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Dale T. Graden, Leonardo Marques. The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 192–193, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.192
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With meticulous research and wide-ranging analysis, Leonardo Marques shows the multiple ways that the United States participated in the transatlantic slave trade. The book provides insights into the “profound structural transformations” during the long nineteenth century, which included “trade liberalization on a global scale and industrial development in parts of the North Atlantic” (3). At the same time, it sheds light on key moments, such as the passage of anti–slave trade laws, and on specific individuals, particularly traffickers of human flesh. The volume shows the clash between pirates who espoused free-trade ideas and considered Africans to be private property and those determined to end a highly profitable and brutal business. For brevity’s sake, United States involvement in the transatlantic slave trade can be broken into four phases.
In a first phase, between the years 1776 and 1820, investors from Rhode Island enabled a U.S. entrée into the transatlantic slave trade. Members of the D’Wolf family of Bristol and the Brown family of Providence, along with numerous others, created a triangular trade that connected Rhode Island, West Africa, and the Caribbean. These entrepreneurs traded New England rum for slaves, whom they transported to Cuba and the U.S. South. Sugar produced in Cuba enabled the production of the rum. “Products forged transatlantic connections as much as winds and ocean currents” (21). These Rhode Islanders became wealthy, and invested in various businesses and institutions. This first phase is distinct in that U.S. merchants directly financed slaving voyages. Several antislavery trade laws that passed in the U.S. (1794, 1800, 1807, 1818, 1819, 1820) helped force an end to Rhode Island’s predominant role in the traffic. International pressures also came into play, specifically, England’s passage of a law in 1807 that prohibited the slave trade throughout its empire and England’s signing of treaties with several nations to suppress the trade from 1817. The dialectic between internal debates in the United States over the illegality of U.S. participation in the international slave trade and external pressures exerted by England to halt this “odious commerce” is a theme that surfaces throughout the volume.
