Margin of Evil

SINS OF THE FATHERS: A STUDY OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADERS, 1441-1807 by James Pope-Hennessy. 286 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

In Benito Cereno, Herman Melville's parable about slavery, the moody, vaguely ailing captain of a Spanish slave ship is asked: "What has cast such a shadow upon you?" He replies simply: "The Negro." In the long aftershadow of centuries, that answer, says James Pope-Hennessy, still holds true for all men.

Pope-Hennessy, authorized biographer of Queen Mary, grandson and biographer (Verandah) of a British colonial governor, is not a formal historian; his book is a stark, sometimes emotional act of moral scrutiny. From brutal start to finish, he documents the slave traders' operation as a "vast complex of international crime." Captains' letters, half-literate journals, freed slaves' memoirs--all the available primary sources are meticulously assayed, not so much to show how the slave trade operated as to try to explain why.

The Speech of Money. Why did the slave-ship captains of Newport--so scrupulous that they took oaths not to gamble, drink or swear--have no scruples at all about their terrible profession? How could the almost offensively respectable Englishman. John Newton, who eventually switched from slave captain to clergyman, pack chained human beings into a suffocating hold as tightly as "books upon a shelf," and then retire to his well-appointed cabin to read the Bible and pray?

To answer such questions, Pope-Hennessy turns again and again to the same motive: profit. Shipbuilders in Liverpool, French sugar planters in the West Indies, rum manufacturers in Massachusetts (there were 63 distilleries there in 1750), coffee growers in Brazil, to say nothing of owners of cotton, rice and tobacco plantations in the South--all were dependent, directly or indirectly, upon the slave trade. All their quoted comments, says the disapproving author, ring with "the eternal voice of the middleman, the levelheaded, grating speech of money."

The network of slave profiteers began with black African wheeler-dealers whose names read like a roster of fly-by-night used-car salesmen--Grand Trading Man Ben Johnson, Willy Honesty, Yellow Will. But before long, European heads of state were getting their share of the action by way of taxes, if not by direct participation. When Queen Elizabeth heard about the first African voyage of John Hawkins, she called it "detestable" and prophesied that it "would call down vengeance from Heaven upon the undertakers." When she learned how handsomely the shareholders made out, she invested in the second expedition herself.

The Queen's coldhearted preference for profit, says Pope-Hennessy, was everywhere the rule. The pages of his book are crammed with standard excuses: "I confess it's not a thing I like," wrote Richard Drake, who nevertheless stayed with the business for 20 years, "but slaves must be bought and sold. Somebody must do the trading, and why not make hay while the sun shines?" Slavery,was one of God's ways of bringing the heathen to Christianity, it was argued; and besides, slavery helped rid Africa of its well-known criminal element.

Some of the apologists carried their rationalization to astonishing lengths. Slavery might be intolerable for a white man, they admitted, but the black was different: his mental and neurological inferiority did not permit him to "suffer as a white man would have." Slavery, in the words of Boswell, was a "happier state of life" for "African Savages." To abolish it, he protested, would be the real crime--"robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow subjects," meaning the slaveowners.

Pope-Hennessy seems satisfied that slavery went out of business only when it ceased to be really good business. But in the end, he does not quite convince the reader or himself that the profit motive alone was responsible for the routes of guilt that can be traced from the Gold Coast of Africa in 1441 to the riot-ripped cities of America in the summer of 1967. Beyond the simple, gory melodrama of greed, a margin of evil in human affairs still remains visible but unaccounted for.

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