By Annika Bärwald 

This article is part of our series entitled “Exiled: Identity and Identification,” which explores the semantic evolution of exile and the lived experiences of people seeking refuge across the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century. It was presented originally at the conference “Who is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge and Asylum, c.1750-1850”, which took place on 30 June – 1 July 2022 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).

In June 1774, an advertisement was published in a Hamburg newspaper stating that “yesterday night at 10 ½, a young Negro around 14 years of age, small in posture [had] in all likelihood been abducted.”^[1] The short text went on to promise a “good recompense” to anyone volunteering information. The language appears vague: Had the youth of African descent in fact been kidnapped and the advertisement was to signal a willingness to pay ransom? This is plausible since youthful (and often enslaved) employees of African descent were still very much sought after at noble courts.^[2] Or had the 14-year-old attempted to flee from slavery and his enslavers wanted to avoid causing a scandal? The latter seems more likely. In fact, a textbook published nine years later described a very similar scenario: an enslaved person named Jan who had accompanied his owner from Suriname attempted to flee but failed, according to the author, as Jan “was easily caught and sent back.”^[3]

Such traces of attempted flights from slavery are rare for Hamburg and its environs even as the presence of enslaved people became more common. Not formally part of a colonial empire prior to the 1880s, Hamburg was the German-speaking territory’s largest port city. Its gateway function facilitated imperial entanglements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Merchants from Hamburg and neighboring (then Danish) Altona owned firms, plantations, and enslaved people in the Dutch colony of Suriname, the Danish-colonized Caribbean, North America, Spanish colonies and elsewhere.^[4] Some participated in the enslavement trade.^[5] Even beyond Hamburg, German-speaking regions were much more strongly engaged in early modern slavery and colonialism than has been assumed in older scholarship.^[6]

As an ancillary effect, a significant number of people of African but also of Asian descent came to live in Germany, and particularly in the Hamburg area. I have compiled archival traces of 230 free and enslaved people of non-European descent living in and around the city from 1750 to 1840.^[7] Yet, flights from slavery have rarely been documented – I have only encountered five cases during my research. All of them appear to have been unsuccessful. 

This article explores the reasons for this absence. It was not, I argue, due to an absence of slavery or Hamburg’s position outside of formal imperialism. Instead, two factors emerge. Firstly, informal information exchange through newspapers fostered a willingness to collude with enslavers that did not necessitate any intervention by Hamburg authorities. Secondly, long before regulating slavery, Hamburg lawmakers had begun to tighten alien laws that targeted the foreign (working) poor, thereby also affecting formerly enslaved people and enabling their removal from the city. The case of Hamburg is thus not only illustrative for the history of early German colonial participation. It also highlights how the institution of slavery could be questioned, negotiated, and enforced outside the bounds of colonial law. 

In total, four advertisements and a textbook description were published on what were likely flights from slavery between 1774 and 1797.^[8] The sought-after person was always a young man or youth, in three cases, working as a household servant, in two cases working aboard a ship.^[9] Neither of the fugitives appears to have arrived in the Hamburg region on their own – theirs was not a case of maritime marronage but rather an opportunity taken on the spot. In one case, an African American seaman attempted to flee together with a white companion, although the significantly higher reward set for the capture of the “black” boy makes clear that their value to the captain differed.^[10] Unlike the many advertisements published daily in the three examined Hamburg newspaper – sales ads, ship arrivals, help wanted ads, announcements for events etc. – none of the advertisements was published a second time or left a discernible paper trail. This, together with the similar textbook description, suggests that the fugitives were quickly captured and reënslaved. 

The advertisements’ wording was key: widely read among people of different professions and status, newspapers were crucial in disseminating information, especially when it came to commerce. Each advertisement text was innocuous enough not to incite public outcry: words such as “slave” or “enslaved” were avoided, even when phrases such as “owner” clearly suggested a relationship of possession.^[11] Instead, the advertisements usually remarked on the person’s non-whiteness. It is possible that such racialized terminology had become synonymous with an enslaved status in Hamburg as it has elsewhere. Then again, in a city in which posting rewards for the retrieval of run-away servants was highly unusual (though one might be warned of larcenous former staff), the promise of remuneration may have sufficed. 

There was apparently no difficulty in finding people willing to aid in capturing and reënslaving fugitives either. This, the above-mentioned textbook author suggests, was also partly due to the lack of an established Black community in Hamburg. Although the sight of people of African descent and enslaved persons was no longer exceptional by the late eighteenth century, there is no evidence of a community of people of African descent like those of London and Amsterdam.^[12] What was missing was thus not only shelter but also the ability to inauspiciously merge into the local population. The textbook passage on Surinamese Jan states that “[h]is color betrayed him.”^[13] Somewhat reductively framed, it is fair to assume that he and the others would have fared differently in regions with a more substantial Black population. 

Additionally, although German-speaking people were more active in anti-slavery activities than has long been assumed, there is no evidence of abolitionist aid available in Hamburg in the late eighteenth century.^[14] There were no activists and lawyers to push for a court case and thus no need for authorities to take a stance on the issue.^[15] Despite a traditional anti-slavery rhetoric in the city, chances of escaping slavery in Hamburg were thin and enslaved people probably knew this.^[16]

A different factor that limited chances of establishing an independent life in Hamburg was Hamburg’s lack of regulation of slavery prior to 1837 combined with ever restrictive alien laws. As several historians have remarked, Hamburg’s 1837 agreement to abolish the enslavement trade seems to have been deliberately protracted, perhaps to shield Hamburg enslavement trade profiteers.^[17] Notably, Britain had abolished the enslavement trade by 1807, Denmark had done so five years earlier. The two Hamburg laws were forceful in eliminating all forms of enslavement though: They not only criminalized any participation in the enslavement trade, but they also declared any formerly enslaved person reaching Hamburg free. In an oddly specific twist, one of the laws also suggested that formerly enslaved people were to become “domestics, or free laborers”^[18] and were to be subjected to the respective legal regulations.

In fact, domestic service had been a niche market for people of African and Asian descent in and around Hamburg, as it was for many immigrants. Constant in-migration from near and far fueled the city’s demographic growth and supplied labor. It also engendered relentless discussions of poverty and morality.^[19] With the influx of French Revolutionary refugees, this tendency accelerated and Hamburg authorities reacted with a string of increasingly rigid regulations targeting domestic and other wage workers. The 1788 “New Poor Law,” for example, forbade offering room and board to poor strangers.^[20] In 1818, thirty years and many passed regulations later, a law threatened domestic workers with incarceration for offenses such as going out without permission or seeking a new position.^[21] Then, in 1829, a comprehensive system of registering foreign-born domestic and menial workers was installed. It required all foreign-born menial workers to be registered and be given limited-time residency cards.^[22]

The respective registers have been preserved for the years after 1834. Unsurprisingly, they mostly list German-speaking people from around Hamburg. However, the regulations affected people of African descent as well, as evidenced by cases such as that of the 20-year-old African Johann Wilhelm Hall or that of Bernhard Lewis from Paramaribo, Suriname. Lewis was listed as a “servant” who worked in Hamburg from 1834 to 1836. After losing his position and failing to find new employment, his permit was rescinded and in April 1837 he left – or had to leave – the city.^[23]Similarly, Hall lost his job in August 1839 after working in both Altona and Hamburg (for a hatmaker) for two years, resulting in his residency permit being annulled and him having to exit the city.^[24] Although it is difficult to ascertain whether Hall and Lewis had, at some point in their lives, been enslaved, their cases illustrate the tight regulations that undergirded the domestic labor market. With deportations explicitly threatened, the freedom offered in Hamburg was at best a precarious one. 

The presence of enslaved and formerly enslave people in the Hamburg regions exemplifies that the ripples of Atlantic slavery came to be felt around the globe by the turn of the nineteenth century. The degree to which European nations tolerated, supported, or repressed slavery on their soil has long been debated. For the German-speaking territories which (apart from Brandenburg-Prussia) did not in formally partake in colonialism prior to the 1880s, this is a particularly tricky question. In their case, there were no colonial laws which could be transferred or rejected. And yet, slavery existed here too and was even justified by leading jurists.^[25]

But the Hamburg case suggests that, on a more quotidian level, widespread acceptance of (or at last indifference to) practices of enslavement existed as well. Flights from slavery seem to have been rare not so much because enslaved people did not arrive in Hamburg but because Hamburg residents willingly cooperated with enslavers. Even those people who had managed to become free faced increasingly restrictive alien laws impeding their pursuit of an independent existence. As the German-speaking territories’ most significant port city, Hamburg fulfilled a gateway function for movements of people into and out of early modern Germany. With regards to slavery, however, it guarded not so much against the influx of slavery but rather against formerly enslaved people forging their way toward independence.

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Annika Bärwald is a History PhD student at the University of Bremen. Her dissertation focuses on Hamburg slavery connections and the lives of people of African, Asian, and Native American descent in and around the city, 1750 to 1840. 

Title Image: Hamburg Deichtor (Brothers Suhr, c. 1840)

Further Reading: 

Brahm, Felix, and Eve Rosenhaft, eds. Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680–1850. Woodbridge, UK, Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2016.

Mallinckrodt, Rebekka von, Josef Köstlbauer, and Sarah Lentz, eds. Beyond Exceptionalism: Traces of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Early Modern Germany, 1650–1850. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.

Müller, Viola Franziska. Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Newman, Simon P. Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London. London: University of London Press, 2022.

Otele, Olivette. African Europeans: An Untold History. London: Hurst & Company, 2020.

Zimmerer, Jürgen, and Kim Sebastian Todzi, eds. Hamburg: Tor zur kolonialen Welt: Erinnerungsorte der (post-) kolonialen Globalisierung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021.

Endnotes:

^[1] Adreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 30 June 1774, 408. I would like to thank the editors of this blog as well as Daniel Durcan for their input and editorial help.

^[2] Cf. Kuhlmann-Smirnov, Schwarze Europäer im Alten Reich, 39–41.

^[3] The author expressed some dismay about the incident and Jan’s severe punishment. Cf. Johann Christian Sinapius, ed., Lesebuch für Kaufleute(Hamburg, Leipzig, 1783), 418.

^[4] Cf. e. g. Brockstedt, Die Schiffahrts- und Handelsbeziehungen Schleswig-Holsteins nach Lateinamerika 1815–1848; Gøbel, “Die Schiffahrt Altonas nach Westindien in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts;” Vogt, Ein Hamburger Beitrag zur Entwicklung des Welthandels im 19. Jahrhundert, for a later period cf. Zimmerer and Todzi, Hamburg: Tor zur kolonialen Welt.

^[5] Cf. zur Lage, “Die Hochphase des deutschen Versklavungshandels;” Ressel, “Hamburg und die Niederelbe im atlantischen Sklavenhandel der Frühen Neuzeit.”

^[6] Cf.  Brahm and Rosenhaft, Slavery Hinterland; Raphael-Hernandez and Wiegmink, German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery.

^[7] Enslaved people appear to form the minority, albeit not an insubstantial one. For the small island of St. Thomas alone, more than 15% of the 69 colonial servants and African Caribbean travelers found in passenger protocols between 1805 and 1840 were enslaved. This project was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program of the European Union (Grant No. 641110 “The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and its Slaves”). However, this text exclusively reflects the author’s views. The ERC is neither responsible for the content nor for its use.

^[8] See citations above as well as Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 1 January 1787, 8¸ Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 25 Februar 1796, 16, 127; Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 14 September 1797, 75, 599. For the 1787 case cf. also Friederichs, Piraten, Kaper und Korsaren im Mittelmeer, 212–13. For comparison, Simon Newman’s study for London found 212 attempted flights from slavery between 1655 and 1704. Cf. Newman, Freedom Seekers, 58.

^[9] Maritime slavery was common in many societies in the Americas but has been underexplored when it comes to African diasporas in Germany. Cf. e. g.  Bolster, Black Jacks.

^[10] The captain offered 1 thaler for the white and 10 for the Black fugitive. Cf. Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 14 September 1797, 75, 599.

^[11] The German word used here is Eigner. Addreß-Comtoir-Nachrichten, 1 January 1787, 1, 8.

^[12] Cf. for those cities e. g. Gerzina, Black London; Ponte, “’Al de swarten die hier ter stede comen’”.

^[13] Sinapius, Lesebuch für Kaufleute, 418.

^[14] For German anti-slavery activism cf. Lentz, “Wer helfen kann, der helfe!”.

^[15] In contrast see the Somerset case as well as legal disputes e. g. in France and other German-speaking regions. Cf. Dziobon, “Judge, Jurisprudence and Slavery in England 1729–1807;” Mallinckrodt, “Slavery and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Germany;” Peabody, “There Are no Slaves in France.”

^[16] Cf. Ressel, “Eine Rezeptionsskizze der atlantischen Sklaverei im frühneuzeitlichen protestantischen Deutschland.” On networks of information cf. Scott, The Common Wind.

^[17] Cf. Weber, “Deutschland, der atlantische Sklavenhandel und die Plantagenwirtschaft der Neuen Welt (15. bis 19. Jahrhundert),” 52; Kresse, Die Fahrtgebiete der Hamburger Handelsflotte 1824–1888, 84. 

^[18] Lappenberg, Sammlung der Verordnungen der freyen Hanse-Stadt Hamburg, seit 1814, vol. 15, 59. 

^[19] Kopitzsch, “Zwischen Hauptrezeß und Franzosenzeit.”

^[20] Christian Daniel Anderson, Sammlung hamburgischer Verordnungen (Hamburg, 1783-1820), vol. 2, 371; vol. 3, 261. Cf. also Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers; Mehnke and Herzig, Armut und Elend in Hamburg.

^[21] Sammlung der Verordnungen, ed. J. M. Lappenberg. Vol. 5, 21–25.

^[22] Ibid., vol. 14, 497–503.

^[23] StH 332-8 A 11 Meldeprotokolle für das fremde männliche und weibliche Gesinde, 1834, 332-8 A 11 vol 3, 532.

^[24] Cf. ibid., vol. 12, 477.

^[25] Cf. Mallinckrodt, “Slavery and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Germany.”