The transatlantic slave trade in the United States was not meant to last until the Civil War. And it wasn’t meant to be a profit center for North American abolitionists.
But even after Congress banned U.S. participation in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and declared it piracy in 1820 – a crime punishable by the death penalty – a robust illegal trade continued. . American shipowners, merchants, sailors, and corrupt officials, based largely in New York City, worked with foreign allies to continue shipping captive Africans through the Middle Passage until the 1860s. This practice did not occur. not only inflicted terrible suffering on enslaved Africans; he also deepened the national divide over the institution of slavery, a divide that contributed to the bloodiest conflict in US history.
READ MORE: First discovery of wrecked slave ship gives brutal details
Continuing the illegal slave trade out of New York
A slave market in New York Harbor.
MPI / Getty Images
The United States was not alone in banning the slave trade – all major slave nations abolished it in 1836 – but that did not end anti-Black racism or the pursuit of profit. Global demand for sugar, coffee, and cotton increased dramatically in the 1800s, and planters in the Americas sought captive laborers to help meet it. The traffickers themselves had a strong incentive to challenge international abolition: Profits from slave traffickers reached 90%, ten times more than a century earlier.
The United States has played a key role in this illegal trafficking from the start. Slave traders brought some 8,000 captives to the southern United States in the decades following the 1807 ban, including hundreds just before the Civil War. Among the last captives brought to American soil was Oluale Kossola (renamed Cudjo Lewis), a young Yoruba who sailed aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the United States in 1860; before his death in 1935, he gave a powerful series of interviews to anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, chronicling the trauma of being captured, sold, and shipped to a foreign land to live – and work – in bondage.
READ MORE: One of the last survivors of a slave boat describes his ordeal in a 1930s interview
But by far the most important contribution was the use of American ships as slave ships. Slave traders loved fast ships such as the Baltimore Clipper, which could outrun slave patrols, including the much larger American and British squadrons. The US government has also refused to allow other countries to intercept ships owned by US citizens. As a result, slave traders from the Atlantic Basin flocked to the American flag, often using American citizens in Rio de Janeiro and Havana as buyers of straw. In the end, half a million captives came to Brazil and Cuba aboard American slave ships in the years following the ban on transatlantic trade.
In the 1850s, a particularly brazen group of slave traders, known as the Portuguese Company, established their headquarters in the burgeoning metropolis of New York. Led by Manoel Cunha Reis, a Portuguese trader who had trafficked Africans enslaved in Brazil and Angola, this group bought second-hand ships in Manhattan’s vast maritime market. Then they worked with American sailors, ship purveyors and corrupt officials like Field Marshal Isaiah Rynders to bring ships en route to Africa for what they claimed to be legal voyages.
New York rose to international fame during these years, especially as the slave trade in Cuba, the main destination for captives, exploded. Almost all of the slavers after 1850 – about 500 – were Americans, and most had connections with New York. British newspapers have called New York “the world’s largest slave market”.
READ MORE: Slavery persisted in New England until the 19th century
Emilio Sanchez: the little-known abolitionist
The British authorities were among the fiercest opponents of the slave trade. Since the US government has largely turned a blind eye to trafficking and refused to let the Royal Navy intercept American slavers, British Consul in New York, Sir Edward Archibald, took matters into their own hands by hiring a spy. . His name was Emilio Sanchez, and he is one of the great unknown abolitionists in American history.
Born in Cuba, Sanchez immigrated to the United States and became a shipowner and merchant in New York. After an entanglement with members of the Portuguese Company ended badly, he was hungry for revenge. He interviewed Archibald and signed up for £ 400 a month plus bonuses for each trip completed due to his information.
Sanchez put his knowledge of Manhattan’s waterfront to good use. For three and a half years he spied on slave traders, monitoring their movements and the departures of their ships. He struck up a conversation with the captains, sailors and outfitters, asking them for information. What was the name of the ship? His owner? When would he leave New York? He wrote everything – often in numbers, for security reasons – for Consul Archibald.
Archibald sent Sanchez’s information across the Atlantic Ocean to London and to British cruisers off the coast of Africa. Often it arrived with British ships before slavers had arrived from American ports. Armed with information that the real owners of the ships were not US citizens, and therefore not allowed to fly the US flag, the Royal Navy struck. In total, Sanchez’s intelligence ended 30 slave journeys and prevented some 20,000 captives from going through the Middle Passage.
READ MORE: This 1841 sea rebellion freed over 100 enslaved people
Illegal slave trade became a problem during the Brewers Civil War
As the slave trade developed in New York City, the nation was increasingly divided over slavery. During a heated dispute over the institution in Kansas, a new party emerged: the Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln and William Seward. Unlike the ruling Democratic Party, which supported slavery and had little interest in crushing the illegal slave trade, Republicans spoke out forcefully against both.
Instead of training their guns in New York City, Republicans reserved their fiercest critics for the South. It was politically convenient: A handful of vocal southerners like Leonidas Spratt of South Carolina sought to reopen the slave trade on their shores in the mid-1850s. Republicans and many northerners were dismayed.
READ MORE: How slavery became the economic engine of the South
William Seward, a New Yorker, addressed the issue, saying “restoring the African slave trade” was a priority of the South, a program that would sow slavery on the expanding western border. He made the issue a key part of his “Irrepressible Conflict” speech in 1858. Abraham Lincoln did the same in his famous “House Divided” speech that same year.
The Southerners and their northern allies responded by accusing Lincoln and the North of hypocrisy and telling them to handle the traffic “under their own eyes.” But when a few ships, including the Clotilda, arrived in the Deep South between 1858 and 1860, Republican critics gained in strength. The blockade of the “reopening of the south” became part of the Lincoln Platform during the presidential election of 1860. Like the Kansas Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott and John Brown raid, the illegal slave trade is turned into a burning coal in the fire of the sectoral crisis.
READ MORE: Forced marriage as 12-year-old girl: The life of the last survivor of an American slave ship
Trade collapses
When the nation broke up after Lincoln’s election, it was actually the Confederacy that took the first steps against the slave trade. Recognizing that the issue was dividing the Confederates at a time when they needed unity more than ever, leading politicians banned trafficking entirely in the Confederate Constitution in 1861.
Lincoln also acted against trade by allowing the British to search American ships under the Lyons-Seward Treaty and refusing to commute the death sentence of slave captain Nathaniel Gordon, who became the only American executed under of the law of 1820. Frightened, the Portuguese fled.
By 1863, the American slave trade had finally ceased.
John Harris is the McDonald-Boswell Chair of History at Erskine College and the author of The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage. Follow him on Twitter: @drjohnaeharris.
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