The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867

Abstract

This book explores U.S. participation in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas from the American Revolution to the U.S. Civil War. It shows how U.S. citizens engaged in multiple forms of participation in the slave trade and how these forms changed over time. The book discusses the emergence of a U.S. branch of the transatlantic slave trade in the aftermath of independence and its quick dismantling in the early nineteenth century. It then looks at the forms of U.S. participation in a highly internationalized contraband slave trade that supplied captives to Brazil and Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century. The growth of these forms of U.S. participation resonated in the U.S. public sphere, contributing to growing tensions around the slavery issue in the 1850s, and in the international arena, stimulating frictions between the British Empire and the United States. This work explores these national and international tensions and the role of slave-trading networks in exploiting and prolonging them.

DB or not DB: Writing the history of the slave trade to North America in the era of the database

“…That is emphatically not to say that Americans were innocent when it came to slave trading. As historians such as Leonardo Marques (2016) and Randy L.…”

“…That is emphatically not to say that Americans were innocent when it came to slave trading. As historians such as Leonardo Marques () and Randy L. Sparks () have demonstrated, American merchants and sailors were deeply involved in the transportation of captives to Brazil and Cuba. It is clear now that the number of captives carried by Americans to Latin America far surpassed the number imported into the United States.…”

TRADING IN AN EMERGING MARKET: E. JOHNSTON & CO AND THE BRAZILIAN COFFEE TRADE 1840-1880

“…A heightened commercial enthusiasm occurred soon after 1808 when Brazil became the new centre of the Portuguese Empire with the transmigration of the Portuguese Court to the city of Rio de Janeiro and the conclusion of the 1810 Anglo-Brazilian commercial treaty, which gave wider access to foreign merchants (Robson 2011). Coffee overtook sugar as the main Brazilian export product during the 1830s (Bacha and Greenhill 1992) and the trade grew to the extent that Brazil became the world's largest producer during the decade with some 40 per cent of total output 10 years later (Marques 2016, pp. 120-122).…”

“…9-35; Jarnagin 2008; Horne 2010; Santos 2014, pp. 43-63; Marques 2016, pp. 127-129, 139 and 165-166).…”

Nestas costas tão largas: O tráfico transatlântico de escravizados e a dinamização de economias regionais no Brasil (c. 1831 - c. 1850)

“…63 Por fim, Gillmer, que foi cônsul dos Estados Unidos no Brasil, também estava envolvido com o tráfico -atuava vendendo e fretando embarcações para traficantes. 64 Seguramente a Todos os Santos foi a maior e mais moderna fábrica do ramo têxtil no Império do Brasil até, pelo menos, a década de 1860. Em 1848, ela estava montada com 2.000 fusos e 50 teares e contava com cerca de 100 "operários nacionais livres, de um e outro sexo"; operando, nesta época, com pouco mais da quarta parte das suas máquinas, produzia diariamente 600 varas de pano.…”