Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XXI

I know that it might appear that I am going backwards in this particular post but I assure you I am not.  This is the way I am introducing Connecticut's involvement and also showing the beginnings of the rice industry that two Southern states made profitable. 

It seems almost impossible to believe but read on. Some of these records have remain hidden for years and are just now coming to light.
I cannot honestly say that this was anyone's fault.  It just happened, but I believe it will, in time, change a bit of the way slavery in this country is viewed.  I honestly hope that it will help to alleviate the tensions which we have on these boards.

Jan. 18, 1757 saw a fast, two-masted ship, the Africa sail from New London harbor; it headed briefly west, 'round Fishers Island in Long Island Sound, and then east, out to open sea.

When the Africa left New London in Jan. 1757, Capt. John Easton and his crew were headed for the west coast of Africa and Sierra Leone, to buy slaves.  (State Archives, Connecticut State Library
(There is a picture here, I'm sorry, I don't know how to add pics to my posts.  The picture credit says photograph by Tom Brown, The Hartford Courant,)

The second in command, Samuel Gould, noted that it was "very could [sic]".  This would be his first entry in an extraordinary ship's log that the Connecticut man kept for 18 months on 3 voyages, taken on 3 different vessels. Each trip had the same purpose: to buy and sell slaves.

Although Rhode Island's leading role in the transatlantic slave trade is well documented, the role of Connecticut on the front lines of the slave trade has been very well concealed.  But the recent resurfacing of Samuel Gould's log, tucked away in the Connecticut State Library for 80 years is changing history.

The lack of research into Connecticut and the slave trade can be blamed in part, on the United States' most infamous traitor, Benedict Arnold.

Arnold was born & raised up-river from New London and was already a turncoat when, during the American Revolution, he led 800 British soldiers on a raid of the port city in 1781 and almost destroyed it.
About 150 structures were burned, including the New London customshouse, with its decades of shipping records.

In the West Indies Connecticut's recognition is usually for its highly profitable involvement as a shipper of livestock. However, Gould's log reveals that African men, women, and children were regularly sought out by men from the colony.   During the latter half of the 18th century, New London-based ships worked the coast of Africa alongside competitors from Rhode Island and Europe, transporting captives to the West Indies and back to the American colonies.

European nations, by the 1600s, were establishing slave-trading centers--slave warehouses that were often called "castles" --along the west coast of Africa.  By about 1700, about 40 such castles were estimated to exist along nearly 2,000 miles of coast, from Senegal's Gore'e Island, south to Ghana's Cape Coast Castle and the infamous Elmina (from el mina, "the mine").

When the Africa and Samuel Gould sailed into the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, Bunce Island, one of the most successful slaving businesses on the coast, was already in operation.  Bunce, at that time called Bence, or Bance, has largely been forgotten, but 4 separate entries on one page of Gould's log for April 1757 indicate that slaves were purchased there.

Although the majority of Africans were brought to the Western Hemisphere through private traders, the castle system was a critical conduit.  And there is no equivalent to Bunce Island, which, unlike many other fortresses, was built specifically to hold slaves.  During the long history of the slave trade, an estimated 645,000 Africans were forced into slavery in the American colonies.  More Africans--perhaps as many as 12,000 ---came here through Bunce than through any other African fortress.

Twenty miles from the point of land later established as Freetown, now the capital of Sierra Leone, tiny Bunce was rapidly emerging in the 1750s as the source of the American colonies most desirable slaves.   In the 1740s, the colonists of South Carolina and Georgia were starting to grow rice, turning over thousands of acres to raising the crop, and they needed the rice-growing farmers from Sierra Leone for their knowledge as well as their labor.

Gould's log records that on May 5, 1757, for example, 10 days after leaving Bunce for the West Indies, Gould wrote from aboard the sloop Good Hope. "This 24 hours Died three small slaves with the Flux--165 Slaves Remain living on Board."

The ruins of the last slave fortress on Bunce--the island may have had six different castles between 1670 and the 1790s--are nearly swallowed up by the equatorial jungle.  Yet the functioning and daily operations of this slaving center are evident.

New England and British commanders made their trade arrangements in the captain's office, with its fireplace evocative of cold weather and home.  Of the fireplace, designed without a flue, only a mantel survives now exposed to sun and rain.

The gravel path down which slaves were forced down to waiting ships still curves towards the jetty.  Though the island ceased to be a trading center two centuries ago, the beaches nearest the jetty are still littered with the Venetian glass beads of deep blue, wine red, and dark green taken in trade for the Africans.

Free workers ("grommetos") manned Bunce and offered slaves taken from as far as 100 miles inland and 600 miles of coast.  New England ships like Gould's could drop anchor for trade and find, on neighboring islands, ample supplies of fresh water, produce, and wood.

Bunce's ready supply of slaves allowed traders to assemble their human cargo very fast and avoid lengthy exposure to the malaria common to coastal Africa.

No one lives on Bunce now.  The caretaker who carefully maintains a scrapbook of signatures of visitors to the island lives on another island.

From a small point of land beyond the tower that once housed company offices, human remains have begun to surface, perhaps trying to speak, to tell what happened here.  On the gravestone of a long-ago company agent named Thomas Knight, only the word "memory" is perfectly legible.

Mr. Gould didn't realize that his 80 page log would one day provide a penetrating glimpse into the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. While he lived and sailed, the trade was legal, and it would remain legal for nearly a half century more.

In the log's last voyage, Gould is aboard the Fox, serving under another Connecticut native, Capt. William Taylor.  The ship sailed from New London in late March 1758, and the captain was buying slaves on the Ghana coast in July when a large ship was sighted to windward. Gould thought at first it was an English warship, but that sail in the distance proved to be a French man-of-war with 60 guns.  Colonial rivals England & France skirmished, and the Count Florentine made the Fox sailors, etc. prisoners.

They must have let them go however, because 2 wks. later the Fox left from Fort Coromantine, a highly disreputable slave fortess in Ghana, and headed, under "small winds and pleasant weather" for New England and home.

Another small snippet here:  A slave ship log in the Connecticut State Library states, in the barest possible terms, that the ship was anchored at Bunce Island and taking on board supplies of food and water, probably from neighboring Tasso Island, and buying enslaved people.  The slaves were destined for St. Christopher, a sugar island in the West Indies, today better known as St. Kitts.  (State Archives, Connecticut State Library, photograph by Tom Brown, The Hartford Courant.)

I will try now to get back closer to the War and show what was happening.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum