Movement To Reopen The Transatlantic Slave Trade

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

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' nd 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:

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 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

* Knights of the Golden Circle
* Filibuster War
* Proslavery thought
* Slave trade in the United States
* Slavery as a positive good in the United States
* Post-1808 importation of slaves to the United States

References

Further reading

*

External links

* - interview with descendant of John S. Montmollin with an account of the '' Wanderer''

Slave trade in the United States
1850s in the United States
Post-1808 importation of slaves to the United States
Atlantic slave trade
Social movements in the United States
History of the Southern United States
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