Probing Africa
Before the Civil War, American ships and merchant traders, especially from Salem, Massachusetts, frequented Africa's coast. But conflict disrupted old trading patterns, lower transportation costs made European goods less expensive in African markets, and discriminatory trade practices stymied Yankee competition. As a result, the American presence on the continent shrank in the late nineteenth century. American adventurers, explorers, mining engineers, and traders, and a few naval officers dispatched to identify prospects for foreign commerce, kept some U.S. interest in Africa alive. The navy's ships patrolled along the African coast to protect American lives and property. But official Washington took few steps to advance U.S. interests in the vast land that the European powers were rushing to conquer.
American tobacco, kerosene, and rum nevertheless continued to claim a good share of African markets. Zanzibar preferred American cotton goods; in exchange, East African gum copal and ivory were shipped to New England factories. When, in the early 1880s, tribal warfare in Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) interrupted the ivory trade, Connecticut plants had to shut down. In west Africa, where Americans had once participated in the slave trade and where many consular agents had long handled American commercial interests, British tariffs hurt American tradefor example, tobacco and rum on the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. Higher tariffs in French West Africa also diminished American commerce. By the end of the century, American trade with the continent had become inconsequential.
Such a decline might not have occurred had Washington heeded Commodore Shufeldt's recommendations. In 1878 the State and Navy departments ordered him to sail the U.S.S. Ticonderoga to Africa and Asia for "the encouragement and extension of American commerce. Shufeldt wrote detailed reports on economic opportunities, port facilities, and laws. He introduced American products to Africans and negotiated trade treaties. For American surplus goods, he advised, "Africa with its teeming population presents a tempting field." He warned that the British and other imperialists were working to drive Americans from the continent. Washington officials read and listened but took no action.
Americans nonetheless became fascinated with black Africa because individuals bent on adventure, fame, and wealth popularized it. Foremost among them was Henry M. Stanley, an immigrant from Wales who claimed U.S. citizenship. While working for the New York Herald, after stints in both the Confederate and the Union armies, Stanley was directed by the newspaper's owner to depart for Africa and find Dr. David Livingstone, the missionary/explorer who in 1866 had disappeared into central Africa while searching for the Nile's source. Stanley arrived in Zanzibar in 1871 and began to write dramatic stories about Africa. With an American flag at the head of his large expedition, he cut across Tanganyika and found Livingstone, who appreciated Stanley's supplies and medicine but insisted on continuing his quest for the great river's headwaters. Three years later Stanley led another venture into the African interior; in his 999-day trek through the wilderness he battled hostile Africans, mapped the territory, disparaged natives as "wooly-headed rabble unchecked and uncurbed by the hand of law," and made the Congo Basin and himself internationally famous. Congress even voted him a resolution of thanks.
King Leopold II of Belgium saw in Stanley an instrument to bring his small nation a large empire. Unable to compete with the more powerful European imperialists, Leopold formed an organization whose announced philanthropic purpose was ending the slave trade and protecting legitimate commerce, but whose real objective was obtaining an imperial foothold for Belgium in the Congo. The king hired Stanley, who negotiated with African leaders in the region to gain their allegiance to the international organization. Leopold also secured the services of Henry S. Sanford, a former American minister to Belgium who sought personal commercial gain from enlarged U.S. trade in the region. Working to thwart the encroaching Europeans, Sanford lobbied in Washington for American support of the principle of free trade in the Congo. In 1884 Sanford succeeded when the United States recognized the Association Internationale du Congo as sovereign over the area.
The United States then found itself in the midst of an international dispute, for other European nations claimed parts of the Congo. To head off a clash, the European rivals convened in Berlin in fall 1884. Washington sent two delegates, one of them Sanford; Stanley advised the American diplomats. The conferees signed an agreement that recognized the international association's (and hence Leopold's) authority over the Congo and ensured an open trade door. The new president, Grover Cleveland, avoiding entanglements with Europeans, withdrew the accord from the Senate. Still, the United States abided by its terms and in 1890 sent representatives to another Congo conference. This time, the conferees in Brussels closed the commercial door by permitting Leopold to levy import duties in the Congo ostensibly to eradicate the slave trade. "Easily hoodwinked," American leaders inadvertently helped the Belgian monarch take over a million and a half square miles of African territory and create "a gigantic trading monopoly behind a smokescreen of philanthropy and altruism." Two years later the United States ratified the accord.