Slave Ship Insurance and How Congress Increased the Risk of Slaving (lower image).
This insurance policy certificate, emanating from Newport, RI, in 1800, identifies a transatlantic, “Triangle Trade” route to Africa with a return leg from Cuba, in turn hauling rum, slaves, and sugar, for example. The 107 slaves and other cargoes transported on the brig “Maria” receive three times the vessel’s adjusted valuation, while prices realized at ports of call would be about twice that shown.
Curiously, a rider effective for both return legs was added some five months later and before departure to further indemnify owners against losses from patrolling “American Cruisers & Insurrection of Slaves.” With the Revolutionary War long over, why would this be necessary?
In 1800, Georgia and South Carolina reopened their transatlantic slave trading which had been illegal since the Revolution. Though now legal in the Deep South, Congress sought reduce American participation by fining citizens so engaged. Congress authorized all “commissioned vessels of the United States, to seize and take any vessel [so] employed,” with crews receiving half the value of a ship and its cargo, while informants collected the vessel’s entire value when sold. Investors were liable to fines of double the value of any vessels and slaves in whom they had an interest, while each sailor was fined $2000.
These enormous incentives should have encouraged Americans to police the trade as privateers and “snitches.” But in actuality, slavers need not have worried – except for one in particular, the flamboyantly careless George DeWolf of Bristol, RI, who, in trying to outdo his uncle, “Captain Jim,” went bankrupt and fled to Cuba due to an informer.
King Cotton and the Internal (or Domestic) Slave Trade (top image).
In this Bill of Lading, a merchant ships bales of cotton and “Twenty two Negroes” to Magnolia, Florida, via Key West on the sloop “Mary Ann.” Charleston, SC, March 31, 1831.
Despite the 1808 Transatlantic Slave Trade Ban, a number of developments combined around 1820 to make southern slavery even more feared, despised – and indeed, profitable: Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin made processing cotton a hundred times faster, and superior varieties to grow and pick were bred permitting a newly mechanized textile industry to ignite the Industrial Revolution.
Meanwhile, soil depletion from the over-cultivation of tobacco left thousands of mid-Atlantic plantations in ruin, so their enslaved were “sold South” where values doubled and tripled. Since the transatlantic ban had already encouraged slave breeding, these factors collectively spawned a Domestic Slave Trade three times greater than the Transatlantic Trade to North America had ever been.
American cotton proved itself the world’s finest. By 1850, up to 75 percent of America’s slaves were harvesting it primarily for export, and by 1862 their average daily picking rate had quadrupled.