The slave trade and the deep south: accounting for the Cotton capital’s human cost

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In little more than a century, Manchester grew from a small market town into the world’s first industrial city. While the factors behind this transformation were complex, what’s clear is how integral systems of racial slavery in the Americas were to British industrialisation: the raw materials they produced, the market demand they created and the capital they generated for reinvestment. These two worlds are connected by an ironclad thread.

The Manchester Guardian’s founder and early backers were thoroughly embedded, leading members of the city’s industrial elite. Much of their wealth and platform were built on profits derived from cotton importation, the textile industry and, in one case, plantation ownership.

This interactive is an attempt to explain those connections and their wider impact to raise awareness of an often neglected part of history.

By its nature, it can only tell part of an immensely complex and harrowing story that spans centuries. It is therefore unable to truly do justice to all the lives and communities affected by these historical calamities.

Part 1: A British business

Plantation agriculture emerged as the dominant economic system in England’s Virginia and Caribbean colonies by the mid-17th century.

Initially, enslaved Africans and indentured servants from Britain and Ireland laboured together, but increasing labour demands drove investment in slave trading, particularly from the 1660s onwards. Slave codes and laws to enforce racial hierarchy were issued as the plantation labour force became majority, then entirely, African.

British goods were shipped to Africa to be exchanged for enslaved captives, who were sold to enslavers in British colonies and the products of those colonies, grown by the enslaved, were then shipped back to Britain. The vast profits were reinvested across Britain’s economy.

Millions of African men, women and children were violently seized and forced on to ships that awaited them on the coast. It was the largest forced migration in human history. The harrowing journey from the African coast to the plantations in the Americas is known as the “middle passage”.

Britain’s involvement in the trading of enslaved African people lasted until 1807. By the mid-18th century, Britain was the dominant trafficker of people across the Atlantic. Many did not survive the middle passage. On British ships alone, an estimated 400,000 trafficked Africans never arrived in the Americas.

The following visualisation shows slave voyages from Africa to the Americas between 1750 and 1775, animated in five year intervals. This key period in Manchester’s, and Britain’s, history represents just one-fifteenth of the total number of voyages made in almost 400 years of trafficking.

Each circle in this animation represents a profoundly horrifying tragedy, a single voyage trafficking captive African men, women, and children. The size of the circle indicates the number of people trafficked. The larger the circle, the greater the number of individuals.

This data, taken from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database at Rice University, is based on every voyage researchers have been able to record and, where possible, information on the number of people enslaved and trafficked.

The data does not even begin to bear witness to the experiences of the 1,805,195 people it represents, hundreds of thousands of whom died during those voyages, the Atlantic Ocean their final resting place.

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Manchester, Calabar, Barbados: a single thread

Slaving voyages left from 23 British ports during this period, loaded with goods to exchange for human beings on arrival in west Africa.

Fifty-six per cent of those recorded left from Liverpool, 20% from Bristol and 18% from London. On the 1,755 recorded Liverpool voyages from 1755 to 1770, 443,144 people were trafficked from Africa to the Americas, 78,414 of whom died during the voyage.

We have surviving records of suppliers for just a very small number of voyages, one of which concerns the slaving ship Dobson, which left Liverpool docks on 14 May 1769 carrying a cargo worth £4,747 – in today’s currency more than £700,000. About a quarter of the value of that cargo, £167,000 today, was provided by three Manchester suppliers.

At today’s prices, Charles Ford and Folliot Powell provided £117,500 and £47,120, respectively, of “Manchester goods”. They both had their merchant houses on King Street, with their warehousing and manufacturing units in nearby Brown Street and Chancery Lane. “Fustian manufacturers” Bentley & Boardman of Blue Boar Court (in today’s Manchester, the site of Selfridges) provided £1,498 worth of cloth caps.

The ship spent weeks on the eastern coast of the Bight of Biafra. The Efik traffickers based at Old Calabar, in today’s Nigeria, had very specific consumer demands and particularly valued cotton textiles, part of a long and strongly developed relationship that the slave trader William Davenport built over decades of commerce in human beings.

The Dobson left Old Calabar on 12 January 1770, by which time 355 men, women and children had been imprisoned in the cramped, unsanitary bowels of its cargo hold, in place of the British-made goods which were traded for them. Sixty-five people died during its voyage across the Atlantic and 15 more seem to have been sold before reaching its final destination.

The life of Henry Baker: a needle-in-a-haystack story

From the turmoil of the Dobson’s cargo hold, 110 men, 59 women, 60 boys, and 46 girls finally disembarked into a totally foreign land, the island of Barbados. They were dragged to the auction block to be sold to enslavers for a total of £8,597, the equivalent of £1,268,000 today.

For the survivors of the deep trauma of the middle passage, arrival in the Americas was the gateway to a new chapter of disorientation and violence. Their experiences, like those of millions of other enslaved people, were of attempted dehumanisation.

This included giving them new names, suppressing cultural expressions, severely limiting movement and agency, as well as using violence and torture to force people into labour.

One of those men and four of those girls were purchased for the sum of £48 by the enslaver Henry Coulthurst, who owned a sugar plantation called Baker’s and a grand house called Fairfield.

When registers of the enslaved were gathered 47 years later, two African-born women, Rosetta, 75, and Jinny, 66, and Barbadian Nancy, 57, were among a community of 33 enslaved people held by Coulthurst’s son, Matthew, at Fairfield, which also included eight-year-old Henry Baker. Rosetta, Jinny and Nancy were old enough to have known and shared experiences and community life with those girls forcibly trafficked from Old Calabar.

CHILD OF REBELLION
Henry was seven when Bussa’s rebellion broke out in 1816. The smell of cane fields burning and plumes of smoke from the east would have filled the air.

What might Henry and his community at Fairfield have felt? Elusive hope that a long-imagined day of emancipation may be suddenly approaching? Also, a sense of fear and uncertainty, as panicked white people fled into town from areas of unrest and armed groups of militia members rushed to muster points and marched by in columns?

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The militia regained control after two days and reprisals were brutal: 50 killed in battle, 214 executed and 170 forcibly transported. A huge blow, though, had been struck against slavery, damaging confidence in the institution and increasing support for abolition and reform.

AN UNLIKELY JOURNEY
Henry began his working life as a house servant, work considered higher status than the heavy labour most enslaved Barbadians were forced to perform. Aged 11 in 1820, he was taken to England by Matthew Coulthurst, probably as a personal groom. The opportunity to even leave the island of his birth was extremely rare.

Henry’s visit gave him a chance to learn new skills and make connections that would prove important in later life. It is likely to have been the first time that Henry met Coulthurst’s four nieces, two of whom were of similar age to him.

Henry was 25 and at Fairfield when British slavery was abolished in 1833. It would be four more years until full emancipation was achieved. The relief and hope of freedom was tinged with great uncertainty. Property in Barbados remained in the hands of the plantation owners. Financial compensation was not paid to those freed, rather to the enslavers, such as the Coulthurst sisters, who became wealthy on the back of Henry and his community’s freedom.

Henry had to use the skills and connections at his disposal to create a new life for himself. By 1841 he was at Sandiway Cottage near Northwich, Cheshire, living as butler to the Coulthurst sisters. In this quiet village in north-west England Henry lived for at least 23 years until his death in 1864, half a mile from the train station from where he would visit his half-brothers in Liverpool and just 20 miles from Manchester, where our story began.

ABOLITION OF THE BRITISH SLAVE TRADE
Decades of campaigning, not least the thousands of Mancunian signatories of abolitionist petitions finally led to the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. The parliamentary bill was passed despite strong commercial interests such as the 111 Mancunians who signed an anti-abolition petition.

While Manchester would no longer profit from the exchange of its produce for those trafficked from west Africa, its dependence upon enslaved labour was, in fact, deepening. Not only did slavery persist in the British colonies, the booming demand for raw cotton in Lancashire drove the spread of the slave system across the North American continent.

Part 2: ‘Cottonopolis’ and the cotton kingdom

In 1790, almost 700,000 people were enslaved across the nascent United States, the vast majority in southern states. Cotton was a minor crop, with tobacco and rice the predominant products of the plantation slavery system.

The 1793 invention of the cotton gin, allowing the efficient separation of seeds from fibres, would eventually lead to the spread of the slave system across a continent and affect millions of lives on a global scale.

Demand for cotton in Manchester and its wider region helped drive production from less than 9,000 bales in 1790 to more than 200,000 by 1800.

The following maps show the number of enslaved residents by county from US census returns. Due to the nature of these historical records, these are likely to be undercounts. Grey denotes unincorporated regions where populations were not counted in that year’s census.

With the Louisiana purchase of 1803, the United States asserted a claim to ownership of a vast region inhabited mainly by Indigenous peoples, almost doubling the nation’s territory and opening up the Mississippi basin to new waves of colonisation. At the river’s mouth, the port of New Orleans would later become Lancashire’s largest cotton supplier and foremost centre of the internal slave trade.

The frontiers of the slave plantation system were gradually expanded from 1810 to 1830 and Manchester’s cotton demand grew in lock-step with US production, which had reached 650,000 bales a year by 1820 and 1m in 1830.

THE COTTON REVOLUTION
In the 1830s an estimated 65,000 Indigenous people were forcibly moved west of the Mississippi. More than 8,000 died during the expulsions.

At the same time, new cotton strains were emerging that offered much greater yields from areas previously unprofitable. A land rush ensued as the federal government sold property that had been forcibly acquired to planters and speculators at next to nothing, while steam power transformed the river network into transport arteries moving cargo and people efficiently over long distances.

The south had become a key frontier in the development of global capitalism, as bankers, insurers, and merchants poured investment into the emerging cotton belt. Cotton production grew from 1m bales in 1830 to 2.5m in 1850.

THE SECOND MIDDLE PASSAGE
The consequences of this rush to investment and profit were catastrophic, as the commodity underpinning it all was the ownership of human bodies and their labour.

A second middle passage took place as 1 million enslaved Africans and African Americans were ripped from families and communities and forced on to boats or marched in chains to the new cotton frontier.

African Americans established new communities, held on to and developed traditions and culture, and created networks of communication, resistance and survival in the face of a violent system of slavery that used torture and abuse to push labourers to work and pick at high rates. Movement and autonomy were strictly and violently enforced.

Almost 4 million people were enslaved across the United States by 1860, 2.5 million of whom were held in the vast cotton belt stretching from the Atlantic coast deep into Texas.

The symbiotic growth of the slavery complex in the south and manufacturing levels in Lancashire continued through the boom. On the eve of the civil war in 1860, when US production had reached above 4m bales, 80% of British raw cotton imports came from the region.

WHAT WAS THE LINK BETWEEN THE GUARDIAN’S FOUNDERS AND PLANTATIONS IN THE US SOUTH?
John Edward Taylor’s firm, Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, bought cotton from enslavers who were based in the Sea Islands, which form a narrow archipelago along the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. The long, fine fibres of the cotton grown in this region were widely sought after as they were the world’s best for manufacturing high-quality textiles.

The research by the Universities of Nottingham and Hull reveals that enslavers supplied Taylor’s firms with hundreds bags of cotton between 1819 to 1825. The cargo on each ship ranged from 7 bags of cotton to 70. Taylor’s firms had also purchased bales from the enslavers.

The following map provides a snapshot based on business records from Taylor & Shuttleworth and McConnel & Kennedy where we can trace individual cotton shipments to specific enslavers or plantations to make a tangible link between them and Manchester. It is not an exhaustive list of Sea Island plantations.

Researchers were able to trace the exact enslavers that the Taylor firms had bought cotton from, and with it, the names of some of the enslaved people. In 1862, enslaved people on the Spanish Wells plantation on Hilton Head Island supplied cotton to Taylor’s firms. The research found the names of 60 people forced to work on this plantation.

The youngest girls were one-year-old Minda and two-year-old Dinah. The youngest boys were Billy and Henry, who were also one year old. The eldest men were Toby, 90, and Tom, 88. There were fewer women than men named; the eldest were Clara, Hagar, and Nancy, who were all 60 years old.

Methodology

SLAVE VOYAGES 1750- 75
All data used in our visualisation of the transatlantic slave trading voyages was provided by the Slave-Voyages project hosted at Rice University, Houston, Texas, with special thanks to John Mulligan and the Rice Center for Research Computing. Slave-Voyages’ methodologies can be viewed on the project website.

The data in our visualisation excludes the following voyages:

• Voyages where the number of enslaved people embarking and disembarking was zero (3.5% of all voyages between 1750 and 1775);

• Voyages for which associated route data was unavailable (827 of 6,763 voyages);

• Voyages that were prevented from leaving their origin port.

In our visualisation, voyages (circles) are sized by the number of enslaved people who disembarked at the primary port of arrival, according to the Slave-Voyages data. We recognise that this approach fails to visually represent the numbers of enslaved people who lost their lives during voyages, and have attempted to draw attention to these tragedies in our writing.

Because no precise data on the routes travelled by each voyage exists, the routes depicted in our visualisation were derived by the Slave-Voyages team using information on Atlantic winds, currents and known maritime routes of the period.

The exact date that a voyage began and/or ended is, in many cases, unknown. As a result, the duration of the voyages as they appear in the visualisation have been normalised to the length of the longest route and their departures staggered according to the number of voyages per route in a given year, with some randomisation applied.

In the Slave-Voyages data, assumptions are made in order to assign national affiliations to vessels transporting enslaved people; for example, though many ships owned in the British Americas and, later, the United States may for all intents and purposes have been British, the slave trade in the British Americas is considered sufficiently distinct from the wider British trade that we opted to categorise these vessels as affiliated with “British American colonies”.

*Geographic specificity is similarly complicated with regard to Portuguese and Brazilian ships in the nineteenth century.

The figures mentioned in the text refer to voyages with disembarkation dates 1750-1775, and include voyages with a vessel affiliation of Great Britain or British American colonies.

CONVERSIONS TO PRESENT-DAY PRICES
The conversion of the value of goods into today’s prices has been done using a measurement of basic inflation, which is the most conservative calculation of present-day equivalent cost.

US ENSLAVED POPULATIONS 1790 - 1860
Analysis by Lincoln Mullen, “The Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790–1860”; based on census materials provided by Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0. Note: values of zero should be treated with caution and may indicate that the data has been lost or was never gathered.

THE SOUTH CAROLINA SEA ISLANDS
The research was compiled by Dr Cassandra Gooptar and Dr Matthew Stallard.

ADDITIONAL CREDITS FOR DESIGN AND GRAPHICS
Harry Fischer
Catriona Morrison
Lucy Swan
Paul Scruton