[NYTr] Eric Foner on a Forgotten Anniversary: The End of the Slave Trade

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Francis Boyle - Jan 1, 2008

[A gang of white Anglo-American criminals get together and enter into a
criminal conspiracy to kidnap Black Africans despite the longstanding
common law determination that kidnapping is a felony punishable by death
and then enact laws and rulings giving them impunity for their crimes.

Similarly a gang of gentile Nazi criminals get together and enter into a
criminal conspiracy to murder Jews despite the longstanding German law
determination that murder is a crime and then enact laws and rulings
giving them impunity for their crimes. At Nuremberg the United States
and Britain cut through the fog of legal obfuscations created by the
Nazis to "legalize" their murder of the Jews and held them accountable
for their crimes. Consequently, we should be able to use Nuremberg to
cut through the fog of legal obfuscations created by the United States
and Britain to "legalize" their kidnapping of Black Africans and hold
them accountable for their crimes. Murder was murder. Kidnapping was
kidnapping. And since both crimes were committed on a widespread and
systematic basis, respectively, by the Nazis and the Anglo-American
slavers, they each became crimes against humanity. -FAB]


The New York Times - Dec 30, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30foner.html

Op-Ed

Forgotten Step Toward Freedom

By ERIC FONER

WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The
last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the
Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World
War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham
Lincoln's birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the
Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely
unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation
of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

This neglect stands in striking contrast to the many scholarly and
public events in Britain that marked the 2007 bicentennial of that
country's banning of the slave trade. There were historical conferences,
museum exhibits, even a high-budget film, "Amazing Grace," about William
Wilberforce, the leader of the parliamentary crusade that resulted in
abolition.

What explains this divergence? Throughout the 1780s, the horrors of the
Middle Passage were widely publicized on both sides of the Atlantic and
by 1792 the British Parliament stood on the verge of banning the trade.
But when war broke out with revolutionary France, the idea was shelved.
Final prohibition came in 1807 and it proved a major step toward the
abolition of slavery in the empire.

The British campaign against the African slave trade not only launched
the modern concern for human rights as an international principle, but
today offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its
multiracial character. It remains a historic chapter of which Britons of
all origins can be proud.

In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the
African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion.
Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our
racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the
19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and
often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common
cause.

Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is
well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the
estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four
centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the
United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly
purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England
profited handsomely from the trade.

The American Revolution threw the slave trade and slavery itself into
crisis. In the run-up to war, Congress banned the importation of slaves
as part of a broader nonimportation policy. During the War of
Independence, tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines. Many
accompanied the British out of the country when peace arrived.

Inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, most of the newly independent
American states banned the slave trade. But importation resumed to South
Carolina and Georgia, which had been occupied by the British during the
war and lost the largest number of slaves.

The slave trade was a major source of disagreement at the Constitutional
Convention of 1787. South Carolina's delegates were determined to
protect slavery, and they had a powerful impact on the final document.
They originated the three-fifths clause (giving the South extra
representation in Congress by counting part of its slave population) and
threatened disunion if the slave trade were banned, as other states
demanded.

The result was a compromise barring Congress from prohibiting the
importation of slaves until 1808. Some Anti-Federalists, as opponents of
ratification were called, cited the slave trade clause as a reason why
the Constitution should be rejected, claiming it brought shame upon the
new nation.

The outbreak of the slave revolution in Haiti in the early 1790s sent
shock waves of fear throughout the American South and led to new state
laws barring the importation of slaves. But in 1803, as cotton
cultivation spread, South Carolina reopened the trade.  The Legislature
of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory also allowed the importation
of slaves. From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans
entered the United States.

By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a
crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of
slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year's Day, the first
date allowed by the Constitution.

For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an
alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators
hypocritically proclaimed the slave- owning United States a land of
liberty.

It is easy to understand, however, why the trade's abolition appears so
anticlimactic. Banning American participation in the slave trade did not
end the shipment of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. Some three
million more slaves were brought to Brazil and Spanish America before
the trade finally ended. With Southerners dominating the federal
government for most of the period before the Civil War, enforcement was
lax and the smuggling of slaves into the United States continued.

Those who hoped that ending American participation in the slave trade
would weaken or destroy slavery were acutely disappointed. In the United
States, unlike the West Indies, the slave population grew by natural
increase. This was not because American owners were especially humane,
but because most of the South lies outside the tropical environment
where diseases like yellow fever and malaria exacted a huge toll on
whites and blacks alike.

As slavery expanded into the Deep South, a flourishing internal slave
trade replaced importation from Africa.  Between 1808 and 1860, the
economies of older states like Virginia came increasingly to rely on the
sale of slaves to the cotton fields of Alabama, Mississippi and
Louisiana. But demand far outstripped supply, and the price of slaves
rose inexorably, placing ownership outside the reach of poorer
Southerners.

Let us imagine that the African slave trade had continued in a legal and
open manner well into the 19th century. It is plausible to assume that
hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans would have been
brought into the country.

This most likely would have resulted in the "democratization" of slavery
as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to purchase slaves,
along with a further increase in Southern political power thanks to the
Constitution's three-fifths clause. These were the very reasons advanced
by South Carolina's political leaders when they tried, unsuccessfully,
to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.

More slaves would also have meant heightened fear of revolt and ever
more stringent controls on the slave population. It would have
reinforced Southerners' demands to annex to the United States areas
suitable for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Central America.
Had the importation of slaves continued unchecked, the United States
could well have become the hemispheric slave-based empire of which many
Southerners dreamed.

Jan. 1, 1808, is worth commemorating not only for what it directly
accomplished, but for helping to save the United States from a history
even more terrible than the Civil War that eventually rid our country of
slavery.

[Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia University.]