|
Article Excerpt
Last year was the bicentenary of the abolition of the African slave trade by the United States and 2008 is the bicentenary of that law going into effect. But there are perhaps better reasons to reconsider the patterns of the U.S. side of the African slave trade. More African migrants have arrived in the United States since 1992 than during the whole slave trade era. Moreover, the moment at which the second African diaspora overtakes the first in terms of size and diversity coincides with a technological revolution. Digitization and the World Wide Web have combined with an established computer revolution to provide historians easy access to documents, and, more important, the power to digest and manipulate the information they contain that is way beyond what their predecessors could ever have imagined. The impact of technology is particularly significant for a subject where the quality and quantity of surviving records is generally very strong and the geographic scatter of the documents immense. While there is much still to be discovered about the U.S. trade in Africans, we can now throw major new light on its rise and fall, the people involved, its size and direction, and a great range of other issues, many of which are not at all quantitative.
The recent launch of the new transatlantic slave trade database (at www. slavevoyages.org) permits an overall reassessment of colonial American and U.S. involvement in the slave trade over the more than three centuries when, by one or more of the definitions discussed below, it was a going concern. Containing records of 34,941 voyages to the Americas, plus a new set of interactive estimates of the volume and direction of the business, it contains the most complete compendium of the U.S. slave trade yet. It brings together and, more important, integrates approximately 3,700 voyages that had some connection with the North American mainland. Much, though not all, of the data were assembled by Elizabeth Donnan, Jay Coughtry, lames McMillin, Warren S. Howard, and numerous other scholars. Voyages that took a year to complete and passed through several jurisdictions, each with its own record gathering processes, necessarily generated fragmentary information about their routes and the people who sailed on them. The new Voyages database constitutes the first serious attempt to tie the voluminous data on the slave trade to, among other places, the North American continent. (1)
But there is an immediate preliminary question of definition. Even if we confine our attention to captives carried across the Atlantic Ocean as opposed to those coming in from elsewhere in the Americas, at least three overlapping definitions of "U.S, slave trade" come to mind. One is the traffic that brought slaves into the territories that either were or became the United States. A second is the traffic carried on in slaving expeditions organized in those territories. A third is the traffic carried on under the U.S. flag, which in the nineteenth century became in part a flag of convenience for slave traders based outside North America, especially those operating from Cuba and Brazil. But, whatever definition is employed, it is rather startling to consider that half a century after the first awakening of scholarly interest in slavery and the slave trade in the United States, which has generated many thousands of monographs and articles, there is still no book on the U.S. transatlantic slave trade, however defined. (2) It scarcely seems possible that what is offered here is, in fact, not so much a reassessment as a first assessment.
The first definition is probably the one that interests most historians. The size and origin of the first African diaspora is basic to more issues in U.S. history than it is possible to list. There may be no monograph on the overall subject, but there is certainly no shortage of opinion, laid out in books and essays on how many people came from Africa to the United States before slavery was abolished and where those people came from. The literature suggests two methods of estimating the number of arrivals from Africa. One is the demographic approach where scholars use population counts and vital rates from the historical record to calculate arrivals as the residual that cannot be accounted for by births and deaths. The procedure generates net arrivals--or arrivals less departures--to which the discussion below returns. The most carefully constructed series of this nature appeared in 1974 when Fogel and Engerman estimated 653,000 arrivals from all sources, including the Caribbean. A major feature of this series is that it has 45 percent of this total, or 291,000, arriving in just thirty years, 1780 to 1810, and 21 percent, or 143,000, in the last decade, 18091-10. James A McMillin has recently revised estimates for the 1783-1810 period downward and incorporated these into the Fogel and Engerman figures, reducing the total for the whole period to 530,700 from 653,000. However, the McMillin revisions are based not on any new population or vital rates data, but rather on a new set of assumptions on what vital rates and population counts might have been. While the new assumptions seem perfectly reasonable, dozens of others that would give quite different results are equally reasonable. There is no compelling reason to accept one set over another. The root of the problem, of course, lies with the fact that the historical record of vital rates for blacks in what became the United States is very thin before the nineteenth century and almost nonexistent before the mid-eighteenth century. In addition, part of the large jump in arrivals in the demographic series late in the period may stem from differences in how the first and second U.S. censuses were conducted (1790 and 1800) relative to their colonial predecessors, rather than the reality of immigration. (3)
The second kind of assessment of the number of captives arriving in North America stems from shipping data. As it is not possible to find a record of every vessel that brought in slaves, this approach can hardly be said to be free of assumptions either. Nevertheless, the empirical basis of shipping movements appears to be much stronger and internally consistent than that for vital rates in the colonial era. David Richardson and I have argued that the shipping data support an estimate of 389,000 captives arriving in the Americas direct from Africa. We think that records survive of vessels bringing about 85 percent of all slaves into North America by this route. (4) This estimate does not include slaves carried from the Caribbean to the mainland, but it does incorporate McMillin's recently published database. (5) To this total could be added an estimate of captives carried from the Gambia to Charleston in the early 1700s which have only just come to light. (6)
Of the approximately 390,000 arrivals, the estimates page of slavevoyages.org has only 6,100 disembarking directly from Africa after 1808. (7) This is dramatically lower than the 54,000 estimated by Curtin, and the "as many as 786,500" projected recently by Ernest Obadele Starks. (8) While the first two of these three estimates purport to measure slave arrivals in the United States directly from Africa, the third seems to be for slave arrivals from all sources. Indeed, at times the term "foreign slave trade" in the subtitle of the Starks book appears to include slaves carried under the third definition of the United States traffic offered above--that carried on under the U.S. flag to Cuba and Brazil after 1808. Starks devotes only a half page to explaining how this estimate is derived, provides no references for the sources he mentions in his explanation, and makes no attempt to break down the 786,500 arrivals into the three categories of U.S. slave trading activity discussed here.
There are two reasons for believing that the true total of arrivals direct from Africa was closer to 6,100 than to either the Curtin or the Starks estimates. First is that between 1808 and 1863, the British maintained a significant naval force off the African coast and to a lesser extent in the Caribbean charged with suppressing the slave trade. British naval cruisers captured 1,559 slave vessels after 1808. (9) Naval officers reported these captures to the admiralty, and, after they carried their prizes into courts around the Atlantic, these courts generated their own voluminous reports of proceedings which were sent to London. In addition, all court and naval personnel collected intelligence on the trade. Almost all the resulting correspondence survives today in thousands of bound volumes in the Admiralty x and FO 84 series of the British National Archives. None of the officials in London, the Caribbean, or Africa whose opinions are recorded in this documentation believed that any of the captives on which they reported were destined for the United States. The British government was concerned about slave arrivals in Texas before it entered the union but never about slaves entering the United States. (10)
The second reason for preferring the lower figure is that the ninth census of the United States--the first to be taken after slavery was ended in the nation--shows that less than one tenth of 1 percent of the black population of the United States was African-born. (11) Thus, if 786,500 slaves arrived after 1808, then almost all of them must have been born in the Americas. This brings us to the issue of the intra-American slave trade. For the arrival of slaves in the smaller vessels that sustained the traffic from the Caribbean in the Colonial period Greg O'Malley has built a separate intra-American slave voyages database and has recently estimated 66,921 captives disembarking on the mainland. (12) But O'Malley's estimate does not include the period after 1808. Is it possible that 780,000 captives (786,500-6,100) born in the Americas arrived in the United States via the illegal slave trade? Probably not, given that this total is greater than all arrivals from Africa into the Caribbean--including Cuba--after 1808, as well as comparable to the total number of captives moved from the upper South to the deep South via the U.S. domestic slave trade in the same period. (13) With slavery ended in much of Latin America by 1820 and in the French Caribbean by 1848 (there were, in any event, fewer than 200,000 slaves in Martinique and Guadeloupe combined in 1830) and with an effective slave registry supervised by the central government in place in the British Caribbean by 1817, only Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico could have supplied such a number. It is inconceivable that planters in the booming Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar economies would have sold off their slaves, native- or African-born, to the United States after 1808, and a large movement of Brazilian born slaves into the United States is also unlikely. We will likely never know the precise size of the traffic into the United States from the rest of the Americas after 1808, but Fogel and Engerman's estimate of 1,000 a year from 1810 to 1860 based on census data is much more likely to reflect reality than is the Starks figure that is eight times larger. (14) Fogel and Engerman did not attempt to separate out arrivals that were African from those that were Americas-born, but if the slave-voyages estimate of 6,100 is accepted then we can hypothesize that no more than 45,900 Americas-born slaves were smuggled into the U.S. (15)
Thus, the most recent voyage-based data for the intra-American and transatlantic slave traffics point to total arrivals of 390,000 direct from Africa down to 1860 and 67,000 from other parts of the Americas by 1808. If we add to this 46,000 for the years after 1808, then the total inflow into what became the U.S. amounts to 503,000 captives. This figure does not include the presumably several hundred free blacks migrating voluntarily over two and one half centuries, which would have to be...
|
