The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644-1867: An assessment

Civil War History

Volumn 54, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 347-378

  Eltis, David ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 70349929254     PISSN: 00098078     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. The Web site www.slavevoyages.org contains three search interfaces. The term "Voyages Database" refers to the first of these three, which gives users access to a database of 34,941 slave voyages. The term "Estimates Page" refers to the second interface, which allows users to interact with the authors' assessment of the overall size and direction of the slave trade. The third interface, accessing details of 67,000 African captives, is not used in this essay.
2. Jay Coughtry The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1981) takes up the Rhode Island slave trade only. As shown below, this accounted for less than half of the U.S. slave trade (again, by any definition).
3. For arrivals in North America, see Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston, Little, Brown, 1974).
4. For the last quarter century of the trade prior to federal abolition taking effect in 1807, see James A. McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810 (Columbia, S.C.: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2004).
5. "Foreign" in the title means "international" and is intended to separate out the author's interest from the U.S. domestic slave trade, which has received much more scholarly attention. To these might be added W. E. B. DuBois's study of suppression, which focuses on the nineteenth century, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1896).
6. For a thesis that draws mainly on secondary sources, see Tommy Todd Hamm, "The American Slave Trade with Africa, 1620-1808," Ph.D. Diss., Indiana University, 1975.
7. Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: Evidence and Methods (New York: Norton, 1989), 55, table 4.2, "The U.S. Slave Trade: A Revised Estimate";
8. McMillin, Final Victims, 18-48. On the census issue, note that estimates of white immigration calculated by the same method also reveal improbably high inflows in 1780-1810.
9. See Hank Gemery, "European Emigration to Norrth America, 1700-1820: Numbers and Quasi-Numbers," Perspectives in American History, New series, 1 (1984): 283-342.
10. See http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom= 1501&yearTo=1866&disembarkation=205.203.201.202.204. For justification of the 85 percent figure see Introduction," Extending the Frontier: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. by David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2008).
11. The 85 percent figure is a weighted average of the ratio of known slaving voyages under the U.S. flag (77.5 percent) and the equivalent ratio for the British trade (93.7 percent) shown in table 1.4 in Extending the Frontier: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ibid., pp. 132-33.
12. McMillin, Final Victims, enclosed CD-ROM. This contains 148 voyages not in our database at the time of the book's publication, subsequently added to slavevoyages.org. McMillin's estimates of slave arrivals in 1783-1810, derived from the "slave-carrying capacity," of the vessels in his database are similar to the independently calculated estimates on slavevoyages.org (146,000 versus 121,000 transatlantic plus 17,000 intra-American arrivals from O'Malley). But the McMillin database has a greater than usual double-counting problem. What appear to be separate voyages are often really fragments of other voyages already included. Not all 1,764 entries in the McMillin database have been checked, but one voyage shows up as no less than five times, 22 others are entered three times, and 224 voyages are included twice. A further 31 are either not slave ships (or lack any identifying marks) or have dates that suggest probable double-counting. Moreover, some other entries have references that are not verifiable. We have set aside a total of 364 entries - one fifth - of the McMillin CD. Not yet checked are the arrivals of vessels in intra-American slave trade, which may have similar problems.
13. The agents of the Royal African Company wrote from the Gambia River in 1701 that "the whole trade of the River lyeth in the hands of the tennpercent ships who are here at this present seven in number some from Carolina & the rest from England who daily increase the price of slaves in this River ("Extract of a letter from Messrs Nathan Pile, Thomas Rayner & Richard Oakely dated 4 March 1700" in British National Archives [hereafter BNA], Treasury series 70, piece 175 [hereafter T70/175], fol. 23. Slave vessels from colonial North America disembarked an average of only 120 slaves before 1711. To replicate this result, see: (http://wilson.library.emory. edu:9090/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo=1710&ptdepimp= 20000). See also "Petition of Sundry Merchants and Planters of the Province of Carolina on behalfe of themselves and the Rest of the Inhabitants of the said Province," circa 1711 (fol. 121).
14. See www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?year From=1809&yearTo=1866&disembarkation=205.203.201.202.204.
15. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 75.
16. Ernest Obadele Starks, Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808 (Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 2007), 10.
17. See http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?year From=1809 yearTo=1866&fate3=3.
18. The Slave Trade Department of the Foreign Office generated about 1,100 volumes of correspondence between 1819, when it was established ,and 1860 (FO 84). The Admiralty 1 series, containing letters from naval officers to the secretary of the admiralty, contains an approximate further two hundred volumes - particularly useful for the pre-1835 period. Over the years, I have consulted about two thirds of this material without finding any evidence of a systematic slave trade from Africa to the United States after 1808.
19. U.S. Census Office, A Compendium of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870), Compiled Pursuant to a Concurrent Resolution of Congress, and under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (New York: N. Ross Pub., 1990). Curiously, Starks cites the ninth census but does so only to indicate the distribution of African-born across individual states. He draws no conclusions from the miniscule numbers of African-born people that he uses to derive this distribution (Freebooters and Smugglers, 208).
20. Greg O'Malley, "Final Passages: The British Inter-Colonial Slave Trade, 1619-1807" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins Univ., 2007), 112.
21. For estimates of arrivals in the Caribbean, see http://www.slavevoyages. org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom=1501&yearTo= 1866&disembarkation=309.501.305.405.304.401.600.310.306.303.402.311.701.403. 302.307.702.404.301.308.
22. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1: 25.
23. One thousand a year from 1809 to 1860 totals 52,000, and arrivals from other parts of the Americas is 52,000 less the 6,100 estimated to have come direct from Africa. Starks constantly conflates the traffic from Africa with the traffic from the rest of the Americas, but see chapters 3 through 5 of Freebooters and Smugglers for references to people and strategies that may have been involved in introducing foreign captives.
24. Philip D. Morgan, "Black Society in Lowcountry, 1760-1810," in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1983), 110-11;
25. Allan Kulikoff, "Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790-1820, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ibid., 144-45
26. and Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986).
27. The total of 389,000 arrivals is close to Curtin's estimate of 399,000, though there are considerable differences between our methodology and his (The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969], 72-75).
28. Stephen D. Behrendt, "Seasonality, African Trade and Atlantic History" (paper presented to Atlantic History seminar, Harvard, August 2007), directed by Professor Bernard Bailyn.
29. The Voyages Database shows that arrivals in the Caribbean in July, August, and September over the whole period of the slave trade were 54 percent of those in January, but the variation through the rest of the year was minor.
30. This no doubt explains the reluctance of the Royal African Company to bring slaves into the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century unless the slaves had been contracted for in London, prior to the vessel sailing. See David Galenson, Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).
31. David Eltis, Philip D. Morgan, and David Richardson, "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas," American Historical Review 112 (2007): 1213-42.
32. Lorena S. Walsh, "Mercantile Strategies, Credit Networks, and Labor Supply in the Colonial Chesapeake in Trans-Atlantic Perspective," in Slavery in the Development of the Americas, ed. by David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and Kenneth Sokoloff (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 99-100.
33. Lorena S. Walsh, Slavery in the Development of the Americas, Ibid., 100-102.
34. Because the New York merchants were Jewish, the "Crown Galley" has received more attention from some researchers than it warrants. See Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998).
35. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), 121.
36. See "The Declaration of Independence: The Want, Will, and Hopes of the People," http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.
37. The name of the first of these vessels has not survived. The second was the Marghareta or Mariquita. The numbers for these voyages in the database (called a voyageid) are 25,055 and 4,829 respectively.
38. Daniel Domingues da Silva, "The Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhao, 1684-1846: Volume, Roots and Organization," Slavery and Abolition (forthcoming in December, 2008).
39. For the larger argument see Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1944).
40. For the U.S. case see Ronald Bailey, "The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England," in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, ed. by Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), 205-46.
41. Helen Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926-37), 2:285.
42. The emergence of the U.S. whaling fleet forms the subject of one of the classic studies of the beginnings of a new industry in the federal period. See Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and T. D. Hutchins, "Call Me Ishmael, not Domingo Floresta: The Rise and Fall of the American Whaling Industry," Research in Economic History 13 (1991): 191-233.
43. For the appearance of steam ships in the slave trade, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1514&yearTo= 1866&rig=28.
44. Coughtry, Notorious Triangle, 25.
45. Cf. David Richardson, "Slave Exports from West and West-Central Africa, 1700-1810: New Estimates of Volume and Distribution," Journal of African History 30 (1989): 8-9.
46. Slaves on the African coast at this time cost about $90 each, and U.S. merchants purchased about 20,000 a year; total cost on the coast thus amounted to $1.8 million. The new U.S. Historical Statistics Web site gives total U.S. imports at this time of about $80 million a year. Note that a peculiarity of the U.S. trade statistics in this era is that imports were valued at the port of loading, not on a c.i.f. (cost, insurance, freight) basis. Slaves were thus worth a little more than 2 percent of U.S. trade.
47. On February 8, 1695, Edward Searle, an RAC factor at Commenda, noted the arrival of a briganteen from New England laden with provisions at Axim (Bread, flour, butter pork, Barbados rum, Madeira wine), Rawlinson manuscript, C746, fol. 67, Bodleian Library, Oxford. The Chief Factor at Cape Coast castle asked that a ship he was dispatching to Virginia be returned to the castle "with tobacco, Wheat, flow, rice, Beef, Pork, Pitch, Tarr, firr poles, Small Masts & Yards etc." (Dalby Thomas, Apr. 22, 1705, BNA, T70/28, fol. 61.
48. Stede and Gascoigne, Feb. 2, 1686, BNA, T70/12, fol. 14. The Royal African Company instructed its factors: "For ye preservation of our negroes we Recomend to you to allow a sufficient quantity of Tobacco, Palm Ovle, Beans and Brandy" (RAC to Peter Duffield, Whydah, Aug. 12, 1701, BNA, T70/51, 105).
49. Captain Willis, May 5, 1705, T70/28, fol. 62, BNA. In the 1720s, another anonymous RAC official provided a similar list that specified 50 gallons per 100 slaves (T70/1222, fol. 8, BNA). The T70 911 to 968 pieces in BNA contain hundreds of manifests of actual slave provisions for slavers leaving London, all of which contain alcohol, tobacco and tobacco pipes.
50. Dalby Thomas, Apr. 28, 1704, BNA, T70/28, fol. 35.
51. George Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters & African Middlemen: A History of American Legitimate Trade with West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Boston Univ. Press, 1970), 18.
52. George Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters & African Middlemen: A History of American Legitimate Trade with West Africa in the Nineteenth Century Ibid., 23.
53. Most recently, Gerald Horne, while avoiding any quantitative assessment, has argued that "U.S. slavers were flocking to the beleagured continent in mid 1840s to buy and kidnap Africans," and that "the illicit slave trade to Brazil . . . was being engineered significantly by U.S. nationals." See The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2007), 64.
54. Starks, in Freebooters and Smugglers, 110-15, 156-62, 167-82, also implies large U.S. involvement, but unlike Horne does not always separate out the traffic to Brazil and Cuba from the traffic to the United States, even though his book is ostensibly about the latter.
55. Eltis, Economic Growth, 55-56, 108-109, 145-63;
56. and the literature cited in Alexandre Vieira Ribeiro and Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, "Amazonia and North-East Brazil in the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment of the Brazilian Slave Trade North of Rio de Janeiro," unpublished paper, 2008.
57. Eltis, Economic Growth, 125-44.
58. The Rosa, captured by the British in 1816 (voyageid = 5,034) turned out to be the Perry, a Baltimore privateer that had cleared out from Havana. The captain and all the crew were American. The crews of the slave vessels captured by the USS Cyane off Upper Guinea in 1820 (see below) were taken back to the U.S. and prosecuted as U.S. citizens. See the (Annapolis) Maryland Gazette and Political Intelligencer, July 18, 1816;
59. Providence (R.I.) Patriot, Columbian Phenix , Dec. 30, 1820.
60. U.S. Government, American State Papers, 2d ser., vol. 5 (1823): 141;
61. The Federal Cases, 30 vols. (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co., 1894-97), 8:985.
62. But see also the report in the Washington, D.C., Daily National Intelligencer, June 19, 1820,
63. "Of the Coast of Africa Extract of a Letter from an Officer on Board the U. States' Ship Cyane, to His Friend in New York," Providence Patriot, Columbian Phenix, Jan. 24, 1821. Two crews of two of the captured vessels retook their vessel from the American prize crew.
64. See Serge Daget, Répertoire des Expéditions Négrières Françaises à la Traite Illégale (1814-1850) (Nantes: Centre de recherche sur l'histoire du mond atlantique, Université de Nantes: Comité nantais d'études en sciences humaines, 1988), 169.
65. David Eltis, "The British Contribution to the Transatlantic Slave Trade after 1807," Economic History Review 22 (1979): 211-27.
66. Despite the fact that he did not accept that the voyage of the Clotilda did not actually take place, Warren S. Howard's American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837-1862 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963)
67. remains the most reliable survey of U.S. involvement in the last years of the slave trade, together with Don Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001)
68. and Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007) provide excellent accounts of particular aspects of the U.S. role.
69. After all, less than half the African captives crossed the Atlantic under the Danish, U.S. and British flags. To see this point, go to http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces?yearFrom= 1501&yearTo=1866 and compare U.S. and British totals in bottom row of table with the total number of slaves exported in the bottom right-hand cell.