Meeting was held September
20, 2023, in the Westhampton Room, Heilman Dining Center, University of
Richmond
Meeting attendance
is increasing. Bethany Sullivan, Director of The James Madison Museum of Orange
County Heritage (https://www.thejamesmadisonmuseum.net)
attended the meeting and spoke about the 18th, 19th and 20th century cultural
heritage and artifacts located at the Museum, of Orange County and the Piedmont
region of Virginia.
The evening’s
presentation was “The Unintended Consequences of Interrupting Britian’s
Slave-trading Economy.” The speaker was Christian McBurney,
author of Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave
Trade. His books are available from his publisher (https://www.westholmepublishing.com/?s=mcburney).
An armada of more
than 2,000 so-called “privateers” were legally commissioned, by both the
Continental Congress and individual states, to seize enemy shipping on both
sides of the Atlantic Ocean in hopes of collecting court-awarded vessels as
prizes whereby seized ships and contents could then be sold. The ship’s owners,
crews and investors profited by selling the captured vessels and contents. This
severely disrupted Great Britain’s global commerce and turned British public
opinion against the war as British officials complained they could not
guarantee the safety of civilian trade. Privateering advanced America’s War of
Independence objectives by diminishing the importation of British goods into the
United Colonies and the exportation of natural resources to Great Britain. Privateers
became “our cheapest and best navy.” Seized merchant ships were later sold to
American traders and syndicates (and others masking as American) who repurposed
the ships expanding commercial capacity for the slave trade.
Christian McBurney’s
presentation “followed the money” of ships and investors from Portugal, Spain, the Dutch Republic, France,
and Britain leading up to slave-trading throughout the Americas. This occurred when the demand for enslaved labor rose sharply with
the growth of sugar cane agriculture in the Caribbean and tobacco plantations
in the Chesapeake region. He described how European naval commerce developed as
triangular trade ventures proved profitable: in which arms, textiles, and wine
were shipped from Europe to Africa; enslaved people were transported from
Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean islands, and North America; and sugar, and its
derivatives rum and molasses, and coffee were shipped from the Americas to
Europe.
At the start of the
American War of Independence, Britain dominated Atlantic commerce and was the
leading slave-trading nation in the world. In 1776, American privateers began
to prey on British merchantmen exploiting
opportunities for immediate profits. Privateers began to capture British slave ships with African captives
on board just before they arrived at their Caribbean Island destinations, and
North American coasts, returning the seized ships to port to declare and await
award their prizes. Privateers later expanded their roaming to the western
coast of Africa.
Based on a
little-known contemporary primary source, The Journal of the Good Ship
Marlborough, one privateer was given an extraordinary task: to sail across
the Atlantic to attack British slave trading posts and ships on the coast of
West Africa. The story of this remarkable voyage is told in McBurnie’s book. He
attributes the work of the Marlborough and other American privateers as so
disruptive that it led to an unintended consequence: virtually halting the
British slave trade. British slave merchants, alarmed at losing money from
their ships being captured, invested in fewer slave voyages. As a result, tens
of thousands of Africans were not forced onto slave ships, then transported to
the New World, and consigned to a lifetime of slavery or an early death.
