PART 2: The Business of Slavery From Africa to the New World

Part 2: The Slave Trade In The Americas, The Ledger and The Letters

By Professor C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus

I first encountered the business of slavery not in a history of suffering, but in a study of finance. I was a PhD student tracing the evolution of financial systems from antiquity to modern times when I stumbled upon the story of Hector Davis. In 1859, his single auction house in Richmond, Virginia, sold human beings with a market value of more than $2.67 million. That sum exceeded the value of all the flour Virginia exported that year, in a city that housed two of the nation’s largest flour mills. It nearly matched the value of the state’s entire tobacco exports.

Davis’s operation ran like a commodity exchange. The Richmond Enquirer carried a daily column of slave auctions the way a newspaper now carries stock market listings. On one October morning in 1857, Davis advertised fifteen human beings for sale at half past nine, directly beside a competitor’s ten and another’s twelve. His directory notice pledged his “best efforts to obtain the highest market prices” and offered lodging in his “safe and commodious jail” at thirty cents a day while owners waited on the market. 

He circulated price sheets. In a letter of May 1858, he quoted a North Carolina client the going rates exactly as a broker quotes bonds: best men, $1,200 to $1,275; girls of twelve to fifteen years, $750 to $1,000 “as to size”; a young woman with her child, $1,000 to $1,100, adding, in the same letter, that the market was “rather dull.” Richmond’s traders together moved eight to ten thousand people a year through this exchange. When Davis died in 1863, his estate was appraised at $100,000.

I also stumbled on letters between slave traders. A letter written by A. J. McElveen, a South Carolina slave-buying agent, to the Charleston broker Ziba B. Oakes, from Sumterville, South Carolina, on 19 January 1854 provides interesting insights. 

McElveen wrote, I bought a boy called Isaac yesterday. He is a carriage driver, painter and varnisher and maker of panel doors. “Also he performs well on the violin and other musical instruments,” and is a skilled cook. “He is a genius … I think heis smarter than I am.”

The letter also described Isaac as approximately 28 years old, about five feet ten inches tall and weighing between 150 and 160 pounds. He calculated that Isaac could be resold for $1,500. 

These records provide an unflinching insight into what Atlantic slavery actually was. It was not a passion, it was not, primarily, even a prejudice. It was a business, run by businessmen, financed by banks, priced by markets, insured by underwriters and accounted for to the penny. 

We should know the numbers, because the numbers are better than our folk memory of them.

Over roughly three and a half centuries, about 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships. About 10.7 million survived the crossing. Here is the fact that surprises most people raised on American cinema. Fewer than four in every hundred of those survivors landed in what became the United States, about 389,000 people. Brazil took nearly five million. The Caribbean, our sea, took over four million more. Jamaica alone received about a million. Barbados, in the seventeenth century, was the engine of the entire English enterprise. The centre of gravity of Atlantic slavery was not Mississippi, it was here.

Why did the Caribbean and Brazil need so many, and the American South so few? Because there were two business models, and the difference between them is the coldest arithmetic in our history. Sugar killed! On the plantations of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, deaths exceeded births, year after year, as a structural feature of the enterprise. Saint-Domingue imported some 800,000 Africans and yet held only about half a million enslaved people when its revolution began in 1791 the rest were dead. The planters knew it and had done the sums, it was cheaper to work a human being to death and buy a replacement than to feed, rest, and sustain him. The enslaved person was carried on the books, in effect, as depreciating equipment.

The United States ran the other model. From that base of 389,000 imports, its enslaved population grew through births to nearly four million by 1860. It was the only major slave society in the hemisphere where this happened, and it created a different monstrosity, the human being as appreciating capital. Children were yield! When the cotton lands of the Deep South opened, more than a million people were sold and marched from Virginia and Maryland southward, a second Middle Passage, conducted entirely within one nation, of which Hector Davis’s auction room was a principal exchange.

And around this capital grew everything capital attracts. By 1860, the assessed value of enslaved people in the United States, some 3.5 billion dollars, exceeded the value of all the nation’s railroads and factories combined. They were the republic’s largest asset class. Cotton was more than sixty percent of its exports. In Louisiana, enslaved people served as collateral in the great majority of mortgage lending by value. A planter borrowed against people the way we borrow against a house. Underwriters insured the cargoes. When the crew of the Liverpool ship Zong threw 132 living Africans into the sea in 1781, the case that followed was not a murder trial. It was an insurance dispute, Gregson versus Gilbert, thirty pounds a head, argued before the finest commercial court in England.

And when the business finally closed, the books were balanced one last time in favour of the owners. Britain’s abolition act of 1833 paid twenty million pounds in compensation, roughly forty percent of the government’s annual spending, to some 46,000 claimants for the loss of their human property. The freed received nothing but four further years of forced “apprenticeship.” The borrowing that funded the payout was folded into the national debt and serviced until 2015 within the lifetime of every adult reading this page.

The records name names, estate by estate, across what is now CARICOM. Begin in Barbados, where the sugar plantation itself was invented. On the sixteenth of May, 1836, the owners of the Drax Hall estate, held by the same family since the 1640s and held by the same family still, were awarded £4,293, twelve shillings and sixpence for 189 human beings. Barbados as a whole drew £1.7 million for 82,807 people. In British Guiana, the money ran richer, because the land was newer and the people priced higher. The commissioners paid roughly £50 a head there against £20 in soil-exhausted Jamaica. Location determined price, exactly as with any other asset. The Anna Regina estate on the Essequibo coast collected £40,353 for 805 people, the award routed through the banking house of Bevan, Barclay and Tritton, because compensation, too, required bankers.

The single largest claimant in the Caribbean was John Gladstone of Liverpool, £106,769 across nine claims for some 2,508 people in Demerara and Jamaica, among them the Success estate where the great rebellion of 1823 had begun. His son William became Prime Minister of Britain four times. In Jamaica, Gladstone appears again at the Holland estate in St Elizabeth, this time not as owner but as mortgagee, collecting £5,624 for 300 people pledged against a loan. The collateral walked free and the lender was made whole. 

Antigua, which alone freed its people at once without apprenticeship, still paid the owners. The Pares estate claim came to £2,551 for 170 souls. And at home, for the Grand Sable estate in St Vincent, the claim was £17,753, five shillings and seven pence, for 704 human beings. Somebody’s great-great-grandmother appears in that count as a fraction of twenty-five pounds.

We are approaching Emancipation Day. Let us not commemorate only the joy of liberation. Let us also reckon with the cold, unyielding arithmetic that made liberation a financial event and with the fact that the debt of that transaction was settled not in 1834, not in 1865, but within our own lifetimes. The ledgers are closed, the accounts are settled but the reckoning is ours.

Tomorrow, Part 3: The Business of the Plantation.

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