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.
Accounts of life in West African slave trading establishments attest to the importance of rum in the slave trade. The Royal Africa Company, which sold and shipped more slaves across the Atlantic than any other institution in history, used rum as currency to support their operations. The royal charter owned the Cape Coast Castle in present day Ghana which stowed thousands of slaves in its dungeons. The soldiers who worked there were paid partly in rum. In 1766, when the Gold Coast saw famine, these soldiers would exchange their daily food rations for more of the drink. The company also owned slaves (strategically brought in from other regions in Africa, such as the Gambia) to run their operation in Africa. To keep these enslaved men working, the company spent only £412 in 1770: £126 10s purchased 506 fathoms of tobacco and £285 10s went to 571 gallons of rum. The ruthless company kept their engine of enslavement well greased with New World exports of rum and tobacco.
Yankee complicity in the trade runs deeper still. Accounts of a slave ship, owned and operated out of Medford, Massachusetts (which just happened to be the New England capital of rum distilling), shows just how important rum was for New England’s involvement in the slave trade.
Letters held by the Medford Historical Society detail the transactions of a local man, Timothy Fitch, who owned a slave ship sailing the triangle trade. The two manifests in the archives show his ships leaving Boston with rum as the main cargo. In 1762, he shipped 130 casks of rum containing 5,170 gallons. At 2 shilling per gallon, this amounts to £517, the single most expensive good of an otherwise varied cargo he valued at £1125 total. Another manifest paints a similar story with 88 barrels of rum.
In the correspondence regarding these cargoes, the owner literally measures a human’s worth in gallons of rum: “toutching first upon the Windward Coast, where I would have you dispose of your Cargo if PoSsible. & purchase your Slaves, even sopose you give One Hundred + fifty Gallons Per head [sic]” The letters even use the word “to slave” meaning to fill the ship’s hold with a cargo of humans.
Slaves were directly exchanged for New England rum by New England slave traders. The entire system worked on slaves and rum. Part of a sailor’s salary was paid in rum and the captain of the ship was paid in slaves. The ship owner laid this out to his captain, “Your Priviledge is Slaves, your Commissions is per cent,” which ended up as 8 slaves on one voyage. When the cargo of slaves did arrive in the ports of the Caribbean, the captain was instructed to, “Dispose of your Slaves + Purchase you a Compleat Load of the Best white Sugars + whare you Cant Stow Hogsheads Stow in Barrells, + the remainder of your Money Purchase, Sugar or MollaSses.” These letters paint a dismal guilt on the hands of New England’s rum industry. Rum was exported as currency to buy slaves. Sugar and molasses came back to make more rum.
Claims that New England rum did not play a large part in the transatlantic slave trade miss the point. Rum may not have dominated the trade economically, but New England was only able to join the trade when it did produce rum. This industry, which depended on the life and labor of enslaved men and women on sugar plantations, was New England’s first cash cow. Not all of that rum went to West Africa, most was consumed at home and half of exports went to thirsty Canadians to the north. When New Englanders did enter into the triangle trade, though, rum was their key and their cash. To rum we owe the early development of important industries like shipbuilding, and to slavery rum owes its existence. New England, like all of the New World, was built by slavery.
By the late 18th century, after Britain outlawed the international slave trade, the availability of molasses waned. France had lifted a prohibition on the production of rum in their Caribbean colonies which had been lobbied for by cognac makers back in Europe, and Britain was rationing molasses imports to the now independent States. Boston’s distilleries began going under and only a handful of them remained by the War of 1812. Americans moved west, farmed corn and grain, and washed rum from their cultural memory with whiskey. The story of rum and slavery was forgotten with the distilleries and the paradigm of the triangle trade took over.
Nevertheless, New England complicity in the triangle trade is irrefutable. The movement of products around this triangle created the new distilling industry which in turn funded Boston’s involvement in the trafficking and shipping of humans from the African continent. History class never impressed the importance of slavery to New England’s early prosperity upon me. The tricky triangle trade kept most slaves from our rocky shores and hid our involvement in the details of trade. All the profits we reaped from rum were sown by slavery. And so we must remember, Boston Harbor once floated with rum-laden ships especially rigged to hold humans in their hulls.
American Spirits: New England Rum, www.ellenjaye.com/hist_rum.html.
Coclanis, Peter A. The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practic, and Personnel. University of South Carolina Press, 2020.
Mccusker, John J. “The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, 1650–1775.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 30, no. 1, 1970, pp. 244–247., doi:10.1017/s0022050700078724.
Risen, Clay. “Back in the Mix: New England Rum.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Oct. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/dining/rum-returns-to-new-england.html.
“Rum in America: Colonial Times to the Tiki Craze.” The Rum Authority, 4 Mar. 2015, www.therumauthority.com/rum-101/rum-in-america-colonial-times-to-the-tiki-craze/.
Rupp, Rebecca. “Rum: The Spirit That Fueled a Revolution.” Culture, National Geographic, 3 May 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/rum-the-spirit-that-fueled-a-revolution#close.
“Slave Trade Letters.” Medford Historical Society & Museum, 25 Apr. 2021, www.medfordhistorical.org/collections/slave-trade-letters/.
“The Historic Rum Trade.” Tell New England, tellnewengland.com/rumtrade.
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