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The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers." Many European slave traders generally did not participate in slave raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade because of malaria that was endemic in the African continent. An article from PBS explains: "Malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, and other diseases reduced the few Europeans living and trading along the West African coast to a chronic state of ill health and earned Africa the name 'white man's grave.' In this environment, European merchants were rarely in a position to call the shots." The earliest known use of the phrase began in the 1830s, and the earliest written evidence was found in an 1836 published book by F. H. Rankin. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807 is a United States federal law that prohibited the importation of slaves into the United States. It took effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution.
The Blockade of Africa began in 1808 after the United Kingdom outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, making it illegal for British ships to transport slaves. The Royal Navy immediately established a presence off Africa to enforce the ban, called the West Africa Squadron. Although the ban initially applied only to British ships, Britain negotiated treaties with other countries to give the Royal Navy the right to intercept and search their ships for slaves.
Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinqué or Cinquez and sometimes referred to mononymously as Cinqué, was a West African man of the Mende people who led a revolt of many Africans on the Spanish slave ship La Amistad in July 1839. After the ship was taken into custody by the US Revenue-Marine, Cinqué and his fellow Africans were eventually tried for mutiny and killing officers on the ship, in a case known as United States v. The Amistad. This reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Cinqué and his fellow Africans were found to have rightfully defended themselves from being enslaved through the illegal Atlantic slave trade and were released. The US government did not provide any aid to the acquitted Mende People. The United Missionary Society, a black group founded by James W.C. Pennington, helped raise money for the return of thirty-five of the survivors to Sierra Leone in 1842.
Wanderer was the penultimate documented ship to bring an illegal cargo of enslaved people from Africa to the United States, landing at Jekyll Island, Georgia, on November 28, 1858. It was the last to carry a large cargo, arriving with some 400 people. Clotilda, which transported 110 people from Dahomey in 1860, is the last known ship to bring enslaved people from Africa to the US.
La Amistad was a 19th-century two-masted schooner owned by a Spaniard living in Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives who had been captured and sold to European slave traders and illegally transported by a Portuguese ship from West Africa to Cuba, in violation of European treaties against the Atlantic slave trade. Spanish plantation owners Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes bought 53 captives in Havana, Cuba, including four children, and were transporting them on the ship to their plantations near Puerto Príncipe. The revolt began after the schooner's cook jokingly told the slaves that they were to be "killed, salted, and cooked." Sengbe Pieh unshackled himself and the others on the third day and started the revolt. They took control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook. Two Africans were also killed in the melee.
The first USS Wanderer was a high-speed schooner originally built for pleasure. It was used in 1858 to illegally import slaves from Africa. It was seized for service with the United States Navy during the American Civil War. In U.S. Navy service from 1861 to 1865, and under outright U.S. Navy ownership from 1863 to 1865, she was used by the Union Navy as a gunboat, as a tender, and as a hospital ship. She was decommissioned, put into merchant use, and lost off Cuba in 1871.
The schooner Clotilda was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving at Mobile Bay, in autumn 1859 or on July 9, 1860, with 110 African men, women, and children. The ship was a two-masted schooner, 86 feet (26 m) long with a beam of 23 ft (7.0 m).
Africatown, also known as AfricaTown USA and Plateau, is an historic community located three miles (5 km) north of downtown Mobile, Alabama. It was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were bought and transported against their will in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States. The Atlantic slave trade had been banned since 1808, but 110 slaves held by the Kingdom of Dahomey were smuggled into Mobile on the Clotilda, which was burned and scuttled to try to conceal its illicit cargo. More than 30 of these people, believed to be ethnic Yoruba, Ewe, and Fon, founded and created their own community in what became Africatown. They retained their West African customs and language into the 1950s, while their children and some elders also learned English. Cudjo Kazoola Lewis, a founder of Africatown, lived until 1935 and was long thought to be the last survivor of the slaves from the Clotilda living in Africatown.
HMS Nimble was a Royal Navy 5-gun schooner-of-war. She was employed in anti-slave trade patrol from 1826 until 1834, when she was wrecked on a reef with the loss of 70 Africans who had been rescued from a slave ship.
Guerrero was a Spanish slave ship that wrecked in 1827 on a reef near the Florida Keys with 561 Africans aboard. Forty-one of the Africans drowned in the wreck. Guerrero had been engaged in a battle with a British anti-slavery patrol ship, HMS Nimble, stationed on the northern approaches to Cuba. Nimble also ran onto the reef, but was refloated and returned to service. The two ships were attended by wreckers, who rescued the Spanish crew and surviving Africans from their ship and helped refloat Nimble. Spanish crew members hijacked two of the wrecking vessels and took almost 400 Africans to Cuba, where they were sold as slaves. Most of the remaining Africans were eventually returned to Africa.
Sunny South, an extreme clipper, was the only full-sized sailing ship built by George Steers, and resembled his famous sailing yacht America, with long sharp entrance lines and a slightly concave bow. Initially, she sailed in the California and Brazil trades. Sold in 1859 and renamed Emanuela, she was considered to be the fastest slaver sailing out of Havana. The British Royal Navy captured Emanuela off the coast of Africa in 1860 with over 800 slaves aboard. The Royal Navy purchased her as a prize and converted her into a Royal Navy store ship, Enchantress. She was wrecked in the Mozambique Channel in 1861.
African Slave Trade Patrol was part of the Blockade of Africa suppressing the Atlantic slave trade between 1819 and the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. Due to the abolitionist movement in the United States, a squadron of U.S. Navy warships and cutters were assigned to catch slave traders in and around Africa. In 42 years about 100 suspected slave ships were captured.
Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar was an American businessman from Savannah, Georgia, best known for his leadership in an investment ring to illegally import slaves from Africa on the ship Wanderer in 1858. The ship ran blockades and brought 409 surviving Africans from the Congo to the United States for sale. The ship was later impounded. Although Lamar and numerous other defendants were prosecuted, none of them were convicted.
Redoshi was a West African woman who was enslaved and smuggled to the U.S. state of Alabama as a girl in 1860. Until a later surviving claimant, Matilda McCrear, was announced in 2020, she was considered to have been the last surviving victim of the transatlantic slave trade. Taken captive in warfare at age 12 by the West African kingdom of Dahomey, she was sold to Americans and transported by ship to the United States in violation of U.S. law. She was sold again and enslaved on the upcountry plantation of the Washington M. Smith family in Dallas County, Alabama, where her owner renamed her Sally Smith.
Matilda McCrear, born Àbáké, was the last known survivor in the United States of the transatlantic slave trade and the ship Clotilda. She was a Yoruba who was captured and brought to Mobile, Mobile County, Alabama at the age of two with her mother and older sister.
The movement to reopen the transatlantic slave trade was an 1850s American campaign by white Southerners, many of them future Confederates, to repeal the 1808 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves and restart the transatlantic slave trade. Due to their foundational role in the Southern economy, and in part due to rampant speculation, slaves had become very expensive. Advocates for restarting slave imports hoped to drive down prices by increasing supply, making slave ownership more accessible to those outside the planter class, and making individual slaves cheaper and more disposable, in the hopes that it would secure the political future of slavery in the United States.
The importation of slaves from overseas to the United States was prohibited in 1808, but criminal trafficking of enslaved people on a smaller scale likely continued for many years. The most intensive periods of piracy were in the 1810s, before the U.S. Congress passed laws with massive fines and penalties including execution for illegal importers, and in the 1850s, when pro-slavery activists decided that the solution to rapid inflation in slave prices was simply to flood the market with humans abducted from across the ocean.
Nelson Clement Trowbridge, usually doing business as N. C. Trowbridge, was an American businessman who worked as both a merchant and farmer in Poughkeepsie, New York, and a slave trader in the Deep South for approximately 25 years prior to the American Civil War. Trowbridge trafficked in slaves in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Louisiana. He also became a plantation owner in Mississippi. He was party to the illegal importation of slaves from Africa on the Wanderer in 1857. Many of the letters written by C. A. L. Lamar about his illegal transatlantic slave trade enterprise of the late 1850s were addressed to Trowbridge ("Trow") in New Orleans. Lamar and Trowbridge, who had had several businesses together, from breeding racehorses to mining for gold, were responsible for at least one blockade-runner, the Ceres, during the American Civil War. Trowbridge was arrested on treason charges twice during the war, and convicted in 1864 of treason and blockade running. The New York Herald and other newspapers deemed him a New York-based Confederate spy and business agent. He seems to have lived in New York City and Mississippi after the war. He died in Mississippi in 1879 and is buried in Augusta, Georgia.
Ceres was a blockade runner of the American Civil War. After Ceres was abandoned near the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina in December 1863, U.S. Navy officers searched the burning ship and found documents belonging to C. A. L. Lamar that revealed several important details about the business of blockade running.
References
- ↑ Wells, Tom Henderson (2009-07-01). The Slave Ship Wanderer. University of Georgia Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-8203-3457-8.
- ↑ "The African slave-trade / by Rufus W. Clark". HathiTrust. 1860. p. 88. hdl:2027/pst.000055471992 . Retrieved 2023-08-15.
- ↑ North-American Review and Miscellaneous Journal. University of Northern Iowa. 1886. p. 458.
- ↑ "The Baltimore Sun 03 Jul 1927, page 8". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 2023-08-11.
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