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  • The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris
  • Robert Colby (bio)
Keywords

Middle Passage, Slavery, Atlantic slave trade

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage. By John Harris. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 300. Cloth, $30.00.)

On September 21, 1859, the barque Pamphylia slipped out of New York harbor. Though purportedly bound for Honduras on a sugar-trading circuit, all evidence pointed to a diff erent, more sinister destination. A Cuban [End Page 704] firm with ties to the slave trade had recently acquired the vessel but obscured its ownership through a charter to another, New York-based Cuban company. This crucial fiction offered the ship an all-important talisman: the right to sail under the U.S. flag. Four months later, however, a British cruiser patrolling for slavers apprehended the Pamphylia near the mouth of the Congo River with six hundred captive Africans aboard. Normally, a ship running under American colors would have been virtually immune from British scrutiny. But after timely intelligence put the warship on the lookout for the Pamphylia, U.S. sovereignty did not shield the slave traders. The British navy took custody of the enslaved, who still endured a simulacrum of the Middle Passage, steered first to St. Helena and then to the British Caribbean to be placed as apprentices. Nevertheless, from the perspective of both the British government and the slave dealers involved, an illicit slave-trading voyage had been successfully suppressed (169–74).

In The Last Slave Ships, John Harris demonstrates the outsized role Americans played in the nearly five hundred slaving ventures launched between 1852 and the trade’s final demise in 1867. Though only a handful ended on U.S. soil (including the famous Clotilda and Wanderer), 91 percent took place on U.S.-built ships (59). Others were helmed by American captains, crewed in U.S. ports, or funded by capital laundered through American financial institutions. The confluence of these elements, moreover, made lower Manhattan a particularly convenient hub from which slave traders from Cuba, Brazil, and Portuguese colonies in Africa could continue their operations.

The greatest benefit American participation offered slave traders, however, was the protective aegis of the star-spangled banner. The nineteenth century saw a series of nations gradually, though often half-heartedly, endorse efforts to suppress the slave trade. Americans celebrated their early abandonment of the traffic and, through a series of laws and treaties, nominally committed to its cessation. In their case, however, not only was the flesh weak but the spirit also was less than willing. Unless (and, in many cases, even if) slave dealers were caught in the act, prosecution was difficult; U.S. law left considerable loopholes through which suspected slavers could slink, including a failure to ban the equipment required for the trade and a cumbersome definition of citizenship. Ironically, the surviving slave trade also provided moral cover for American slaveholders and their allies who desired to annex Cuba even as they ignored U.S. complicity in that traffic. It was little wonder, then, that three-quarters of [End Page 705] the hundreds of slave ships descending on Africa in the 1850s and 1860s sailed under U.S. colors (59).

Only the Republican Party’s ascendancy in the 1860s undercut Americans’ participation in the slave trade. Having campaigned against Democratic hypocrisy on the matter, the Lincoln administration cracked down on slave trafficking, passing new laws, deploying intelligence gathering tactics of the sort favored by the more-successful British, and aggressively prosecuting slave traders like Nathaniel Gordon. Most importantly, Secretary of State William Seward signed a landmark treaty removing many of the protections offered by U.S. colors. With the national government’s authority deployed more enthusiastically than ever before against the trade, the American resources so crucial to its survival dried up, leading to its ultimate demise in the late 1860s.

In showing the importance of laws, treaties, and their enforcement to the slave trade, Harris adds a crucial political component to our understanding of the second slavery. This economic phenomenon certainly rested on surging global demand for slave-produced commodities...

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