Editor's Note: Suppression of the African Slave Trade Revisited

Welcome to a special issue to commemorate the bicentenary of the closing of the African slave trade by the United States. On January 1, 1808, the legislation took effect that banned the importation of Africans. Although slavery continued in the Atlantic Rim, the occasion—coupled with action by Great Britain a year earlier—marked an important moment in the march toward the eventual abolition of slavery throughout the western hemisphere.

As scholars well know, the trade in Africans continued well beyond 1808, lasting legally and illegally until its close in 1867. During that time, between 2 and 3 million more Africans—a great many of them children—were taken from their homeland to the Americas. This represented a substantial portion of the 12.5 million enslaved who were carried in ships during the nearly 400 years of this largest forced migration in human history.

The focus for this issue on suppression of the trade borrows from the seminal work conducted by W. E. B. Du Bois, who published in 1896 the first professional study of the African slave trade. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America came out as the first volume in the "Harvard Historical Studies" series. Produced for his dissertation at Harvard University, it was a work of incredible breadth, tracing the rise of legislation and enforcement against the trade from the colonial period until just after the American Civil War. For a long time, this book represented one of the only efforts to reveal the U.S. side of the story and it remains the only monograph on the subject that considers this perspective over such a wide time-frame.¹

When he published his study, Du Bois concluded that the 1807 law failed abysmally because of spotty enforcement and apathy on the part of the government and the white public in general. He considered the U.S. ban on the trade a "dead letter," and estimated that the illegal trade brought perhaps as many as 250,000 Africans into the country by 1860. The study also patiently gathered and traced the voluminous legislation developed by the various colonies, as well as the efforts by the subsequent states and the U.S. Congress, in order to curtail the trade in Africans. This work continues to serve historians who wish to find in one place the legislation used by opponents to end this barbarous practice.

Interest in the U.S. side of this story has grown over the past decade, and although the literature remains nascent and evolving it has chipped away at some of Du Bois's larger interpretations. Most do agree that U.S. enforcement against the illicit trade was irregular at best and at times bordering on non-existent, such as in the period between 1808 and 1842. And it is true that the only person executed for violating the U.S. statute came under the Lincoln Administration.²

Yet newer works have complicated the picture. Work on the African Squadron—the arm of the U.S. Navy that patrolled for slavers—has detailed attempts to crack down on the trade, even though they were hardly consistent or uniformly successful. Without these efforts, recent studies argue, the trade could have flourished even more. Scholars have even found southerners were split over the issue and that many influential people from what became the Confederacy strongly opposed the importation of Africans. This included southern members of the U.S. Supreme and Federal courts. And new compilations of data suggest that the 1807 ban enacted by the U.S. actually had a great impact on restricting the importation of Africans as slaves.³

With the exception of the estimation of numbers, Du Bois has not been completely overturned but to an extent modified. The participation of British North American colonies in the African trade was limited for most of the colonial period and the numbers of slaves smuggled into the U.S. certainly did not approach what he had projected. However, the Federal government exhibited a mixed track record at enforcement, and beyond 1807...