American involvement in slavery and the illegal slave trade only ended during the Civil War.
By Manuel Barcia
and
John Harris
December 6, 2020
Last weekend, “60 Minutes” featured a special on the recent discovery of the sunken remains of the slave ship Clotilda. On this vessel, traders brought 110 captive Africans to Alabama in 1860 — a full half-century after Congress outlawed such traffic.
While viewers may have been stunned to learn that trading still happened on the eve of the Civil War, they shouldn’t be. After the federal abolition of the trade went into effect Jan. 1, 1808, hundreds of illegal slaving voyages with American connections crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean, bringing captives not just into the United States but also to the two largest destinations for enslaved Africans during this period, Brazil and Cuba. These voyages fueled the expansion of slave-grown agricultural products that were traded on international markets, not only enabling a model of economic development defined by human suffering and death, but further empowering racist systems whose legacies endure today.
The 1808 ban on the trade was a bright note in the young Republic’s history, a signal that perhaps the ideals of the American Revolution could in fact be realized. But while some traders responded to the new law by quitting the traffic, others doubled down. After the ban, American ships smuggled around 8,000 enslaved Africans to U.S. shores, usually through the Gulf of Mexico, and sold them illicitly to cotton planters in the Deep South. America’s westward expansion was built on African as well as African American labor.
And arrivals in the South were dwarfed by U.S. participation in the trade to other parts of the Americas, even though the traffic was illegal there, too. Around half a million captives arrived in Brazil and Cuba aboard American ships in the 1800s, fueling the production of slave-grown coffee and sugar and feeding overseas markets for these goods. It turns out that Americans’ caffeine addiction and Europeans’ sweet tooth were satisfied by trafficked Africans — not to mention the U.S. shipbrokers, captains, crews and diplomats, often based in Rio de Janeiro and Havana, who were deeply involved in enslaving them.
If anything, traders seemed to become even more brazen over time. The most notorious example of American participation in the illegal trade was the involvement of New York City in the 1850s and 1860s. By this stage, the U.S. government’s negligence in combating the trade, especially its willingness to let the traffic carry on under the American flag, had become notorious all over the Atlantic basin. Slave traders, often born in Portugal but living in Brazil and Angola, came streaming into Manhattan to buy up ships for the traffic in America’s biggest ship market and financial center.
This so-called “Portuguese Company,” featuring the notorious Manoel Cunha Reis and José Maia Ferreira, worked with a laundry list of American and Cuban merchants in New York, local ship provisioners, seamen and corrupt officials such as Chief Marshal Isaiah Rynders. They sent hundreds of slave ships from New York’s crowded wharfs disguised as legal merchantmen in pursuit of African goods such as palm oil. By the opening of the Civil War, they were also operating from abolitionist strongholds of New England such as New Bedford, as well as from the Southern metropolis of New Orleans.
It was the success of these Northern-based traders that inspired Southerners such as Timothy Meaher, who was behind the Clotilda’s voyage, to start their own slaving voyages. Meaher had seen traders in other cities act with near-impunity and thought he, too, had little to fear. He was right. Another group of Southern enslavers in Georgia learned the same lesson, organizing two voyages by a large yacht named the Wanderer in the late 1850s. They escaped punishment as well.
Ironically, it was these handful of Southern voyages that aided the downfall of the American trade. The recently formed Republican Party and its leader, Abraham Lincoln, were opposed to the trade wherever it took place, but they made political hay out of lambasting Southern attempts to defy federal law. To them, it was further evidence of Southern radicalism on the slavery question. William Seward, a Republican U.S. senator from none other than New York, presented the “restoration of the African trade” as the culmination of Southerners’ dark aims, while skirting the issue of Northern involvement in the trade.
White Southerners responded with cries of hypocrisy. The trade was helping drive North and South apart.
The election of Lincoln as president in 1860 set the trade on the path to destruction, but it didn’t come immediately. Slave ships continued to leave New York until the winter of 1862, over a year into the Civil War, and during the same period when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, the last American slave ship was not the Clotilda, but the Marquita, a New York ship that the British captured off the Congo River in summer 1863. Indeed, the Confederacy acted more quickly against the trade, banning it in their provisional Constitution in 1861 to preserve unity among Southern Whites, most of whom were wary of reopening the traffic.
But the trade’s days were numbered in the North, too. Although the war was Lincoln’s clear priority, by the end of 1861 he had appointed energetic new officials in New York such as Chief Marshal Robert Murray to monitor the trade. The next year, the Senate ratified the Lyons-Seward Treaty with the British, giving the Royal Navy the right to intercept suspected American slavers at sea. And Lincoln refused to commute the death sentence of Nathaniel Gordon, a notorious trader in New York, who was subsequently hanged. The Portuguese Company buckled and broke.
Demonstrating the influence of American slaving, without the use of U.S. ports and ships, the traffic to other countries soon dwindled and then crashed, dropping by half every year until the last known slave ship arrived on Cuban shores in 1867. The Atlantic trade, the largest forced migration in human history, was finally over.
As last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” showed, the survivors of the Clotilda’s voyage forged new lives in the Americas, against the odds. While U.S. involvement in slavery and the illegal trade ended during the Civil War, its effects lived on. The trade turns out not to be so distant after all, and neither are its legacies. As we have seen in recent years, White supremacy remains a potent force in our nation and abroad, and structural inequalities stubbornly persist. The illegal trade teaches us that we should not ignore injustices that are right before our eyes. Facing them head-on would be one way to honor the victims of the last slave ships.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...long-after-it-was-illegal-with-lessons-today/
By Manuel Barcia
and
John Harris
December 6, 2020
Last weekend, “60 Minutes” featured a special on the recent discovery of the sunken remains of the slave ship Clotilda. On this vessel, traders brought 110 captive Africans to Alabama in 1860 — a full half-century after Congress outlawed such traffic.
While viewers may have been stunned to learn that trading still happened on the eve of the Civil War, they shouldn’t be. After the federal abolition of the trade went into effect Jan. 1, 1808, hundreds of illegal slaving voyages with American connections crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean, bringing captives not just into the United States but also to the two largest destinations for enslaved Africans during this period, Brazil and Cuba. These voyages fueled the expansion of slave-grown agricultural products that were traded on international markets, not only enabling a model of economic development defined by human suffering and death, but further empowering racist systems whose legacies endure today.
The 1808 ban on the trade was a bright note in the young Republic’s history, a signal that perhaps the ideals of the American Revolution could in fact be realized. But while some traders responded to the new law by quitting the traffic, others doubled down. After the ban, American ships smuggled around 8,000 enslaved Africans to U.S. shores, usually through the Gulf of Mexico, and sold them illicitly to cotton planters in the Deep South. America’s westward expansion was built on African as well as African American labor.
And arrivals in the South were dwarfed by U.S. participation in the trade to other parts of the Americas, even though the traffic was illegal there, too. Around half a million captives arrived in Brazil and Cuba aboard American ships in the 1800s, fueling the production of slave-grown coffee and sugar and feeding overseas markets for these goods. It turns out that Americans’ caffeine addiction and Europeans’ sweet tooth were satisfied by trafficked Africans — not to mention the U.S. shipbrokers, captains, crews and diplomats, often based in Rio de Janeiro and Havana, who were deeply involved in enslaving them.
If anything, traders seemed to become even more brazen over time. The most notorious example of American participation in the illegal trade was the involvement of New York City in the 1850s and 1860s. By this stage, the U.S. government’s negligence in combating the trade, especially its willingness to let the traffic carry on under the American flag, had become notorious all over the Atlantic basin. Slave traders, often born in Portugal but living in Brazil and Angola, came streaming into Manhattan to buy up ships for the traffic in America’s biggest ship market and financial center.
This so-called “Portuguese Company,” featuring the notorious Manoel Cunha Reis and José Maia Ferreira, worked with a laundry list of American and Cuban merchants in New York, local ship provisioners, seamen and corrupt officials such as Chief Marshal Isaiah Rynders. They sent hundreds of slave ships from New York’s crowded wharfs disguised as legal merchantmen in pursuit of African goods such as palm oil. By the opening of the Civil War, they were also operating from abolitionist strongholds of New England such as New Bedford, as well as from the Southern metropolis of New Orleans.
It was the success of these Northern-based traders that inspired Southerners such as Timothy Meaher, who was behind the Clotilda’s voyage, to start their own slaving voyages. Meaher had seen traders in other cities act with near-impunity and thought he, too, had little to fear. He was right. Another group of Southern enslavers in Georgia learned the same lesson, organizing two voyages by a large yacht named the Wanderer in the late 1850s. They escaped punishment as well.
Ironically, it was these handful of Southern voyages that aided the downfall of the American trade. The recently formed Republican Party and its leader, Abraham Lincoln, were opposed to the trade wherever it took place, but they made political hay out of lambasting Southern attempts to defy federal law. To them, it was further evidence of Southern radicalism on the slavery question. William Seward, a Republican U.S. senator from none other than New York, presented the “restoration of the African trade” as the culmination of Southerners’ dark aims, while skirting the issue of Northern involvement in the trade.
White Southerners responded with cries of hypocrisy. The trade was helping drive North and South apart.
The election of Lincoln as president in 1860 set the trade on the path to destruction, but it didn’t come immediately. Slave ships continued to leave New York until the winter of 1862, over a year into the Civil War, and during the same period when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, the last American slave ship was not the Clotilda, but the Marquita, a New York ship that the British captured off the Congo River in summer 1863. Indeed, the Confederacy acted more quickly against the trade, banning it in their provisional Constitution in 1861 to preserve unity among Southern Whites, most of whom were wary of reopening the traffic.
But the trade’s days were numbered in the North, too. Although the war was Lincoln’s clear priority, by the end of 1861 he had appointed energetic new officials in New York such as Chief Marshal Robert Murray to monitor the trade. The next year, the Senate ratified the Lyons-Seward Treaty with the British, giving the Royal Navy the right to intercept suspected American slavers at sea. And Lincoln refused to commute the death sentence of Nathaniel Gordon, a notorious trader in New York, who was subsequently hanged. The Portuguese Company buckled and broke.
Demonstrating the influence of American slaving, without the use of U.S. ports and ships, the traffic to other countries soon dwindled and then crashed, dropping by half every year until the last known slave ship arrived on Cuban shores in 1867. The Atlantic trade, the largest forced migration in human history, was finally over.
As last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” showed, the survivors of the Clotilda’s voyage forged new lives in the Americas, against the odds. While U.S. involvement in slavery and the illegal trade ended during the Civil War, its effects lived on. The trade turns out not to be so distant after all, and neither are its legacies. As we have seen in recent years, White supremacy remains a potent force in our nation and abroad, and structural inequalities stubbornly persist. The illegal trade teaches us that we should not ignore injustices that are right before our eyes. Facing them head-on would be one way to honor the victims of the last slave ships.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...long-after-it-was-illegal-with-lessons-today/
