Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 27: The illegal international slave trade after 1808

James Oakes is a Civil War historian who has what I consider to be a good sense of the contradictory nature of historical trends, in which good things and bad things not only happen at the same time, but they can be intimately connected to each other.

In Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long? New York Review of Books 04/08/2021 issue; accessed 03/29/2021, he discuss how the American Revolution created a contradictory world" int he United States "that simultaneously encouraged and abolished slavery."

In his classic study Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams posited a historic reversal of fortune brought on by the American Revolution. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, Williams argued, the profits from slavery and the slave trade proved crucial to financing the early stage of the British Industrial Revolution. But when Americans secured their independence, they broke free from Britain’s imperial trade restrictions, undermining their efficacy. British capitalists quickly became converts to free trade and began denouncing the West Indian “monopoly” for using mercantilist protections to keep the slave economies artificially afloat. In Williams’s telling, the capitalists turned against slavery out of cupidity rather than humanity.

This two-part story has come to be known as the Williams thesis, and although it has provoked decades of debate it has largely survived, albeit in somewhat modified form. Most scholars now agree that slavery and the slave trade were integral, though not necessarily indispensable, to British economic development in the eighteenth century. And most agree that the world’s first abolitionist movement emerged in both the US and Britain as a consequence of the American Revolution, especially in the 1780s, though not necessarily because capitalists began assailing slavery.

What the Williams thesis could not explain was the dramatic revival of slave economies in the first half of the nineteenth century. No doubt something changed in the late eighteenth century, but it was not simply a case of capitalists suddenly turning against slavery. Rather, as Leonardo Marques points out in his exceptional survey of US efforts to suppress the slave trade [The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 (2016)], the Age of Revolution created a contradictory world that simultaneously encouraged and abolished slavery. [my emphasis]

He points to post-Revolutionary events like the gradual emancipation laws in the North and the anti-slavery Haitian Revolution as boosting the anti-slavery cause, while rapid economic growth in the US and Britain and the growth of slavery in other places like Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as expressions of a contrary strengthening of the institution.

Oakes explains that despite the US banning of the international slave trade in 1808, practice still continued. And there were Americans, like shipbuilding enterprises that profited from the ongoing international slave trade. And there still were a significant number of slaves coming from the illegal international slave trade still entered the US after 1808. It took decades of international treaties and elaborate efforts by Britain and the US to suppress the international trade. And it was still going on right up until the Civil War. Lincoln began much more vigorous enforcement of US and international laws against the trade, while preceding Democratic administrations had preferred to turn a blind eye to it as much as possible.

Oakes closes with this important observation, "The slave trade did not die on its own; it had to be killed. It took sustained political opposition to overcome the powerful economic incentives that kept the slavers in business. The same could be said of slavery itself."