The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644–1867: An Assessment

Last year was the bicentenary of the abolition of the African slave trade by the United States and 2008 is the bicentenary of that law going into effect. But there arbetter reasons to reconsider the patterns of the U.S. side of the African slave trade. More African migrants have arrived in the United States since 1992 than during the whole slave trade era. Moreover, the moment at which the second African diaspora overtakes the first in terms of size and diversity coincides with a technological revolution. Digitization and the World Wide Web have combined with an established computer revolution to provide historians easy access to documents, and, more important, the power to digest and manipulate the information they contain that is way beyond what their predecessors could ever have imagined. The impact of technology is particularly significant for a subject where the quality and quantity of surviving records is generally very strong and the geographic scatter of the documents immense. While there is much still to be discovered about the U.S. trade in Africans, we can now throw major new light on its rise and fall, the people involved, its size and direction, and a great range of other issues, many of which are not at all quantitative.

The recent launch of the new transatlantic slave trade database (at www.slavevoyages.org) permits an overall reassessment of colonial American and U.S. involvement in the slave trade over the more than three centuries when, by one or more of the definitions discussed below, it was a going concern. Containing records of 34,941 voyages to the Americas, plus a new set of interactive estimates of the volume and direction of the business, it contains the most complete compendium of the U.S. slave trade yet. It brings together and, more important, integrates approximately 3,700 voyages that had some connection with the North American mainland. Much, though not all, of the data were assembled by Elizabeth Donnan, Jay Coughtry, James McMillin, Warren S. Howard, and numerous other scholars. Voyages that took a year to complete and passed through several jurisdictions, each with its own record gathering processes, necessarily generated fragmentary information about their routes and the people who sailed on them. The new Voyages database constitutes the first serious attempt to tie the voluminous data on the slave trade to, among other places, the North American continent.¹

But there is an immediate preliminary question of definition. Even if we confine our attention to captives carried across the Atlantic Ocean as opposed to those coming in from elsewhere in the Americas, at least three overlapping definitions of "U.S. slave trade" come to mind. One is the traffic that brought slaves into the territories that either were or became the United States. A second is the traffic carried on in slaving expeditions organized in those territories. A third is the traffic carried on under the U.S. flag, which in the nineteenth century became in part a flag of convenience for slave traders based outside North America, especially those operating from Cuba and Brazil. But, whatever definition is employed, it is rather startling to consider that half a century after the first awakening of scholarly interest in slavery and the slave trade in the United States, which has generated many thousands of monographs and articles, there is still no book on the U.S. transatlantic slave trade, however defined.² It scarcely seems possible that what is offered here is, in fact, not so much a reassessment as a first assessment.

The first definition is probably the one that interests most historians. The size and origin of the first African diaspora is basic to more issues in U.S. history than it is possible to list. There may be no monograph on the overall subject, but there is certainly no shortage of opinion, laid out in books and essays on how many people came from Africa to the United States before slavery was abolished and where those people came from. The literature suggests two methods of estimating the number...