Corrupt Bargaining: Partisan Politics, the Election of 1824, and the Suppression of the African Slave Trade

Between 1808 and 1820, the United States transformed the foreign slave trade from a legitimate form of commerce into a capital crime. This transformation reflected the determination of the American public and their representatives to extricate the United States from participation in the foreign slave trade. Yet, in the spring of 1824, a group of U.S. senators refused to approve the renomination of a customs collector who had sought to suppress the illegal slave trade emanating from his home district. A few weeks later, this same group of senators effectively scuttled the anti-slave trade treaty that the Monroe administration had negotiated with Great Britain. This article will expose why this group of lawmakers opted to weaken the nation's ability to suppress the illegal traffic. It will argue that – as members of William Crawford's faction – they set aside their ideological support for suppressing the foreign slave trade in order to secure the allegiance of another senator, James D'Wolf of Rhode Island, and then, with D'Wolf's crucial assistance, strike a blow against John Quincy Adams, who was one of Crawford's intraparty rivals in the upcoming presidential election of 1824. But the fallout from this particular deal – or "corrupt bargain," as such political horse-trading would soon come to be known – was not limited to the election. On the contrary, Crawford's faction had severely undermined the federal government's effort to suppress the slave trade in an ultimately futile effort to hurt Adams. This article will therefore reveal how even popular policy measures were vulnerable to electoral ambitions and that seemingly small political deals could have longstanding and widespread repercussions.