1655 was the year of the first Virginia law which mentioned slavery as a legitimate institution, and the Commonwealth Era was also the one which saw England take active, organized steps to enter the slave trade. In this episode, we discuss the history of England’s Western Africa trade, and exactly what was going on, slavery-wise, in pre-Restoration Virginia.
Full Text
In 1620, an English explorer in Africa declined the offer to trade in slaves by saying “We are a people who did not deal in any such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes.” By 1660, though, slavery was a legally established practice in English America.
Introduction
Understanding the context of American colonization wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t include a background on the trade in West Africa, and just like so very many other things, this shifted enough in the aftermath of Cromwell’s victory that it’s time to start the discussion. It’s also a story with a fascinating number of familiar names from and connections to the American colonies we’ve been discussing.
Western Africa, also known as Guinea to the North, and Angola to the South, was a land of sparse population and abundant natural resources. The Portuguese grew sugar on several previously uninhabited islands off the African coast, while pepper, ivory, hides, wax, redwood, ambergris and gum arabic all emerged as valuable African assets. Most important of all, though, was gold, and its abundance around modern Ghana led to the name, the Gold Coast. To obtain these things, Europeans would establish trade networks across the region, exchanging artisan products from some African areas in exchange for natural resources in others. Cloth made in Benin could be traded for redwood in Sierra Leone, or of course gold.
But, England was a relative latecomer to this trade. We started this podcast with the reign of Henry VIII, and it was also with Henry VIII’s split with Rome that the English first took a real interest in West Africa. Before this, trade in the region had been dominated by England’s oldest ally, Portugal, and apart from a blip during the Yorkist reign of Edward IV, no English king had wanted to jeopardize this relationship, so England had stayed out.
But, under Henry VIII, England broke with Rome, Portugal didn’t, and with that, their relationship deteriorated. So, English ships started traveling to Africa, but without a huge amount of success. Then, Portugal’s own fortunes waned as it was joined with Spain, and the opportunity emerged for other countries to fill the void.
The Dutch, French, Swedish, Danes, English and Spanish would all vie for this trade, but like in so many things, the Dutch initially emerged as the strongest competitors, while England lagged, consumed by internal issues. By the 17th Century, though, Western African trade would be dominated by the Dutch and shaped by their competition with the English, who were finally emerging as a colonial power. Competition between the two would in turn be rooted in the international intrigues of the era, and would ultimately contribute to the Anglo-Dutch Wars, but gosh, that all gets complicated and a bitttt too off topic. Not sure I’ve ever said that before.
All this to say, English presence in Western Africa started very slowly. A couple dozen Tudor-era ships, including Richard Hawkins’ infamous three slave trading trips, some piracy, and that was about the end of it. In 1604, England took its first bold steps, against Spanish wishes, by manipulating the wording of a treaty between the two countries, but they also kept their trade far away from Spanish merchant centers in the region, and focused on things like gum arabic, wax and redwood rather than the really extravagant luxuries like gold.
It was all very low key until 1607, the year that Jamestown was founded. In that year, London merchant and privateer John Davies started petitioning King James’s Privy Council for a trading monopoly to Western Africa, for a joint stock company that he would run. In 1618, he got it, and in the meantime he’d set up a small trading post on the coast, the earliest English establishment in Western Africa. His company was called the Company of Adventurers of London Trading to the Ports of Africa, but it was more commonly known as the Guinea Company, or the Ginney and Benney Company.
They focused their efforts on Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone, where they’d set up that first trading post. In Sierra Leone, they traded for redwood, which was used for dying cloth, and in Senegal and Gambia, they focused on hides, wax and ambergris, while searching further inland for the sources of the area’s gold.
At this point in time, though, slavery was explicitly not a part of the Guinea Company’s work. While searching the Gambia River for the source of the region’s gold, a man named Richard Jobson was offered some slaves to trade, and semi-famously replied “We are a people who did not deal in any such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes.”
It was a statement not only of practicality, but a moral stance, and in these years, there is no evidence of slave trading by the company. That said, there is absolutely evidence of some slave trading by English interlopers, or individuals who were illegally trading in the area despite the Guinea Company’s monopoly. These slaves could be sold in colonies throughout South America, especially in Brazil.
But, like so many early colonial ventures, the early years of the Guinea Company saw more setbacks than successes, and its investors lost more money than they made. In 1624, the company’s governor, William St. John, was sent to debtor’s prison, and the same year Parliament suspended the company’s monopoly, saying that the company didn’t actually do enough with it to justify preventing others from trying to make money in the area. The next year, Davies died, and by the year after that, all but four of the company’s original members had quit. These members included deputy governor Kenelm Digby, as well as Ferdinando Gorges. They stopped paying the company, defaulted on their subscriptions, and left it to sink into inescapable debt.
As the company collapsed, though, a new group of merchants emerged within its ranks, and foremost among these was a man named Nicholas Crispe, who bought a controlling interest in the Guinea Company in 1628. Crispe was extravagantly wealthy, thanks to the brickmaking trade, and he was also exceptionally ambitious. He had captained a merchant ship for a few years, and perhaps acted as a privateer, before returning home to become one of the most prominent merchants in Stuart England. There was virtually no colonial venture that he didn’t participate in at least somewhat, and family members of his were some of the earlier Virginia settlers. He also had a factory producing glass beads for American settlers to trade with the Indians. And now, in 1625, this 27 year old was determined to make the African trade work.
He’d financed a voyage or two to Africa, and perhaps even gone there, after Parliament had suspended the company’s monopoly, and now he approached King Charles with a proposal. The few people from the original company who wanted to remain involved in the African trade would join together to form a new company with a very specific plan. Chief among these continued investors were Humpfrey Slaney, brother of the John Slaney at whose house Squanto had once stayed, as well as his apprentices, John Wood, and William Clobbery. William Clobbery of Clobbery and Company, William Claiborne’s associate on Kent Island. And these are the people who would lead the new Guinea Company, again, so many American connections.
At this point in time, there was still very little in the way of slave trading going on. The big exception was one ship which ended up being seized by a French privateer around Senegal in 1629, which had lost the company 20,000 pounds and finalized its financial collapse.
After this collapse, though, Crispe applied for the new patent he had been planning. His new patent focused on the redwood trade, which was already established as the company’s main source of revenue, while emphasizing a search for gold with the trade in sugar as a backup. This was a great plan. Portugal could no longer prevent foreigners from trading in sugar, and sugar was easily valuable enough to ensure a profit on any voyage. And that would allow them to look for gold until they found it. So whatever gold they found, they’d bring home, and whatever space they had leftover, they’d fill with sugar. Crispe had a great plan, and a great reputation, and soon the combination attracted new investors. And as of 1631, he had an expanded patent which allowed him to trade not only in Guinea, but in Angola, too, as well as a fresh start which gave the company some leeway on paying back previous financiers’ debts.
Crispe was in almost complete control of the company at this point. Between him and his brother, who was acting on his behalf, he owned about 75% of the company’s shares. He recruited the help of a Dutch man who had formerly worked for the Dutch West India company, named Arent de Groot, to organize company operations within Africa, and his plans went exceptionally well. Soon the company had a series of trading posts and tribe connections throughout Western Africa, and it was pulling in a lot of money.
There was a difference, though, between Crispe and his three other primary associates, Slaney, Clobery and Wood. Actually, there were a few differences, and these led to a massive falling out between them. The first of these was that Crispe worked through the company, led the company and poured huge amounts of money into its operations, while the other three were just as happy to be interlopers as investors, and in fact, they started to favor being interlopers over investors. And interlopers were emerging as the biggest problem the company faced, followed by the Dutch. The Scottish briefly chartered a company to trade in the area and try to find gold, but only sent a couple of ships, one of which was seized by the Portuguese at Sao Tome. But really the competition was coming from English interlopers, meaning that Slaney, Clobery and Wood were competing against their own company. They got a combined 25% of whatever Crispe organized, but 100% of whatever they illegally organized themselves, so they did both.
And this is kind of important, because at this point in time, the company was doing no slave trading. It had dabbled a tiny bit in the last year of the old company’s collapse, and with the renewal of the company under Crispe, had again fully rejected the practice. Crispe had no interest in the slave trade. Maybe he was morally averse to it in the way that Davies and Jobson had been, or maybe he was simply more interested in gold and sugar, and maybe he didn’t want to risk his alliances with African tribes who were helping him … there’s no way to fully know from the documents which exist.
But what we know is that interlopers like Slaney, Clobbery and Wood along with Maurice Thompson, who we know from Providence Island and the Navigation Acts, were doing plenty of slave trading. So there was a split. Slave trading was almost wholly done illegally against Crispe’s patent, while Crispe rejected the idea. And by 1637, Crispe was actively working against it. He was complaining to King Charles about interlopers coming to trade for slaves, specifically naming Clobbery and Maurice Thompson as the biggest offenders, and sending ships to defend the coast from them. They intercepted ships as they left England and as they approached Africa to prevent these voyages whose explicit intention was to take slaves from West Africa to “foreign parts.” Maurice Thompson came up in our Providence Island story, and also as the man who penned the Navigation Act and Act for Forbidding Trade with Virginia, Barbados, Bermuda and Antigua, and the man who pushed the Navigation Act through Parliament with his brother’s help. He was involved in the Canadian Fur Trade, and was one of the English merchants pushing for a monopoly on Virginia tobacco. He also had land in a bunch of different colonies and worked to influence their direction from England. Later he would help with Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, and take over the East India Company, so it’s very clear that Thompson was massively important and massively Parliamentarian, in fact a key financier of their war effort in the same way that Crispe was for the king. So that’s who we’re talking about when we talk about Maurice Thompson.
And, another slave-trading interloper was Samuel Vassall, who worked a lot with Clobbery and who was one of those early New Englanders.
So, the thing that’s really interesting to start noting here is that there’s a serious political divide on the issue of slavery. Crispe, that Virginia-connected, devoted Royalist, was following in the anti-slave trade steps of his predecessors, Davies and Jobson. Meanwhile, the people leading in the illegal slave trade are uniformly Puritans who will soon lead the Parliamentarian cause. Thompson, Clobbery, Vassall … And this goes along with Puritan Providence Island being the first slave-based English economy in the Americas, as well as Barbadian Puritans leading that colony’s conversion to a slave-based economy as well, and Emmanuel Downing’s active advocacy of slavery within Massachusetts Bay. We’ll get into a little more discussion of this later, but I think it’s a very interesting trend, and something to draw attention to now, because it is a trend that will continue to define our story.
In the 1630s, though, Crispe and the company were bringing in lots and lots of money through gold and sugar trading. Over the course of two years, de Groot had built a trading empire in Africa, while Crispe planned it from England. Permanent factories managed continual trade and storage of goods, so that ships could simply sail there, load and return to England. They were bringing in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pounds worth of Gold in addition to everything else. And what developments the company as a whole couldn’t fund, Crispe financed personally.
And, while he couldn’t fully stop Clobbery and Thompson’s slave trading, he was doing the best he could. But as war approached, the political divide between the Parliamentarian interlopers and Royalist Crispe came to the forefront in terms of importance. And when I say that Crispe was a royalist, I mean he was a diehard royalist, moreso than anyone we’ve discussed in this podcast with the exception of Governor Harvey. Even people who we’d label as perhaps extreme royalists, like Digby and Montrose, and for that matter the Earl of Strafford, had started their careers in staunch opposition to King Charles. Even Berkeley had voiced some criticism early on. Not Crispe. Crispe was so devoted a royalist that when he later died, he had his heart put in an urn underneath a bust of Charles I which he, himself had commissioned to be sculpted and placed in his Church. Crispe was so dedicated a Royalist that when the Civil War started, Crispe’s unhesitating reaction was “everything I have is yours for this fight.”
And this was not a secret as war approached. So when the Long Parliament first met, and Crispe was elected to it, it was only a matter of weeks before Parliament was siding with Thompson and Clobbery, and against him. They ordered him to surrender the patents which gave him monopolies to certain parts of the African trade. Then, in 1641 as Parliament prepared to pass the Grand Remonstrance, an act which passed by 11 votes, Crispe was one of the 10 people they expelled, saying that this was because he was a monopolist and against the Parliament. When the war started, Crispe fled London and raised a regiment to fight for the king as well as a squadron of 15 ships for his navy. And by the end of the war, he’d lost pretty much everything for that fight. Company trade was cut off, interloping was encouraged, and what Crispe hadn’t given to the king was taken by Parliament, either at the beginning of the war or when his estate was sequestered toward the end of it.
Sequestration was done in proportion to the level of support royalists had given the king’s cause, and as such Crispe lost everything. “Everything” included his shares in the Guinea Company, and those shares were given to the company’s Parliamentarian merchants and interlopers, John Wood, Maurice Thompson, William Clobbery, as well as Rowland Wilson and Thomas Walter. Not too long after this, Crispe left England to join Prince Charles’s Court in Exile. So Crispe is out of our story for the time being, and honestly, forever. He will never actually get back his former riches, or his influence in the West African trade. He made a brief visit to the Gold Coast in 1655 to trade for ivory, but that’s his only interloping voyage we have any evidence of, and he wasn’t really in control of anything even after the Restoration.
And in his place, the Parliamentarians he’d been feuding with were in control of the company, and immediately there was a new flurry of activity, and this activity, now including both interlopers and the company itself, heavily focused on slavery. Barbados had by now emerged as an economy that relied on slaves, and Barbados could also give company merchants sugar to sell in England. This was at the same time as these same merchants were pushing for English monopoly trade in the Americas. They wanted the exclusive right to Barbadian sugar, and to get that, they needed to show that they could provide everything Barbados needed to produce that sugar. Plus, there was an ideological shift happening, that shift to empire we discussed a few weeks ago. It wasn’t just about getting rich off of one venture, it was about establishing England as an empire with merchants at its center, while the most profitable part of America had shifted to a reliance on slaves.
The war had taken a toll on the Guinea Company, though, and it would never return to its former success. The Committee of Trade investigated it in 1651, in response to a long series of petitions and counter-petitions initiated by Vassal, and found that it was a shambles. Interlopers had destroyed its profits, while it had had to invest heavily to maintain its trading posts, factories and forts to defend itself against the Dutch. The man in charge of its greatest successes was now living in exile, and Prince Rupert’s time in West Africa, that time he’d spent there when his captains refused to go to Barbados, had also been incredibly effective at damaging the company, and reducing the money it could provide to the English Commonwealth. Vassall was by now the leader of the company’s challengers, both a prominent interloping slave trader and a company opponent within Parliament, and he had even ousted company merchants from their Winneba lodge in 1648. So to reduce the threat he posed, they added him to the company as they tried to rebuild.
And because the company was such a mess, and because the Commonwealth was now focusing so much on colonies and trade existing for the benefit of England, and because Africa could benefit this emerging empire so much, the Rump Parliament revised the company’s patent. It explicitly ordered them to start trading in slaves, because the sugar islands needed slaves. With the Navigation Act, it was up to English merchants to get the needed slaves to Barbados, etc. So the company was ordered to increase its slave trading, and the company lost its monopoly on the areas most associated with slave trading in order to encourage individual merchants to compete with the company to increase trade volume. The company would keep its monopoly in the areas associated with the redwood and gold trade, but those, like Nigeria and Benin, which were most associated with the trade in slaves would be free to anyone who would do it. But under Thompson and Vassal’s leadership, the company continued to intensify its involvement in the slave trade, extending that trade even to places like the Gold Coast, where it still had a monopoly, but which notably had always been the focus of trade in commodities which were also valuable.
By the end of the 1650s, though, the company was again in an irrecoverable state, and this time, in the wake of war with the Dutch, it gave up on the whole affair. It leased its rights to Maurice Thompson’s East India Company, which wanted gold and ivory for the Indian market, and which wanted to use slaves to build a Pacific Empire from East Africa to Indonesia. And that was it. The East India Company set up a post in Benin, but the Guinea Company was done for, and so was England’s West African trade, at least for a while.
So, to understand the growth of slavery in the tobacco colonies, specifically, we really have to understand this wider English context. Because here’s the thing about slavery in the Chesapeake. Up until the Commonwealth era, places like Virginia really didn’t have many slaves at all, and it’s only with that era that the importation of Africans there even began to increase. As of 1649, the year of Charles I’s execution, only 18 Virginians had Africans working for them in any capacity, and together, those 18 people had about 3-500 Africans. This is in a colony with about 30,000 people. In fact, those 18 people were almost exclusively people who were prominent enough to have appeared in our podcast. Abraham Peirsey, George Yeardley and his sons, Daniel Gookin, Samuel Mathews, George Sandys …
And their importation of Africans was very intentional during the reign of Charles I, and into the Commonwealth era. There was absolutely no trade directly from Africa to the Chesapeake, and no wider interest among Virginians in moving away from the indentured servant labor model. It wasn’t something that just organically happened, even after Barbados and English merchants started to focus more heavily on slaves and the slave trade. Even Thompson and Vassal didn’t ship slaves directly to North America. In order to get slaves, Mathews and his colleagues had to set up their own, New England-run trade with Barbados.
Early on, at least some of the political divide in bringing Africans into Virginia has very tangible, straightforward reasons. The earliest Africans were brought to Virginia by privateers. They were the spoils of an undeclared war with the Spanish, and the Puritans wanted to support this war. Buying Africans, whether as servants or slaves, was one of the most tangible forms of support colonists could give. But after Charles I took the throne, that wasn’t a driving factor anymore. Yet, Mathews and his colleagues continued to actively invest in expanding slavery, even while it was exclusively limited to their tiny, marginalized political faction. So by the end of the 1650s, Mathews and a dozen others had shifted their labor force to be majority slave, even while no one else in the colony had slaves, and while slavery was in no way legally codified there, and half a century before the rest of the colony would make a similar shift.
And even at the end of the century, when the colony as a whole shifted towards slavery, there was a split in what Africans tended to be called, and again, that split tended to occur along political lines. Royalists and their descendents tended to call them “negroe servants,” while the Parliamentarians of the Northern Neck deemed them slaves even early on.
And another facet of this political split is that it was in the mid 1650s, under Bennett and Claiborne’s government, that slavery started to move toward being a legally recognized form of labor in Virginia. As of 1640, only one black had been made a legal, lifelong slave, and that was as a legal punishment which was implemented in the Puritan Northern Neck, in York County.
The first Virginia law to mention slavery as any sort of an institution, was under Bennett and Claiborne in 1655. It still wasn’t a legally codified practice, but it was only overtly accepted after Virginia was reduced and they took the government. Laws in Virginia were hard to enforce, and I’m not saying that people like Samuel Mathews hadn’t been able to keep Africans as slaves rather than indentured servants regardless of the laws, but the point is that it was under Bennett’s leadership that this started to be legally codified. And this occurred at the same time as the Commonwealth government in England was actively encouraging the slave trade.
And no one I could find went into any scholarly analysis of this political split or why it might have existed, but I did see some hints of possible reasons in my research. Again, I’m going to emphasize, not particularly scholarly in a way that would hold up today, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Slavery was, of course, firmly established in New World colonies even before Roanoke was founded. Religion was used both to oppose and to justify the practice. There was some talk of expansion, and the simple fact that indentured servitude necessitated territorial expansion, which wasn’t necessarily something that could happen indefinitely.
Most interesting of all, though, I’d say, and most ideological, and most controversial and therefore least discussed in the modern world, is the idea that equality-minded people, which Puritans were, saw slavery as something of a potential social equalizer among English colonists. England was a lost cause in terms of eliminating hierarchy, but America was a nearly blank slate, a society which theoretically could be built without any significant hierarchy among English people. Avoiding indentured servitude, and replacing it with slavery, could help shift colonial society from the unequal, aristocratic type structure like England had, to a more equal, democratic one. And Puritan Parliamentarians were indisputably the people who wanted this shift, while Anglican Royalists were perfectly comfortable with the established social order, roles, hierarchy and aristocracy. I find that an extremely interesting interpretation, even if there’s no way to prove that it was the case.
Regardless, though, you can really see in this story a tangible part of what we discussed a couple episodes ago, which is this building of empire that started under the English Commonwealth, and the changes that that drove in America. And like I told you, it’s going to be a thread through a lot of the stuff we discuss going forward. And next week, we’re going to go back up north and discuss developments in New England, specifically regarding the Colony of Maine.