Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
THE DARK SIDE OF RUM
“I OWN I am shocke’d at the purchase of slaves,
and fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see?
What? give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea!
Besides, if we do, the French, Dutch, and Danes,
Will heartily thank us, no doubt, for our pains;
If we do not buy the poor creatures, they will;
And tortures and groans will be multiplied still.
If foreigners likewise would give up the trade,
Much more in behalf of your wish might be said;
But while they get riches by purchasing blacks,
Pray tell me why we may not also go snacks?
(William Cowper “Pity for poor Africans” 1788)
The slave trade from Africa to the Americas is one of the blackest pages in the history of the world and crucially affected the formation of the nations of the New Continent. The trade itself, and then the development of great slavery-based societies in the Americas has naturally attracted the interest of scholars, popularizers and novelists. The literature on this theme is huge and I do not dare to delve into it, I just wish to tell the story of the close relationship between rum and slavery.
Rum was born as a by-product of sugar making, and the labor force on great sugarcane plantations in the Americas was mainly made up of enslaved black Africans and their descendants. The slaves themselves were probably the first to discover the alcoholic beverage made from the spontaneous fermentation of sugar making by-products and later among the first consumers of the distilled drink made with that fermented beverage, which is our rum.
Portuguese slavers traditionally used wine to barter with slaves in Africa, but in the 1640s, Brazilian slavers began to use their rum (called gerebita) and later British and other European slavers made the same. Then, the Americans also entered the lucrative trade by using their locally produced cheap, strong rum. Without any moral qualms, but with a hint of embarrassment. For example, Captain David Lindsey of Newport called the vessels engaged in the trade ‘rum ships’ rather than slave ships, and another slaver captain referred to ‘us rum men’. Even the rum for the slave trade was euphemized into ‘Guinea Rum’”.
“Introspecting and honest New Englanders summed up a phase of contemporaneous hypocrisy, the religious cloak wrapped around their slave-trading with the phrase ‘Missionaries on deck and rum in the hold’” (C. W. Taussig “Rum, Romance and Rebellion” 1928))
African consumers were not indifferent to the quality of the rum they bought, but they were more interested in its alcoholic strength. So, many slavers could save space in the hold and hence transport costs, by loading very strong rum and then diluting it with local water. For example, in 1773, the sloop Adventure, from Newport, Rhode Island, made a voyage to Africa with most of its cargo consisting of rum, Newport distilled rum. According to Taussig: “The chief purchase was slaves, though a little pepper and some palm oil were obtained, and enough gold-dust to pay part of the master’s wages. Rum was the principal medium of payment. If the reader will compare the amount of rum expended as shown in the Trade Book with the amount which appears in the invoice already referred to, he will note an excess of rum sold over that shipped – about 500 gallons – which indicates that … were inclined to ‘worter’ their rum.”
But how much did a slave cost? It is difficult today, at least for us non-specialists, to estimate the real value of the currency of the time. It becomes easier, and more terrible in its brutal simplicity, when the price of a human being is given in rum. Hugh Thomas in his great book “The Slave Trade” (1997) writes:
“In 1755 Caleb Godfrey, a slave captain from Newport, Rhode Island, bought four men, three women, three girls, and one boy for 799 gallons of rum, two barrels of beef and one barrel of pork, together with some smaller items; and in 1767 Captain William Taylor, acting for Richard Brew of Cape Coast, bought male slaves at 130 gallons each, women at 110, and young girls at 80. By 1773 the price was higher: 210 to 220 gallons per slave was paid by the captain of Aaron Lopez’ Cleopatra.”
There was something profound in the relationship between slavery and rum, or better, between the degradation of slavery and the degradation of drunkenness: both deprive the individual of his rational faculties, his freedom of choice, his being fully a man, so they reinforce each other in a tragic vicious circle and many contemporaries were fully aware of it.
As early as 1684, Thomas Tenison, later Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote: “I am loath to be particular with you, sir, in respect to negro men, and your plying of them with this destructive liquor [Rum]; and that upon Sunday too, to very bad purpose: And tho’ your Intention herein be to perpetuate their servitude, etc. the very methods you take to do it, by such indulging of them in this excess of drinking”.
In 1733, James Oglethorpe founded the new colony of Georgia. He was a social reformer and a humanitarian and planned a system of “agrarian equality”, away from the two extremes of poverty and wealth. The new Colony was to be based on family farming, and prevent social disintegration associated with excessive social inequality and big cities. Land ownership was limited to fifty acres, a grant that included a town lot, a garden plot near town, and a forty-five-acre farm. Servants would receive a land grant of their own upon completing their term of service and no one was permitted to acquire additional land through purchase or inheritance. In this American Utopia, rum and slavery were forbidden.
The awareness of this relationship is, I believe, at the heart of the strong bond which historically existed between abolitionist movements, whose objective was to abolish slavery, and temperance movements, which in their turn wanted to limit, and often eliminate altogether, the consumption of alcohol.
All this concerned only white people, but what about the slaves themselves? What did they think about rum? It is not easy to answer this question, for slaves did not leave any written testimony, and almost all that we know about them comes from the white masters, but something transpires. It was customary in nearly all the plantations to make regular distributions of rum to the slaves. They were limited distributions, not enough to make them drunk, but slaves enjoyed them greatly, and they contributed to maintaining order and respect for hierarchies. Often, when the work was particularly hard or difficult, they were given an extra ration as a reward. Planters lived in a perpetual contradiction. On the one hand, rum made the slaves happier and more docile, it made them work harder and better accept their bondage. On the other, too much rum made them drunk, therefore unable to work and at times even rebellious and dangerous.
And yet, the drunkenness of the slaves, whichever way it may appear, was never a real moment of liberation, on the contrary it reasserted their condition of inferiority. Let’s read the testimony of a former slave, Frederick Douglass, 1845: “The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave. They do not give the slaves this time because they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it. This will be seen, by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation. For instance, the slaveholders not only like to see the slave drink of his own accord, but will adopt various plans to make him drunk. One plan is, to make bets on their slaves, as to who can drink the most whisky without getting drunk; and in this way they succeed in getting whole multitudes to drink to excess. Thus, when the slave asks for virtuous freedom, the cunning slaveholder, knowing his ignorance, cheats him with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled with the name of liberty. The most of us used to drink it down, and the result was just what might be supposed; many of us were led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field, feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.”
In Great Britain, thanks to the long fight of the abolitionist movements, in 1807 Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act which forbade the slave trade; from January 1st, 1808 and in the following years other countries followed its example. The slave trade was prohibited, but not slavery itself, therefore slave smuggling became a thriving business for a few decades, in which Spanish slavers distinguished themselves. Finally, on August 1st, 1838, slavery at last ended in the British West Indies. To the imperishable glory of the French Revolution, on February 4, 1794, the National Convention had decreed the abolition of slavery; but in 1802 Napoleon – his imperishable infamy – reintroduced it and only in 1848 did a new revolution definitely abolish slavery in the French colonies. Slavery was abolished in the USA between 1863 and 1865 and the illegal trade ended, at last, around 1870. Slavery was finally abolished in Cuba in 1886 and in Brazil in 1888.
In the Caribbean, the first consequence of the emancipation of the slaves was a massive exodus of them from the plantations and their settlement on small, marginal plots of land where they lived by subsistence farming and short periods of wage labor in the plantations. The planters reacted by importing massive quantities of Indentured Workers from Europe, Africa and Asia, mainly from Portugal, Sierra Leone and India. “By contracting foreign laborers and slowly mechanizing their sugar mills, the British and French planters managed to save their sugar industry despite the economic crisis caused by emancipation. The increase in sugar prices between 1854 and 1884 made it possible for the planters to obtain new loans to finance the mechanization of the industry during the transition from slavery to paid labor. Meanwhile, a new free peasantry emerged in the West Indies.” (Frank. Moya Pons “History of the Caribbean” 2007). So, unlike in Haiti, where the plantation system collapsed with the Independence and the end of slavery, in the Caribbean the sugarcane plantations did not disappear, while the arrival of new workers changed the demographic composition of many islands.
POST SCRIPTUM
The vast majority of American slaves were African blacks, but not all of them. Intolerance, hypocrisy and greed crossed racial borders. Here is a letter written by New England’s famous Puritan minister Cotton Mather in 1682:
“To Ye Aged and Beloved Mr. John Higginson:
There is now at sea a ship called the Welcome which has on board a hundred or more of the heretics and malignants called Quakers, with Mr. Penn who is the chief scamp, at the head of them.
The general court has accordingly given secret orders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig Porpoise, to waylay the said welcome, slyly as near Cape of Cod as may be, and make captive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, so that the Lord may be glorified, and not mocked on the soil of this new country with the heathen worship of these people. Much spoil can be made by selling the whole lot to Barbados, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar, and we shall not only do the Lord great service by punishing the wicked, but we shall make great good for his ministers and the people.
Master Huscott feels hopeful and I will set down the news when the ship comes back.Yours in ye bowels of Christ,Cotton Mather”
Marco Pierini
