Dickey writes: "The stars and stripes, not the Confederate flag, once
represented the sordid system of human slavery in Cuba."
Cubans attend the US flag raising ceremony in Havana, Cuba. (photo:
Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)
Cuba's Star-Spangled Slavery
By Christopher Dickey, The Daily Beast
15 August 15
The stars and stripes, not the Confederate flag, once represented the sordid
system of human slavery in Cuba.
Old Glory is flying once again in front of the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba.
And at the flag-raising ceremony on Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry
did everything he could to remind people of the history that brought it down
54 years ago. "For more than half a century," he said, "U.S.-Cuban relations
have been suspended in the amber of Cold War politics."
The U.S. punditocracy, meanwhile, weighed in with predictable platitudes
about the meaning of it all. Many complained that Cuban dissidents should
have been invited to the embassy. The Washington Post called the State
Department's excuses for this failure "lame" and proclaimed, "The American
flag is a powerful symbol of the country's long and noble struggle to defend
the values of freedom and democracy."
Fair enough. But as we've learned in the course of this summer, flags can
mean many things to many people. And if we want to have a better
understanding of Cuba, now that it's beginning to open up, we should
remember that its troubled relations with the United States did not begin
with Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959 or even Teddy Roosevelt's charge up
San Juan Hill. We should understand that for many years the American
flag-not the Confederate flag-was, for Cubans, the star-spangled banner of
slavery.
Early in the 19th century, Great Britain, the United States, and most of the
governments of Europe had passed laws banning the horrific slave trade
between Africa and the Americas. The British, who finally emancipated the
slaves in their colonies in 1833, moved not only to end their own previously
extensive participation in the trade in humans, but to prevent others from
carrying out that grim commerce as well. They deployed warships off the
coast of Africa and South America to stop, search, and seize suspected
slavers, and they used gunship diplomacy more than once to impose their will
on weaker nations.
But the United States had gone to war against Britain in 1812 to stop it
from stopping and searching any American ships, and steadfastly refused to
let the British anti-slaving fleet stop American-flag vessels. Instead,
Washington deployed its own feeble squadron off the coast of Africa which
did little to stop slavers and much to interfere with the British efforts to
do so.
The main market for the slaves-tens of thousands of them every year- was the
Spanish colony of Cuba, where it was more profitable to work them to death
in the cane fields and then replace them with new, cheaply bought Africans,
than it was to keep them healthy and alive. Technically, it was illegal to
import them, but the law was ignored.
And, technically, trafficking in African slaves was illegal in the United
States as well-it was supposed to be a hanging offense-but the New York ship
builders and outfitters figured it was well worth the risk, and when cases
were brought before the Southern courts they refused to indict.
Indeed, the pro-slavery faction in the United States had its own designs for
Cuba: to buy it or conquer it and turn it into two new slave states, thus
assuring control of the Senate and greater power in the House of
Representatives. (Slaves had no rights as citizens or as human beings under
the Constitution, but counted as three-fifths of a person for census
purposes, thus hugely inflating the voting power of the states that held
them.) More than a century before the Bay of Pigs fiasco, adventurers in the
United States organized invasions of Cuba to "liberate" it from Spain in the
interests of American slavery. Those, too, were fiascos.
It is difficult to conceive, today, just how gruesome was the trade carried
out under that American banner of "freedom and democracy." In the 1850s,
Southern politicians known as "fire-eaters" were defending slavery-and the
slave trade-as a moral good. They were pushing to reopen it between Africa
and the United States. And at the epicenter of Southern radicalism,
Charleston, many refused to acknowledge the grotesque inhumanity of the
Cuban trade even when it stared them in the face.
In late August 1858, the horror that the South did not want to imagine-a
slave ship-was right there in Charleston harbor. Vomit and urine and feces
and blood had seeped deep into the raw wood of the sunless slapped-together
slave decks in the hold, staining them indelibly with filth. Cockroaches by
the millions seethed among the boards, and clouds of fleas and gnats rose up
from them.
The stench that came from this vessel wasn't the smell of a ship full of
cattle and horses, but that peculiar smell that surrounds humans, and only
humans, who are very afraid and very sick, or dying, or dead. The water in
Charleston Harbor was still and flat and thick as oil, and the air was
stifling hot and heavy. The stinking vessel, a brig called the Echo, had
been captured off the coast of Cuba a few days before.
Because it was the summer, the season of disease, many of Charleston's
better-off residents had left the city. For those who remained behind the
spectacle of the Echo and its Africans was a disgusting but almost
irresistible novelty. Because the transatlantic trade had been banned for 50
years, many had never beheld such a ship before. "You will see by this
morning's Mercury that we have a slaver in our harbor," one distinguished
Charlestonian wrote to a friend. "She has on board about 300 naked native
negroes, 60 of them women. Every one of whom is in the family way. Everybody
is talking about them. The yellow fever, the cables and every other subject
have faded before this. There is really and truly an excitement among these
cold, stolid Charlestonians."
That the Echo had been captured at all was the result of a dawning awareness
by the federal government of something that the British consul in
Charleston, Robert Bunch, had been explaining to the foreign office in
London for years: the fleets of slave ships flying the American flag,
supported by money-men in New York, and incited and abetted by the
fire-eaters like Robert Barnwell Rhett and Leonida Spratt, posed a growing
threat to the authority of Washington and to the Union itself.
The slave traffic was growing fast. Something had to be done before the
momentum became unstoppable. So, quietly and against stubborn bureaucratic
resistance, President James Buchanan had American warships step up their
anti-slaving patrols off the coast of Cuba as well as Africa. And the Echo
was their first prize.
The story of the Echo's capture, as told in the Charleston newspapers, began
at dawn on Saturday, August 21, 1858, when the USS Dolphin pulled out of the
Cuban port of Sagua-la-Grande, about 150 miles east of Havana. The Dolphin
was a brig-of-war, and she had been on desultory anti-slaving missions off
the coasts of Brazil and Africa from the time she'd first been commissioned
more than 20 years before. With two square-rigged masts and six 32-pound
guns she was, despite her age, quick and deadly by the standards of the
time, but she'd seen little action.
Now, through the course of the morning, the Dolphin's crew could spy far
ahead of them the twin masts of another brig. They didn't pay much
attention. The stranger wasn't a very big ship, and looked like the kind of
boat used for coastal trade among the maze of islets and keys off the north
shore of Cuba. But by around one in the afternoon, the Dolphin had pulled
closer. Its commander, Lt. John Newland Maffitt, was about as shrewd a
skipper as could be found in the U.S. Navy at the time, and he knew right
away that this ship looked too light in the water for a coastal trader.
The Dolphin picked up speed. The strange brig started to take evasive
action, hauling in some of its canvas and tacking hard to starboard with the
kind of speed and efficiency that's only possible when a ship is manned by a
large and well-trained crew. Coastal traders didn't normally have those
kinds of men on board.
Maffitt decided to play a little game with his quarry. He ran up the British
flag where the strange brig could see the colors clearly. The British could
not board an American vessel without provoking an international incident,
which is why so many slavers flew the Stars and Stripes whenever they
thought they might be challenged by one of Her Majesty's ships.
At first, the stranger showed no colors at all, but after hours giving
chase, Maffitt fired a shot close under her stern. The stranger ran up the
American flag. It had fallen into the trap. Maffitt took down the British
ensign and ran up the American one. Still the stranger struggled to get
away. Maffit fired again, this time under the ship's bow. The stranger
hauled down her sails, struck her American colors and threw them into the
sea.
The armed boarding party from the Dolphin noticed the name of the ship, the
Echo, was painted on a slab of wood nailed to the stern, but the original
name, the Putnam, was still visible, a ghost image of white painted over in
black.
"We found her a brig of 320 tons, filled with Africans," one of the
Dolphin's officers wrote to a friend later that week. "The appearance was
most revolting; never can I forget it. There were 328 negroes crowded
together between decks." They were crammed in, half crouched and so closely
packed that only the tops of their heads were clearly visible, and the
stench was almost unbearable. "The poor wretches looked half starved, and
some of them were mere skeletons," wrote the officer. The sails and other
fittings of the ship were American. Many of the crew were American. The
captain, a Mr. Townsend, was from Boston.
Some 455 Africans had been taken on board the Echo near Kabinda on the
African coast. More than 140 had perished during the weeks at sea and were
thrown overboard. ("The shark of the Atlantic is still, as he has ever been,
the partner of the slave trader," wrote a British editorialist.) It took the
U.S. Navy prize crew six days to sail the Echo to Charleston harbor, the
most important American port within reach of the fetid vessel. By then,
another eight captives had died. And they just kept dying.
Within hours of the Echo's arrival, Charlestonians were debating what to do
with the human cargo. There was no precedent for the arrival of Africans
under these circumstances and there was no jail in the city that could hold
them. In the Charleston Daily Courier the next morning, a correspondent
writing under the name Curtius argued that the only "humane" thing to do
would be to make slaves of them and train them to perform useful occupations
in South Carolina.
In the event, federal officials decided to hold the Africans at a massive
fort called Sumter that had been under construction for years near the
entrance to the harbor and still was not quite finished. The Echo was
brought in and anchored near the Customs House. But the town's notables had
to charter their own transportation to get a look at the Africans
themselves:
"The gentlemen, representing a great variety of interests, were much
gratified at the spectacle presented by these savages, who appeared in fine
spirit and entertained their visitors with a display of their abilities in
dancing and singing," wrote the correspondent for the Charleston Mercury.
The dancing was a grim ritual, in fact, that belonged to no particular
culture in Africa, but to the trade in captives. Once a day at most, the
people packed into the hold would be brought on deck to get some air. Those
who were dead or dying were identified and thrown into the sea. Food was
forced down the throats of those who refused to eat. Sometimes the captain,
and rarely some of the other officers, took their pick of the women. And
there on the shifting deck, someone would beat a drum "to dance the slaves,"
to give them a little exercise. Those who refused were whipped. Then they
were herded below again into their floating hell.
"The whole exhibition was exceedingly interesting and novel, in which the
Negroes seemed to take great delight," wrote the Mercury. "Very few are left
in the hospital, and those manifest anxiety to get out. The ailments with
which they are afflicted are readily yielding to medical treatment, and the
general health of the gang has much improved."
This was all a lie, of course. Yellow fever was raging in Charleston at the
time and Fort Sumter was not immune. The Africans also "ate freely the
shell-fish which collected around the fort, and died rapidly," wrote a
doctor assigned to care for them. "Their condition on leaving the brig Echo
was painful and disgusting in the extreme. They had been huddled together
closer than cattle, and slept at night in as close contact as spoons when
packed together. Privation of every kind, coupled with disease, had reduced
all of them to the merest skeletons, and to such a state of desuetude and
debility that on entering the fort they could not so much as step over a
small beam, one foot high, in the doorway, but were compelled to sit on it
and balance themselves over. It is impossible for you to imagine their sad
and distressed condition."
The U.S. marshal at Charleston, who had been vocal in his support for
reopening the trade with Africa, felt differently after watching over its
victims for the three weeks the Echo's people were held at Fort Sumter.
"Thirty-five died while in my custody," he wrote to a friend, "and at one
time I supposed that one hundred would have fallen a sacrifice to the
cruelties to which the poor creatures had been subjected on board the
slaver. I wish that everyone in South Carolina who is in favor of the
re-opening of the slave trade could have seen what I have been compelled to
witness. It seems to me that I can never forget it."
For the Africans who had been kidnapped from their homes, loaded on the
death ship en route to Cuba and rescued, after a fashion, by Lt. Maffitt,
the tragedy continued. By the time those who survived Sumter reached Liberia
aboard the U.S. warship Niagara, another 71 had died on board. The American
agent charged with caring for them was furious at what he had seen and wrote
to a friend in Britain that the Christian nations of the world had to unite
to stop the trade. "Some new mode must also be introduced for the trial of
those found on the slavers," he wrote, "probably by trying them at once and
swinging them up to the yard-arm."
Consul Bunch, Her Majesty's man in Charleston, was inclined to share the
sentiment as it became obvious that South Carolina was not a place were
justice could be had. Proceedings against the captain and crew of the Echo
got under way in November and the whole affair took a "very remarkable"
turn, Bunch reported in an official dispatch. The lead attorney for the
defendants was none other than Leonidas Spratt, who "has made himself very
conspicuous by his advocacy. of a revival of the Slave Trade." And despite
the overwhelming evidence against the captain and crew, the grand jury, in
what Bunch called "a monstrous piece of absurdity," refused to indict. In
his confidential correspondence with London, Bunch was flabbergasted: "That
the offense with which the men were charged was committed, and by them, no
one professed for a moment to doubt. They were taken in the very act, and
every witness was present who could affirm their guilt. There was,
therefore, no loophole through which the grand jury could escape. And yet,
such is the force of public sentiment, that they refused to allow a trial to
take place."
In the first years of the American Civil War, Consul Bunch's reporting from
the previous decade about the American involvement with the slave trade from
Africa to Cuba, and the Southern crusade to reopen the slave trade between
Africa and the United States, had played a pivotal role in the Crown's
reluctance to support the Confederacy.
In early 1862, almost a year into the war, and still a year before the
Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, President Abraham Lincoln proved
his willingness to fight the African slave trade with two important
measures:
First, he allowed the hanging in February 1862 of the American ship captain
Nathaniel Gordon, from a prosperous family in Maine, who had transported
thousands of Africans and "lost" hundreds of them thrown dead or dying into
the waters between Congo and Cuba.
"Any man who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa
of her children to sell them into interminable bondage, I will never
pardon," Lincoln declared. Gordon was the only slaver ever executed by the
United States for his crimes against humanity.
Secondly, Lincoln agreed to a treaty allowing mutual search between British
and American vessels, meaning slavers could no longer hide behind Old Glory.
It was only then-after the Union victory 150 years ago-that the Stars and
Stripes could be said to be, in the words of this morning's Washington Post,
"a powerful symbol of the country's long and noble struggle to defend the
values of freedom and democracy."
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Cubans attend the US flag raising ceremony in Havana, Cuba. (photo:
Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/15/cuba-s-star-spangled-slaver
y.htmlhttp://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/15/cuba-s-star-spangled-
slavery.html
Cuba's Star-Spangled Slavery
By Christopher Dickey, The Daily Beast
15 August 15
The stars and stripes, not the Confederate flag, once represented the sordid
system of human slavery in Cuba.
ld Glory is flying once again in front of the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba.
And at the flag-raising ceremony on Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry
did everything he could to remind people of the history that brought it down
54 years ago. "For more than half a century," he said, "U.S.-Cuban relations
have been suspended in the amber of Cold War politics."
The U.S. punditocracy, meanwhile, weighed in with predictable platitudes
about the meaning of it all. Many complained that Cuban dissidents should
have been invited to the embassy. The Washington Post called the State
Department's excuses for this failure "lame" and proclaimed, "The American
flag is a powerful symbol of the country's long and noble struggle to defend
the values of freedom and democracy."
Fair enough. But as we've learned in the course of this summer, flags can
mean many things to many people. And if we want to have a better
understanding of Cuba, now that it's beginning to open up, we should
remember that its troubled relations with the United States did not begin
with Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959 or even Teddy Roosevelt's charge up
San Juan Hill. We should understand that for many years the American
flag-not the Confederate flag-was, for Cubans, the star-spangled banner of
slavery.
Early in the 19th century, Great Britain, the United States, and most of the
governments of Europe had passed laws banning the horrific slave trade
between Africa and the Americas. The British, who finally emancipated the
slaves in their colonies in 1833, moved not only to end their own previously
extensive participation in the trade in humans, but to prevent others from
carrying out that grim commerce as well. They deployed warships off the
coast of Africa and South America to stop, search, and seize suspected
slavers, and they used gunship diplomacy more than once to impose their will
on weaker nations.
But the United States had gone to war against Britain in 1812 to stop it
from stopping and searching any American ships, and steadfastly refused to
let the British anti-slaving fleet stop American-flag vessels. Instead,
Washington deployed its own feeble squadron off the coast of Africa which
did little to stop slavers and much to interfere with the British efforts to
do so.
The main market for the slaves-tens of thousands of them every year- was the
Spanish colony of Cuba, where it was more profitable to work them to death
in the cane fields and then replace them with new, cheaply bought Africans,
than it was to keep them healthy and alive. Technically, it was illegal to
import them, but the law was ignored.
And, technically, trafficking in African slaves was illegal in the United
States as well-it was supposed to be a hanging offense-but the New York ship
builders and outfitters figured it was well worth the risk, and when cases
were brought before the Southern courts they refused to indict.
Indeed, the pro-slavery faction in the United States had its own designs for
Cuba: to buy it or conquer it and turn it into two new slave states, thus
assuring control of the Senate and greater power in the House of
Representatives. (Slaves had no rights as citizens or as human beings under
the Constitution, but counted as three-fifths of a person for census
purposes, thus hugely inflating the voting power of the states that held
them.) More than a century before the Bay of Pigs fiasco, adventurers in the
United States organized invasions of Cuba to "liberate" it from Spain in the
interests of American slavery. Those, too, were fiascos.
It is difficult to conceive, today, just how gruesome was the trade carried
out under that American banner of "freedom and democracy." In the 1850s,
Southern politicians known as "fire-eaters" were defending slavery-and the
slave trade-as a moral good. They were pushing to reopen it between Africa
and the United States. And at the epicenter of Southern radicalism,
Charleston, many refused to acknowledge the grotesque inhumanity of the
Cuban trade even when it stared them in the face.
In late August 1858, the horror that the South did not want to imagine-a
slave ship-was right there in Charleston harbor. Vomit and urine and feces
and blood had seeped deep into the raw wood of the sunless slapped-together
slave decks in the hold, staining them indelibly with filth. Cockroaches by
the millions seethed among the boards, and clouds of fleas and gnats rose up
from them.
The stench that came from this vessel wasn't the smell of a ship full of
cattle and horses, but that peculiar smell that surrounds humans, and only
humans, who are very afraid and very sick, or dying, or dead. The water in
Charleston Harbor was still and flat and thick as oil, and the air was
stifling hot and heavy. The stinking vessel, a brig called the Echo, had
been captured off the coast of Cuba a few days before.
Because it was the summer, the season of disease, many of Charleston's
better-off residents had left the city. For those who remained behind the
spectacle of the Echo and its Africans was a disgusting but almost
irresistible novelty. Because the transatlantic trade had been banned for 50
years, many had never beheld such a ship before. "You will see by this
morning's Mercury that we have a slaver in our harbor," one distinguished
Charlestonian wrote to a friend. "She has on board about 300 naked native
negroes, 60 of them women. Every one of whom is in the family way. Everybody
is talking about them. The yellow fever, the cables and every other subject
have faded before this. There is really and truly an excitement among these
cold, stolid Charlestonians."
That the Echo had been captured at all was the result of a dawning awareness
by the federal government of something that the British consul in
Charleston, Robert Bunch, had been explaining to the foreign office in
London for years: the fleets of slave ships flying the American flag,
supported by money-men in New York, and incited and abetted by the
fire-eaters like Robert Barnwell Rhett and Leonida Spratt, posed a growing
threat to the authority of Washington and to the Union itself.
The slave traffic was growing fast. Something had to be done before the
momentum became unstoppable. So, quietly and against stubborn bureaucratic
resistance, President James Buchanan had American warships step up their
anti-slaving patrols off the coast of Cuba as well as Africa. And the Echo
was their first prize.
The story of the Echo's capture, as told in the Charleston newspapers, began
at dawn on Saturday, August 21, 1858, when the USS Dolphin pulled out of the
Cuban port of Sagua-la-Grande, about 150 miles east of Havana. The Dolphin
was a brig-of-war, and she had been on desultory anti-slaving missions off
the coasts of Brazil and Africa from the time she'd first been commissioned
more than 20 years before. With two square-rigged masts and six 32-pound
guns she was, despite her age, quick and deadly by the standards of the
time, but she'd seen little action.
Now, through the course of the morning, the Dolphin's crew could spy far
ahead of them the twin masts of another brig. They didn't pay much
attention. The stranger wasn't a very big ship, and looked like the kind of
boat used for coastal trade among the maze of islets and keys off the north
shore of Cuba. But by around one in the afternoon, the Dolphin had pulled
closer. Its commander, Lt. John Newland Maffitt, was about as shrewd a
skipper as could be found in the U.S. Navy at the time, and he knew right
away that this ship looked too light in the water for a coastal trader.
The Dolphin picked up speed. The strange brig started to take evasive
action, hauling in some of its canvas and tacking hard to starboard with the
kind of speed and efficiency that's only possible when a ship is manned by a
large and well-trained crew. Coastal traders didn't normally have those
kinds of men on board.
Maffitt decided to play a little game with his quarry. He ran up the British
flag where the strange brig could see the colors clearly. The British could
not board an American vessel without provoking an international incident,
which is why so many slavers flew the Stars and Stripes whenever they
thought they might be challenged by one of Her Majesty's ships.
At first, the stranger showed no colors at all, but after hours giving
chase, Maffitt fired a shot close under her stern. The stranger ran up the
American flag. It had fallen into the trap. Maffitt took down the British
ensign and ran up the American one. Still the stranger struggled to get
away. Maffit fired again, this time under the ship's bow. The stranger
hauled down her sails, struck her American colors and threw them into the
sea.
The armed boarding party from the Dolphin noticed the name of the ship, the
Echo, was painted on a slab of wood nailed to the stern, but the original
name, the Putnam, was still visible, a ghost image of white painted over in
black.
"We found her a brig of 320 tons, filled with Africans," one of the
Dolphin's officers wrote to a friend later that week. "The appearance was
most revolting; never can I forget it. There were 328 negroes crowded
together between decks." They were crammed in, half crouched and so closely
packed that only the tops of their heads were clearly visible, and the
stench was almost unbearable. "The poor wretches looked half starved, and
some of them were mere skeletons," wrote the officer. The sails and other
fittings of the ship were American. Many of the crew were American. The
captain, a Mr. Townsend, was from Boston.
Some 455 Africans had been taken on board the Echo near Kabinda on the
African coast. More than 140 had perished during the weeks at sea and were
thrown overboard. ("The shark of the Atlantic is still, as he has ever been,
the partner of the slave trader," wrote a British editorialist.) It took the
U.S. Navy prize crew six days to sail the Echo to Charleston harbor, the
most important American port within reach of the fetid vessel. By then,
another eight captives had died. And they just kept dying.
Within hours of the Echo's arrival, Charlestonians were debating what to do
with the human cargo. There was no precedent for the arrival of Africans
under these circumstances and there was no jail in the city that could hold
them. In the Charleston Daily Courier the next morning, a correspondent
writing under the name Curtius argued that the only "humane" thing to do
would be to make slaves of them and train them to perform useful occupations
in South Carolina.
In the event, federal officials decided to hold the Africans at a massive
fort called Sumter that had been under construction for years near the
entrance to the harbor and still was not quite finished. The Echo was
brought in and anchored near the Customs House. But the town's notables had
to charter their own transportation to get a look at the Africans
themselves:
"The gentlemen, representing a great variety of interests, were much
gratified at the spectacle presented by these savages, who appeared in fine
spirit and entertained their visitors with a display of their abilities in
dancing and singing," wrote the correspondent for the Charleston Mercury.
The dancing was a grim ritual, in fact, that belonged to no particular
culture in Africa, but to the trade in captives. Once a day at most, the
people packed into the hold would be brought on deck to get some air. Those
who were dead or dying were identified and thrown into the sea. Food was
forced down the throats of those who refused to eat. Sometimes the captain,
and rarely some of the other officers, took their pick of the women. And
there on the shifting deck, someone would beat a drum "to dance the slaves,"
to give them a little exercise. Those who refused were whipped. Then they
were herded below again into their floating hell.
"The whole exhibition was exceedingly interesting and novel, in which the
Negroes seemed to take great delight," wrote the Mercury. "Very few are left
in the hospital, and those manifest anxiety to get out. The ailments with
which they are afflicted are readily yielding to medical treatment, and the
general health of the gang has much improved."
This was all a lie, of course. Yellow fever was raging in Charleston at the
time and Fort Sumter was not immune. The Africans also "ate freely the
shell-fish which collected around the fort, and died rapidly," wrote a
doctor assigned to care for them. "Their condition on leaving the brig Echo
was painful and disgusting in the extreme. They had been huddled together
closer than cattle, and slept at night in as close contact as spoons when
packed together. Privation of every kind, coupled with disease, had reduced
all of them to the merest skeletons, and to such a state of desuetude and
debility that on entering the fort they could not so much as step over a
small beam, one foot high, in the doorway, but were compelled to sit on it
and balance themselves over. It is impossible for you to imagine their sad
and distressed condition."
The U.S. marshal at Charleston, who had been vocal in his support for
reopening the trade with Africa, felt differently after watching over its
victims for the three weeks the Echo's people were held at Fort Sumter.
"Thirty-five died while in my custody," he wrote to a friend, "and at one
time I supposed that one hundred would have fallen a sacrifice to the
cruelties to which the poor creatures had been subjected on board the
slaver. I wish that everyone in South Carolina who is in favor of the
re-opening of the slave trade could have seen what I have been compelled to
witness. It seems to me that I can never forget it."
For the Africans who had been kidnapped from their homes, loaded on the
death ship en route to Cuba and rescued, after a fashion, by Lt. Maffitt,
the tragedy continued. By the time those who survived Sumter reached Liberia
aboard the U.S. warship Niagara, another 71 had died on board. The American
agent charged with caring for them was furious at what he had seen and wrote
to a friend in Britain that the Christian nations of the world had to unite
to stop the trade. "Some new mode must also be introduced for the trial of
those found on the slavers," he wrote, "probably by trying them at once and
swinging them up to the yard-arm."
Consul Bunch, Her Majesty's man in Charleston, was inclined to share the
sentiment as it became obvious that South Carolina was not a place were
justice could be had. Proceedings against the captain and crew of the Echo
got under way in November and the whole affair took a "very remarkable"
turn, Bunch reported in an official dispatch. The lead attorney for the
defendants was none other than Leonidas Spratt, who "has made himself very
conspicuous by his advocacy. of a revival of the Slave Trade." And despite
the overwhelming evidence against the captain and crew, the grand jury, in
what Bunch called "a monstrous piece of absurdity," refused to indict. In
his confidential correspondence with London, Bunch was flabbergasted: "That
the offense with which the men were charged was committed, and by them, no
one professed for a moment to doubt. They were taken in the very act, and
every witness was present who could affirm their guilt. There was,
therefore, no loophole through which the grand jury could escape. And yet,
such is the force of public sentiment, that they refused to allow a trial to
take place."
In the first years of the American Civil War, Consul Bunch's reporting from
the previous decade about the American involvement with the slave trade from
Africa to Cuba, and the Southern crusade to reopen the slave trade between
Africa and the United States, had played a pivotal role in the Crown's
reluctance to support the Confederacy.
In early 1862, almost a year into the war, and still a year before the
Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, President Abraham Lincoln proved
his willingness to fight the African slave trade with two important
measures:
First, he allowed the hanging in February 1862 of the American ship captain
Nathaniel Gordon, from a prosperous family in Maine, who had transported
thousands of Africans and "lost" hundreds of them thrown dead or dying into
the waters between Congo and Cuba.
"Any man who, for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa
of her children to sell them into interminable bondage, I will never
pardon," Lincoln declared. Gordon was the only slaver ever executed by the
United States for his crimes against humanity.
Secondly, Lincoln agreed to a treaty allowing mutual search between British
and American vessels, meaning slavers could no longer hide behind Old Glory.
It was only then-after the Union victory 150 years ago-that the Stars and
Stripes could be said to be, in the words of this morning's Washington Post,
"a powerful symbol of the country's long and noble struggle to defend the
values of freedom and democracy."
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