Answer:
Atlantic-historian Leonardo Marques’ new book is therefore the first to comprehensively examine the United States’ links to the slave trade between the Revolution and the Civil War, and it reveals the plethora of ways that Americans were involved in the business. Marques first describes how Rhode Island merchants pushed into the slave trade after the Revolution, taking advantage of the opening of Cuba to foreign slave ships. Merchants in Bristol, Rhode Island, flouted Congress’ 1807 abolition of the trade until 1820, when a new act made it a capital crime for U.S. citizens to be involved in the slave trade. Although historians have seen the 1820 act as toothless—no U.S. citizen was executed for illegal slave trading until 1862—Marques contends that “[e]vidence of U.S. citizens financing slave voyages almost disappears after 1820” (105). Marques then explores how the U.S. continued to be involved in slave trafficking after 1820. Between 1820 and 1866, slave ships carried 2.4 million Africans to the Americas, principally to Brazil (1.5m) and Cuba (0.7m). Using new data, Marques reveals that the majority of these Africans were forcibly transported in American built vessels that were designed to outrun the British Navy’s anti-slave-trade squadron. While slave ships typically flew the Portuguese or Spanish flag after 1807, a significant proportion sailed under the Stars and Stripes, which offered protection from search and seizure by the British Navy. U.S. citizens also continued to be concerned in the trade. Yankee captains and sailors manned slavers alongside foreigners. And American merchant firms in Brazil had Africans consigned to them during the 1830s and 1840s, who they resold to plantations, sometimes to American-owned coffee estates. When Brazilian authorities—under pressure from British and American consuls—drove out Portuguese and Spanish slave traders in 1856, many of them relocated to New York where they acquired American citizenship and dispatched slave ships to Cuba under the American flag. Marques’ new research thus demonstrates that the small numbers of captives carried on U.S. owned and flagged vessels belies a much deeper and persistent connection between the United States and the slave trade.
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