The Triangle Trade.
Most middle-schoolers could cough up this mnemonic if asked about the transatlantic slave trade. Some might even venture to tell you where the three vertices of that triangle lay: West Africa, the West Indies, and New England. And the best informed may even explain the underlying economics, as humans in chattel slavery moved from the ports of West Africa to the Caribbean islands, sugar moved from the Caribbean to New England, and rum moved from New England back to West Africa. But, the question on the test, invariably, is only about the triangle.
Such a convenient way to teach our kids what happened. We boil down the story like sugar cane, purifying the juice into nice geometric crystals and tossing the sticky, mucky, dark molasses to the way side. When we teach the slave trade as just a triangle, we strip history of all intent and agency and endow it with the cosmic coincidence that should only belong to constellations — three dots which just happened to connect. Without a clear view of what the triangular trade meant back then and means to us today, our education is insufficient, and I feel that mine has been.
As a New Englander, I have been lulled into a false innocence by that tempting triangle. I condemn the slave traders in their hellish ships and the plantation owners on their toilsome estates, but my northern home gets off free. This is the treachery of the triangle. New England constitutes a whole vertex of this triangle, yet I’ve never appreciated that fact, nor felt any of the weight of that history. Seeing the transatlantic slave trade without a sense of its purpose is not seeing it at all. Acknowledging, understanding, and remembering New England’s complicity in the slave trade is a historical responsibility for all modern Yankees.
However Puritanical the mythology of New England’s founding seems, alcohol was quickly and consistently an object of cultural importance. The year 1633 saw the first tavern open up in Boston, and in 1639, the leaders of the Mass Bay Colony lifted the legal prohibition on the sale of spirits. Colonists daily quenched their thirst with cider and beer in lieu of water, and by the 1650’s, a new alcoholic spirit distilled in the Caribbean (then the West Indies) pulled into the harbors of colonial America. Rum.
Rum was the product of European thirsts for both conquest and booze. Sugar cane came to the New World on the ships of Columbus who had seen plantations in the Azores and Madeira. The new crop flourished in the Caribbean. Harvests were pressed and the juices were boiled down into crystallized sugar and sticky, useless molasses. Eventually, someone figured out that, instead of dumping molasses into the sea, it could be fermented. Once it was distilled, rum was born.
Rum became the New World’s drink of choice. Colonists liked to drink the stuff (estimates range from 4–20 gallons a year per person) and New Englanders liked to make it. As distilleries multiplied up north in Boston and Newport, the holds of ships leaving Jamaica and Barbados carried more sugar and molasses and less rum. In 1770, the colonies imported 6 million gallons of molasses from the sugar cane plantations of the West Indies. These casks would be transformed into rum in the copper pot stills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. By the late 18th century, over 60 distilleries were operating out of Boston alone and dozens boiled away down in Rhode Island. New England had the making of a new industry.
New England’s new industry, and its position to provide spirits to a growing population in the Americas, poised the region for growth and prosperity. Prior to the distillery boom, New England fed itself from farming and fishing. Salted fish were the region’s only export, and French colonies were prohibited by law to pay for the fish with anything but molasses. What luck! On the back of the profitable rum industry, the local economy grew and transformed. The related industries of shipbuilding, coopering, lumber, and metalwork all flourished. Rum was like a windfall of gold, and gallons of it were literally used as a currency in colonial America. The industry was so important to the local economy that the 1764 Sugar Act, which made enforcement of a tax on molasses stricter, led to uproarious protests and perhaps even foreshadowed the American Revolution. Rum transformed rustic New England. But rum isn’t the whole story — all of this development occurred on the backs of slavery. New England’s economic roots, which privilege us today, are entangled in the dark history of slavery.
Some have claimed that the role of rum in the transatlantic slave trade is overstated. These claims point to the fact that only a fraction of New England rum made it to the shores of West Africa. The total value of the rum that did reach the shores of Africa amounted to only a fraction of the cost of slaves that were taken from the continent. In this way, New England’s rum industry had less to do with the overall slave trade than the triangle theory tells us. But, this does not mean that rum and its origins were not important to New England’s prosperity. Every swig of rum that Boston distilleries produced was fermented and distilled with Caribbean sugar and molasses which, in turn, was produced with slave labor. While rum may have only been a drop in the bucket for the slave trade at large, it meant everything for New England’s involvement and benefit.
90% of all rum produced in New England was consumed within the colonies. The rum that was exported tended to stay on this side of the Atlantic, slaking the thirst of Canadians and native tribes. Nevertheless, West Africa was the main transatlantic destination for New England rum, and once it arrived there, it was invariably used as currency in exchange for human slaves.