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

August 29, 2016
In this scholarly yet accessible work, Marques, professor of history at Brazil’s Universidade Federal Fluminense, analyzes the various levels of U.S. participation in the importation of slaves to the Americas. In 1807, the U.S. and Britain passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, subjecting ships flying the colors of those nations to seizure and detainment. But with the growing demands for labor in Cuba and Brazil, slave traders “continued to profit from the traffic under the flags of Spain and Portugal,” neither of which had yet abolished the slave trade. Marques shows that after the War of 1812 the U.S. continued to deny British proposals of a mutual right of search, allowing slave traders to exploit building pressure between the two nations throughout the first half of the 19th century. In the 1850s, Anglo-American tensions decreased but tensions within the United States rose as slave owner Henry Wise called for a repeal of all anti-slave-trade legislation. At the same time, Marques writes, abolitionists argued that “the most effective way of ending the transatlantic slave trade... was to abolish slavery altogether.” Marques’s ambitious and well-researched study delivers on its promise to shed new light on the economic and ideological forces that led to the Civil War.