Two Flags
I saw this comparison on Facebook. I didn’t think it was an entirely fair one, so I wrote a response to it below. Every country has something in its history it isn’t proud of, the trick is to try to fix it, remember the mistakes and ensure they never happen again.
100% correct — the Confederate Battle flag wouldn’t have flown over a slave ship as it was a battle flag — a flag carried by warriors into battle. Interestingly both American Unionist and Confederate warships had a history of carrying foreign naval flags to get out of tight spots and would be unlikely to fly their own unless they got in a scrap or were back in port. No slave ship would have been granted that honour, even if the Confederates actually owned any, which is unlikely — slavers were individual merchants running their business rather than state-run naval ships.
The same was true in Britain and to a greater extent. The British took and sold slaves, especially in the Caribbean and probably would have flown this flag until public opinion swayed greatly against slavery in the second half of the 18th century. From that point past the 1807 Abolition, any ship flying a British flag could be stopped by the Royal Navy at any point. The British government went so far as to pay out huge sums of money to the slave owners, although not the slaves themselves(!), to ensure that the abolition could go as smoothly as possible. After this point, no slaver would be foolish enough to fly a British flag. Indeed an 1814 petition signed by 0.75 million British citizens (of the total population of 12 million) “denounced the peace treaty with France for not including a clause immediately banning the slave trade under the French flag.” Imagine how much more difficult mobilising people in Britain would have been 200 years ago — that is a huge number! And this was a country that had been at war with France for 10 years. One might think they wanted that peace treaty signed sharpish, but no, the British people found out the wording of the treaty and sent it back! The British slave trade was suppressed quickly. 7 years later, the British people were already going after the other countries who hadn’t outlawed it yet.
During the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) the RN stopped every ship suspected of being part of the Atlantic slave trade whether they were neutral, belligerent or allied in the war. Due to the conditions aboard those ships in an effort to carry more slaves to make more money at point of sale, the smell carried for miles downwind.
The British formed the West Africa Squadron after 1807 as the first serious attempt to interdict the slavers on their way across the Atlantic laden with African slaves. These slavers’ ships were seized, returned to Africa, the slaves freed, the crew arrested and put on trial and their ship and other cargo auctioned off with portions of the sale going to the RN capturing crew, and the British government. The crew even got paid more by bringing more slaves back to Africa to be freed at the British-founded “Freetown”.
The British interdiction efforts increased as time went on and successfully abolished slavery in the rest of the Empire in 1838, the French abolished it almost entirely in their own Empire by 1905. The US attempts were weak and ineffective especially with the split in public opinion between the north and south which eventually contributed to the Civil War. The importation of slaves into the US had already been outlawed by Jefferson in 1808, but in the 1850s slavery was legalised in the southern states and in the US Census of 1860, the slave population had increased to 4 million. All of this after the British slave trade had ceased.
The RN increased their interdiction efforts into the Middle East and the Indian Ocean and in 1842 the British and US signed a treaty formalising the US contribution to the West Africa Squadrons.
The sources I have attached tell it better than I could.
However, it is important to remember that comparing the two flags over which flew aboard slave ships is pointless. One is the flag of a country, the other was a battle flag for a country that only lasted 4 years but still represents racism and oppression to millions even today. They were used for completely different things. Indeed by that picture’s standard, the Union flag from Britain was technically NEVER used aboard a RN interdiction ship because those were ships of war and the flag wasn’t used for that purpose. Does that mean tacit approval of slavery? It isn’t a fair comparison.
Why not point out:
1. The British flag had ceased to be used on slave ships 55 years before the Stars and Bars even existed.
2. For ages it was the Naval Ensign which flew on the RN ships who alone provided slave trade interdiction for years before other countries joined the effort. Indeed the RN continued to interdict slavers who weren’t British once those British slavers were quickly put out of business. This continued and added to the pressure on other countries to stop the slave trade themselves. It was the RN who prevented even more slaves entering America while the trade was legal there.
Slavery was bad, the British were among the main countries to take slaves and use them in their colonies. As the product of French and British slaves taken to different parts of the Caribbean, I am just as aware as most what people forcibly taken from their own culture and placed in another went through. It was awful. But the British took the lead in fighting the slave trade. It wasn’t perfect, and no lives can be given back to those who lost them, but those actions taken by the British were a start and a better one than those taken by the rest of the powerful countries in the world at the time.
Sources below:
http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-csan.html
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/.../the.../...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Slave_Trade_Patrol
http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_155.html
http://www.bostonreview.net/jenny-martinez-slave-trade-on...
http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/gb-enshs.html
Originally published at www.dcxiii.com.
