The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810 (review)

This work demonstrates the value of careful attention to a subject that previously appeared only as part of more general surveys. In The Final Victims, James A. McMillin attends to the Atlantic slave trade between the end of the Revolutionary War and the federal ban beginning in 1808. This close examination yields important insights into the extent of the commerce, the shifting origins of this new generation of forced migrants and the merchants who sent ships to capture them, and the new levels of brutality accompanying this last stage of the legal traffic.

As McMillin pursues these subjects, he offers several important conclusions. His discussion of the numbers of victims is of particular value and will likely prove the most lasting contribution of this book. He subjects the methods and sources used by past estimators to unflinching scrutiny. McMillin acknowledges and reveals all the difficulties involved in the complex task of making correct estimates. But his methodical critique of past efforts makes for a convincing case. So does his willingness to reveal his own methods and sources and to combine three different means of arriving at the best possible estimate. McMillin's transparency with his sources is refreshing. He provides not only extensive appendices in the book, but also a searchable CD database of slave arrivals, voyages, and sales (with a guide for searching it in the book's appendices) sold along with the book. McMillin makes a convincing case that the number of foreign slaves brought to America between 1783 and 1808 was on the order of 170,000—well above Philip D. Curtin's estimate of 92,000 in The Atlantic Slave Trade; a Census (1969) and below Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman's 291,000 in Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1992).

Another valuable chapter is McMillin's account of the rise of European and Yankee merchants in the Charleston and Savannah commerce in slaves. Southern-born merchants had dominated the trade in the colonial era, earning vast profits and social respectability. But after the dislocations of the American Revolution, what McMillin calls a "second and more successful British invasion" (78) descended on the lowcountry in the form of merchants who drove all competitors out. In the hard times of the 1780s, merchants' British origins and status as demanding creditors kept young southerners from aspiring to join their ranks, and "the voids created by retirements and deaths were usually filled by northern or European immigrants or their sons" (83). Thus it was the vagaries of debt and social pressures, not antislavery sensitivities, that kept white southerners from regaining their previous prominence as slave traders. This is an important point, for it entered political debates in the antebellum era when southern spokesmen blamed hypocritical Yankees for violating their antislavery professions by foisting slaves on reluctant southerners. This was a redirected revival of the old charge of British merchants forcing slaves on the colonies, and while it got the demographics right, it was misleading as to motivations.

McMillin's depiction of the horrors of the postrevolutionary middle passage is compelling and insightful. He persuasively argues that the trade's brutalities exceeded those of the colonial era, particularly during the legal trade's last gasp between South Carolina reopening it in 1804 and the 1808 ban. He clearly develops the consequences for the Africans—mainly lengthened journeys and detentions in port in increasingly crowded, disease-ridden quarters—of the demand for slaves that accompanied the mad rush to beat the abolition clock in both Britain (1807) and America (1808). This is a damning indictment of the human toll flowing from slave traders' limitless greed. Another glimpse of the slave merchants' greed and determination comes in a brief discussion of the audacious shenanigans—legal and otherwise—of Rhode Island slaver James D'Wolf.

Aside from these sketches and the inherent human interest of a study of the slave...