|
Article Excerpt
ARTICLE CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION I. ORIGINS OF THE ANTISLAVERY COURTS A. The Rise of British Abolitionism B. Abolitionism and British Foreign Policy, 1807-1814: Unilateralism C. British Foreign Policy at the End of the Napoleonic Wars: A Network of Treaties II. THE COURTS OF MIXED COMMISSION FOR THE ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE A. Overview of Court Operations B. The Courts in Operation: Impact and Limitations 1. Impact: Volume of Cases 2. Limitation: Nonparticipation 3. Limitation: Other Loopholes 4. Limitation: Reluctant Treaty Partners 5. Limitation: Faltering Domestic Support C. From Crisis to Success: The Final Abolition of the Slave Trade 1. Portugal 2. Brazil 3. Spain, Cuba, and the United States III. INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW AND INTERNATIONAL COURTS: RETHINKING THEIR ORIGINS AND FUTURE
INTRODUCTION
Almost exactly two centuries ago, in March 1807, both the United States and Great Britain passed landmark legislation prohibiting the slave trade. The anniversary of this event has been marked with fanfare in both countries. (1) But these celebrations mask the fact that the transatlantic slave trade continued for another sixty years before it was finally suppressed. This Article is about those sixty years and the surprising and forgotten role that international law and international courts played in the extinction of the slave trade.
Between 1817 and 1871, bilateral treaties between Britain and several other countries (eventually including the United States) led to the establishment of international courts for the suppression of the slave trade. (2) Though all but forgotten today, these antislavery courts were the first international human rights courts. They were made up of judges from different countries. They sat on a permanent, continuing basis, and they applied international law. The courts explicitly aimed to promote humanitarian objectives. Though the courts were extremely active for only a few years, over the treaties' lifespan, the courts heard more than 600 cases and freed almost 80,000 slaves found aboard illegal slave trading vessels. (3) During their peak years of operation, the courts heard cases that may have involved as many as one out of every five or six ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade. (4)
These international antislavery courts have received scant attention from historians, (5) and legal scholars have almost completely ignored them. (6) To be sure, the cases they adjudicated represented only a fraction of the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa, and they left the East African slave trade untouched. Social, economic, political, and military factors created an environment amenable to the formation of the courts, and it is difficult to untangle the causal role played by these factors from the role of the courts themselves in the ultimate global abolition of the slave trade. The final suppression of the slave trade only occurred when changes in attitudes toward the trade in various countries led to effective enforcement of domestic laws against the traffic; these changes in domestic attitudes appear linked at least in part to international efforts to ban the slave trade, though other factors likely played a role as well. But regardless of the weight of various causal factors in the suppression of the slave trade, an international legal institution that had a direct and tangible impact on nearly 80,000 human lives should be far more than a footnote in the history of international law. Modern international courts--about which tens of thousands of scholarly pages have been spilled--measure their successes on a much smaller scale. (7)
In addition to its intrinsic historical interest, the story of the antislavery courts has important implications for contemporary issues in international law. Most legal scholars view international courts and international human rights law largely as post-World War II phenomena, with the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals and the founding of the United Nations as the seminal moments in the turn to international law as a mechanism for protecting individual rights. (8) But in fact, the nineteenth-century slavery abolition movement was the first successful international human rights campaign, and international treaties and courts were its central features. (9)
The history of the antislavery courts also reveals a more complex interrelationship between state power, moral ideas, and domestic and international legal institutions than many contemporary theories of international law and relations acknowledge. Great Britain, the main instigator of the antislavery treaties, no doubt would not have campaigned so strongly for abolition if it had been truly devastating to its economic and political interests. Yet substantial evidence shows that Britain's abolition policy was motivated by genuine humanitarian concerns and that the policy inflicted significant economic costs on its empire. Of equal significance, Britain used international law as one important tool for persuading other countries to abandon a widespread and profitable practice. Britain was the nineteenth century's greatest naval power, and its initial efforts to suppress the slave trade were military and unilateral, involving seizures of slave vessels by the British navy and condemnation of those ships in British courts. Over time, however, Britain found it could not rely on its military power alone, but instead had to utilize that power in conjunction with cooperative legal action to achieve its goals. Over several decades, Britain convinced one country after another to ratify increasingly powerful treaties against the slave trade. At the same time, these international legal mechanisms would have been ineffective without Britain's military and economic power. At critical moments, Britain was forced to deploy its "hard" powers, as well as its domestic laws and courts, to bring reluctant treaty partners back into the legal fold. In short, neither raw coercive power nor international law alone was enough to achieve the abolition of the slave trade. Both were necessary.
Each time and place in history is different, of course, and yet this episode is evocative of contemporary problems in international relations, including efforts to foster democracy and human rights both through the use of force and/or through international legal institutions, including courts. The antislavery movement's use of international law and legal institutions as part of a broader social, political, and military strategy can help us better understand the potential role of international law today in bringing about improvements in human rights. In more theoretical terms, the history of the antislavery courts suggests a need for a thicker, more robust account of the relationship between power, ideas, and international law. In short, this forgotten bit of history should change the way we think about international courts and international human rights law--their origins, limits, and potential.
I. ORIGINS OF THE ANTISLAVERY COURTS
In 1800, slavery was a fundamental part of the world's economic and social order. Though not practiced in Europe itself, European colonies in the Western Hemisphere relied heavily on slave labor to support their plantation economies. Slave trading ships crossed the Atlantic flying the flags of all the seafaring European nations, as well as of the newly independent United States of America. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, an estimated 609,o00 slaves arrived in the New World. (10)
Within a relatively short time span, however, things began to change. In 1807, Britain became the first major country, followed shortly by the United States, to ban its subjects from participation in the slave trade. (11) By the early 1840s, more than twenty nations--including all the Atlantic maritime powers--had signed international treaties committing to the abolition of the trade. By the late 1860s, only a few hundred slaves per year were illegally transported across the Atlantic. (12) And by 1900, slavery itself had been outlawed in every country in the Western Hemisphere.
The abolition 10 slavery has received a great deal of attention from historians, (13) but much less from scholars of international law. And yet the abolition of chattel slavery remains perhaps the most successful episode ever in the history of international human rights law. Slavery is one of the few universally acknowledged crimes under international law. (14) Though powerful countries today defend torture (15)--another practice placed strictly off limits by international law--no nation today officially defends slavery. To be sure, modern forms of forced labor remain a significant human rights issue affecting millions of people, but the type of widespread, legalized chattel slavery that was commonplace in the nineteenth century has mostly disappeared. (16)
How did such a dramatic shift occur in disparate societies around the world in less than a century? Changes in the world economy in the nineteenth century certainly created the conditions that made the abolition of slavery more feasible. But the best historical evidence suggests that slavery did not die an accidental death of abandonment in the face of competition from industrial capitalism. (17) Slavery was eradicated, intentionally, by people who had come to believe it was morally wrong. It was eradicated in part by military force, but also by coordinated legal action--including, surprisingly, international courts.
A. The Rise of British Abolitionism
The indisputable star of the international abolition story is Great Britain. Britain was, along with the United States, one of the first major countries to ban the slave trade. Unlike the United States, (18) Britain, whose ships were responsible for more than half of the trade in the years leading up to the ban, enforced its prohibition on slave trading with persistent vigor. Moreover, Britain soon became the main advocate of international treaties banning the trade. Though it received little immediate benefit, Britain devoted significant material resources to suppressing the slave trade. As one historian has explained, slavery was unlike other issues in foreign policy at the time:
Although the British saw abolition as in the national and indeed international interest, it was not a matter of national survival and honor, nor was it even likely to result in any short-run gain for the country. The ultimate goal was not the winning of territory or trade concessions, but rather the imposition of a conception of freedom.... (19)
By one modern estimate, Britain's effort to suppress the slave trade cost an average of nearly two percent of its annual national income for each year between 1807 and 1867, (20) and the direct costs of its annual suppression efforts between 1816 and 1862 were roughly equal to the total profits it had received from the trade between 1761 and 187. (21) During the height of its suppression efforts in the 1840s, somewhere between one sixth and one quarter of the ships in the Royal Navy were involved in antislavery patrols. (22)
Not surprisingly, there is an extensive historiography of the causes and origins of British abolitionism. Early historians described the British government's campaign to eradicate the slave trade as one of pure idealism. As one oft-quoted historian put it, "[t]he unweary, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations." (23) Later historians viewed skeptically these claims of pristine moral motives. In 2944, Eric Williams published an influential revisionist history, Capitalism and Slavery, in which he argued that economic self-interest motivated Britain's antislavery campaign. (24) Williams contended that by the turn of the nineteenth century, the British plantation economies in the West Indies were already in decline, while industrial capitalism was on the rise. As industrial capitalists came to dominate the British economy and political system, he argued, they pushed for the abolition of slavery to advance their own interests. (25)
The next generation of historians acknowledged some connection between the rise of capitalism and the abolition of slavery but rejected Williams's account as overly simplistic. (26) Among other things, Williams's account was not supported by the evidence; the economic decline of British West Indian plantations did not begin until well after the abolition of the trade. (27) In fact, both the slave trade and slave colonies were highly profitable to Britain at the time of abolition and would likely have remained so for many years. (28) It was abolition itself, not some other factor, that led to both the absolute and relative decline of British plantation colonies in the Caribbean. (29) As one economic historian explained:
In 1800, if one were to argue in terms of economic self-interest, the British should have been actively encouraging the slave trade and slave settlements throughout the world. Such a policy would have been highly effective in achieving national goals as laid down by the amalgam of London merchants and landed gentry who dominated the British government at this time. It would also have best served the material aims of manufacturers and wage earners alike. (30)
Though disagreeing on many details, historians now largely concur that British abolitionism arose out of a confluence of factors, including Enlightenment philosophy and religious revival movements. (31) Abolition was also only one part of a broader humanitarian movement in England: other areas of concern included poor laws, labor standards, and prison conditions. (32) As for the role of capitalism, some have suggested that the antislavery movement served to legitimate free labor, thereby reinforcing the interests of new capitalist elites in Britain. (33) Others have challenged the degree to which antislavery did deflect attention from domestic labor issues and have suggested instead that capitalism's key contribution to the antislavery movement was a cognitive one, namely an awareness of cause and effect across the marketplace that brought home to British consumers the causal connection between their demand for sugar, the demand for slave labor on the sugar plantations of the West Indies, and the horrors of the "Middle Passage"--the voyage across the Atlantic in the hold of a slave ship. (34) More recently, historians have also countered the emphasis on elite interests by demonstrating the genuine importance of widespread, popular support in Britain for the abolitionist cause. (35) For their part, international relations scholars have puzzled over the degree to which abolition affected British foreign policy, finding Britain's actions against the slave trade unexplained by conventional theories of international relations. (36)
Regardless of its precise origins, the abolition movement indisputably became an important force in British politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Early abolition efforts did not strike at the heart of the problem--the institution of slavery itself, which was not abolished in British colonies until 1833--but focused first on limiting the geographical reach of slavery, and second on restricting the trade in slaves from Africa to the New World.
On both sides of the Atlantic, opponents of the slave trade conceptualized the issue in terms of human rights, and spoke as well of a religious and moral obligation. Upon introduction of an early and unsuccessful bill to ban the slave trade in 1776, one member of the British Parliament argued that the "[s]lavetrade was contrary to the laws of God, and the rights of man." (37) Speaking in support of legislation to ban the slave trade in 1806, Lord Grenville likewise characterized slavery as contrary to the "rights of nature" whereby "every human being is entitled to the fruit of his own labour." (38) President Thomas Jefferson's message to the U.S. Congress in 1806 supported legislation against the slave trade because it would "withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa." (39)
From the beginning, law was a key weapon in the abolitionists' arsenal. In 1772, in the landmark case of Somerset v. Stewart, (40) a British court held that slavery would not be legally recognized within Britain itself. James Somerset, a slave from Virginia, had been brought to England by his master, Charles Stewart, who intended ultimately to return with Somerset to America. Once in England, however, Somerset's situation came to the attention of abolitionists, who helped him file a petition for habeas corpus seeking his release. (41) The court held that slavery was "so odious" and contrary to natural law that it could only be justified by positive law. (42) Thus, despite the practical "inconvenience" that might follow from the decision-which Stewart had argued would include the liberation of some 14,000 slaves in England valued by their owners at a total of 800,000 [pounds sterling]--the court ordered Somerset's release. (43)
Having succeeded in establishing that any slave who touched British soil would be free, the abolitionists next focused their efforts on banning the transport of slaves from Africa to the New World. The immediate abolition of slavery was deemed politically infeasible because it was too vital to the economies of the West Indian colonies. The slave trade, although lucrative for the British merchants who participated in it and a vital source of new slaves for British colonies, was a somewhat easier target. For one thing, the slave trade was viewed as the cruelest part of the system. Accounts by sailors and freed slaves of the horrors of the Middle Passage were widely circulated in Britain. Abolitionists also argued that cutting off the supply of fresh slaves would induce owners to treat their existing slaves better and thus reduce horrific mortality rates on plantations; better treatment of slaves, they argued, might even improve productivity.
Abolitionist leaders succeeded in putting the abolition of the slave trade on the political agenda in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce, a bill for the abolition of the trade passed the House of Commons in 1792, but was blocked in the House of Lords. (44) After this initial progress, however, almost a decade followed in which the movement made little headway. The French Revolution had provoked fear in Britain's ruling classes and led to a crackdown on political agitation; the public meetings and petition campaigns that had propelled abolition onto the parliamentary agenda came to a halt. (45) Though Wilberforce continued to introduce antislavery legislation each year, the legislation received little attention, and other matters, such as the war with France, dominated Britain's political agenda.
In the spring of 1806, the abolitionists finally changed tactics and used the renewed war with France to their advantage. The crucial first step was the passage of the Foreign Slave Trade Act, (46) which prohibited British subjects from participating in the slave trade with the current or former colonies and possessions of France and its allies. (47) Framed as a national security measure rather than a humanitarian one, the Act easily passed the House of Commons. Proslavery forces realized the potential importance of the measure by the time it reached the House of Lords, and submitted a petition with more than four hundred signatures from the key trading center of Manchester opposing the Act. The abolition forces responded within hours with a counter-petition from Manchester bearing more than 2300 signatures. (48) The House of Lords quickly agreed to the Act. (49)
Having gained this wedge, the abolitionists promptly renewed their efforts to achieve a broader ban. Conditions were favorable in more ways than one. First, the petition campaign in support of the Foreign Slave Trade Act had shown that popular support for abolition was both widespread and deep, even in regions where trading interests were strong. Although British voting rights would not be expanded beyond a limited segment of the population for another twenty-five years, strong popular sentiment influenced politics.
The slave trade became an issue in key parliamentary elections in the fall of 1806. (50) By that time, two changes since the 1790s had reduced the perceived threat of foreign competition with British commercial interests in the West Indies: first, the war with France had reduced French power in the West Indies and on the high seas; and second, a Haitian slave revolt had led to the independence of France's most productive sugar colony. And so it happened that, in early 1807, both houses of Parliament finally passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. (51) As of May 1, 1807, the law completely prohibited participation in the slave trade by British subjects and the importation of slaves to British possessions. The British navy began to enforce the ban, and the slave trade under the British flag rapidly decreased. (52)
B. Abolitionism and British Foreign Policy, 1807-1814: Unilateralism
Following passage of the 1807 Act, it quickly became clear that it would be in Britain's interest to encourage the suppression of slave trading by other countries as well. If other nations continued to tolerate the trade, the only effect of Britain's ban would be to shift the trade from British-flagged ships to the ships of other nations. In addition, the Caribbean colonies of other nations would continue to receive infusions of new slaves, putting British possessions that could not receive such reinforcements at an economic disadvantage. Thus, the British West Indian planters, who had been the strongest opponents of the 1807 Act, quickly became supporters of British efforts to stamp out the slave trade carried out by other nations.
At the time, other countries showed little interest in implementing an effective ban on the trade. Though there had been abolition movements in France and the United States, abolitionists were not sufficiently influential in domestic politics in either of those countries in 1807 to force their governments to devote significant resources to the suppression of the slave trade, particularly on the high seas. Like Britain, France initially drew a distinction between slavery in its colonies and slavery on French soil. Long before the much-celebrated decision by the British court in Somerset, French admiralty courts had granted numerous petitions for freedom on behalf of slaves who had been brought within the French mainland. (53) In 1794, the revolutionary government in France abolished slavery in its colonies, (54) and the French slave trade was temporarily dampened. (55) This abolition effort was short-lived, however, for the trade was never effectively suppressed and Napoleon reauthorized slavery in French colonies in 1803. (56)
The United States had prohibited the outfitting of slave ships in American ports in 1794 (57) and enacted legislation completely banning the slave trade under the American flag and into American ports in March 1807. That legislation took effect in 1808, the earliest date allowed by the Constitution. (58) Within a decade, the United States had effectively suppressed slave imports into its own territory, (59) But in the face of sectional divisions between North and South, the United States devoted few resources to enforcing the ban against U.S.-flagged ships on the high seas. (60)
Abolitionist movements had even less power in Spain and Portugal, the other major maritime powers with significant plantation colonies in the New World. (61) Both of those countries permitted the trade to continue unrestricted under their flags, and the slave trade from Africa to Cuba and Brazil flourished.
Britain thus resorted initially to unilateral military action to suppress the slave trade. The 1807 Abolition Act was enacted during the Napoleonic Wars, during which Britain claimed the right under the law of nations to search ships on the high seas to determine whether they were enemy ships or, if neutral ships, whether they were violating principles of neutrality by, for example, carrying contraband for the enemy or running a blockade. Although the primary efforts of the British Navy were in pursuance of the war effort, Britain also began using this search right, derived from international law, as a method to suppress the slave trade. Ships found carrying cargoes of slaves were brought into British vice admiralty courts around the Atlantic for condemnation as prizes under the law of nations. (62)
The British appellate courts first addressed this issue in the case of The Amedie. (63) While sailing under the flag of the United States from Africa to Cuba with a cargo of 105 slaves, The Amedie was captured by a British warship in 1808. Though the United States was a neutral in the war at that time, its ships were arguably subject to search under the law of nations to ensure that they were not violating neutrality. The British vice admiralty court in Tortola condemned the ship as a lawful prize, and the court in London affirmed. The court observed that the British Parliament had clearly "declared the African slave trade is contrary to the principles of justice and humanity." (64) While noting that the United States had also banned the trade as a matter of domestic law, the court acknowledged that the positive law of nations, either by treaty or custom, did not completely ban the slave trade:
[W]e cannot legislate for other countries; nor has this country a right to controul any foreign legislature that may think proper to dissent from this doctrine and give permission to its subjects to prosecute this trade. We cannot, certainly, compel the subjects of other nations to observe any other than the first and generally received principles of universal law. (65)
Using the same natural law reasoning as the court in Somerset, however, the court concluded that it was entitled to presume the slave trade unlawful unless some positive law authorized it. Having found the trade presumptively illegal, the court put on the claimant "the whole burden of proof ... to shew that by the particular law of his own country he is entitled to carry on this traffic." (66) Even where the claimant was able to demonstrate domestic legal authority, the court intimated that "persons engaged in such a trade cannot, upon principles of universal law, have a right to be heard upon a claim of this nature in any court" and that, in any event, "no claimant can be heard in an application to a court of prize for the restoration of the human beings he carried unjustly to another country for the purpose of disposing of them as slaves." (67) Thus, the court upheld the condemnation of the ship and its cargo; (68) the slaves were freed, and the ship itself was awarded as prize to its captor, as was customary. (69)
Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Britain continued the practice of seizing foreign slave ships, including American, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French vessels. (70) Other nations protested Britain's heavy-handed search tactics, (71) both in relation to captured slave ships and in relation to maritime commerce more generally, as exceeding permissible bounds under the law of nations. Indeed, British search and seizure of American ships, though not specifically slave ships, was one of the main bones of contention that led to the War of 1812. (72) But Britain persisted in these unilateral seizures through the end of the Napoleonic Wars. As the following tables show, Britain captured a nontrivial number of ships during this period.
In one sense, the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814-15 was a peculiar time for Britain to change the direction of its antislavery policies. After all, Britain won the war, and, more than that, had established itself as the dominant maritime power. But with the end of hostilities, Britain's unilateral actions became more suspect. The right to search foreign-flagged vessels was linked under the law of nations to a state of warfare, and its scope was controversial even in that context. It was clear that there was no general right of peacetime search, aside from cases of piracy. Although the British courts would not begin to invalidate the peacetime search and seizure of foreign-flagged slaving vessels until 1817, the writing was already on the wall. Unilateral British suppression efforts in peacetime would not be perceived as legitimate by its own courts, let alone by other countries, many of which had already insinuated that Britain was not interested in the slave trade at all, but was simply using the humanitarian cause as a cover for its self-interested efforts to dominate maritime commerce. (74)
In July 1816, the British government acknowledged that the peacetime searches were illegal under international law, (75) and the following year, British courts began invalidating seizures of slave ships, starting with the case of Le Louis, issued on December 15, 1817. (76) Le Louis involved a French vessel seized in 1816 and condenmed by the British vice admiralty court at Sierra Leone. The condemnation was reversed on appeal in an opinion authored by Sir Walter Scott. (77) Although the court acknowledged that French law prohibited the slave trade, the court found that Britain had no legal authority to search the ship on the high seas. (78) Noting that the customary law of nations provided no generalized right to search in peacetime, the court concluded that Britain could not search or seize a French ship in conditions of peace unless the ship was engaged in piracy or the search was directly authorized by a treaty with France. The court found, first, that the slave trade was not piracy under the general law of nations. Second, the court concluded that the 1815 treaty in which France had agreed to ban the slave trade was not sufficient to confer a right of peacetime search. Thus, there was no legal basis for the search and seizure. (79) In the face of this positivist, formal view of the status of international law on the slave trade, it was clear that if Britain wanted to suppress the slave trade, it would need to persuade other countries to commit to the project and to enter into treaties that would give legal legitimacy to its actions.
C. British Foreign Policy at the End of the Napoleonic Wars: A Network of Treaties
The end of the Napoleonic Wars not only made it something of a necessity for Britain to address the slave trade issue on a multilateral basis, but also presented an opportunity for the British government to make the issue a bargaining chip in the series of diplomatic negotiations and realignments that inevitably followed the war. In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, Britain successfully negotiated for clauses related to the slave trade in a number of multilateral and bilateral treaties. Although the multilateral treaties ultimately included only statements of principle against the slave trade with no enforcement mechanisms, several of the bilateral negotiations ultimately resulted in treaties that not only banned the slave trade but also provided for enforcement of the ban in international mixed courts.
The British government faced strong domestic political pressure to make abolition a central feature of the immediate postwar negotiations. When the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, returned from the initial peace treaty negotiations in France in the summer of 1814, he was greeted with euphoria and praise for having brought the long war to a successful conclusion. These accolades, however, were quickly supplanted by criticism for having agreed to a provision in the treaty that allowed France to renew its participation in the slave trade (participation that had been dampened or eliminated during the war) for five more years. (80) Wilberforce, the leader of the abolition movement in Parliament, immediately described the treaty provision as the "death-warrant of a multitude of innocent victims, men, women and children." (81) Lord Canning pointed out that Castlereagh had opposed the 1807 Act abolishing the trade, thereby implying that he had not pursued the issue with sufficient diligence in the peace negotiations. (82)
Abolitionist leaders reached out to the public for support. In what may have been the largest popular petition campaign in Britain's history, more than three-quarters of a million people (out of a national population of approximately twelve million) signed petitions denouncing this provision of the peace treaty with France. (83) Debates over the slavery article tainted local victory celebrations around the country, with pictures of Africans in chains being displayed at some festivals. (84) In his correspondence, the Duke of Wellington commented on the "degree of frenzy" in London about the slave trade, noting that "[p]eople in general appear to think that it would suit the policy of this nation to go to war to put an end to that abominable traffic." (85) Both the House of Commons and the House of Lords passed resolutions urging that the slave trade issue be brought up at the upcoming Congress of Vienna, where the countries involved in the just-concluded war hoped to transform the initial peace agreement into an arrangement for long-term stability in Europe. (86)
Canning's suspicions about Castlereagh were largely correct: Castlereagh did not view abolition as a proper element of British foreign policy, suggesting in private that it was wrong "to force it upon nations, at the expense of their honour and of the tranquility of the world. Morals were never well taught by the sword." (87) But stung by the public outcry, Castlereagh and Prime Minister Liverpool felt compelled to instruct British negotiators to redouble their efforts to conclude antislavery treaties with France, Spain, and Portugal. (88)
Castlereagh directed the Duke of Wellington, who had been sent to Paris, immediately to reopen the issue with the French government. Wellington was instructed to press for immediate abolition of the slave trade by the French, as well as rights of reciprocal search on the high seas to enforce the ban. Recognizing that this proposal would not go over well with the French government, Castlereagh noted that "[t]o soften the exercise of this power, perhaps it might be expedient to require the Sentence of Condemnation to be passed in the Courts of Admiralty of the Country to which the Ship detained belongs." (89)
The French negotiator rebuffed Wellington's initial approach, pointing out that the public sentiment against the trade in France was not as strong as in Great Britain. (90) Castlereagh then sent word to Wellington that he should offer France a material inducement for cooperation on the slavery issue--either a cash payment or an island in the West Indies. (91) This offer, too, was rejected. (92)
While negotiations with France were momentarily stalled, Britain proved more successful in its negotiations with the Netherlands, which in August 1814 formalized by treaty the promise it had made in June 1814 to prohibit the slave trade. (93) Negotiations with the United States ending the War of 1812 also included discussion of the slave trade. The United States, which had already banned the slave trade by statute, (94) was amenable to including a provision on the topic in the peace treaty. Thus the Treaty of Ghent, signed between Great Britain and the United States on December 24, 1814, declared that "the traffic in slaves is irreconcilable with the principles of humanity and justice," and both nations pledged to "use their best endeavours" to abolish the trade, though the treaty did not include particular mechanisms for enforcing this promise. (95)
Throughout the summer and fall of 1814, the British government tried to obtain similar agreements from Spain and Portugal. Britain's emissary in Madrid, Sir Henry Wellesley, initially sent word that he was not optimistic about obtaining any abolition agreement whatsoever from the Spanish government. (96) Following the British public outcry in reaction to the French treaty, Wellesley told his Spanish counterpart, the Duke of San Carlos, that any treaty they might conclude would not be well-received in London unless it included an abolition clause. San Carlos responded that the continuance of the slave trade was essential to the viability of Spain's colonies and its abolition was inconceivable in the immediate future. Wellesley only managed to secure a provision agreeing to limit the traffic under the Spanish flag to Spanish citizens and to Spanish possessions. (97)
This concession was unsatisfactory to the government in London, which faced continuing pressure to show some progress on the issue. Wellesley thus received instructions to use the cash-incentive approach. He offered the Spanish government a loan of 10,000,000 Spanish dollars in exchange for the immediate abolition of the slave trade. (98) The Spanish government, though in serious need of the money, declined the offer. (99) A month later, the Spaniards--perhaps still hoping for the money--made a counteroffer, suggesting that they would immediately ban the trade everywhere except in the zone from the equator to ten degrees north of the equator. (100) Anything short of total abolition, however, remained unacceptable to London. (101)
Negotiations with Portugal proved more promising. Before the war had begun, the Portuguese government had grudgingly agreed to a treaty in 1810 in exchange for British support against the French. That treaty committed Portugal to the gradual abolition of the slave trade, and, in particular, limited the trade of slaves by Portuguese subjects to that carried on between the mainland and Portuguese ports in Africa and Brazil. (102) During the war, Portugal had become indignant when Britain had invoked the treaty as an excuse to unilaterally seize and condemn Portuguese ships in its vice admiralty courts, and the issue remained an irritant in Anglo-Portuguese relations at the end of the war. But Portugal was heavily dependent on England for military and financial support, and, in January 1815, Britain finally succeeded through a combination of bribery and threats in persuading Portugal to enter into new treaties restricting the slave trade. In the first of these treaties, the Convention of January 21, 1815, Britain agreed to pay Portugal 300,000 [pounds sterling], ostensibly as compensation for Portuguese ships illegally condemned by British vice admiralty courts. (103) In a companion treaty, signed on January 22, 1815, Britain forgave the remainder of a 600,000 [pounds sterling] loan made earlier to Portugal, and Portugal agreed to ban the slave trade north of the equator and to adopt measures necessary to enforce the ban. (104) Although this was progress, it was not a great victory, since the majority of Portugal's slave trade was destined for Brazil, which lies south of the equator.
While pursuing these various bilateral negotiations, Britain was simultaneously trying to obtain a multilateral agreement on the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna, where representatives of all the European powers had gathered to sort out a wide variety of issues related to the settlement of the war. (105) Beginning in December 1814 and throughout January and February 1815, the diplomatic representatives meeting in Vienna intermittently discussed the slave trade. (106) While Russia, Austria, and Prussia were quite supportive of Britain's proposals related to the slave trade, none of these countries had significant maritime empires. France, Portugal, and Spain were as recalcitrant in the multilateral negotiations as they had been separately.
It appears that the idea of an international body aimed at suppression of the slave trade first emerged during these negotiations at Vienna. And while no permanent international legal structures were created as a result of either the Congress of Vienna or the subsequent meetings between the great European powers, the idea of such structures was very much on the table. The Russian Czar Alexander I had some grandiose ideas about a permanent international league of like-minded Christian monarchs that would preserve peace and order in Europe. (107) This line of thinking culminated in the Holy Alliance initially signed between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the fall of 1815 and later joined by most of the "crowned heads" of Europe. (108)
Britain stayed out of the Holy Alliance-which Castlereagh privately pronounced a "piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense." (109) But Britain did spearhead the more limited and less metaphysical November 1815 treaty of the Quadruple Alliance, which established a mutual security and cooperation system for Europe and provided for regular meetings among the major powers. (110) Consistent with the overall discussion at Vienna of creating stable frameworks for cooperation, Britain firmly supported the creation of some kind of permanent international commission to deal specifically with the slave trade, although it was not yet clear what the powers and responsibilities of such a commission would be. (111)
The effort to address the slave trade issue at the Congress of Vienna ended on February 8, 1815, with the delegates adopting a nonbinding declaration that condemned the slave trade,...
|
