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Slavery in America was always distasteful to the home government, and only reluctantly permitted because of the apparent necessities of the case and in the hope of ameliorating the lot of the Indians. The whole plan of the asiento was based on the principle of regulating and limiting slavery. In theory the Spanish sovereigns ruled the Indies with an autocratic sway.
Of more immediate value to Great Britain was the trade concession, called the Asiento, made by Spain . Prior to the Asiento, the British had been forbidden to trade with the Spanish possessions in America, and the French had monopolized the sale of slaves to the Spanish colonies.
It was called Asiento because the Spanish Government let, or farmed by treaty, the privilege of supplying its colonies with slaves. The two principal articles of this contract, which was to expire in 1712, related to the number of negroes and the rent of the privilege.
This Asiento of 1713 was an agreement between England and Spain by which the latter granted the former a monopoly of the Spanish colonial slave trade for thirty years, and England engaged to supply the colonies within that time with at least one hundred and forty-four thousand slaves at the rate of forty-eight hundred per year.
But at the Peace of Utrecht, Louis XIV., exhausted by an unprofitable war, relinquished his asiento to the English, who were eager enough to take it. It was for this advantage that Marlborough had been really fighting; at least, it was the only one of consequence that Blenheim and Malplaquet secured to his country. The reign of Louis XV. commenced in 1715.
After the expiration of the Eynger and Sayller grant the king left the control of the slave trade to the regular imperial administrative boards, which, rejecting all asiento overtures for half a century, maintained a policy of granting licenses for competitive trade in return for payments of eight or ten ducats per head until 1560, and of thirty ducats or more thereafter.
These in fact had such an ascendency that when in 1663 Spain revived the asiento by a contract with two Genoese, the contractors must needs procure their slaves by arrangement with Dutch and English who delivered them at Curaçao and Jamaica. Soon after this contract expired the asiento itself was converted from an item of Spanish internal policy into a shuttlecock of international politics.
At first it seems as if the letters-patent of Louis XV. were inspired by some new doctrine of free-trade. And he did cherish the conviction that in the matter of the slave-trade it was preferable to a monopoly; but his motive sprang from the powerful competition of England and Holland, which the Guinea Company faced profitably only while the War of Succession secured to it the asiento.
The French encouraged settlements in the West Indies in the seventeenth century, but at last, finding that French immigrants would not come, they began about 1642 to import Negroes. Owing to wars with England, slaves were supplied by the Dutch and Portuguese, although the Royal Senegal Company held the coveted Asiento from 1701 to 1713.
When peace was arranged, nearly ten years after, the asiento was renewed for four years, and not one word was said in the treaty about Spain renouncing the right of search.
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