American Slavers by Sean M. Kelley;

Author:Sean M. Kelley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

E•I•G•H•T

Slave-Trading Communities

When Newport’s Joseph Thurston was readying the sloop Prudent Abigail for a voyage in 1739, he employed two caulkers, two blacksmiths, three carpenters, three coopers, a rope maker, a painter, a sailmaker, a joiner, and a block maker, and worked with four ship’s chandlers. From local artisans he purchased sails, nails, and two ship’s boats. He bought ship’s biscuits from a baker, pork from a butcher, and a host of other provisions, including cider, peas, flour, hogs’ fat, cordwood, hoops, staves, swivel guns, gunpowder, lead balls, and cloth from unnamed suppliers. He paid eleven different people for unspecified services and hired two enslaved men from their owners for fifty days each. For just one voyage, then, he paid thirty-seven tradesmen, laborers, and merchants, none of whom would sail on the vessel, a total of £2,862 Old Tenor. And Thurston’s account did not actually give a complete reckoning of all of the people involved. He paid an unknown number of distillers £2,522 for 8,409 gallons (approximately 84 hogsheads) of rum. His accounts do not name the many free and unfree laborers who worked for the tradesmen, and they do not mention the women and children who performed the domestic labor that made it possible for the artisans to ply their trades. The amount of local labor that made the Prudent Abigail’s voyage possible was typical for the era. A former clerk to one of Newport’s slavers estimated that the major merchant houses employed as many as fifty people aboard their ships, in their counting houses, and on the docks. Multiplied over nearly two thousand voyages before 1808, it is clear that slaving involved not merely merchants and crew—it encompassed entire ports.1

Slaving ports were a very particular subspecies of maritime community. In those towns that participated heavily, slaving became a path to power and social mobility. It shaped the local demography by exaggerating the already high male death rate and increasing the enslaved population. Finally, slaving ports’ direct connections with Africa produced unique cultural clusters and pockets of specialized knowledge that challenged (though never overcame) white racial assumptions.

Many ports dispatched Guineamen over the long history of American slaving, but in most cases the impact of the slave trade on the port itself was slight. Some ports, such as New London, Connecticut, and Perth Amboy, New Jersey, sent out too few slave ships to have much observable effect on the community at large. Other ports, such as Boston and New York, dispatched many vessels, but since their total shipping volume was so large, slave ships accounted for about six in every one thousand clearances. Of the many thousands of Bostonians and New Yorkers engaged in maritime pursuits in a given year, only a few would have touched a slave vessel. Charleston presents a different picture. Charleston was a major disembarkation point for ships coming in, but apart from the rush of 1804–1807, it was never a leading dispatch point. During those four years, maritime life in Charleston did revolve around slaving. Yet

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