The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War

In The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War, Jeff Forret recounts the fascinating diplomatic story of four separate wrecks of US domestic slave-trading ships on British shores. The Comet collided with a reef off the Bahamas in 1831, when slavery was still legal throughout the British Empire. The Encomium met an identical fate on the same reef in 1834, while the Enterprise wandered far off course before seeking refuge in Bermuda in 1835. Both of these latter incidents occurred in the immediate aftermath of the 1833 passage of Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act, which introduced the gradual emancipation of slavery in most of the empire through several years of apprenticeship. Finally, the Hermosa wrecked (again) off the coast of the Bahamas in 1840, two years after the apprenticeship system had concluded and British West Indian slavery had ended. Yet despite the very different legal climate for slavery within the British Empire across these four shipwrecks, in each case the British officials concluded that the enslaved individuals had to be granted their freedom: they had gained it just by setting foot on British soil.Forret painstakingly details the efforts of the individual slaveholders, the slave traders, the insurance companies, and the federal government over the next two decades to receive compensation from the British government for the value of this emancipated property. Representatives of the government, including both southern slaveholding politicians and prominent northerners like US Minister to Britain Martin Van Buren, argued vigorously in favor of the property rights of these enslavers. Each of the ships had been legally engaged in transporting slaves as part of the domestic trade—as opposed to the illegal international slave trade—and had veered off course into British territory by accident. Since they had neither committed a crime nor actively chosen to land on British soil, the government argued that they should have been allowed to proceed to their final destinations with all their human property intact. Although the British finally agreed in 1837 that the slaveholders of the Comet were due just compensation for the value of their emancipated property, since that incident occurred while slavery remained legal within the empire, they steadfastly refused to compensate any claimants after the passage of the 1833 Abolition Act. Both the slaveholders and their US representatives repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of the British: first, that they had freed the slaves from the Encomium and the Enterprise without strings, while the British slaves living on Bermuda and in the Bahamas at that same moment were required to submit to years of apprenticeship before receiving their freedom; and second, that British slaveholders were being paid reparations for their lost property by the British taxpayers, while refusing to compensate the American slaveholders. It would not be until 1855, during an omnibus negotiation with the British over numerous disputes between the two nations, that the British relented and paid reparations to the claimants from the final three shipwrecks.While the history of these voyages is interesting, Forret stretches the narrative much more than is necessary. For example, there are extensive biographical discussions of several of the slaveholders which are largely irrelevant to the argument. On the other hand, there is virtually no discussion of the formerly enslaved people themselves, beyond basic descriptions from the manifests. Forret gives no indication that he sought to trace the experiences of these individuals in Bermuda or the Bahamas once they were freed. A captivating photograph of one of the girls liberated in Bermuda—taken decades later—appears on page 125, but with no discussion or contextualization whatsoever by the author. Even without examining the fates of individual freed people, more context for what life would have been like for emancipated people in these two British colonies during the 1830s would have been welcome. Similarly, Forret needed to place these shipwrecks within the broader context of the domestic slave trade—and particularly the movement of slaves by water as opposed to overland. Slaveholders expressed some fear that the prospect of emancipation would encourage enslaved cargo to mutiny and seek shelter in a British port—and Forret cites one 1841 case in which they did just that—but did this possibility have any actual effect on the decision to transport enslaved people by sea?Forret’s main argument is consistent with recent historiography about the complicity of the federal government in slavery. “Before and even during the Civil War, the U.S. government voiced no qualms against pursuing compensation when white slave owners and white-owned insurance companies stood to benefit. To the contrary, officials actively and enthusiastically labored to subsidize them for their losses” (10). The histories of these four shipwrecks serve as an engaging example of this sobering reality.