The Negro was, in short, the backbone of the South. To quote J. W. DuBose, eminent authority on Confederate history, again, “What would have been the fate of the Southern portion of the British American possessions had the African not come? Whence would have come the immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to America; and where would they have settled had not African labor been available? African labor … was the introduction of a hitherto unknown muscular force, proving on trial to be the most perfect agent of production then known to commerce.” (Life and Times of Yancey, pp. 159, 170. 1892)
THE MOLASSES TRADE
The events leading up to the trade in rum and molasses are these: England, with Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595), had taken the lead in the slave trade. The Royal African Company had the monopoly but it was unable to supply the demand and Parliament ordered the trade opened to all British ships “for the well supplying of the plantations and colonies with sufficient numbers of Negroes at reasonable prices.”
New England Yankees who had inherited the maritime spirit of their motherland now entered this trade with such zest that they soon became rivals of the English merchants. The Yankees had discovered that molasses, the best article for making rum, was either being fed to the hogs or thrown away in the French sugar islands of the Caribbean, and therefore could be had very cheaply. The molasses trade, in turn, gave impetus to other New England industries as distillling, fishing, shipbuilding, lumber and horse—and cattle-rearing. In 1708, Governor Cranston of Rhode Island reported that his colony had built 103 ships since 1698. In 1749, Boston had 469 ships tied to the slave trade. G. F. Dow has a special chapter on American ships engaged in the trade.17 The New England merchants, says Louis B. Wright, had discovered “two commodities which enriched them and their ports, rum and slaves.”18
Thanks to rum and the slave-trade, New England became commercially dominant in the New World. She not only dominated the Caribbean trade but that of Virginia, the Carolinas, and the rest of the South. She had very few slaves herself. Her climate and agriculture did not make them profitable. In 1776, the six New England colonies had only 16,034 slaves as compared with nearly 300,000 in Virginia alone. Her type of industry made white servants, who were semi-slaves, more profitable. In 1652, Rhode Island abolished Negro slavery, not from humane reasons but because what she gained from it locally was trifling in comparison with what she made from the trade. In abolishing her own slavery, she had specially provided that “nothing in the Act shall extend or be deemed to extend to any Negro or mulatto slave brought from the coast of Africa into the West on board any vessel belonging to this colony.”1
This was the procedure. New England ships with their cargo of rum would sail to West Africa, where they would exchange it for slaves and such articles they could pick up as gold dust and ivory, thence to the West Indies where they disposed of them at high profit, then return with molasses for more rum, then again to Africa. This was known as the Triangular (or Three-Cornered) Trade. Molasses, be it noted, was slave-produced, too.
Distilling became the chief home industry of New England, especially of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. There were hundreds of distillers. Boston with her then small population alone had sixty-three. But they could not keep pace with the demand.
“The trade in Negroes from West Africa,” says Weeden, “absorbed immense quantities of spirit. The African demand was very importunate.” Letters of ship-captains of the period prove it. In 1752, when Captain Isaac Freeman wrote for a cargo of rum, he was told that he wouldn’t be able to get that quantity even in three months. “There are so many vessels loading for Guinea we can’t get one hogshead of rum for the cash.” Captains were advised to water their rum. One satire ran “Water ye rum as much as possible and sell as much by the short measure as ye can. An overwhelming Providence has been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathen to enjoy the blessings of a gospel dispensation.”
Dow says, “Molasses was the all-important feature of the slaving trade, which required rum as a means of barter for slaves for without molasses there could be no New England rum.” He reproduces letters from ship-captains of the time telling how great a necessity they found rum. There are also letters from distillers. “In whatever branch of trade we now find ourselves,” said W. B. Weeden, “we are impressed by the immense prevalence and moving power of rum, lumber, Negroes … all feel the initiative and moving impulse of rum. … Rum distilling and Negro importation gave more than direct profits to Newport (Rhode Island), great as they were. They gave a tremendous impulse to more than legitimate industry and commerce and compelled the exchange to follow in the wake of the ‘rum’ vessel and slaver.” Molasses, says James Parton, in his “Life of Franklin,” was the basis on which a great part of the commerce of America rested. … The single article of molasses did actually par, and was therefore the equivalent of the bulk of the numberless articles which Yankee traders took to the French West Indies.” (Vol. 2, p. 298. 1865). Pitman says likewise, “In the great slave communities to the southward, Americans found the only great and permanent market for all their staples. It was the wealth accumulated from West India trade which more than anything else underlay the prosperity of New England and the Middle Colonies.”20a
New England made better rum, sold it cheaper, and pushed it so energetically that it began to displace English rum and even French brandy.
The war of the American Revolution really began in rivalry over the African slave-trade. The American colonies, principally the New England ones, were taking it away from the mother-country principally by using rum as barter for slaves, ivory, gold and other products. This later cartoon from Punch of London illustrates the English viewpoint. America is shown getting all the benefits from Africa; England who started the exploitation is getting nothing. John Bull is asking why.
Yankee success galled not only the slave-trading moguls of Bristol and Liverpool but the British government, itself. Under the Assiento of 1713, England had the monopoly of supplying slaves to the Spanish colonies of the New World. Slave-trading, the profits from slave products, and African trade in general, were very important in the British economy. Karl Marx did not exaggerate when he said, “The population and wealth of England after slumbering for seven hundred years began to develop itself under the influence of slave-acquired capital.” How dared Americans, colonials, to become their rivals, demanded the English. Were not colonies founded for the benefit of the mother-country? To make it still worse the Americans with their trade were helping to develop the colonies of their great rival, France. The British West India planters were especially angry. They joined with the mother country in demanding that Americans either be prohibited from using foreign molasses or from making rum. They presented a petition to Parliament urging an “Act for the better securing and encouraging the trade of His Majesty’s Sugar Colonies in America.”21
American interests in London replied, “The trade between the Northern colonies and French islands is absolutely necessary for the continuance and being of the Northern colonies and is so far from being a trade detrimental to Great Britain, that in its natural consequence, it brings great riches to this Kingdom. …
“The British Northern colonies, a laborious, industrious people that furnish a great strength to this nation must grow poor, their trade in general be so greatly reduced that they will be utterly disabled from making returns to England for one-half of the manufactures of this kingdom they now consume. … The Molasses trade is the most (if not the only) valuable one New England hath.”22
The Americans, in short, wanted free trade. But they protested in vain. Two years later (1733), Parliament passed the Molasses Act (6 George II. Chap. 13), placing a duty of sixpence (about thirty cents) on each gallon of imported molasses, or about half as much as the purchase