In the Wake of Slavery

Writing in the 2010 New York Times op-ed "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game," Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. hoped to a provide a corrective to what he regarded as the prevailing view of the transatlantic slave, namely, that Europeans were alone responsible and therefore alone culpable for the capture, sale, and transfer of millions of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade. In an effort to reframe the recent debate regarding slave reparations, Gates hoped to place responsibility for the slave trade where it truly belonged, "to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization." In particular, Gates emphasized the role Africans played in the trade, noting that "90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders." Given this, "the problem with reparations," Gates concluded, "may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted."¹

In the days and weeks following the publication of that article, Gates's argument was held up to critical scrutiny. In one particularly scathing critique, historian Barbara Ransby identified in Gates's position "a pernicious argument … that essentially absolves Americans of the guilt, shame and most importantly, financial responsibility for the horrific legacy of slavery in the Americas."² Historian Eric Foner responded similarly, noting that "identifying Africa's part in the history of slavery does not negate Americans' responsibility to confront the institution's central role in our own history."³

While many rushed to offer correctives to Gates's revised history of the slave trade, my mind went back to another op-ed, also published in the pages of the New York Times. Some 150 years ago, an anonymous writer under the pseudonym "Salt" penned "The African Slave-Trade; Our Responsibility for Its Continuance." The author lamented both the persistence of the illicit trade in African captives and America's continued complicity: "The American flag … is polluted by covering more slavers, probably, than the colors of any other nation." That article appeared in August 1860, just months before South Carolina seceded from the United States. On the eve of a war that would culminate in the emancipation of some 4 million enslaved men, women, and children, Salt contended that the United States had long refused to confront the slave trade on the African coast where captives were procured and had turned a blind eye to the various and sundry American ports where captives continued to be unlawfully deposited: "Disguise the subject as we will, there is no concealing the fact that the responsibility of the African Slave-trade rests … on the United States, for not taking prompt measures in suppressing the trade under its flag."⁴

The debate about culpability and the slave trade has a long history in the United States. It is enshrined in the US Constitution: article I, section 9 specifically barred Congress from banning the importation of slaves for a period of twenty years. The debate reemerged in the early years of the nineteenth century upon the passage of the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves (1808), and it animated both the North and the South in the lead-up to the Civil War. Indeed, Southern calls to reopen the slave trade in the 1850s galvanized William Foster along with Timothy and James Meaher to flout federal law and outfit the Clotilda as a slave ship leading, in 1860, to the illegal importation of Cudjo Lewis and his compatriots, who were secreted into Mobile, Alabama, under cover of night.⁵ The debate over slavery and the slave trade sparked the bloody Civil War, which finally resolved the matter in law but not in practice—the embers simmer still. No wonder, then, that when Zora Neale Hurston first encountered Lewis in 1927, she desperately sought to tap into his memories, to travel back along the spoor that first brought him from that place to this one.

Hurston bristled under the knowledge...