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