No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Chambers. Verso Press, 2015. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1781688076. $27.00.
Chambers begins with a discussion of the relations between the post-revolutionary generation of political officials and business elites that facilitated American participation in the Cuban slave trade. These “15ers” included such well-known figures as John Quincy Adams who, despite his later support for abolitionism, formulated the Monroe Doctrine in part to support American-Cuban efforts to ship coffee and sugar to Russian ports on the Baltic Sea. One of Adams’ key collaborators in this nefarious business was James D’Wolf, a successful slave trader and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. D’Wolf in many ways symbolized the traits of Americans involved in the Cuban slave trade—ambition, cunning, and an almost inhuman callousness towards the lives of the human beings whose lives they destroyed in the pursuit of profit. Vignettes from D’Wolf’s life appear at various points in
No God But Gain to help drive home the brutality which underwrote the genteel lifestyles of Americans who invested in the Cuban slave based economy.
American participation in Cuban slavery required not merely New England capital or Washington political clout, but boots on the ground in Havana. American agents such as Edward Spalding and Benjamin Bosworth worked actively to outfit ships and crews, smuggle slaves into Cuba, and export coffee, cotton, and sugar abroad. Encouraged by Spanish officials who liberalized trade policies and Cuban planters who wished to encourage “white” migration, many New Englanders traveled south to take up new lives as Caribbean planters. The rolling hills and sandy beaches of Matanzas Province (including an area known locally as the
Bahía de Cochinos, or Bay of Pigs), which superficially resembled the Massachusetts coastline, proved a popular destination for many expatriate Yankees.
Chambers complicates our traditional understanding of both capitalism and slavery in several ways. Drawing from scholars such as James Oakes and Sven Beckert, Chambers reveals how American settlers like Nathaniel Fellowes, Ebenezer William Sage, and S.A. Rainey used modern business techniques—rigorous bookkeeping, time management techniques, and labor allocation—to make their plantations efficient business operations. Yet Americans who ran their plantations in such a manner became brutal slaveholders whose callousness towards the lives of their slaves often shocked their Cuban neighbors. Chambers thus asserts that capitalism and slavery were not only compatible but presented a dynamic, thriving alternative to free labor that would not be eradicated until Union victory in the Civil War.
https://www.civilwarmonitor.com/blog/chambers-no-god-but-gain-2015