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Slave Trade Records from Liverpool, 1754–1792 - Volumes
Volumes
5 volumes in Slave Trade Records from Liverpool, 1754–1792
The Case and Southworth records
The Case and Southworth records (380 MD 33-36) cover the years from 1754 to 1769. They are the surviving commercial manuscripts of a Liverpool merchant firm with a branch house in Kingston, Jamaica. Thomas Case was listed in the Liverpool trade directory for 1766 as a merchant in Water Street. He owned a number of ships, became a member of the African Company of Liverpool, and held shares in eighteen slaving vessels. Two of these ships, the Fortune and the Bee, were vessels where he was the sole owner; the others were co-owned with his brother Clayton and other Liverpool merchants such as William Boats and William Davenport. Thomas Case entered into an insurance brokerage business with William Gregson in 1774. This was dissolved in 1778, however, when bankruptcy proceedings were issued against Case after he fell into financial difficulties. Nicholas Southworth, who managed the Kingston end of the Case & Southworth partnership, had captained three slaving vessels from Liverpool to Africa and the Caribbean in 1746, 1748 and 1752. Southworth was the part owner of several slave vessels in the 1750s and 1760s but he never co-owned vessels with Case. The partnership of Case & Southworth appears to have flourished until the records end in 1767.The records of Case & Southworth are bound volumes with detailed information on the import of hardware, textiles and provisions from British and Irish merchants via Liverpool to Kingston; the sale of lots of slaves in Kingston; and imports of sugar, rum, pimento and wood at Liverpool. Both ends of the business, at Liverpool and Kingston, acted on commission, but sales were much more valuable at the Jamaican end (largely owing to the slave sales) than on Merseyside. The Liverpool house under Case sold on behalf of far fewer people than the Kingston branch under Southworth. This resulted from the much larger population of the Lancashire port and its hinterland compared with the much smaller white population in Jamaica. The Account Book (380 MD 33) and the Journal (380 MD 34) include a mass of daily transactions. At first sight these list a bewildering array of sales but they can be collated and analysed to indicate some interesting patterns in consumer behaviour. Some of the detailed accounts of slave sales, giving the purchasers, date of purchase, size of lot sold and prices gained, are duplicated in the two Sales account books (380 MD 35-36) but some are not. The Case and Southworth account books are some of the most detailed sales’ records of Africans in the British slave trade available in any British archive. Read more →
The Thomas Leyland records
Thomas Leyland (c.1752-1827) was a merchant, banker, millionaire and three times Mayor of Liverpool. In 1766 he won a lottery prize of £20,000, which he used to build up his business affairs. He was involved in various trading partnerships. He built up much of his mercantile fortune from participation in the slave trade, and was particularly active in that traffic as well in various other trades in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Leyland had an interest in sixty-nine slaving voyages from Liverpool. The ships in which he was concerned delivered an estimated 22,365 Africans to the Americas. He was associated with some other important Liverpool merchants but he also linked up with smaller fry. Thus, for example, he was part owner with David Tuohy in the slave ship Kitty in 1789. In 1802 Leyland entered into a banking partnership with Clarke and Roscoe, a firm of Liverpool bankers. After this was dissolved in 1806, he set up his own bank in Liverpool with his nephew Richard Bullin in 1807. Through amalgamations, his banking business later became part of the Midland (now HSBC) Bank. Thomas Leyland left a fortune of £600,000 in 1827, making him one of the wealthiest decedents in Britain at the time. In addition to the records made available here, further documents relating to Leyland’s slave trading and banking career survive in the HSBC archives and among the Dumbell Papers at Liverpool University Library. A good many of Leyland’s ships’ books relating to the slave trade were unfortunately destroyed by bomb damage during the Second World War. Read more →
The Tuohy papers
The documents pertaining to David Tuohy are those of an Irishman who spent fourteen years in the African trade, including the captaincy of four slave voyages between 1765 and 1769 and part-ownership of ten Liverpool slave ships from 1772 to 1786. Tuohy married in Liverpool in 1768 and settled there in 1771. After his experience as a captain of slave vessels, he settled down as a merchant on Merseyside. In Gore’s Liverpool Directory for 1781, he is described as a merchant resident at 48 Old Hall Street. His correspondence indicates that he conducted trade between Liverpool and Ireland, importing beef, butter and tallow, and exported beer, cheese, and salt. He also remained active in the transatlantic slave trade. Tuohy participated in voyages where he could spread his investment among other partners, as in the voyage of the Brig Nancy in 1774, in which he held a one-sixth share (380 TUO/4/7). His ventures in the triangular slave trade involved sending ships to the Windward, Ivory and Gold coasts, the Bight of Benin, and especially Angola, and then selling Africans at Jamaica, Barbados, St. Kitts, Antigua, Dominica, and Grenada. Tuohy had few mercantile contacts on the North American continent apart from in Charleston, South Carolina. He probably died in the late 1780s or early 1790s; the last mention of him in these papers is a letter addressed to him dated September 1788 (380 TUO/6/4). Read more →
Miscellaneous documents from the Liverpool Record Office
Several smaller items which include interesting additional details on the Liverpool slave trade. Read more →
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