Slave trade to the United States

The Event: Forcible transportation of Africans to North America

Date: Early seventeenth century to 1862

Location: United States and Africa

Significance:Mass importation of enslaved Africans into the thirteen British colonies became established practice during the mid-seventeenth century. Although slavery existed in every colony, the greater portion of the African population resided in the plantation South. The slave trade was carried on legally until 1808, when Congress outlawed it; afterward, it continued illegally until the time of the Civil War. One of the lasting impacts of the slave trade was the creation of a large African American population that has made an immeasurable impact on US society and culture.

The first documented instance of enslaved Africans being carried to what is now the United States occurred in 1526, in a Spanish attempt to establish a coastal colony. However, that effort failed so completely it is no longer known whether the attempt was made in present-day Georgia or South Carolina. In any case, when Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, the Spanish explorer and former follower of Hernán Cortés, led six hundred settlers to the site where he had received a large land grant from the Spanish crown, an unknown number of enslaved Africans were among the colonists. At some point before the colony was abandoned, the Africans broke free. Four decades later, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés led a successful effort to establish what would prove to be a permanent settlement at St. Augustine, Florida. Enslaved Africans made up a small portion of St. Augustine’s original population, but they may have numbered close to six hundred by the end of the eighteenth century.

British Slave Trade

The first Africans known to arrive in British North America were among the original settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. That much is known. Less certain, however, is the status of these Africans. Because slavery was not then recognized under English law, it has been argued that these early Black Virginia colonists were indentured servants with the same legal rights and obligations as White indentured servants in the colonies. However, regardless of what the true status of those colonists was, slavery was soon to be recognized in the British colonies.

As the southern colonies developed labor-intensive plantation systems to produce cash crops, such as tobacco, a transition was eventually made from indentured servitude to a form of racially based slavery. This development mirrored the existing model for Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The tendency to move toward this Iberian American conception of slavery can be seen in Virginia as early as 1640, merely two decades after the founding of Jamestown. From that time, one after another, the British colonies legalized slavery, thereby opening the door to the involuntary immigration of Africans via what would become notorious as the “Middle Passage” that linked Africa to North America.

The legalization of slavery in the thirteen British colonies actually began in the northern colonies and occurred in this order:

•Massachusetts, 1641

•New Hampshire, 1645

•Connecticut, 1650

•Virginia, 1661

•Maryland, 1663

•Delaware, 1664

•New Jersey 1664

•New York, 1664

•North Carolina, 1669

•South Carolina, 1682

•Pennsylvania, 1700

•Rhode Island, 1700

•Georgia, 1750

Slavery had actually started in New York before 1664. When the Dutch founded their New Amsterdam colony in 1625, slavery was almost immediately introduced. Therefore, when the English assumed control of the colony in 1664, they merely continued a system that the Dutch had already put in place. In Delaware, which had begun as New Sweden, slavery of Africans was introduced as an accomplished fact in 1639 and was carried over through the Dutch occupation in 1655 and the English occupation in 1664.

Patterns and Statistics

Generally, the pattern of trade in slaves to the mainland of British North America followed at a steady but unspectacular pace, with the notable exception of South Carolina, through the seventeenth century and into the early years of the eighteenth century. Then followed a period of accelerated enslavement until the outbreak of the American Revolution during the 1770s. After the revolution, the transatlantic trade steadily declined until 1808, the year in which it was officially outlawed by the federal government. After that date, the southern states continued a greatly diminished and illegal trade until 1862, when the US Civil War put a halt to most southern maritime commerce. Throughout those years, however, a large internal trade in slaves was carried on in the South.

The total number of Africans who were forcibly brought to what is now the United States has long been the subject of intense debate. Because of imprecise and incomplete data, gaps between the lowest and highest modern estimates have been exceptionally wide. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, about 12.5 million Africans were put on ships to the Americas with about 10.7 million surviving to reach its shores.

When plantation owners bought enslaved people, they generally preferred to get them from different regions for reasons of security. It was expected that slaves from different cultures who arrived speaking different languages were less likely to plan escape attempts and insurrections. Favorable and unfavorable stereotypes of different African cultures sometimes also played roles in the trade. For example, Ibo men from what is now southeastern Nigeria were popularly regarded as being prone to defiance and therefore potentially dangerous. In contrast, Mandinke men from a large inland region of West Africa were thought to be more susceptible to discipline and thus more desirable for enslavement. At the same time, however, enslavers in different American colonies held different stereotypes. For example, Ibo men were considered desirable in Virginia because of their presumed greater capacity for hard work. In Louisiana, Ibo women were sought because of their alleged propensity for greater fertility.

As was true in other parts of the Western Hemisphere, geographical proximity dictated that the majority of Africans forcibly transported to North America originated in West Africa. The most persuasive estimates show the largest number of enslaved Africans came from the west-central portion of the African continent, and the smallest number came from the continent’s eastern coast. Curiously, most of the small number of slaves originating on Africa’s eastern coast were shipped to Virginia, where they accounted for some 4.1 percent of the total enslaved African population.

Conditions for Africans caught in the slave trade were dismal. People were typically crowded in close quarters aboard ships, with poor sanitation and ventilation contributing to rampant disease. Violence and sexual exploitation were also widespread. Historians have suggested that mortality rates during the voyage from Africa to the Americas was over 20 percent in the early stages of the trade, and remained near 10 percent into the 1800s. Revolts and uprisings among enslaved Africans were common—hundreds were recorded in slave ship records and many more likely went undocumented—though rarely successful. Enslavers used shackles and other restraints as well as harsh punishment to discourage insurrection and defiance, but many enslaved people still fought for freedom, even with little hope of success. Others refused food or died by suicide, including jumping overboard. Historians have estimated that about one in every ten slave ships faced some level of resistance.

The Revolution, the Constitution, and 1808

At least a decade before the American Revolution raised questions about the compatibility of slavery and the principles of liberty and equality, there arose a growing perception that both the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself were eventually destined for oblivion. In the northern and mid-Atlantic colonies, vestiges of slavery persisted, but the institution had never really taken root and was gradually being abolished. There, it was often taken as common knowledge that slavery, even in the South, was becoming less profitable and would in time simply peter out of its own accord.

By 1787, four years after American independence was achieved, ten of the original thirteen states had outlawed the importation of enslaved Africans. The exceptions were North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Even among those who remained staunch in their support of slavery, there developed a concern that having too massive an influx of Africans enter the United States might lead to a perilous situation wherein someday free and enslaved Black people would so far outnumber White people that a race war might happen, possibly with American Indians allying with the Africans. This fear was certainly a powerful sentiment among Virginia planters.

The question of the slave trade, in conjunction with the larger issue of slavery, was debated at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia. Delegates of the three Deep South states that still allowed the slave trade remained so strong in their support of slavery that it was feared by other delegates that any firm moves against either the slave trade or slavery might result in one or more of those states refusing to ratify the Constitution. Consequently, a compromise was hammered out whereby the Constitution guaranteed that Congress would not prohibit the slave trade before the year 1808. However, the Constitution does not use any form of the word “slave.” According to Article I, section 9 of the document, "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person."

Other clauses favorable to slave owners, such as one that could be interpreted as requiring the return of fugitive slaves crossing state lines, were also inserted in the Constitution to appease southern states. The Constitution was afterward duly ratified and put into effect.

In 1807, an act of the British parliament made Great Britain the first nation officially to outlaw the slave trade. The following year, in accordance with the constitutional provision permitting such an act, the US Congress passed a law prohibiting the importation of enslaved people from outside the United States.

After Formal Abolition of the Trade

Both Great Britain and the United States outlawed the African slave trade, but enforcing this prohibition was a different matter. Indeed, American efforts to enforce the ban were practically ineffective. US laws, such as the Piracy Act of 1820, which made slave trading subject to the death penalty, were not enforced and, consequently, widely ignored by both traders and law-enforcement officials.

Spain and Portugal, two other major colonial powers in the Western Hemisphere, made no pretence of their opposition to the British and American bans and showed their contempt for the ineffective Anglo-American enforcement measures. Nevertheless, Britain’s powerful Royal Navy remained an intimidating force for any rogue slave trader to defy.

More effective perhaps than the ban in keeping down the slave trade to the United States was the fact that the natural population increase among the already resident enslaved population in the southern states was sufficient to meet the demands for slave labor on the plantations. The internal slave trade among the states flourished. In fact, the main sources of labor to southern cotton plantations during the years leading up to the Civil War (1861–65) were the auction blocks in Virginia. The last known slave ship confirmed to have brought enslaved Africans to the United States was the Clotilda (also known as the Clotilde), which arrived in Alabama in 1859. While the shipowner was arrested on charges of illegal slave trading, the case was eventually dropped, indicating the difficulty in enforcing anti–slave trade laws.

As the nation drifted into civil war in 1861, the avenues open to external slave traders rapidly closed. By early 1862, the Union’s naval blockade of Southern ports effectively stopped new imports of African slaves. The symbolic end of the illicit slave trade occurred on February 21, 1862, when Captain Nathaniel Gordon became the first, and only, slave trader hanged under the Piracy Act of 1820. With the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865 and the subsequent ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution later that same year, slavery was completely and permanently abolished and with it the Atlantic slave trade to the United States.

Almost two centuries later, in March 2015, the United Nations unveiled a permanent monument, called the Ark of Return, dedicated to the legacy of those who were submitted to what is considered one of the most unjust and brutal systems in history. The memorial, standing at the UN's New York headquarters, was meant to serve as a reminder of the injustice and the necessity of learning from past mistakes. The UN also set aside every March 25 as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to honor its victims and reflect upon its impact.

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