Movement to reopen the transatlantic slave trade to the United States

Even though the U.S. was no longer legally receiving transatlantic or transcaribbean slave ships after 1808, the trade continued to Brazil and Cuba; the British Royal Navy captured this slave trader's flag in the 1860s

The movement to reopen the transatlantic slave trade was an 1850s American campaign by white Southerners, many of them future Confederates, to repeal the 1808 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves and restart the transatlantic slave trade. Due to their foundational role in the Southern economy, and in part due to rampant speculation, slaves had become very expensive. Advocates for restarting slave imports hoped to drive down prices by increasing supply, making slave ownership more accessible to those outside the planter class, and making individual slaves cheaper and more disposable, in the hopes that it would secure the political future of slavery in the United States.

History

Newspaper editorials in response to the capture of the Wanderer

The movement was widespread and growing throughout the decade. The 1808 law was "denounced in vehement terms" throughout the South, and called the "fruit of 'a diseased sentimentality' [and a] 'canting philanthropy.'" For example, in 1854 a Williamsburg County, South Carolina grand jury reported, "As our unanimous opinion, that the Federal law abolishing the African Slave Trade is a public grievance. We hold this trade has been and would be, if reëstablished, a blessing to the American people and a benefit to the African himself." The Southern Commercial Convention met at Montgomery, Alabama in 1858 to debate the issue. As one speaker, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, argued:

Map depicting William Walker, one of the freelance colonizers called "filibusters" who sought to capture Central American or Caribbean land to expand the territory of the United States where slavery was legal (see also Narciso López); the failed filibuster invasions of Nicaragua and Cuba, which occurred in the 1850s, were funded by slave owners and slave traders in the American South

A resolution was passed to similar effect in Louisiana in 1859. A Louisiana newspaper editorial argued, "The minute you put it out of the power of common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman to help him in his farm or his wife in the house, you make him an abolitionist at once." The position was strongly advocated by the radical militant Fire-Eaters.

Nathan Bedford Forrest advocated for human trafficking from overseas, both before and even after the American Civil War. In 1859 he resold some of the Africans illegally imported on the Wanderer before the Civil War. Later, in 1869, he told the New York Times that his plan for a new Southern labor force would be, "Get them from Africa...They'll improve after getting here; are the most imitative creatures in the world, and if you put them in squads of ten, with on [sic] experienced leader in each squad, they will soon revive our country."

There were apparently sectional differences amongst the slave states about the idea: "Thomas Walton of Mississippi said in an essay appearing in DeBow's Review for January, 1859, that if a southern confederacy were formed Virginia and Kentucky would prevent the re-opening of the African trade for the sake of their own dealers."

See also

References

Further reading

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