed.), Poems and Other Writings by the Late Edward Rushton. To which is Added a Sketch of the Life of the Author (London, 1824), 38–40, cited in Hunter, Forgotten Hero, 10, 47; Fladeland, Abolitionists, 25–26. 35. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London, 1938, 2001 edition), 184–85; R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848 (London, 1988), 231–33, 246–56.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav295 295

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296

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

36. Edward Rushton correspondence to George Washington, in Hunter, Forgotten Hero, 107–13; Fladeland, Abolitionists, 26. 37. Hunter, Forgotten Hero, 49–50; Royden, Pioneers and Perseverance, 28. 38. MMM, D/CR/12/2, List of recipients of parcels and pamphlets (early 1830s); MMM, D/CR/12/39, List of Anti Slavery Pamphlets Circulated by Liverpool Ladies Association 1830–31; Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 58. 39. A. Richardson, introduction to Eliza Knipe, ‘Atomboka and Omaza; an African Story’, in Richardson (ed.), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 63. 40. D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1967), 388. 41. Eliza Knipe, ‘Atomboka and Omaza: An African Story’, published in Six Narrative Poems (London, 1787); Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 33; M. Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London, 1992), 241, 362. 42. Mary Birkett, A Poem on the African Slave Trade Addressed to Her Own Sex (Dublin, 1792); J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (London, 1998), 140–41; Ferguson, Subject to Others, 178, 180–82; Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 34–40. 43. Ferguson, Subject to Others, 181. 44. T. Burke, ‘“Humanity is Now the Pop’lar Cry”: Laboring Class Writers and the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1787–1789’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 42 (2001), 260. 45. A Compendious and Impartial Account of the Election at Liverpool Which Commenced on the First and Closed on the Eighth of November 1806 Together with Such of the Songs and Squibs as Possess either Point or Humour, and are not of Libellous Tendency: and also a Correct List of the Freemen who Polled (1806–7), viii. 46. History of the Election for Members of Parliament for the Borough of Liverpool, 1806, Containing the Addresses of Different Candidates, with a List of the Freemen’s Names who Voted (1806–7), 10–15. 47. A Compendious and Impartial Account of the Election at Liverpool, vi. 48. A Compendious and Impartial Account of the Election at Liverpool, 89–90. 49. A Compendious and Impartial Account of the Election at Liverpool, xi–xii. 50. History of the Election, 1–45; A Compendious and Impartial Account of the Election at Liverpool, 83–128; Sanderson, ‘The Structure of Politics in Liverpool’, 85, 88; B. W. Higman, ‘The West India Interest in Parliament’, Historical Studies, 13 (1967), 9; D. A. Macnaughton, ‘Roscoe, William’, in H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 47 (Oxford, 2004), 737.

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav296 296

20/11/2007 14:42:59

Index

Abashy, Duke 27 abolition economic impact on Liverpool 230–1, 246 petitions against 243, 245 Liverpool 10–11, 15–16, 277–93 Sierra Leone Company 10, 252–70 Adams, Captain John 68 Ado, William 260, 266 Africa abolitionism 252–70 African agency in the slave trade 43–61 credit relationships 44, 46–7, 50–61 Europeans resident in 45–7, 60, 68–9, 74 fort-trade markets 6, 45–6, 67–72, 75–85, 86, 87 Liverpool’s dominance of British slave trade 14–34 number of slaves exported by region of departure 45 ship-trade markets 6, 68–82, 84–8 slave trade to Chesapeake 98–114 trade cargoes 21–2, 74–5, 237–74 African slave merchants Anomabu 68 Bonny 68 credit relationships 27, 44, 46–7, 50–61 dominance of Liverpool traders 27 networks 84 Royal African Company 82 ship-trade markets 68–82, 84–8 Sierra Leone Company 260–1, 262–3,

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav297 297

265, 267, 268, 269–70 African-American culture, creation of 138, 139–41, 152–8 Africans abolitionism 284–6, 287–8 creation of Afro-Caribbean culture 138, 139–41, 152–8 as crew on Guineamen 78 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 8, 138–58 human agency in the slave trade 1, 5, 43–61, 284–6, 287–8 studying in Liverpool 27, 266–7 Afro-Caribbean culture, creation of 138, 139–41, 152–8 Agah, Gold Coast 69 agents, Chesapeake 107 Agnes I 122 Agnes II 122 Aiken, John 19, 170–1 Ainsley 124 Aja 143–4, 150–2, 156 Akan 141, 143–4, 150–2, 156, 157 Albion 192 Alexander 127, 129 Alimamy Sadu 261 Alithea 122 Alleyne, Mervyn 157 Alvarez, Abraham 146, 148 Amacree 123 amanyanabo (Bonny) 55, 56, 57 Ambriz, Angola 71 American War of Independence 24 abolitionism 285–8 changes in disembarkation regions 29

20/11/2007 14:42:59

298

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Chesapeake slave trade 114 Sierra Leone settlers 254–5 Amounderness, Lancashire 124, 128–9 Amy 267–8 Anderson, John and Alexander 85 Angola Bristol slave merchants 84, 86–7 creation of African-American cultures 156 crew on ships to 69, 70, 75, 77, 78 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 143–52, 156 prices for slaves from 149–50 Royal African Company 82 ship-trade markets 69, 70, 75, 77, 78 see also Ambriz; Cabinda; Loango; Melimba Annabella 131 Annapolis, Maryland 108 Anomabu, Gold Coast 66, 67–70, 71 Anstey, Roger 1–4, 11–12 Anti-Slavery Society 277 Archbould, Henry 150 Aro 52, 55 Arochuku, Nigeria 52 Ashton, Nicholas 186 Aspinall, James 28, 29 Atlantic Creoles 141–2 Aylmer, Lieutenant Whitgift 151 Ayscough, Major Thomas 151

Backbarrow Iron Company 130 Backbarrow, Lancashire 130–1 Backhouse, Daniel Bight of Biafra 28 direct trade with the West Indies 185 Lancastrian networks 124, 125–6 wealth from the slave trade 133, 168 Backhouse, Gerrard 129, 133 Backhouse, John Lancastrian networks 129, 132 trade with the Chesapeake 104–5, 110 trade links with Virginia 185 Backhouse, Thomas property 172

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav298 298

trade with the Chesapeake 104–5, 110 Backhouse, William 129 Bahia, Brazil 153, 156 Bailyn, Bernard 3 Baker & Dawson 29–32 Baker, Dave 130 Baker, Peter 28, 133 Baltic trade 17 Banana Islands (Bananoes), Sierra Leone 51, 53, 260–1 Bananoes, Sierra Leone 51, 53 Bance Island, Sierra Leone Bristol slavers 87 credit relations with African slave dealers 51 crews for ships to 75–6, 85 fort-trade markets 69, 75–6, 85, 87 Royal African Company 82 Sierra Leone Company 264 social networks of Europeans in 53 banking 185, 231, 236 Baptist, John 76 Barbados numbers of slaves disembarked in 28, 30–1 slave cultures 141, 156 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 103, 111–12, 113 Barber, Miles bankruptcy 185 Lancastrian networks 7, 121, 122, 125, 126 slave factory at Isle de Los 131 Barclay 128 Bassa, Sierra Leone 51, 71 Beckford, Peter, Sr. 148, 150 Beetham, Westmorland 132 Begg, William 28 Behrendt, Stephen D. 4, 5–6, 66–88, 127 Benguela, West Central Africa 46 Benin, manpower requirements for ships to 71 Benin, Bight of (Slave Coast) dominance of Liverpool traders 26–7 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 142–52

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fort-trade markets 45–6, 68–9, 71 number of slaves embarked from 25, 26, 45–6 prices for slaves from 149–50 Royal African Company 82 share of Liverpool slave trade in Africa 47, 49 ship-trade markets 69 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 112, 113 see also Ouidah; Popo; Porto Nuovo Bennis, Andrew 75, 76 Benson, Moses direct trade with the West Indies 185 Lancastrian networks 124, 125–6, 129, 132 property 172 slave trade to Jamaica 29 Bent, Ellis 128–9 Bent, Mary 128 Bent, Robert 190 Berlin, Ira 141–2 Betty 129 Biafra, Bight of 5 Bristol slavers 86–7 commercial families 53 credit relations 51–61 crews on ships to 69–70, 71, 78 dominance of Liverpool traders 24, 25 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 142–52 loading rates 57–8 number of slaves embarked from 25, 26, 27–8, 45–6 prices for slaves from 149–50 Royal African Company 82 seasonality of trade 74–5 share of Liverpool slave trade in Africa 47–51 ship-trade markets 68, 71, 78, 83, 86 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 112, 113 Taylor’s voyage to Bonny 69–70 see also Bonny; New Calabar; Old Calabar bill guarantee system 32–3, 34, 44 ‘bills in the bottom’ of the ship 33, 34

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav299 299

Index

299

Binns, Dr Jonathon 278, 279 Bird, Joseph 245 Birkett, Mary 289, 290–1 Black, Patrick 84, 232 Black, Peter 84 Black Poor 254–5 Blackburne, John 236, 239 Bloom 128 Blundell family, Chesapeake trade 102, 103, 104, 106 Blundell, Bryan, Sr. 102, 103, 104 Blundell, Jonathan 28, 232 boating trade 72 Boats, William 28, 29, 190 Bold, Jonas 234 Bolden, William 106, 185, 235 Bolton 127 Bolton, John direct trade with the West Indies 185 Lancastrian networks 124, 125–6, 127 wealth from the slave trade 133, 168 Bonny, Bight of Biafra 5 Bristol slave merchants 84, 86–7 captains of slave ships to 76 commercial families 53 credit relations 51, 52–3, 55, 57–8, 60–1 crews on ships to 70, 71, 76, 78 deaths of crewmen from disease 72 dominance of Liverpool traders 27 loading rates 57–8 ship-trade market 66–70, 71, 78 Sierra Leone Company 263 social networks of Europeans in 53 Taylor’s slaving voyages 1799 66–70 Bootle, Lancashire 23 Bordeaux 16–17 Borsay, Peter 228 Bostock, Robert 77 credit relations 53 remuneration 69 shipbuilding 241 trade cargoes 238 Botanic Garden, Liverpool 228 Bourne, Cornelius 185, 234–5 Bowers, Captain Stephen 76–7 Bowie, James 75, 76, 84–5 Brade, Robert 190

20/11/2007 14:42:59

300

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Bragg, Captain William 151 Branker, Peter Whitfield 17 brass industry 239, 240, 243 Brazil, slave culture 140 brewing industry 23 Brighouse, Captain 131–2 Bristol abolitionism 15 areas of embarkation of slaves in Africa 24–7 Bight of Biafra 5 bill guarantee system 33 building of docks 19 Chesapeake trade 98–100, 101, 109 crews on ships from 6, 67, 72–3, 75, 78–80, 86–7 exports to Africa 21–2 Gold Coast slave exports 83 growth of transatlantic commerce 16–17 impact of the slave trade 230, 243 industry in surrounding area 18, 23–4 Liverpool’s dominance of British slave trade 4–5, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22 networks of African merchants 84 number of slave voyages 21 numbers of slaves by disembarkation region 28–32 salaries for crew and officers 72–3 shipbuilding of slave ships 19 sugar trade 34 British Leewards 28, 30–1 British Windwards 30–1 Brocklebank, Arthur 228 Brooks, Joseph 102 Brothers 123, 124 Brunton, Reverend Henry 266–7 Buck, Nathaniel 239 Buck, Samuel 239 Buckle, Captain 261 Bud 128 Bullins, Richard and Christopher 231 Bullom people 256 Bullom Shore, Sierra Leone 258–9, 266 Burke, Tim 291 Burnard, Trevor 3, 4, 8, 138–58 Buxton, Thomas 253, 265, 266, 268, 270

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav300 300

Cabinda, Angola 70, 71 Caldcleugh, Boyd and Reid 77 Calvert, Anthony 84 Calypso 232, 262–3 Cambridge University 178, 179 Camden, William 84 Cameroons credit relations 51, 57 Liverpool merchants 26, 84 manpower requirements for ships to 71 ship-trade markets 69 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 112, 113 Campbell, George 102 Canal Navigation Company, Ulverston 127 canal network 23, 127 Cape Coast, Gold Coast 45–6, 68, 71, 82, 144 Cape Mount, Windward Coast 51, 69, 71, 72 captains 66–88 Chesapeake trade 111 from Lancaster and environs 119, 120–9, 134 that later became slave merchants 167 Caribbean bill guarantee system 33 development theory 2 numbers of slaves disembarking in 29, 30–1 see also Jamaica; West Indies Carolinas 28, 30–1, 32–3, 101, 106, 156 Carter family 107 Casamance, Senegambia 46 Case, George 28, 29 Castillo, Sir James 144 Cato 121 Caton 122 Caton, Lancashire 122, 123, 127–8, 132, 133 Catterall, Robert 69 Cawthorne family 120 Ceded Islands 29, 34 Central Africa, influence on AfroCaribbean culture 140–1, 157 Chambers, Douglas 157

20/11/2007 14:42:59

Charitable Institution House 281 charitable institutions 9, 229–30, 281 Charming Nancy 132 ‘charter’ generations 155–6 Cheadle, Cheshire 172 Checkland, S. G. 227 Chesapeake 6–7 creation of African-American cultures 156 domination of Bristol traders 28 growth of transatlantic commerce 17 Liverpool slave trade to the 98–114 numbers of slaves disembarked in 30–1 seasonality of slave trade 108–9 tobacco 6–7, 17, 20, 98–114 Chesterfield 84, 232 Chorlton, Cheshire 170 Christianity, Sierra Leone Company 252–70 Christofen, Peter 75 Clarke, Thomas 29, 133, 172 Clarkson, John 257, 258–9, 269 Clarkson, Thomas abolitionism in Liverpool 277, 284, 291 Sierra Leone Company 254, 255, 256–62, 265–6 class, social aspirations of slave merchants 8–9, 164–93 Clay, Richard 110 Clay, Robert 102 Clayton, John 232 Cleveland, James 53, 69 Cleveland, William 53, 260–1, 266 Company of Adventurers Trading to Africa 82 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa 68–9, 82, 121, 232 Congo River 48–9 crews of ships to 71, 77 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 152, 153 consignment system 106–7, 109–10 convict servants 6–7, 102, 105 Cooke, George 231 Cooper, Thomas 261 Cope, Colonel John 145, 150, 151

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav301 301

Index

301

Copeland (Copland), John 132, 232 copper industry communications with Liverpool 23 impact of slave trade on 18, 242, 243–4 trade cargoes 239, 240 Cordosa, Moses 148 Cork 16–17 corn 67–8 Coromantee region 147, 152 cotton industry 18, 22, 261 Cowie, Robert 76 Cowper, William 284 credit bill market 32–3 Chesapeake slave trade 101, 107, 108–9, 110–11 credit relationships with African slave dealers 27, 44, 46–7, 50–61 Sierra Leone Company 267 Creoles Atlantic 141–2 ethnicities in Jamaica 147, 152, 155, 156, 157 crews 66–88 Chesapeake trade 111 geographic origins of 75–82 impact of slave trade on Liverpool 241, 243 muster rolls 187, 188 promotion rates 86–7 salaries for 69, 72–4 ship-trade markets 5–6, 69, 72–4, 75–82 Cropper, James abolitionism 277–8, 281, 286, 288, 293 impact of slave trade on Liverpool 227 Sierra Leone Company 257 Crosbie, James 235–6 Crosbie, John 28 Cross River 51, 84 Cuba 29, 34, 156 cultural capital 9, 227–46 Cumba Bali Damba 261 Cunliffe family 7, 191 Cunliffe, Ellis 112–14, 234

20/11/2007 14:42:59

302

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Cunliffe, Foster Chesapeake slave trade 102, 103, 104–5, 107, 111 Eastern Shore Maryland stores 112 investment of profits from the slave trade 234 Cunliffe, Robert 112–14, 234 Cunningham, John 76 Currie, Dr James 279, 281–2, 289 customs duties, Isle of Man 21–2

Dahomean culture 156 Daltera, Joseph 114 Dalzel, Archibald 82–4 Dannet, Reverend Henry 283, 285, 289 Daulby, Daniel 279 Davenport, William Bight of Biafra 28 business partnerships 232 Chesapeake slave trade 102 Lancastrian networks 126, 130, 132 Old Calabar 84 Davidson, Andrew 77 Davies, Captain William 262, 264 Dawes, Governor 259, 260–1 De Camp, D. 157 Demerara 32 Denison, William 122 development theory 2, 3 Dickson, William 172 distilling industry 23 Dixon, Thomas 190 Dobb, William 29 Dobson, Miss 122, 123–4 Dobson, John 102, 185 Dolben, Sir William 256 Dolphinholme, Lancashire 132, 133 Dominguia 261 Dominica 29 Doran, Felix, Jr. 128, 190 Doran, Felix, Sr. 28, 128, 190 Douglas, Isle of Man 21–2 Dove 122 Drescher, Seymour 1, 2, 10, 253 Dresser, Madge 230 Drinkwater, Margaret 178 Drinkwater, Peter 178, 181

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav302 302

Dublin 16–17 Duck, Edmund 146 Duke, Antera 27 Duke family 53, 55, 56 Dunbar, Thomas 185 Dutch Caribbean 29 Dutch traders 48, 49

Earle family abolitionism 281 patterns of investment 232 slave sales in St. Kitts 131–2 trade links with Italy 185 Earle, Ralph 232 Earle, Thomas Bight of Biafra 28, 84 business partners 232 Lancastrian networks 129 personal estate at death 168 Earle, William Bight of Biafra 28, 84 business partners 232 Chesapeake slave trade 102 personal estate at death 168 slave trade with the Chesapeake 106 earthenware 110, 239, 240 East India goods 21–2 East India Company 85, 246 Edwards, Bryan 156–7 Ekpe (Leopard) Society 55, 56–7 Elder, Melinda 4, 6, 7, 119–34 Elem Kalabari see New Calabar Eliza 129 Elizabeth Anderson 75–7, 84–5 Elletson, Richard 155 Elmina, Gold Coast 45–6 Eltis, David 141, 142–5, 150, 151, 254 Engerman, Stanley L. 2, 254 Espino, Don Juan 144 ethnicity slaves in the Chesapeake 112 slaves in Jamaica 8, 138–58 slaves shipped from the Bight of Biafra 52 Europeans cultures in North America 157–8 resident in Africa 45–7, 60, 68–9, 74

20/11/2007 14:43:00

Evered, William 103 Everton, Lancashire 170–1, 236 Exchange 228 Eyes, John 240

factories, fort-trade markets 6, 43, 45–6, 67–72, 75–85, 86, 87 Fairweather, Captain Patrick 84–5 Falconbridge, Alexander 72 Falkner, Edward 174 Falkner, Thomas 185 Fante 68 Fauntleroy, William, Jr. 110 Fayrer, Captain Joseph 130–1, 133 Fenwick, Henry 146, 147 Ferguson, Moira 290 Ferret 125 Fischer, David Hackett 157 Fisher 123, 264 Fisher, John 185 Fisher, Ralph 130, 172 Fisher, Roger 185 Flint Mug Works 243–4 Forde, Charles 190 Forsyth, Captain 132 fort-trade markets 6, 45–6, 67–72, 75–85, 86, 87–8 Foster Cunliffe and Sons (and Co.) 104–5, 234 Fowden, Joseph 172 Foxcroft, John 127 Foxcroft, Thomas 125, 128, 133 Foxcroft, Reverend Thomas Hammond 133 France 21, 24 Fraser, James 74 freed slaves, Sierra Leone Company 254–5, 257–60, 266, 268–9 Freeman, Judith 146 Freeport, Sierra Leone 261, 266 Freetown, Sierra Leone 10, 252–70 French Caribbean 29, 30–1 French privateers 20 French Revolution 280 French Revolutionary Wars 87, 243, 245, 263 French slave merchants 33, 46, 48, 49

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav303 303

Index

303

Fula Empire 261 Fuller, Thomas 146–7 Furness, Lancashire 124–7, 133 Furry Cannaba 261–2 Futa Jallon 52, 261

Gabon credit relations 51, 57 dominance of Liverpool traders 26 manpower requirements for ships to 71 Sierra Leone Company 262–3 Galenson, David W. 147 Galloway, Archibald 75 Gambia 122 Gambia Island 264 Gambia River Chesapeake slave trade 103–4, 105 credit relations 53 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 144 fort-trade markets 69 manpower requirements for ships to 70, 71 Royal African Company 82 ship loading rates 58 Sierra Leone Company 260 Gamble, Captain Samuel 76 Games, Alison 157–8 Garstang, Lancashire 128–9 Gascoyne, Bamber 291–2 Genes, Don Juan 144 Gent, William 146 Gentleman’s Magazine 192–3 George 121 Georgia 28, 30–1 Gildart, James 7, 102, 103, 104–5, 110, 191 Gildart, Richard 7, 102, 103, 104–5, 110, 127 Gladstone, John 281 Glasgow Chesapeake tobacco trade 7, 34, 101 docks 19 growth of transatlantic commerce 16–17 locational advantage 20 occupational structure 241–2

20/11/2007 14:43:00

304

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

glass, trade cargoes 240 Goad, John 102, 124–5, 128 Gold Coast Bristol slavers 87 Chesapeake slave trade 112, 113 credit relations 52, 53 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 142–52 fort-trade markets 45–6, 68–9, 70, 71, 72, 74 London traders 82–4 number of slaves embarked from 24–6, 45–6 prices for slaves from 149–50 Royal African Company 82 seasonality of trade 74 share of Liverpool slave trade in Africa 47, 49 ship loading rates 58 Sierra Leone Company 262–3 Taylor’s voyage to Anomabu 68, 69 See also Agah; Anomabu; Cape Coast; Elmina; Lagoo Golden Age 121 Goodwin, William 233–4 Goore, Charles 104–5, 110, 114 Gore’s General Advertiser 187, 192 Gore’s Liverpool Directory 232, 240, 245 Goulding, Matthew 111 Granada 122 Granville Town, Sierra Leone 254–5 Gray, John 261–2 Grayson, Edward 185 Green, Robert 28, 185 Greetham, James 234–5 Gregson, James 28, 29, 168–70 Gregson, John 29 Gregson, William 28, 29, 170 Grierson, Alexander 264 Guadeloupe 29, 30–1 Guianas 30–1 Guinea mariners 66–88 gunpowder 21–2, 130–1, 239 guns impact of slave trade on Liverpool 243–4

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav304 304

trade cargoes 67, 238, 239, 240 Guy, Major Richard 151

Hair, Paul 1–4, 11–12 Haiti 156 Haitian Revolution 286 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo 141 Hallhead, Robert 103, 232 Hamilton, Arthur 240 Hamilton, Hance 77 Hannah 122 Harding, James 154–5 Hardman, John 102, 235–6 Harper, William 28, 185 Harris, Reverend Raymond (Raimundo Hormoza) 278–9, 283 Harrocks, Richard 265 Hardwar, Henry 235 Hart, Richard 127 Hartwig, Reverend Peter 267 Harvie, Alexander 15 Hasell, Christopher 172 Hawes, J. 255 Hayes, James 130 Hayhurst, Thomas 186 Hayman, Captain William 76 Henshaw family 55 Herskovits, Melville J. 139–40 Heversham, Westmorland 133 Hewitt, Robert 146 Heywood family 132, 185, 191 Heywood, Arthur 178 Chesapeake slave trade 102, 103 Jamaica slave trade 29 property 235–6 Heywood, Benjamin 29, 235–6 Hinde 121 Hinde family, Lancastrian networks 121, 130, 132, 133 Hinde, Joshua 132, 133 Hinde, Samuel 121–2 Hinde, Thomas, Jr. 121–2, 132 Hinde, Thomas, Sr. 121 Hinde, William 121 Hindle, William 69 Hodgson, Ellis Leckonby 129, 131 Hodgson, John (of Caton) 15

20/11/2007 14:43:00

Lancastrian networks 7, 123, 126, 132 Miles Barber’s slave factory in Isle de Los 131 move to Liverpool 122 wealth from the slave trade 133 Hodgson, Thomas (of Caton) 15 business partners 232 Lancastrian networks 7, 123, 126, 132 Miles Barber’s slave factory in Isle de Los 131 move to Liverpool 122 wealth from the slave trade 132, 133 Hodgson, Thomas (of Garstang) 128–9 Hodgson, William (of Garstang) 128 Hodson, John 69 Holland 21–2 Holme, Peter 28, 29, 232 Holt-Gregson papers 188 Holywell, Flintshire 244 Honesty family 53, 55 Hope 239 Hormoza, Raimundo (Harris, Reverend Raymond) 278–9, 283 ‘houses’, Bonny 55 Howman, Brian 3, 4, 10–11, 277–93 Hughan, Thomas 66, 69–70 human agency 3–4 abolitionism 284–6, 287–8 African 1, 5, 43–61 human capital 5–6, 66–88, 257 humanitarianism, abolitionism 254 Hunt, John 147 Hunter, Henry and Robert 87 Hutton, George 125, 128, 132 Hyde, F. E. 236, 242

Ibibio 52 Igbo 52, 141, 156, 157 Iland, Anthony 142 indentured servants 6–7, 17, 100, 102, 105 Industry 106 Ingram, Francis 26–7, 29, 185 insurance 20, 236 investment impact of slave trade on Liverpool 8–10, 227–46

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav305 305

Index

305

monopoly trading companies in Africa 45–6 Ireland 16–17, 76, 78, 100, 158, 229, 231 iron industry 124–5, 130, 133 Islam 50 Isle de Los, Sierra Leone credit relations with African slave dealers 51 crews on ships to 71, 76 fort-trade markets 69 Miles Barber’s slave factory 131 runaway slaves in Sierra Leone 265 social networks of Europeans in 53 Isle of Man 21–2, 34, 78 Islington China Manufactory 243–4 ivory 261, 262, 263

Jamaica domination of Liverpool traders 28 ethnicities of slaves in 8, 138–58 growth of transatlantic commerce 17 Lancastrian networks 125, 127 mortality rates amongst Europeans in 153, 154–5 numbers of slaves disembarked in 28–9, 30–1 James Fort, Senegambia 46, 68 James River Basin, Virginia 101 James and William 262 James, William 102 Jane 121–2 Jenny 126 John 130 John and Betty 104 John and Thomas Hodgson Lancastrian networks 7, 123, 126, 132 Miles Barber’s slave factory in Isle de Los 131 move to Liverpool 122 John Welch and Company 125 Johns 119 Johnson, Anthony 142 Johnson, Marion 1, 2 Jones, James (Bristol merchant) 87 Jones, Thomas (Bristol merchant) 72

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306

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Jones, Thomas (cook on Spy) 75 Jupiter 122

Kamaranka River 261–2 Kate 238 Keaten, John 87 Kelly, Smith 145, 148–9 Kendal cottons 130 Kendall, Anthony 123 Kendall, James 122 Kendall, John 122, 123–4 Kendall, Matthew 124 Kendall, Richard 122–4, 133 Kewley, John and Patrick 185 King, Captain 262 King of Dahomey 121 King Grey 128 King, Thomas 84 Kingston, Jamaica 67, 76, 148 Kitchen, Robert 127 Klein, Herbert 2 Knies, John 69 Knight, John 28 Knipe, Eliza 289–91 Koya Temne 260 Kwa language group 143

La Page, R. B. 157 Lace, Ambrose 28 Lagoo, Gold Coast 69 Lagos, Nigeria 71 Lahou, Sierra Leone 51 Lake District, investment from 7 Lancashire bill market 32–3 captains of slave ships 78 geographic area of origin of slave merchants 167 impact of slave trade on 244–5 industry 18, 22, 32, 129–31, 288 relationship of Liverpool to 22–4, 32, 66 slaver networks 7, 119–34, 236 Lancaster 7, 119–34 Land Tax Assessments 1798 172–3 Langton, J. 236–7

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav306 306

languages Creole 155, 156 English as lingua franca 53 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 143, 147 latent events 3 Law, Satterthwaite and Jones 132 Lawson, Caesar 69 Laxton, P. 236–7 Leck, Lancashire 127–8 Leckonby, Thomas 128 Lee, Piers 232 Leeds-Liverpool canal 23 Leopard 104 Leopard Society see Ekpe Society Leslie, Charles 152 Lesser Antilles 17 letters of reference 54 Leyland, Thomas banking 185 Bight of Biafra 28 Jamaica 29 non-slave trade 231 personal estate at death 168 property 172, 173, 236 slave trade 281 trade cargoes 238 Lickbarrow, Thomas 232 Lightbody, Elizabeth 122 Lindow 129 Linecar, Samuel 76 linen industry 22 Lisbon 16–17 Little Pearl 87 Lively 127 Liverpool abolitionism 10–11, 277–93 African agency 5, 43–61 Africans studying in 53 apology for role in slave trade 227 areas of embarkation of slaves in Africa 24–7 building development 232–6 Chesapeake slave trade 6–7, 98–114 credit relationships with African slave traders 44, 46–7, 50–61 crews 66–88 direct trade with 185

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disembarkation regions in Africa 28–32 districts where slave merchants lived 170–2 docks 18–19 dominance of British slave trade 1740–1807 4–5, 14–34 growth of transatlantic commerce 16–17 impact of the slave trade on 9–10, 227–46 industrial base 17–18 Lancastrian networks 7, 22–4, 119–34, 244–5 leading slave merchants 194–215 locational advantages 16, 20–4, 33–4 newspapers 192–3 occupational structure 17–18, 236–44 ship-trade markets 6, 68–82, 84–8 shipbuilding 19–20, 240–4 social aspirations of slave merchants 164–93 wills of slave merchants 208–15 Liverpool Chronicle 192 Liverpool Corporation 234–5 abolitionism 280, 283, 284–5 building development 233 docks 18–19 gunpowder 130 Liverpool Courier 192 Liverpool Guide (1796) 241 Liverpool Herald 284 Liverpool Infirmary 229 Liverpool Institution 228 Liverpool Journal 192 Liverpool Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association 277, 278, 289 Liverpool Library 229 The Liverpool Memorandum Book 232, 236 Liverpool Merchant 111 Liverpool Mercury 192 Liverpool Plantation Registers 189–90 Liverpool School for the Blind 283 Liverpool and Slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool-African Slave Trade 278, 279 Liverpool Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery 277, 278

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav307 307

Index

307

Liverpool Town Council 278–9 Liverpool West Indian Association 281 Lloyd’s Register of Shipping 188, 189 Loango, Angola 46, 47, 49, 69, 71 London areas of embarkation of slaves in Africa 24–7, 28–32, 83 bill market 32–3 Chesapeake slave trade 98–100, 101, 109 crews 6, 66–7, 75–8 fort-trade markets 82–4, 86, 87–8 Gold Coast 82–4, 86 Liverpool’s dominance of British slave trade 1740–1807 4–5, 14, 16, 20 number of slave voyages 21 Royal African Company 82 shipbuilding of slave ships 19 Taylor’s voyage to the Gold Cost 74 trade cargoes 85–6 Upper Guinea 86 London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade 255, 279 Long, Samuel 145, 146, 150 Longmore, Jane 4, 9–10, 227–46 Lonsdale, Lancashire 124, 125, 128 Lord Grey 129 Los Islands see Isle de Los Lottery 239 Louisiana 156 Lovejoy, Paul E. 4, 5, 43–61 Low Wood, Lancashire 130–1 Lower Eastern Shore, Chesapeake 100 Lower Guinea, ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 140, 142–52 Lower James, Chesapeake 105, 106, 108, 110 Lowndes, Edward 114, 232 Lowndes, Francis 114 Lowther 122 Luanda, West Central Africa 45–6 Lunatic Asylum, Liverpool 229 Lune Valley, Lancashire 122, 123, 127–8, 132 Lyceum Library 228, 229 Lynch, Sir Thomas 146

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308

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Macaulay, Zachary 253, 258–70 McCragh, Dennis 146 McQueen, James 277 Madison, James 110 Maldives 21 Manchester 123, 124 Manchester credit from exporters 32 impact of the slave trade on 244–5 textile for trade cargoes 22–3, 85–6 Manchester Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade 278 Manchester goods 239, 244–5 manufacturing 236–44 Margaret 123 Maroons arrival in Sierra Leone 257 Jamaica 141 Marquis of Granby 122 Mars 132 Martinique 29, 30–1 Marton 122 Mary 87, 145 Mary and Betty 123 Mary Ellen 129 Maryland 6–7, 17, 98, 108 Mason, Edward 185, 234–5 mates 72–4 Mears, Thomas 234 Melimba, Angola 69, 70, 71 Melville, Thomas 82 Mentor, Edward 87 Merrick, Benjamin 76 Mersey, River 19 metal industry impact of the slave trade on 243, 245 trade cargoes 238, 239 Middle Passage disruption of African cultures 139, 140 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 148 trauma of 8, 139, 140 Middleham 127 Middleton, Sir Charles 255 Middleton, Richard, bankruptcy 185 migration European cultures in North America 157–8

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav308 308

from Lancaster and environs to Liverpool 7, 120, 121–34 population of Liverpool 17 within West Africa 143 Miles, Richard 82–4 Mill, David 82 Mill, John 82 Milligan, Robert 87 Mills, Selina 269 Milnthorpe, Westmorland 133, 172 Minchinton, Walter 2 Minerva 121 Mintz, Sidney 8, 139, 155 missionaries, Sierra Leone Company 266–7 Modyford, Charles 145, 146 Molesworth, Hender 145 Molly 122 Montego Bay, Jamaica 69 More, Hannah 256 Morecambe Bay 120, 124, 134 Morgan, Sir Henry 146 Morgan, Kenneth 4–5, 14–34 Morgan, Philip 142 Moss, William 241 Mullin, Michael 157 Mumbee, Valentine 150 Murray, John 22 Music Hall, Liverpool 229 muster rolls 187, 188 Naimbanna 262 Napoleonic Wars 243, 245 Naval Office Shipping Lists 188, 189 naval stores, Chesapeake trade 101, 102–3, 106, 108, 110 Neilson, William 185, 190 New Calabar, Bight of Biafra credit relations 51 crews on slave ships to 71, 76 dominance of Liverpool traders 27 ship-trade markets 69 Newton, John 256, 283 Nicholas, Richard 103 Niger Delta 51 Norris, Robert 146 North America

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credit relationships 43–4 disembarkation regions 28–32 European cultures 157–8 Liverpool’s Chesapeake slave trade 98–114 slave cultures 153 Northwich, Cheshire 23 Nova Scotia, freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone 257–60 Nuñez, River fort-trade markets 69 Sierra Leone Company 260, 261, 264, 265 Nunns, John 119 Nutry, Trevor 76

occupational structure, Liverpool 236–44 Ogden, Edmund 234, 245 Okill, Charles 233 Old Calabar, Bight of Biafra 5 Bristol merchants 84 credit relations 51, 52–3, 55–7 crews on slave ships to 69, 71, 72, 76 dominance of Liverpool traders 27 loading rates 57–8 Sierra Leone Company 263 social networks 53, 55–6, 84 townships, 55 Oliver, Don Alexander 144–5 Orgill, Andrew 146 Ormond, John 69 Oswald, Richard 82, 85 Otter 127 Ouidah, Bight of Benin 45–6 Bristol slavers 87 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 144, 152, 156 fort-trade markets 68 manpower requirements for ships to 71 Royal African Company 82 Owens, Thomas 75 Oxford, Maryland 108 Oxford University 178, 180

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav309 309

Index

309

Pa Cumba 260 Paine, Thomas 288 Papaw 147, 152, 156 Parfitt, E. L. 262–3, 267 Parke, Thomas 130, 131–2, 174 Parker, Hugh 126 Parker, John 126 Parr, Edward 103 Parr, John 234 Patterson, Orlando 139 Patuxent, Maryland 108 pawnship 27, 60 Old Calabar 56–7 Sierra Leone 58–9, 263 Windward Coast 58–9 Pearce, John 265 Peckard, Dr Peter 256 Peers, Leigh 103 Peggy 264 Pemberton, John 103, 104, 107, 178 Penkett, John 103, 236 Penny, James 7, 124, 125–6, 129, 131, 132 Penton, Samuel John 75, 76 Pepple family see Perekuele family Percival, James 28, 29 Perekuele family 53, 55, 56, 57–8 pewter 18 pidginization 147, 152 Piedmont, Chesapeake 101 pipe-making 238, 239, 240, 244 Pitt 122 Plantation Registers 189–90 planters attitude to slave cultures in Jamaica 141–2, 153 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 142–8, 150–2 mortality rates 153, 154–5 patterns of buying at slave sales 142–8, 150–1 selling slaves for Liverpool traders in the Chesapeake 106–7, 109–10, 111 Sierra Leone Company 258–9, 268 size of slaveholdings in Jamaica 153–5 Plymouth 20 Pole, William 133, 168

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310

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Pongo River 69, 76, 260, 261, 266–7 Poole 20 Pope, David 3, 4, 8–9, 164–93 Popo, Bight of Benin 69, 71 Poro society 59 Port Royal, Jamaica 148 Porter, Andrew 266 Porteus, Beilby 283, 284–5, 288 Porto Novo, Bight of Benin 26–7 Portsmouth 20 Portuguese traders 46, 48–9 post-modernism 3 Potomac River Basin, Chesapeake 105, 107, 108 press gangs 70, 284 Preston 131–2 Preston, Gerrard 129 Preston, William 129 Preston and Winder 129, 131 Price, Richard 8, 139, 155 prices, slaves in Jamaica 149–50 privateers 20 privilege slaves 72–4 Probate Duty 168 property, owned by slave merchants 165, 170–4, 186, 219–22, 232–6 Public Dispensary, Liverpool 229

Quakers, abolitionism 278, 280, 281, 290 RAC see Royal African Company racism, abolitionism 284–6, 287–8 Ralph Fisher and Company 123–4 randomization 139–41, 155, 158 Rappahannock River Basin, Chesapeake 100–1, 103–4, 105, 107–8, 110 Rath, Richard Cullen 147 Rathbone, Joseph 234–5 Rathbone, William III 278, 279–80, 281, 289 Rathbone, William IV abolitionism 279–81, 289 Edward Rushton 284 Sierra Leone Company 10, 256 Rawlinson, Abraham 125 Rawlinson, Henry 125

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav310 310

Rawlinson, John 132 ‘refuse’ slaves 149 Registers of Mediterranean Passes 187, 188 Reid, George 146 religion impact of slave trade on Liverpool 229–30 Sierra Leone Company 50, 252–70 Renner, Reverend Melchior 267 Revestment Act 1765 22 Richardson, David 1–13, 43–61, 243 Richardson, William 76 Robert and William 123 Roberts, John 185 Robin John family 53, 55, 56 Rogers, James 87 Roscoe circle, abolitionism 279–82, 291 Roscoe, William 11, 231 abolitionism 279–81, 282, 291–3 Edward Rushton 284 Rose 104 Royal African Company (RAC) 8 bill guarantee system 33 Chesapeake slave trade 100 credit 53 end of monopoly 14 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 139, 143, 144–5, 146, 148 fort-trade markets 47, 68–9 Lancaster 120 links to London 82 Royal College of Surgeons 78 Rumbold 122 Rumbold, Thomas 28, 29, 110 Rushton, Edward 283–9, 291

Sadler, Charles 145 St Andrew, Jamaica 154–5 St Helen’s, Lancashire 23 St John Parish, Jamaica 150–1 St. Kitts 131–2 St. Louis, Senegambia 46 St. Lucia 29 St. Vincent 125 salt 23, 239, 240, 241 San Domingo 29

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Sanderson, Frank 11 Sandown 76 Sandys, Samuel 185 Sankey Brook navigation 23 Sansom, Phillip 255 Sarah Bonadventure 145 Satterthwaite, Benjamin 132 Satterthwaite, John 131–2 Satterthwaite & Robinson 131–2 Savage, Richard 29 Saville 122 Schofield, Eunice 7 Schofield, Maurice 7 Schwarz, Suzanne 1–13, 252–70 Scotland 76, 78, 85, 255 Seaman, Thomas 28, 29 Seaman’s Hospital, Liverpool 229 Seel, Robert 110 Seel, Thomas 103–4, 235 Senegal River 70, 71 Senegambia creation of African-American cultures 156 crew for slave ships to 71 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 143, 144–52 fort-based markets 46 number of slaves embarked from 24, 25, 45–6 share of Liverpool slave trade in Africa 47, 49 slaves from Futa Jallon 52 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 111–12, 113 see also Casamance; James Fort; St Louis Sestra Crue, Windward Coast 51 Seven Years’ War Chesapeake slave trade 104, 112–14 Liverpool’s locational advantage 20 numbers of slaves disembarking in French Caribbean 29 Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser 187 Sharp, Granville 254–5 Shaw, John 131 Shaw, Samuel 28, 103, 106 Shepherd, Reverend William 283, 285 Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav311 311

Index

311

commercial families 53 credit relations 51 fort-trade 69 Sierra Leone Company 260 Sherbro, River 266 Ship Registry Act 1786 188 ship-trade markets 6, 68–82, 84–8 shipbuilding 19–20, 240–4 Shirburn Castle 129 Sierra Leone 5 attacks on slave ships 59 Chesapeake slave trade 112, 113 commercial families 53 credit relations 51–61 crews for ships to 70, 71, 85 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 143 fort-trade markets 46, 69, 70, 71, 85 Lancastrian networks 131 manpower requirements for ships to 70, 71 Miles Barber’s slave factory 131 number of slaves embarked from 25, 26, 45–6 Royal African Company 82 share of Liverpool slave trade in Africa 47, 48–51 ship loading rates 58, 60 Sierra Leone Company 10, 252–70 social networks 53 see also Bance Island; Banana Islands; Banaoes Island; Bassa; Bullom Shore; Freeport; Freetown; Granville Town; Isle de Los; Lahou; Nuñez, River; Sherbro Island Sierra Leone Company 10, 252–70 Simpson, Samuel 121 Slater, Gill 185 Slave Coast see Bight of Benin slave merchants abolitionism 253 bill guarantee system 32–3, 34 children of 175–84 credit from suppliers of exports 32 credit relationships 43–4, 46–7, 50–61 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 144–5, 148–9

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312

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Europeans resident in Africa 45–7, 60, 68–9, 74 fathers of 216–18 investment of profits of slave trade 231–6 Lancaster networks 120–34 leading merchants in Liverpool 194–215 Liverpool docks 19 marriage 174–5, 176 negative attitude towards 227–8 officers and crews 66–88 other trade with the West Indies 185 property 170–4, 186, 219–22 Sierra Leone Company 262, 264, 268, 269–70 social aspirations of 8–9, 164–93 socio-economic background of 165–7 wealth of 167–70 wills of 208–15 see also African slave merchants slave sales Chesapeake 106–7 credit relationships 32–3, 43–4 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 8, 138–58 Lancastrian networks in the West Indies 131–2 patterns of buying in Jamaica 147–8, 150–1 prices for slaves in Jamaica 149–50 slave ships attacks on by African groups 59 Bonny 68 Bristol slavers 19, 86–7 captains 72–4, 111, 119, 120–9, 167 Chesapeake slave trade 98–9, 111 crews 5–6, 66–88, 111, 119–29, 167, 187–8 ethnicities of slaves arriving in Jamaica 139–45 investment of profits of slave trade 231–6 Lancastrian supplies for 129–31 lists of 187–8 Liverpool’s dominance of British slave trade 14–15 loading rates 57–8

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav312 312

London slavers 19 number of voyages 3, 21 officers 66–88 patterns of ownership 231–2 salaries for crew and officers 69, 72–4 seasonality of trade 74–5 ship-trade markets 6, 68–82, 84–8 shipbuilding in Liverpool 19–20, 240–4 Sierra Leone Company 264 Taylor’s voyage to Bonny 69–70 trades for fitting out 240–1, 242–4 slave trade Chesapeake slave trade 98–114 crews 66–88 distinction between ship-based and fort-based trade 6 dominance of Liverpool 1740–1807 4–5, 14–34 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 138–58 fort-trade markets 6, 45–6, 67–72, 75–85, 86, 87–8 impact of slave trade on Liverpool 9–10, 227–46 investment of profits of 8–9, 231–6 Lancastrian networks 119–34 Liverpool’s locational advantages 16, 20–4 loading rates 57–8 ship-trade markets 6, 68–82, 84–8 Sierra Leone Company 252–70 slaves African areas of embarkation 24–7, 28–32, 111–12 Chesapeake slave trade 98–114 creation of Afro-Caribbean culture 138, 139–41, 152–8 death of slave owners in Jamaica 153, 154–5 ethnicities in Jamaica 8, 138–58 freed slaves in Sierra Leone 252, 254–5, 257–60, 266, 268–9 London’s slave trade 83 prices in Jamaica 149–50 randomization 139–41 runaway slaves in Sierra Leone 265 size of slaveholdings in Jamaica 153–4

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Sloane, Hans 147, 156 Smeathman, Henry 259 Smith, Henry 127 Smith, John (carpenter on Spy) 75, 76 Smith, M.G. 139 smuggling 22 social aspirations, slave merchants 8–9, 164–93 social capital 6–7, 52–4 Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade 278, 279, 281–2 Society for Missions to Africa and the East 267 Society for the Promotion and Encouragement of Art and Design in Liverpool 228–9 Soltow, Lee 172–3 South Carolina 32–3, 101, 106, 156 South Central Africa 152 South East Africa 47, 143, 152 South Potomac, Chesapeake 105 Southampton 20 Spanish America Atlantic Creoles 141 domination of Liverpool traders 32 numbers of slaves disembarked in 30–1 slaves shipped from Jamaica 143–5, 148 Spanish Caribbean 30–1 Spanish privateers 20 Sparling, John 235 Chesapeake trade 106, 185 property 172, 236 Speers, Alexander 87 Spencer, Captain John 87 Spy, crewmen 75–7 Staffordshire 244, 245 Stag 132 Stamp Duty 168 Staniforth, Thomas 172 Stanton, Colonel Edward 145 Strickland and Company 130 Stobart, Jon 227–8, 244 Stribling, Samuel 86–7 structural theory, post-modernism 3 sugar growth of transatlantic commerce 17

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav313 313

Index

313

refining industry 23, 239, 240, 241, 245 Sierra Leone Company 257–9, 268 surgeons 72–3, 74, 78 Susu language 266–7 Swanzy, James 82–4 Sweet, James H. 140, 155 Swift 124

Tacky’s Rebellion 152 Tamazin 121 Tarleton, Banastre 291–2 Tarleton, Cicely 129 Tarleton, Clayton 185 Tarleton, Elizabeth 129 Tarleton, John, Jr. 28, 29, 185 Tarleton, John, Sr. 185, 193 Tarleton, Thomas 28, 126, 173–4, 185 taxation, Isle of Man 21–2 Tayloe, John 107 Taylor, I. C. 227 Taylor, Robert 66 Taylor, Samuel 86 Taylor, Simon 66–70, 74, 78, 87 Teare, William 22 Temne people 256, 258 textiles from Lancaster and environs 22, 130 impact of slave trade on Lancashire 244–5 London 85–6 mills built with wealth from the slave trade 133 Taylor’s slaving voyages 1799 67 trade cargoes 22–3, 238–9, 240, 241 Theatre Royal, Liverpool 229, 231 Thellusson, Peter 76 Thetis 122 Thomas 127 Thornton, Henry 255, 259, 269–70 Thornton, John 140, 142–3, 156, 158 Threlfall, Joseph 126–7 Tibbles, Anthony 1–13 Tillie, John 146, 147–8 Timbo, Futa Jallon 261 tobacco, Chesapeake 6–7, 17, 20, 98–114 Tolderby, Captain John 150

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314

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery

Tom, King 258, 264 Tooka Kerren (Freeport) 261 trade cargoes for Bonny 74–5 Chesapeake trade 106, 109–10 credit 32 from Lancaster and environs 22, 23, 130 impact of slave trade on Liverpool’s occupational structure 237–40, 241–4 Isle of Man 21–2 London 85–6 pawnship 27 Taylor’s slaving voyages 1799 67 textiles from Lancashire 22 Trader, Thomas 69 Trafford, William 28, 29 Trinidad 29, 156 Trinidad and Tobago 30–1 Trinity House 84 True Blue 121 trust, credit relationships 43–4, 52–4, 60 Trusty 77 Turpin, William 75 Turton, William 240 Two Brothers 122

Ulverston, Lancashire 120, 125–7, 133 Upper Guinea ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 143–52 fort-trade markets 68–9 London 86 Royal African Company 82 ship-trade markets 69 Upper James River Basin 105, 107–8 Urania 129

Vaughan, William 19 Venus 69 Vickery, Philip 146, 147 Virgin Islands 29 Virginia 6–7 growth of transatlantic commerce 17

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav314 314

Liverpool’s Chesapeake slave trade 98, 104, 108 naval stores trade 101

Wade, John Robinson 87 Wakefield, Thomas 130 Wales 18, 76, 78, 244 Walker, Thomas 256 Wallace, J. 277 Wallace, James 22–3 Wallace, William 279, 281 Walsh, Lorena S. 4, 6, 98–114 war Liverpool’s locational advantages 20 salaries for crew and officers 72, 73 War of the Austrian Succession 20, 102 War of the Spanish Succession 14, 18 Ward, Henry 145, 148–9 Ward, Joseph 131 Warner-Lewis, Maureen 140–1, 157 Warrington, Cheshire 23 Washington, George 286–8 Watson, Sir Francis 145, 150 Watt, James 261–2 Weaver Navigation 23, 245 Wedgwood, Josiah 256 Welch, George 128 Welch, James 128 Welch, John 125 Chesapeake slave trade 102, 103 Lancastrian networks 127–8 wealth from the slave trade 132 Welch, Robert 128 West Central Africa credit protection 59 crew for ships to 71 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 142–52 fort-trade markets 45–6 Liverpool trade with 24, 25 number of slaves embarked from 25, 26, 45–6 share of Liverpool slave trade in Africa 47–51 ship loading rates 58 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 112, 113

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see also Angola; Benguela; Luanda West Indies bill guarantee system 33 credit relationships 43–4 direct trade with Liverpool 185 growth of transatlantic commerce 17 Lancastrian networks 7, 131–2 press gangs 70 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 111–12, 113 Westmoreland 129 Weuves, Jerome Bernard 82–4 Whaley (Whalley), William 84, 103, 232 Whalley, William 146, White, Andrew 185 White, Henry 120–1 Whitehaven Chesapeake tobacco trade 7, 101, 109 growth of transatlantic commerce 16–17 industry in surrounding area 23–4 Whittle, Charles 145 Wicksted, Richard 170 Wigan 23 Wilberforce, William 66, 255, 281, 291 Wilkes, Nicholas 150 Willan, T. S. 240 William 124 Williams, Eric 164, 186 Williams Fort, Ouidah 68 Williamson, John 232 Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser 187–8, 192 Williamson’s Liverpool Memorandum Book 189 wills of slave merchants 208–18 Wilmot, John 146 Wilson, Christopher 130

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav315 315

Index

315

Wilson, Edward 28, 29 Wilson, Captain Thomas 75, 76 Windward Coast 5 attacks on slave ships 59 captains of slave ships to 76–7 credit relations 51–61 crews on ships to 78 deaths of crewmen from disease 72 ethnicities of slaves in Jamaica 143 Liverpool merchants 84 manpower requirements for ships to 70, 71 number of slaves embarked from 25, 26, 45–6 share of Liverpool slave trade in Africa 47, 48–51 ship loading rates 58, 60 ship-trade 69 Sierra Leone Company 262 slaves sent to the Chesapeake 112, 113 see also Cape Mount; Sestra Crue Wood, John 228 Woodville, William 185 Woodville, Captain William, Jr. 87 wool industry 18 Woolly, John 146 Wright, Matthew 122

yams 74–5 Yannamarow 122 Yates, Reverend John 10, 256, 279 Yeats, John 125, 128, 132 York 260 York River Basin 108, 110 Yoruba 156 Young, Sir George 255

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav316 316

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Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav317 317

20/11/2007 14:43:01

Liverpool and Transatlantic Slav318 318

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