Here are a few facts on Northern shipping of slaves. It is evident that your question on the crews is irrelevant at the least.
1805..... Between 1795 and 1805 more than 100,000 Africans were sent to America on 934 Rhode Island based vessels.
1831..... More than two decades before, the US Congress had banned the importation of slaves into the country. New England slave traders continued to carry on the slave trade into the Caribbean, Central, and South American markets. In this year, an English seaman, a Captain Isaacs made this statement about New England slave traders,
“Few have visited this port (Lamu) except the enterprising Americans whose star-spangled banner may be seen streaming in the wind where other nations would not deign to traffic.”
1856..... The United States Dept. Marshall for that New York district reported in 1856 that with regard to the construction and preparation of Northern slave ships:
"the business of fitting out slavers was never prosecuted with greater energy than at present."
12/1858..... In a report to the Secretary of State, the British admiralty reported that during the previous year, the British Navy on patrol in African waters, and searching for ships involved in the slave trade, had captured 33 American slave ships. The British also stated that another 23 American ships had escaped their patrols.
4/21/1859..... The US Navy sloop of war, Marion, was on station near the coast of Africa. It discovered and seized the American slave trade ship, Orion.
4/27/1859..... The Marion, just off the Congo, seized the American ship, Ardennes of New York, as it was engaged in the slave trade.
9/21/1859..... The US Naval vessel, Portsmouth, seized the sloop Emily, of New York, for being engaged in the slave trade.
12/2/1859..... In a report to President Buchanan, Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey stated that US Navy vessels were actively seeking to interdict slave trading vessels in Caribbean waters. The steamers Crusader, Mohawk, Wyandott, and Water Witch were cruising the waters of Cuba seeking American ships carrying on the slave trade.
Two weeks earlier, the Mohawk had discovered a brig at anchor near Cuba. Upon investigating it, the Naval Commander discovered that the brig was the Cygnet, of Baltimore, and had evidently recently landed a cargo of slaves. The ship was taken into custody and moved to Key West.
In a year and a half preceding the War Between the States eighty-five slave trading vessels were reported as fitting out in New York harbor and an author of the time wrote that,
"from 1850 to 1860 the fitting out of slavers became a flourishing business in the United States and centered in New York City."(Dubois)
8/8/1860..... Under command of Capt. Nathaniel Gordon, the ship Erie was discovered by the United States steamer Mohican, on the morning of the 8th day of August, 1860. She was then about fifty miles outside of the River Congo, on the West Coast of Africa, standing to the northward, with all sail set. She was flying the American flag. A gun from the Mohican brought her aside.
Lieutenant Todd of the USS Mohican went on board himself about noon, and took command of the prize. He found on board of the Erie eight hundred and ninety-seven (897) Negroes, men, women, and children.
Mr. Gordon was probably the most successful of the individuals engaged in the trade. A native of Maine, he had engaged in the business many years since, and had always eluded justice.
The last thing the UN is trying to do is reduce slavery throughout the world!
There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach and in the destruction of lives.
Read about Todays Child Sex Slaves!<
Tennessee in June 1861 became the first in the South to legislate the use of free black soldiers. The governor was authorized to enroll those between the ages of fifteen and fifty, to be paid $18 a month and the same rations and clothing as white soldiers; the black men appeared in two black regiments in Memphis by September.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995) pp. 218-219
Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. Furthermore, the story outlines the history of slavery here, and the first slave owner, the Father of American slavery, was Mr Anthony Johnson, of Northampton, Virginia. His slave was John Casor, the first slave for life. Both were black Africans. The story is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners.
-"Selling Poor Steven", American Heritage Magazine, Feb/Mar 1993 (Vol. 441) p 90
Of course, a full telling of Black History would not be complete without a telling of the origin of slavery in the Virginia colony:
Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378
"In 1650 there were only 300 negroes in Virginia, about one percent of the population. They weren't slaves any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia, and who were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.
Slavery was established in 1654 when Anthony Johnson, Northampton County, convinced the court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor, a negro. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
But who was Anthony Johnson, winner of this epoch-making decision? Anthony Johnson was a negro himself, one of the original 20 brought to Jamestown (1619) and 'sold' to the colonists. By 1623 he had earned his freedom and by 1651, was prosperous enough to import five 'servants' of his own, for which he received a grant of 250 acres as 'headrights.'
Anthony Johnson ought to be in a 'Book of Firsts.' As the most ambitious of the first 20, he could have been the first negro to set foot on Virginia soil. He was Virginia's first free negro and first to establish a negro community, first negro landowner, first negro slave owner and as the first, white or black, to secure slave status for a servant, he was actually the founder of slavery in Virginia. A remarkable man." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html
I found the reference, out of Michael A. Hoffman II's "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America" : Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.
Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.
Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People,"
(New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:
"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.
"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.
"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.
"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
Child slavery today in West Africa?
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/child.html
Slavery throughout historyhttp://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery_today/slavery.html
"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement--even for the most admirable and benign of purposes--is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
--Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take it away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps the group that had the strongest vested interest in seeing the South victorious were the black slaveowners. In 1830 approximately 1,556 black slaveowners in the deep South owned 7,188 slaves. About 25% of all free blacks owned slaves. A few of these were men who purchased their family members to protect or free them, but most were people who saw slavery as the best way to economic wealth and independence for themselves. The American dream in the antebellum South was just as powerful for free blacks as whites and it included the use of slaves for self-improvement. They bought and sold slaves for profit and exploited their labor just like their white counterparts.
Richard Rollins
After their capture one group of white Virginia slave owners and Afro-Virginians were asked if they would take the oath of allegiance to the United States in exchange for their freedom. One free negro indignantly replied: "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave from this same group, upon learning that his master had refused, proudly exclaimed, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave agreed: "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." On another occasion a captured Virginia planter took the oath, but slave remained faithful to the Confederacy and refused. This slave returned to Virginia by a flag of truce boat and expressed disgust at his owner's disloyalty: "Massa had no principles." Confederate prisoners of war paid tribute to the loyalty, ingenuity, and diligence of "kind-hearted" blacks who attended to their needs and considered them fellow Southerners.
Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.