“nil Disprandum” (February 1969 | Volume: 20, Issue: 2)

“nil Disprandum”

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Authors: Zûlide Cowan

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February 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 2

“Here we are in the most miserable station in the world, attempting the impossible—the suppression of the slave trade. We look upon the aflair as complete humbug.… So long as a slave worth a few dollars here fetches £80£–100 in America, men and means will be found to evade even the strictest blockade.” So wrote an officer serving with the British antislavcry patrol along the coast of West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. And a humbug, very largely, it was; just as seventy years later the American attempt to suppress rumrunners was a humbug as long as people kept buying and drinking. The slave markets in Bra/il, Cuba, and the American South still nourished, and the more difficult it was to get a cargo of slaves to market, the more lucrative the venture became.

Great Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807; the United States followed suit the next year. The great difference was that the British government vigorously tried to implement the law, sending a large and wellequipped squadron to patrol the West African coast and blockade the ports from which slaves were most frequently sent out, while the American slave-trade patrol never consisted of more than four or five vessels at a time. It was not only the influence of the slaveholding states that enfeebled the U.S. Navy’s efforts: many of the slave-runners were built and fitted out in the North, and some were owned by northerners. As late as 1859–60, at least a hundred American-built slave ships sailed from New York Harbor on their nefarious missions.

But even without American foot-dragging and duplicity, the task confronting the antislavery patrol was almost impossible. The coast they were supposed to blockade was 2,000 miles long; the subterfuges practiced by greedy slave traders were manifold and ingenious, including false ship’s papers (often American, since the United States did not permit ships of her registry to be searched by foreigners) and hidden decks where slaves were packed in literally like sardines.

When a slave cargo was apprehended, the disposition of the “prize” was no simple matter. The slaves were usually consigned to an uncertain fate in the ports of Sierra Leone or Liberia, where presumably they would thenceforth be free. For a time, ships were sent back to their country of origin and sold at auction, often falling again into the hands of the original owners. Eventually the British solved this problem by burning slavers after they had been officially condemned. As for the crews, they were technically liable to trial and severe punishment, but for practical reasons they were more often put ashore at the nearest mainland point and left to fend for themselves. The American authorities were reputedly more severe, yet statistics show that in the period 1837–62, when the death penalty was the ultimate punishment for slavers, the federal government imprisoned only two dozen men caught in slaving operations, and executed only one man. (For this and other