10/29/09
American Exceptionalism and our “Peculiar Institution”: An Ethical and Statistical Problem With American Historians Whitewashing the Illegal Importation of African Slaves
Introduction
In his pious accolade reviewing two posthumous volumes of the late great George Fredrickson (New York Review of Books, December 4, 2008), the preeminent American academic historian of the Civil War, James MacPherson, of Princeton University, summed up succinctly, with his customary flair, the hegemonic view concerning the unexampled and implausible expansion of the African-American population in the U.S. until 1860. He failed to mention any smuggling at all after 1808. This error in African-American demography, arising from a consensus of neglectful studies based on tangible evidence and easily available records, leaves out what should be an obvious and crucial source for the incredibly rapid expansion of the slave population, namely the illegal and mostly undocumented importation of slaves. Instead, the squirrel scholars and bean counters have postulated a preposterous fertility and life expectancy of the slaves brought in, mostly by Yankees, before 1808.
In fact, more slaves may have been imported after 1808 than before. The extent of slave smuggling until the 8th U.S. Census of 1860, has been de-emphasized and virtually denied since the 1920’s, because of deliberately forgotten culpability on the part of the abolitionist North, their supposed altruistic motives stressed while denying Yankee mercantile relationships with Southern planters, based on the advantage to both of African slave labor. So close was the connection between New York City and Southern cotton planters, that the city itself seriously considered seceding with the South.
Both Northerners and Southerners have obscured the link between the financiers and merchants of northern cities and their plantation-owner counterparts in the South, who flourished both before and after the War- at least after the corrupt bargain that ended Reconstruction and occupation in 1876.
We cite three credible sources to support our theory: Senator Stephen Douglas, W.E.B. Dubois, and William Alexander Percy I. Douglas, one of the most astute and informed politicians of the time, opined that more slaves were imported in both 1859 and in 1860 than in any previous year. The greatest and earliest professional scholar on the subject, W.E.B. Dubois, the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, concurred with Douglas's judgment and further regretted towards the end of his life that he himself hadn't spent more time documenting it. Undoubtedly, Dubois had personally known a number of these illegal imports and knew many others within the black and white community who were familiar with illegally imported freed people.
In 1891, Dubois calculated that 250,000 slaves were smuggled into the U.S. from 1808 to 1860. Because of the illegal nature of that slave trade, there is scant documentation to refute the downplaying and minimization of it. But increasing evidence is coming to light even while the old evidence continues to be disregarded. In 1839, during the antebellum era, indeed when King Cotton was beginning to reign in the Deep South, the abolitionist Theodore D. Weld published American Slavery As It Is, in which he clearly details the methods by which the illegal slave trade into the U.S. was conducted:
"The fact that thousands of slaves, generally in the prime of life, are annually smuggled into the United States from Africa, Cuba, and elsewhere, makes it manifest that all inferences drawn from the increase of the slave population, which do not make large deductions, for constant importations, must be fallacious…the African slave-trade adds ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND SLAVES TO EACH UNITED STATES' CENSUS. These are in the prime of life, and their children would swell the slave population many thousands annually--thus making a great addition to each census.”
Weld’s figures, about 15,000 slaves annually, are much higher estimates than postulated by Stephen Douglas in 1860, and later by W.E.B. Dubois. A mean average for the period 1808 to 1860, however, can not be a reliable barometer of the illicit smuggling of slaves, as many annually variable factors influenced the trade including the dramatic rise of the cotton trade, European wars, and British Navy attempts to stop the trade.
In the spirit of mutual forgiveness, deciding to draw a curtain of oblivion on the hatreds and tragedies of the Civil War, historians from the North and South began to develop a new consensus after 1876. U.B. Phillips consolidated this consensus in his classic work, American Negro Slavery (1918), the first major work to marginalize the significance of the illegal slave trade,
“As to the dimensions of the illicit importations between 1808 and 1860, conjectures have placed the gross as high as 270,000. Most of the documents in the premises, however, bear palpable marks of unreliability. It may suffice to say that these importations were never great enough to affect the labor supply in appreciable degree. So far as the general economic regime was concerned, the foreign slave trade was effectually closed in 1808…At that time, however, there were already in the United States about one million slaves to serve as stock from which other millions were to be born to replenish the plantations in the east and to aid in peopling the west. These were ample to maintain a chronic racial problem, and had no man invented a cotton gin their natural increase might well have glutted the plantation labor market.”
Phillips’ trivialization of the illegal slave trade supports his theory that the slaves were well cared for, thus their reproduction, facilitated with relative ease due to an alleged atmosphere of congeniality, rose to the staggering number counted in 1860. His explanation:
“It is clear that for a variety of reasons American slaves had both higher birth rates and lower mortality rates than those elsewhere in the Americas…This growth was entirely the result of natural increase, for the small number of slaves smuggled into the United States was probably exceeded by the number who escaped from slavery.”
(Slavery, 23, 94,147-148)
In 1950, Noel Deere had dared to suggest the possibility of over a million illegal slave imports to the U.S., but Curtin "demolished" him. Not one of the leading historians go above the figures carefully derived from the easily available documents cited by Philip Curtin, 54,000 (The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, 1969), who "proved" U.B. Philips' opinion. Few if any historians have been willing to question Phillips.
Influenced by the growing civil rights movement, Kenneth Stampp laid the foundation for undermining the consensus in The Peculiar Institution (1956), but he ultimately failed to make the connection between the exploding slave population and his meticulous research on the low birth rates and high mortality rates of the slaves (in clear contrast to Philip's presumptions of paternalistic care facilitating high birth rates and low mortality rates). Since Stampp, this conundrum has been puzzled over by many scholars: Fogel and Engerman, Genovese, Fredrickson, among others.
Obadele Starks, in Freebooters and Smugglers (2007), projecting what he thought Dubois implied, states that over 700,000 slaves were smuggled in. David Eltis (Kent State University) considered by many as the highest authority on the subject, countered Starks and other revisionists, by stubbornly relying on the same sources used by Curtin. Eltis minimizes the numbers even further, suggesting that even Curtin's estimates are too high. Other "reputable" scholars such as Michael Tadman from the University of Liverpool also concur with this old consensus. We believe between 400,000 and 500,000 African slaves were smuggled into the U.S. during the fifty-three year span of the illegal trade. If we are right, about as many or more were illegally imported in to the U.S. afterwards as before 1808.
In addition to Douglas and Dubois, we have a third unique source, a most reliable oral tradition because it comes from a very literate Southern planter. My great-grandfather William Alexander Percy (Princeton, 1853) was one of the largest and most successful planters in the Mississippi Delta, and knew about the vast number of slaves smuggled in. He told this to his oldest son Leroy Percy, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, who in turn told his nephew and ward, my own father William Armstrong Percy II. Daddy finally confided to me, at age 15 when I was at Middlesex, after I’d asked him how late the Yankees had sold slaves to Southerners, to which he responded that vast numbersof slaves were still being imported in the 1850's from Africa via Cuba, where they were "broken in" before being smuggled into the States. This "breaking in" phase, Daddy contended, included disciplining the slaves, teaching them to plow, and familiarizing them with some words of English. I sincerely hope, but cannot prove that my great-grandfather didn't buy any of these illegal imports.
Almost three score years ago when I was fourteen, I went from “deep in the heart of Dixie”, Memphis, Tennessee, where your social rank depended on how many slaves your ancestors had owned and what rank they had in the Confederate Army, to Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, the stronghold of Yankeedom, proud station on the Underground Railroad, home of Thoreau, Emerson and the Alcotts, where what mattered most socially was how many ancestors you had on the Mayflower and what books they had written., The Yankee boys (I was the only southerner, recruited for diversity, in my entering class of 1933) quickly taught me that the Negroes, as they called them, were just as good as we. They confidently asserted that it was the Irish, their predominant servant class, not the “negras” as I still called them, who were inferior. I, of course, was well aware of how awful the rednecks were. After all they had tossed out my father’s Uncle LeRoy as United States senator in 1912 -- the first direct election to the senate in Mississippi. Theodore Bilbo had been the campaign manager for their candidate Vardaman, and even my louche father recognized that his Uncle LeRoy’s greatest achievement during the 1920’s had been keeping the Klan out of Washington county, Mississippi, where the county seat Greenville was the center of the Delta. (See Revolt of the Rednecks, 1964) All gentlefolk knew how horrid lynchings were and how stupid, brutal, and corrupt the poor whites, on top since 1912, were. As my Uncle Will wrote in Lanterns on the Levee (1941), from that time forward the bottom rail (the rednecks whom he considered inferior to the blacks) was on top and was going to stay there. The upper class Southerners which included all my family (except my paternal grandmother who came from Scottish yeoman stock), didn’t protest segregation or the Democratic white primary. Nor did I know how brutal and lethal slavery had been, nor even how unfair and humiliating sharecropping was, until I came to study amongst the Damn Yankees in the frozen North.
When I went home on vacations, I began investigations into these northern boys’ claims. "Perfessah" Falls, as everyone dutifully called him, ran the rural school for blacks near my grandmother’s plantation. He told me that it was hard to keep the students in school, even though classes were suspended for the most intensive periods of cotton labor, planting and hoeing from spring until the fourth July and picking in fall. Their parents, without education themselves, saw little need for their children to receive schooling. Besides, children became useful on the farm at about age six when they could gather eggs, water cattle, and most importantly, pick cotton. In such hard times, as in the Depression, and even early, post-WW II South – especially on such poor soil as we had near Memphis – every hand was needed. Many didn’t attend school, "Perfessah" Falls claimed, to my astonishment, because they lacked clothes. That reminded me that during the summers I had seen on many plantations, many children totally nude up to puberty, as had also been common, as I later learned, in the days of slavery and reconstruction. But that was in the late 30’s, towards the end of the depression and when rural electrification was only beginning, courtesy of the T.V.A.
During these discussions my father, who saw nothing wrong with segregation except that it was enforced by rednecks instead of Bourbons (as upper class Southerners were called after The War), related how his uncle and guardian the Senator, who had died in 1929, had told him that his father Col. Percy, (Princeton, 1853) had related how slaves were being imported in great numbers up until the outbreak of the Civil War. Colonel Percy, like General Robert E. Lee, and other reasonable Southerners, opposed secession before most of them joined the Confederate ranks after the fact.
I thought that this claim about illegally importing slaves was dubious, but I never forgot it. Over the years I have worked on demography in medieval Sicily, Renaissance Europe, and more recently in ancient Greece and Rome. Such work and passing acquaintance with comparative studies of slavery convinced me that the extraordinarily rapid increase in the number of African slaves in the antebellum south, though doubtless undercounted, could not possibly have come about by natural increase – even if all the slaves had been treated as paternalistically and benevolently, as I had been taught to believe before I set foot in Concord and began to learn otherwise, as Fitzhugh, the greatest antebellum apologist asserted, who claimed most Southerners treated slaves better than the Yankees did the Irish mill hands who could be replaced at no cost. This dramatic increase could not even have been accounted for had all the slaveholders in the Old Dominion and other lesser states with worn out land had concentrated exclusively on breeding, which they rarely did. Fitzhugh stated that “[n]o man in the South, we are sure, ever bred slaves for sale.” While this may be somewhat discredited as the dubious claims of an ardent apologist, the existence of slave breeding between 1808 and 1860, infrequent as it was, cannot explain the anomaly of the increase of the American slave population. Never in all recorded history has a slave population grown so exponentially except, if one accepts the standard account, in the antebellum U.S. South and in Bermuda, an island with an idyllic climate, no harsh labor, and few germs or viruses.
American Slave Population Census Figures, 1790-1860
(from /slavfree.htm)
Year / Slave Population1790 / 694,207
1800 / 887,612
1810 / 1,130,781
1820 / 1,529,012
1830 / 1,987,428
1840 / 2,482,546
1850 / 3,200,600
1860 / 3,950,546
In some West Indian islands, slaves were, in some periods, worked to death on average in seven years. Because they were so cheap before 1808, they didn’t need to be preserved much less bred, as was the case in late Republican Rome when Cato in De Agricultura, copying Carthaginian manuals, recommended brutal exploitation and no breeding for maximum profit. Slaves always had a longer life expectation in the U.S. and on the rest of the non-tropical North American mainland than in the Caribbean, Brazil or Late Republican Rome, but they weren’t superhuman breeders. Those who thought that slaves were mistreated in the same manner we have just described, working them to death with no special emphasis on breeding, are simply incorrect, if only because how expensive slaves became, especially between 1808 and 1860. It was not feasible to spend so much capital on slave labor and not protect in some considerable measure the health and care of the slave. This observation lends some credence to the notion that slave-owners were more humane than has been allowed, especially since Stampp’s denunciation (1956), but we do not exonerate those who did indeed treat their slaves brutally.
During the five decades of illegal importation virtually as many slaves were slipped to Cuba as to Brazil, in each of which harsh conditions occasioned low birth rates and high mortality rates, but so many more survived in Brazil than in Cuba. Obviously, a large portion of the slaves in Cuba were re-exported to the U.S. The tome by Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (1997), has gathered more data about this trade than other previous works but he hasn't digested it or related it properly to that re-exportation. Both before and after the War for American Independence, and before the prohibition of slave importation twenty years after the ratification of the Constitution, slave breeding was usually encouraged in British North America, which already had a more normal ratio between males and females than in Brazil or the Caribbean. Cultivating cotton, the main crop after 1820, was less lethal than tobacco planting and tobacco less dangerous than sugar cane or rice. The threat to ship recalcitrant slaves down the Mississippi River from cotton to cane cultivation was often enough to get more cooperation from the victim, but some were actually shipped “down the River”. Treatment by masters as well as type of work and climate caused variations in life expectations and reproduction rates. For various reasons the censuses doubtless undercounted slaves, likely due to lack of diligence or the hiding of newly imported Blacks, but nothing legal can explain the extraordinary increase recorded by the census takers.