If your early history education was anything like mine, we didn’t learn much about the transatlantic slave trade before college. It was a Very Bad Thing that operated in a triangular fashion, that was made clear, but pedagogically speaking the late 18th through mid-19th century was little more than the quick intake of breath between weeks of waxing rhapsodic on wars for the soul of the nation. Past the ratification of the Constitution, there might be a little Monroe Doctrine here, some slavery and abolition there, occasional forays into the Second Great Awakening and Seneca Falls, but generally the nearly six-decade intermission between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars never seemed to merit more than a few hours of hasty overview.
However briefly, the slave trade did at least come up regularly, or at least biannually, usually in the form of a short reading about the Middle Passage. The images of abolitionist literature that accompanied this homework were likewise perennial: an enslaved man begging his freedom, chained, kneeling, a “supplicant” (aka Josiah Wedgwood’s “Am I not a man and a brother”) or neatly diagrammed cross-sections of hand-drawn boats, their precise outlines filled to bleeding over with hundreds of cramped Black figures rendered small enough to stay abstractions. Less often, all of this was accompanied by a date, 1808, the year legislation banning U.S. participation in the international slave trade went into effect, the very earliest moment the Constitution would allow. I got my Black American history at home, but if someone had asked Young Me a question as simple on its face as when the slave trade ended, I would have somewhat confidently guessed 1808.
Much has been written detailing what students in the United States don’t learn about slavery and the slave trade in school. In our contentious educational landscape, speculating on how history curricula might be reimagined to explicitly discuss the transatlantic trade—both as context for U.S. slavery and in its own right—might sound indulgent, or outright laughable. But feasibility can be a dangerous metric. It has the power to replace what ought to be done with individual perceptions of, and limitations on, what can be done. It's the cudgel of the status quo, beating back those who are willing to imagine a different world.
In 1808, ending the United States’ de facto participation in the transatlantic slave trade wasn’t feasible. And it certainly wasn’t the end of the transatlantic slave trade, in the U.S. or anywhere else.
There was plenty of political support for the new law, passed in 1807. Most states had banned the international slave trade decades earlier when they were still colonies in revolt—by this time South Carolina was the only state that permitted it. For over a decade, ships flying American colors had been prohibited from engaging in the trade. Despite being an enslaver himself, addressing a body filled with plenty more, in 1806 President Jefferson had urged Congress to end the “violations of human rights” that was the international slave trade as quickly as allowed, acknowledging that, “although no law you may pass can take prohibitory effect till [sic] the first day [of 1808], yet the intervening period is not too long to prevent, by timely notice, expeditions which cannot be completed before that day.”
If that seems optimistic, it was. Though subsequent legislation would build on and strengthen the 1807 act, adding teeth to policy one law at a time was slow going, and those who couldn’t envision a way of life or economic system without enslavement continued trafficking. The international trade in the enslaved to the United States persisted, illicitly, and sharply increased in the decade before 1860. Though building slave ships had been illegal since 1794, the Chesapeake region, particularly in and around Baltimore, was a ready supplier of the best slave ships on the water until at least the 1820s. And even without unlawful international slave trading, the United States maintained an extensive, remorseless domestic slave trade until the Civil War.
Not entirely effective then, and also not first—Denmark abolished the slave trade in 1792, though they opted to gradually phase it out so as not to disrupt colonial plantation economies in the West Indies, meaning the restriction didn’t take full effect until 1803. This unlikely pair of early adopters did share one quality, though—they both understood that while slave trading was certainly profitable, it was nothing compared to the potential of slave breeding.
And that, at least in the United States, is where cotton comes in.
Harvesting the quintessential crop of U.S. slavery was backbreaking, incredibly onerous work, but sugar, the commodity that ruled plantations in southern Louisiana and farther south throughout the Caribbean and Americas, provided a litany of ways to die. The most vicious driver was arguably not a man in a field, but figures in a distant ledger; sugar planters found it both expedient and profitable to simply accept the maiming, burning, and dying and budget for replacement labor accordingly. (Under the plantation system, the average life expectancy for an enslaved sugar mill worker was seven years, and harvesting remains dangerous work today). Sugar production was also frequently, though not exclusively, regarded as “men’s work.” This perception, alongside the rapid turnover required by all the untimely death and sustained by the ongoing import of the enslaved, created massive gender imbalances on most sugar producing plantations.
By contrast, most states produced cotton, not sugar. Enslavement still murdered untold numbers in the U.S.; it just wasn’t producing cotton that killed them. Harvesting and processing cotton did not carry the same risks as sugar, nor was it thought to require exclusively (or even majority) male labor. A balanced enslaved population enabled the United States to maintain and expand its enslaved population through “natural increase,” meaning that even reproduction rates reduced by the conditions of enslavement were such that a once-trafficked labor force had become self-sustaining. What the blandness of the phrase obscures is a system in which enslaved reproduction was frequently anything but natural—readily coerced, often forced, and yes, bred. Add to this (a rather tortured interpretation of) the English legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem— “that which is born follows the womb”—meaning in the United States, enslaved women passed their status as human chattel to their infants and, well, no imports required.
“Natural increase” wasn’t happening for European empires and their increasingly fractious colonial holdings—at least not those whose coffers relied on the production of sugar—and many within the planter class wholeheartedly believed they would never, could never, afford to give up enslaved labor. Towards the end of the 18th century, as abolitionist campaigns in Britain surged, slave traders and profiteers in Spain and colonial Cuba, Portugal, and colonial Brazil, even Jamaica, England’s most profitable slaving colony, likely assumed that though a few small reforms to satisfy the rabble-rousers might be forthcoming, not much would fundamentally change.
Though the English weren’t the first transatlantic slave traders—that dubious distinction belongs to Prince Henry the Navigator and the Portuguese—by the end of the 1700s, they had become the most prolific. John Hawkins ushered England into the slave market in the mid-1500s, snagging a knighthood from Elizabeth I in the process, and over the course of the next two and a half centuries British slave traders trafficked well over 3 million enslaved people, second only to Portugal and Brazil combined. By the beginning of the 1800s, the value added by the slave trade likely exceeded a tenth of the entire British economy. And yet, in 1807, Britain banned the slave trade. If Denmark and the United States, whom Britain slips between in the order of slave trade abolition, were comparatively small players whose shifts lacked much worldwide market impact, Britain was quite the opposite. Despite the timing—the empire’s ban went into effect little more than a half a year before its former colonies—the two nations could not have arrived at the new policy more differently.
The English campaign for slave trade abolition was a contentious, prolonged, and grassroots affair. Beginning in the late 1700s, a diverse coalition of British abolitionists used everything from boycotts, petitions, bills, anti-slavery literature, even the 18th century version of data analytics to try to turn the tide against this vast, inexorable, and well-funded oppression. Winning the legislative battle in 1807 didn’t effectively stop the trade; those unwilling to outright defy the law could still profit indirectly. Though the quantity of British slave ships dropped precipitously, they were soon replaced by ships from nations that scrupled less, or not at all. The money was just too good.
Passionate anti-slavery advocates and the policymakers they’d (somewhat) successfully convinced found themselves strangely and suddenly united. Those who believed the trade was a moral wrong and those, less high-minded, motivated by economic concerns agreed that the deed was done and that having given up the British market share in slave trading, other nations should be… encouraged to do likewise. If Britain couldn’t have a slave trade, nobody could.
Enforcing the law fell to the Royal Navy—turns out, for the slave trade to stop, someone had to actually stop slavers. The U.S. ban had authorized their Navy to detain slavers, but there it ended; the States wouldn’t even authorize a suppression force until 1819. By contrast, the British had two ships off the African coast within months of their 1807 ban and wished them happy hunting. British ships in the Caribbean didn’t even have to be sent patrolling for slavers, as their station was already a major battleground in the Napoleonic Wars. The conflict was the perfect pretext, as slavers flying enemy colors could be boarded and captured under the rules of war.
Of course wars, even wars against Napoleon, do eventually end, and in the wake of Waterloo in 1815, Britain was left with a problem: It didn’t actually have the right to board foreign ships, as doing so during peace time was a possible prelude right back to war. The Royal Navy could still detain ships under British colors, but what about everyone else? The Congress of Vienna, begun in November the previous year, presaged years of inducements, cajoling, and threats on the part of Britain to obtain the right to detain, inspect, and condemn slavers, no matter what their country of origin, all while the Royal Navy continued to patrol. The crux was the “right of search,” the right to police the seas, and though both France and the U.S., still fresh from wars with England, refused outright, treaties would emerge between Britain and an increasing number of countries. Armed with these agreements, a squadron made up of six to eight Royal Navy vessels—and, when those often proved too slow to keep up with their quarry, supplemented by repurposed slave ships—eventually coalesced along the coast of Western Africa, a place so inexorably tied up with the trade that it had for centuries simply been known as the Slave Coast.
Suppression still took decades of work on multiple fronts. Support for active suppression from England, though still vocal, waned over the years in the face of the trade’s seeming indefatigability—millions of pounds had been thrown at the problem, the lives of British sailors had been lost, and for what? Crucially, by the mid-19th century, efforts to dismantle the trade coincided with the rise of scientific racism in Europe, and though Britain would treat with some European powers (and the U.S.) as equals, using remuneration to lure the more cash-strapped empires of continental Europe into compliance, there was little compunction about deploying embargo and naval blockade when newly-formed states in the Americas or the leaders of African tribal nations did not comply. By the 1850s, thanks to renewed effort and a hodgepodge of treaties and agreements (both mutual and unilateral) with British hands all over them, the international slave trade could be said to no longer exist on the industrial scale of the previous few centuries, though it did continue on a smaller scale until the first multilateral general treaty to suppress the slave trade was signed in 1890 at the Brussels Conference.
There was no mechanism of enforcement in this new agreement, but other disruptive elements were at play. By the late 19th century, the “Scramble for Africa”—the partitioning of nearly the entire continent between seven European powers (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Britain)—was on, and though each of these nations would approve the Brussels Act, the overarching concern of these signatories was less human rights and more colonial might. It’s not entirely bleak: Some historians have sourced the origins of the United Nations to the Brussels Conference and found the foundations of international human rights law in the international courts convened to adjudicate the fate of captured slave ships. And what we now think of as the transatlantic slave trade did, ultimately, end. However, the moral ambivalence, the racism, and the greed shared by colonialist powers would ultimately bring nations divided by the battle over continuing the licit slave trade into consensus, patting themselves on the collective back for exploiting the resources and residents of Africa without the expedient of chains.
It’s not surprising, really, that suppression paved the way for modern colonialism; 19th century African liberation, as conceived of by the British and emulated elsewhere, was not a freedom project. In fact, during the first half of the 1800s, at the height of suppression, those “liberated” by British suppression efforts soon found that they were actually recaptives, neither technically owned nor free to leave. Their “choices” if “liberated” in then-British colony Sierra Leone were resettlement in the colony to be assigned farms or menial work, conscription into a segregated regiment of the Royal Marines (for the men), and apprenticeship. The unfortunates slated for apprenticeship were shipped to where they’d been headed when the British captured their slaver-prisons—the Caribbean. Held “for a term not to exceed fourteen years” and often longer, apprenticeship ruthlessly extended the lag between freedom promised and freedom delivered, and these “apprentices” toiled and died in the sugar cane fields of Britain’s island holdings until the system was abolished in 1838, five years after slavery was abolished in most of the empire and persisted elsewhere even longer. (In 1833 the British government passed a slavery ban that in 1837 also threw appeasement money at enslavers to compensate them for their “losses,” passing the bill to British taxpayers, who finally paid it off in 2015.)
So when did the slave trade end? Speaking broadly, the international slave trade never ended. It was driven underground, it changed and evolved and made some geographic shifts, but the trade in non-free people continues to this day.
Looking specifically to the transatlantic slave trade, it depends on how you measure results: by the standards of the treaty-makers or the exploited, according to the law or to reality—but it definitely wasn’t 1808. Understanding that the slave trade did not magically disappear with the flick of a few quills and the snap of (American) fingers helps illuminate the long legacy of that oppression, as it manifests in the commodities we consume daily and for those still reckoning with the economic and political repercussions of European mercantilism, capitalism, paternalism, and racism.
There are other things we don’t learn when this history isn’t taught. The fact that at least some of the American politicians who enacted the 1808 ban believed that it would eventually starve the life out of Southern American slavery is striking in its naiveté and shortsightedness. It’s difficult to fathom how men made rich by enslaved people assumed others were keen to give the practice up. It’s easy to assume why they didn’t do more.
When history is gutted of accuracy for comfort or convenience, we’re robbed of the knowledge that wishing for better isn’t enough. Maybe that’s the point. But see: no system, no matter how longstanding or entrenched, is inevitable and unchangeable. Systemic problems require multi-faceted solutions, and a less abridged retelling of the transatlantic slave trade demonstrates that even in the face of epic, unmitigated suffering, the effort to craft those solutions is going to be unpopular, contentious, questionably executed, unbearably prolonged—and still entirely vital. That we’re here, even now, is proof that the cost is worth it; it’s also proof that the work is not done.
I’m honestly not sure if it’s comforting or daunting to accept that that redressing oppression is struggle measured in generations and counted in days.
But it is history.
A.E. Rooks is a two-time Jeopardy! champion with completed degrees in theater, law, and library and information science, and forthcoming degrees in education and human sexuality. Her/their new book THE BLACK JOKE: The True Story of One Ship's Battle Against the Slave Trade is published by Scribner.
