Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part XXVI

We hear so much about the atrocities committed by Southern slave owners, plantation owners really.  Because the average Southerner could not afford slaves.  A very prosperous farmer "might" own one slave but certainly not the 100s that he's usually given credit for in junior high history books, etc. 

At some point equal responsibility must be given and the truth about what happened before slaves ever got to the South.
I am sure there are numerous threads devoted to the interpretation of how slaves were treated in the South.  It's up to the reader to decipher truth from fiction. Heresay evidence carries no weight but there are plenty of amateur historians who would like to believe that every single
plantation owner was cruel and merciless.  There are rotten apples in every section of people.

That is not what this thread is about so back to the issue at hand:

A schooner named the Mary E. Smith was one of the last slave ships known to try to reach Brazil; in August 1855 it began it's voyage from Boston, as a deputy U.S. marshal tried to arrest its defiant owners.  They gave him a choice: Get off the ship or go to Africa.  He got off the ship.   Months later the Mary E. Smith was seized cruising the Brazilian coast loaded with Africans dying of thirst and hunger.  She had been unable to find a safe harbor to land her cargo. (Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law 1837-1862., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963, pp.47, 124-126.)

The trade to Brazil had remained open effectively until 1851, even though it was technically illegal, but the Brazilian government itself finally started to crack down on its powerful slave merchants.  When the Brazilian market finally shut down, the illegal trade shifted mainly to the sugar plantations of Cuba and even, briefly, to the cotton-producing Southern states.[/b]

The most notorious slave ship in history, the Wanderer left New York harbor (June 1858) for Africa, just as the government agents knew it would.  This racing yacht, the Wanderer, had been built on Long Island and was now outfitted with 15,000 gallon water tanks.  Her owners were Southern members of the New York Yacht Club, allied with Charles A. L. Lamar, a Georgia firebrand who publicly boasted that he intended to reopen the slave trade to the United States. (Wanderer voyage and reopening of the slave trade: (Thomas Henderson Wells, The Slave Ship Wanderer, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968,pp. 8-13; Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, pp. 162-163.)

So well known was the Wanderer's mission that she was welcomed with a cannon salute when she stopped in Charleston, South Carolina, on the way to Africa.  Newspapers reported her progress, and the British boarded her when she reached the Congo River in mid-Sept.  No navy seized her, though.  A special prosecutor appointed to the cases later claimed the entire voyage was a conspiracy organized in New York. (Thomas Henderson Wells, The Slave Ship Wanderer , Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968, p.38)

She landed a cargo of about 400 Africans in late November, 1858, mostly teenage boys, on a private island off the coast of Georgia.  As many as 80 Africans had died during the Middle Passage; the survivors disappeared into slavery.  Lamar and the Wanderer commanders went through a series of sensational trials that ended without anyone being convicted.

A yacht bigger than the Wanderer was among the last Cuba-bound ships; it was more exotic and called the Nightingale.  Just days before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in April 1861, a U.S. navy vessel patrolling a section of the West African coast visited for centuries by slave ships seized the Nightingale with nearly 1,000 Africans on board and another 600 waiting on the beach! (William Armstrong Fairburn, Merchant Sail, 6 vols. Center Lovell, ME: Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation, 1945-1955, vol. #6,pp. 3091-3092.)

She'd been named for the Swedish singer, Jenny Lind, and had been built a decade before in Maine, across the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with no expense spared. The Nightingale's speed in the China clipper ship trade soon made her a celebrity. But her days of glory ended in Jan. 1860 when it was sold in New York to a mysterious foreign buyer who hired an American captain, Francis Bowen, known as the "Prince of Slavers" to take her to Africa.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum