11th August 2021
As part of my research into slavery and the law, I want to ascertain the chronological parameters of the transatlantic slave trade.
At one end, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is the emergence of the trade in the days when the legal system(s) were very different to now – with rights of action and forms of property with which many modern lawyers would not now be familiar.
But what of at the end?
Of course, we all know that the trade had (supposedly) ended by the early to mid nineteenth century.
But in fact the last victims of the trade were alive until modern times.
The last (known) living victim did not die until 1940 – within the lifetime of four currently serving United Senators
And if one looks at the lives of the last three of those who are known to have survived, you get some interesting insights into the role of (relatively) recent law in respect of transatlantic slavery.
The survivors names were Oluale Kossola (also known as Cudjo Lewis), Redohsi, and Matilda McCrear – see here, here and here.
The ‘legal’ insights one gets are:
– how transactions were still being made in Africa, and how the supply of slaves was still organised so as to meet demand;
– how the traders deftly evaded justice – by procedural delays, as well as destroying evidence and hiding the human evidence – and also by jury verdicts;
– how survivors did not have the automatic benefit of American citizenship after emancipation because they were born abroad; and
– how one of the survivors even sought compensation (presumably in the 1920s or 1930s) but the claim was dismissed.
These examples touch on modern legal issues – the existence of illegal markets, criminal prohibition and its avoidance (both in substance and by gaming procedure and evidence), rights of citizenship, and rights to compensation.
The story of the transatlantic slave trade lasted some five hundred years.
The story goes from the legal days of actions in trover and assumpsit to the laws that exist today.
It was far more extensive both in scope and duration than many would realise.
In a way, the story of the slave trade is the story of modern commercial law.
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I would like to know of a modern analysis of how the history of slavery has permeated modern US society and culture and institutions, sort of ‘critical race theory’ without the stigma of ‘progressivism’.
And thank you for your work on this.
Any analysis of this is almost certain to be stigmatised as “progressivism” or worse. Even to take an interest in the question or to suggest that it deserves examination will be dismissed as “woke”.
I don’t know how far you’ve got on your analysis of legal regimes, but I would expect the common law was simply bent and adapted in an attempt to deal with the new circumstances, by making analogies with and where necessary extending the known law. A modern parallel might be the struggle to deal adequately with cryptocurrencies.
On the slave trade, as I hope you’d confirm, while the general shape of it is pretty clear (millions of African people enslaved and transported to the Americas, with the bulk of it under the British in the 18th century and the Portuguese in the 19th century) there are many points of detail over the long sweep of the best part of 500 years.
So, for example (and just by way of setting the scene, not excuse) there were serfs in medieval England up to the 15th or 16th century, and later forms of indentured servitude that the British brought to their American colonies, both similar in some ways to slavery. Serfdom continued in other other parts of Europe well into the 19th century. Forms of forced labour still exist in various places: debt bondage, truck, and the like. While illegal (as importing slaves to the US was in 1860) there are still instances in the UK today.
There were slaves in Iberia from Roman times, through Al-Andalus, and after the Reconquista. The Aztecs had slaves before the Europeans arrived. There were slaves in Africa before the Europeans went there to buy them in any numbers. There were slaves in Africa after it became illegal for Europeans to buy them.
The transatlantic trade began with Iberian conquistadors importing enslaved African people to supplement and replace indigenous Americans they had enslaved; ballooned with British ships into the 18th century; and despite the UK and US both claiming to have “abolished” the slave trade in 1807, the transportation of enslaved African people to the Caribbean and South America (Cuba and Brazil in particular) continued as late as 1870. People in Africa were still being enslaved, and their captors were willing to sell them.
The Clotilda took the last known African slaves to the US in 1860 (almost as a dare, it seems, and a direct parallel to a trade that was continuing into Cuba). The slaves were bought from Dahomey, which continued its slave practice until it was forced to become a French protectorate in the 1890s.
As extraordinary as it may seem, the last person known to have been born into slavery in the US died in 1972. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Mills_(slave)
Andrew
A very helpful and needed perspective on the past, and what was, not necessarily what today’s observer might think appropriate. I have not come across any culture or civilisation (black, brown, or yellow) which did not at one point practice slavery. What happened in Europe was the emergence of new unexploited land and the conceptual and technological means for large-scale agriculture which required labour. A well understood and widely employed solution offered-itself. It was the sheer scale it eventually took which exposed the horror of human behaviour when permission was given to own and exploit slaves for financial gain. It took some time for morality to catch up.
Perhaps we might get to it, but there were people at the time who said the slave trade was immoral. For a long time, it seems most people – at least those with the money and the power, which in the 17th to 19th centuries meant a small elite – were content to profit from the slave trade, financially and in terms of the commodities it produced, particularly as the horrors were mostly far away and out of sight.
For example, strange as it may seem, slavery was initially banned in colonial Georgia, at the instigation of James Oglethorpe (who was formerly a deputy governor of the Royal African Company, until the incident of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, an educated Muslim African and slave trader who was himself enslaved and transported to the Americas). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Experiment
Some Quakers in the American colonies were against slavery before 1688: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1688_Germantown_Quaker_Petition_Against_Slavery
Perhaps there will be modern day commercial interests that will play the same ‘compensation’ cards as latter day slavers. It would filter down into to spaces occupied by smaller people, but they would not get the same benefits.
Boris says he has to abide by contracts. But he thinks he can pick and chose.