A Forgotten Case of White Reparations

With Professor Jeff Forret

Today, we dive into a forgotten episode where the government did everything it could to help the worst people.

In The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War, Professor Jeff Forret (Lamar University) explores shipwrecks in the 1830s. On board were hundreds of enslaved captives. All of them survived, and almost all of them were soon free in British colonies. Afterward, the U.S. government worked really hard to make sure that enslavers received reparations for their lost “human property.”

You might draw some parallels from today’s interview to contemporary politics. Personally, I’ve thought about it while watching the government now promise “restitution” to “victims” of DEI…

A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to the podcast version on Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you listen:

Shoutout to justice-minded orcas

Ben: To begin, can you talk about the landing of the Comet and the start of the controversies at the heart of your book?

JF: Sure. I end up talking about four different shipwrecks—four cases of domestic slave trading vessels getting blown off course. In all four cases, they ended up somewhere in the colonial British Atlantic—three times in the Bahamas, once in Bermuda.

In 1831, the Comet, the first of the cases, departed from Alexandria, Virginia with a ship filled with enslaved captives, bound for New Orleans. The ship ended up crashing in the Bahamas. Everybody from the ship—captain, crew, other white passengers, and all of the enslaved people were rescued. They were all taken to Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, and British authorities had to decide what to do with them.

Britain had abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. Precedent held that if enslaved people reached British soil, they would be considered free. It wasn't entirely clear if the precedent applied to British colonies as well. Ultimately a judge stated that the enslaved captives had the option to be freed when they wrecked in the Bahamas. Almost all of them chose that option.

Ben: You describe the captives on one of the ships laughing, celebrating, kissing, and embracing when granted freedom. It’s a really moving moment.

How did enslavers react?

JF: Well, slave traders at the time had insurance. During that trip from the Upper South to New Orleans, there were various things that could happen, be it a shipwreck, a storm, uprisings, outbreaks of disease—

Ben: —pods of orcas—

JF: Ha, yes, that too. So insurance companies in places like Charleston, New Orleans, and so on would write out policies to protect “human property” for the duration of voyages.

When the enslaved cargos on the shipwrecks were liberated, sometimes the insurance companies paid right away. Sometimes they didn’t. Policyholders had to take them to court to get them to pay up and prove that yes, this was a covered claim by the policy.

Ben: I have conflicted feelings about enslavers getting their insurance claims denied. On the one hand, I love to see it. On the other... insurance companies—

JF: —are insurance companies.

Ben: Very consistent.

JF: Still, Southern courts forced insurance companies to pay up. They were not willing to see slaveholders’ property rights tampered with.

As these cases mounted and more and more was paid out, insurance companies needed to protect their bottom lines. So that's when they and the uncompensated slaveholders turned to the U.S. government for assistance.

Ben: Why was the government such an integral part of this process?

JF: The simple answer is that Americans were looking to get money from the British Crown, a foreign country, so the U.S. government had to be involved.

The more complicated piece of the puzzle relates to the U.S. government's relationship to slavery. The Constitution acknowledged and recognized slavery in many ways, whether through the three-fifths clause or the fugitive slave clause. Protecting enslavers was part and parcel of the very structure of our government.

And during most of this time, Andrew Jackson, an enslaver himself, was president. He conducted a genocide of Indigenous peoples to clear land for slave owners. So he was certainly friendly to requests for aid. He dispatched a number of diplomats to negotiate with Britain.

Britain agreed to compensate the first two ships but didn’t want to provide any restitution for the third ship, the Enterprise. That deal was great as far as most of the slave owners and insurance companies were concerned, but John Calhoun—

Ben: —an adamant supporter of slavery—

JF: —yes—really kept the ball rolling. He wasn’t going to let this end.

Ben: You write, "Slave owners never earned much of a reputation for moderation." Your description of slave owners does.

JF: Ha, maybe so.

Ben: Can you talk about who was in charge of the final determination and how it all shook out?

JF: Sure. The unresolved cases combined with other, unrelated points of contention between Britain and the U.S. Finally it all just kind of reached a critical mass where the two countries said, "We have to meet and deal with all of these claims."

A pair of commissioners—one from the U.S., one from Great Britain—worked out a number of the resolutions among themselves. But for the ones they couldn’t agree on, they appointed a “referee” named Joshua Bates.

Bates was from Massachusetts and living in London. He worked at Baring Brothers, a bank that had all kinds of dealings with slavery. Both sides agreed that whatever Bates said would be a final ruling. He had several nieces in abolitionist circles, which made him seem like a balanced referee.

Ben: Saying I have abolitionist nieces sounds like the mid-19th-century equivalent of I’m not racist, I have Black friends.

JF: Exactly. Bates basically argued that Britain may have abolished the slave trade before the shipwrecks, but the British hadn't completely eradicated slavery. Proceeding from that point, he said slavery wasn’t entirely unlawful, and the U.S. insurance companies and slave owners deserved compensation. So that’s what they got.

Ben: To inject some figures here, after 16 months of negotiations, some $600,000—or about $22 million today—exchanged hands between the U.S. and British governments—

JF: —after a long waiting period. But yes, there was a deep commitment from the U.S. government to make this happen.

Ben: You write, "Before, and even during the Civil War, the U.S. government voiced no qualms... when white slave owners and white-owned insurance companies stood to benefit. To the contrary, officials actively and enthusiastically labored to subsidize them for their losses.”

How do you think this historical chapter should factor into discussions of reparations today?

JF: These questions are thorny. Honestly, the best time to have made reparations for enslaved people would have been immediately upon their emancipation. The U.S. failed to do that. We really missed that crucial window.

Still, one point of comparison is the compensation for slave owners that have taken place elsewhere. France extracted payments from Haiti for slave owners from 1825 to 1947. After liberating enslaved people, Britain ended up taking out loans to repay slave owners, too. Those loans didn't get paid off until 2015.

Ben: Wow! That sounds like Britain's version of student loans... but, somehow, infinitely worse.

JF: Ha, exactly.

So, we have a lot of examples of governments having the will to pay reparations. I think the history invites us to ask: why is the will there in certain cases and not in others?