American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865 by Sean M. Kelley
A Sea of Words: Lincoln Paine reviews
Author: Sean M. Kelley
496 Pages
6.12 x 9.25
Hardcover and eBook formats
Published by Yale University Press, May 2023
9780300263596
Americans’ involvement in the transatlantic slave trade is sometimes downplayed because only 305,000 enslaved Africans were embarked in American ships between the 1640s and 1860s, and these represent only 2.4 percent of the total number of enslaved people brought from Africa to the Americas over the course of nearly four centuries.
Yet as Sean Kelley explains in American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865, these figures have been used to discount the impact of the trade on the United States, as if anyone can justifiably ignore the moral and financial cost of American involvement in the transatlantic trade in human beings. We might as well dismiss Covid-19 because a coronavirus because is only nanometers wide.
American Slavers is a tightly argued refutation of this way of thinking that focuses on the work of American traders who transported enslaved people from Africa to the Americas rather than on the importation of captives into the colonies and United States generally or the interstate slave trade. He pays particular attention to the political milieus in which American traders had to work in Madagascar and western and central Africa. And he shines a harsh light on the impact of the barbaric commerce on American ports that relied on the trade to one degree or another, in particular Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina.
Among the many things that make Kelley’s account of Americans’ involvement in human trafficking so devastating is its necessary focus on the banality of commerce: how much a person cost, the replacement of trade goods for specie in transactions, the number of enslaved people ships’ officers were entitled to as a “privilege,” the difficulty of obtaining insurance or paying remittances when the trade was outlawed, the complexities of breaking into the trade in Africa, or of skirting laws and treaties, even though these were all too often enforced halfheartedly.
The chronological ark of Americans involvement in the trade is easy enough to trace: Seventeenth-century English Bostonians and Dutch New Yorkers — many of them pirates or in league with pirates — trafficked people between Madagascar and the Caribbean, especially Barbados. These gave way to the “rum men” of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, though the latter dominated the trade in the 1730s, their ascendancy due perhaps to a change in monetary policy ordained from London, which affected the royal colony of Massachusetts, but not Rhode Island, a charter colony.
At this point, Americans focused on the Guinea Coast around Senegambia, and Kelley explains how the African side of the ledger was influenced by the same sort of considerations as animated Americans and Europeans: a need for revenues generated by the traffic in people; religious proscriptions on enslavement — specifically of Muslims by non-Muslims (and, as among Christians, often ignored); drought as a driver of migration; political rivalries; and the like.
The focus of the trade subsequently moved to the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), where Americans entered more well-established markets in which they were able to contract for enslaved people as much as a year in advance and, as Kelley puts it, they “entered into a crude futures market in human lives.”
When the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves took effect in 1808, American traders moved offshore, first modelling for and later in service to mostly Cuba-based traders. When an 1835 treaty allowed British warships to arrest Spanish ships simply for being equipped with the paraphernalia of the slave trade, Cubans began using the Stars and Stripes as a flag of convenience. By the 1850s, the traffic in people had been almost universally outlawed, and Kelley fittingly describes the far-flung networks of shippers, brokers, crews, and others — then centered on Cuba, New York, and Congo — as constituting closely held transnational crime syndicates.
The Lincoln administration took an aggressive approach to slavery and the slave trade — overseeing the only execution of a convicted slaver, allowing British warships a limited right of search of suspected slave ships, and the Emancipation Proclamation — but Kelley notes that the trade itself might have continued had it not been for the growing hostility to slavery in Cuba and Spain, which passed forceful anti-slave trade legislation in 1866.
This is a comprehensive history, but profoundly nuanced, and while Kelley is in no way sympathetic to the trade or the people who drove it, neither is he in any way polemical. American Slavers will remain the standard treatment of its subject for the foreseeable future.
Kelley, Sean M. American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
