The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 by Leonardo Marques (review)

The involvement of the Portuguese, British, and French in the transatlantic slave trade is more well known than that of the United States. Drawing on the vast data of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Leonardo Marques's The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 chronicles the "deep transformation in the nature of US involvement in the transatlantic slave trade between the American Revolution and the Civil War" (p. 3). During those nine decades, "[a]pproximately five million enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas" (p.11). And, despitethe United States formally abolishing the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, American participation in transatlantic slaving voyages endured throughout the nineteenth century. Marques uncovers this American collusion, weaving an international, interimperial narrative that integrates the North and South Atlantic. In doing so, Marques demonstrates the importance of viewing the United States from not only an Atlantic perspective but also a hemispheric one, even in the nineteenth century.

In each chapter Marques traces slave traders as they strategically adapted to the changing legal, economic, and geopolitical landscapes of the Atlantic world. He begins in the early republic. The years between the American Revolution and the Slave Trade Act of 1807 saw the rapid growth of U.S. slave trading. Tied to a burgeoning maritime sector, slave trading linked American ports such as Bristol, Rhode Island, to Africa, the U.S. South, Brazil, and—of particular importance after the Haitian Revolution—Cuba. Following passage of the 1807 and 1820 anti–slave trade laws, which outlawed the transatlantic slave trade and made involvement in slave trading into piracy, Americans sold their expertise. They worked as captains, crew members, and agents on Spanish and Portuguese slaving vessels destined for the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. Naturalized U.S. citizens were particularly desirable. In the event of capture, they could evade punishment better than native-born Americans. In other instances, American expertise was material; U.S.-built vessels, usually clippers from Baltimore, became a hallmark of the nineteenth-century transatlantic trade. In myriad ways, Americans continued to profit from and be complicit in the transatlantic slave trade decades after condemning it. The American Civil War effectively eradicated the transatlantic slave trade by galvanizing Spanish and Cuban elites to suppress the remaining traffic after the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Those interested in the history of the American South will find the region largely absent from Marques's book. Southern planters, as complicit as they were in the domestic slave trade, were less active in the transatlantic trade. The book's geographic scope, however, is one of its most valuable assets. Attuned to political, economic, and agricultural developments in England, the United States, the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and Brazil, Marques admirably writes a sweeping yet nuanced history that captures the extensive, shifting ties between Americans and their southern neighbors. Developments in Africa, however, are overlooked. Methodologically, Marques's scholarship underscores the immense value of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Peppered with statistics and charts, the book exhibits empirical rigor. Yet even with this plethora of numbers, Marques incorporates ample narrative as he traces ships and slavers throughout the Atlantic. That narrative takes readers from the High Court of Admiralty to the shores of Cuba and Brazil and the sea lanes in between. In each of these locales, Americans and others debated what constituted legal involvement in a business that many, including some Americans, saw as a crime against humanity.