US Congressional Act of 1807
Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves
|
Long title
| An Act to prohibit the importation of slaves, into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States, from and after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight.
|
---|
Enacted by
| the
9th United States Congress
|
---|
Effective
| January 1, 1808
|
---|
|
Public law
| Pub. L.
Tooltip Public Law (United States)
9?22
|
---|
Statutes at Large
| 2
Stat.
426
, Chap. 22
|
---|
|
- Introduced
in the Senate as S. 41 by
James Turner
(
D-R
?
NC
)
- Passed the Senate
on December 17, 1805 (
16-11
)
- Passed the House
on February 13, 1807 (
113-5
)
- Signed into law
by President
Thomas Jefferson
on March 2, 1807
|
The
Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves
of 1807 (2
Stat.
426
, enacted March 2, 1807) is a
United States federal law
that prohibited the importation of slaves into the United States. It took effect on January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted by the
United States Constitution
.
This legislation was promoted by President
Thomas Jefferson
, who called for its enactment in his 1806
State of the Union Address
. He and others had promoted the idea since the 1770s. It reflected the force of the general trend toward abolishing the
international slave trade
, which
Virginia
, followed by all the other
states
, had prohibited or restricted since then.
South Carolina
, however, had reopened its trade. Congress first regulated against the trade in the
Slave Trade Act of 1794
. The 1794 Act ended the legality of American ships participating in the trade. The 1807 law did not change that?it made all importation from abroad, even on foreign ships, a federal crime.
The
domestic slave trade
within the United States was not affected by the 1807 law. Indeed, with the legal supply of imported slaves terminated, the domestic trade increased in importance. In addition,
some smuggling of slaves persisted
.
Background
[
edit
]
The Act affected only the import or export of slaves, and did not affect the internal trade in states or between states. During the American Revolution, all of the
Thirteen Colonies
prohibited their involvement in the international slave trade (some also internally abolished slavery), but three states later reopened the international slave trade again (
North Carolina
banned slave imports in 1794, and strengthened the law in 1795.
[1]
Georgia
received transatlantic slave ships until 1798.
[2]
South Carolina
reopened the transatlantic slave trade in December 1803 and imported 39,075 enslaved people of African descent between 1804 and 1808
[3]
).
Article 1 Section 9 of the United States Constitution
protected a state's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years from federal prohibition.
Article 5
said that this clause could not be affected by constitutional amendment. Only starting on January 1, 1808 could there be a
federal law
to abolish the international slave trade in all states, although individual states could and did ban it before such time.
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
[4]
Wikisource
has original text related to this article:
By 1775, Africans both free and enslaved made up 20% of the population in the Thirteen Colonies, which made them the second-largest ethnic group after
English Americans
.
[5]
In 1774, the influential, revolutionary
Fairfax Resolves
, called for an end to the "wicked, cruel, and unnatural"
Atlantic slave trade
.
[6]
During the
Revolutionary War
, the United Colonies all pledged to ban their involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. This was done for a variety of economic, political, and moral reasons depending on the colony.
[7]
After the American victory in 1783,
South Carolina
reopened its involvement in the slave trade until prohibiting it again in 1787, but then reopened it in 1803; while
North Carolina
allowed the trade beginning after the
Treaty of Paris (1783)
until abolishing its involvement in slave trading in 1794; and
Georgia
allowed the slave trade between 1783, until it closed its international trade in 1798. By 1807, only South Carolina allowed the Atlantic slave trade.
[8]
On March 22, 1794, Congress passed the
Slave Trade Act of 1794
, which prohibited making, loading, outfitting, equipping or dispatching of any ship to be used in the trade of slaves, essentially limiting the trade to foreign ships.
[9]
On August 5, 1797,
John Brown
of
Providence, Rhode Island
became the first American to be tried in federal court under the 1794 law. Brown was convicted and was forced to forfeit his ship
Hope
.
[10]
In the 1798
act
creating the
Mississippi Territory
, Congress allowed slaves to be transferred from the rest of the United States to Mississippi Territory, and exempted the territory from the part of the 1787
Northwest Ordinance
that abolished slavery in the
Northwest Territory
(modern-day
Midwest
) after 1800. However, the same act also abolished the importation of slaves to the Mississippi Territory from "foreign parts" (foreign nations).
[11]
The penalty for illegally importing slaves from abroad to the territory was a fine of $300.
[12]
In the
Slave Trade Act of 1800
, Congress outlawed U.S. citizens' investment in the trade and the employment of U.S. citizens on ships involved in the trade.
[13]
Passage of the Act
[
edit
]
On March 3, 1805,
Joseph Bradley Varnum
submitted a Massachusetts Proposition to amend the Constitution and Abolish the Slave Trade. This proposition was tabled until 1807.
On December 2, 1806, in his annual message to Congress, widely reprinted in most newspapers, President
Thomas Jefferson
denounced the "violations of human rights." He said:
I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally, to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.
[14]
Under Varnum's leadership, legislation moved through Congress and passed both houses on March 2, 1807. The House and Senate agreed on a bill, approved on March 2, 1807, called
An Act to prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States, from and after the first day of January, in the year of our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight.
The measure also regulated the
coastwise slave trade
. President
Thomas Jefferson
signed the bill into law on March 2, 1807.
[15]
Many in Congress believed the act would doom slavery in the South, but they were mistaken.
[16]
The role of the Navy was expanded to include patrols off the coasts of Cuba and South America. The effective date of the Act, January 1, 1808, was celebrated by
Peter Williams, Jr.
, in "An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade" delivered in
New York City
.
[17]
Effectiveness and prosecutions for slaving
[
edit
]
While there are no exact figures known, historians estimate that up to 50,000 slaves were illegally imported into the United States after 1808, mostly through
Spanish Florida
and
Texas
, before those states were
admitted to the Union
.
[18]
However, South Carolina Governor
Henry Middleton
estimated in 1819 that 13,000 smuggled African slaves arrived every year.
[19]
: 160
Carl C. Cutler's classic book on American
clippers
records:
The act outlawing the slave trade in 1808 furnished another source of demand for fast vessels, and for another half century ships continued to be fitted out and financed in this trade by many a respectable citizen in the majority of American ports. Newspapers of the fifties contain occasional references to the number of ships sailing from the various cities in this traffic. One account stated that as late as 1859 there were seven slavers regularly fitted out in New York, and many more in all the larger ports.
[20]
In 1820, slave trading became a
capital offense
with an amendment to the 1819
Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy
. A total of 74 cases of slaving were brought in the United States between 1837 and 1860, "but few captains had been convicted, and those had received trifling sentences, which they had usually been able to avoid".
[21]
Nathaniel Gordon
, who was hanged in 1862, was the only person to be executed for illegal slave-trading in the United States.
[21]
In addition, after the 1808 abolition of the slave trade to the United States, many Americans continued to engage in the slave trade by transporting Africans to Cuba. From 1808 to 1860, almost one-third of all slave ships either were owned by American merchants or were built and outfitted in American ports.
[22]
It is possible that U.S. citizens "may have transported twice as many Africans to other countries such as Cuba and
Brazil
as they did to their own ports".
[22]
The U.S. Navy was slow to institute anti-slaving patrols off the slave ports of Africa?it was not until the 1820 legislation that authority was given to the president to use naval vessels for this task. Even then, enforcement activity was sporadic and largely ineffective. The U.S. position meant that many slave ships from other countries falsely flew the American flag to avoid being seized by
British anti-slaving patrols
. The first U.S. warship sent to the African coast to intercept U.S. vessels operating in the illegal trade was the
USS
Cyane
. A total of five U.S. Navy ships were on station there in 1820 and 1821, arresting 11 American slavers. No further U.S. anti-slaving patrols were carried out until 1842, and then with limited effectiveness due to political pressure from the slave-owning states. The Atlantic slave trade was not ended until the U.S. Civil War, when American-built and -managed ships were prevented from operating.
[23]
: 33, 36, 415?416
Antebellum proposals by Fire-Eaters to reopen
[
edit
]
In the South, the
Fire-Eaters
?antebellum pro-slavery extremists?proposed repealing the act and once more legalizing the international slave trade in the United States. Historian
Erskine Clarke
writes that this call "was a shameless expression of their contempt for any antislavery sentiment and a part of their stratagem to divide the nation and create a slaveholding confederacy. Among other things, the Fire-Eaters hoped that a reopened international slave trade would incense the North, and that Northern outrage would cause white Southerns to unite and move toward secession."
[24]
In addition to whipping up sectional tensions, Fire-Eaters advocated the reopening of the slave trade in order to drive down the price of slaves; to balance the millions of European immigrants who had settled in the North and maintain Southern representation in Congress; and assert the morality of slavery: "Slave trading had to be made right, otherwise slavery was imperiled."
[25]
Fire-Eaters essentially desired to "legitimize the slave trade in order to make the point that both slavery and the African slave trade were morally acceptable practices"?a view intended to be precisely opposite that of the
abolitionists
, who affirmed the immorality of both slavery and the slave trade. The view alarmed even pro-slavery figures, such as former President
John Tyler
, who in retirement wrote a widely republished letter condemning the Fire-Eaters' call to abrogate Article 8 of the
Webster?Ashburton Treaty
(which barred the slave trade). Tyler noted that the South had voted to ratify the treaty.
[26]
Slavery and the cotton economy boomed during the 1850s, and cotton prices were resurgent after a decline in the 1840s. This, in turn, drove up the price of slaves, which led to further pressure to re-open the slave trade to meet demand or bring down prices. Not all Southerners felt this way, however, as the high price of slaves benefitted slave owners and slave merchants. But the general sentiment called for a re-opening of the trade as a logical extension of the support for slavery. Southerners reasoned that, if slavery was good, then putting more people into slavery must also be good, and that, if trading slaves in the South was okay, then trading them from Africa must also be okay. Conventions of Southern planters repeatedly called for the trade to re-open. This, of course, was a non-starter in Congress. There were also attempts from state legislatures to allow the importation of "apprentices" from Africa, but without success. When trying to repeal the slave act failed, some turned to simply ignoring it. Notable cases during the 1850s included slaves smuggled aboard the
Wanderer
and the
Clotilda
.
[27]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
"Slavery"
.
NCpedia.org
. Retrieved
2024-01-08
.
- ^
Marques, Leonardo.
"The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776?1867"
.
etd.library.emory.edu
(Dissertation later published by Yale UP). p. 44
. Retrieved
2024-01-08
.
- ^
Shugerman, Jed Handelsman (2002).
"The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina's Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803"
.
Journal of the Early Republic
.
22
(2): 263?290.
doi
:
10.2307/3125182
.
ISSN
0275-1275
.
- ^
U.S. Constitution ? Article 1 Section 9
- ^
"Scots to Colonial North Carolina Before 1775"
. Dalhousielodge.org. n.d. Archived from
the original
on February 19, 2012
. Retrieved
April 20,
2012
.
- ^
Foner, Eric; Garraty, John A. (2014).
The Reader's Companion to American History
. Houghton Mifflin. p. 705.
ISBN
978-0-547-56134-9
.
- ^
Finkelman, Paul (2007).
"The Abolition of The Slave Trade"
. New York Public Library
. Retrieved
25 June
2014
.
- ^
O'Malley, Gregory E. (2009). "Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Migration from the Caribbean to North America, 1619?1807".
The William and Mary Quarterly
.
66
(1): 145, 150.
- ^
Timeline: The Atlantic Slave Trade
Archived
March 11, 2010, at the
Wayback Machine
- ^
Papers of the American Slave Trade
- ^
Arthur Scherr,
John Adams, Slavery, and Race: Ideas, Politics, and Diplomacy in an Age of Crisis
(ABC-CLIO, 2017), p. 198.
- ^
United States; Joseph Story (1827).
The public and general statutes passed by the Congress of the United States of America: from 1789 to 1827 inclusive, whether expired, repealed, or in force: arranged in chronological order, with marginal references, and a copious index: to which is added the Constitution of the United States, and an appendix
. Wells and Lilly.
- ^
"Regulating the Trade"
. New York Public Library
. Retrieved
December 5,
2015
.
- ^
John Paul Kaminski (1995).
A Necessary Evil?: Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution
. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 256.
ISBN
9780945612339
.
- ^
United States (1850).
The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America
. Charle C. Little and James Brown. pp.
426
?430.
- ^
Peter Kolchin,
American Slavery
(1993) p. 80
- ^
Pater Williams, Jr.,
An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Delivered in the African Church in the City of New-York, January 1, 1808
, Paul Royster, Ed., online pdf version, Digital Commons, University of Nebraska ? Lincoln, accessed 31 May 2012
- ^
Randy J. Sparks,
Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives Across the Atlantic World
(Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 80.
- ^
Garrison, William Lloyd (1832).
Thoughts on African colonization: or, an impartial exhibition of the doctrines, principles and purposes of the American Colonization Society. Together with the resolutions, addresses and remonstrances of the free people of color
. Boston.
- ^
Cutler, Carl C. (1984).
Greyhounds of the Sea
(3rd ed.). p. 39.
- ^
a
b
Hugh Thomas,
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440?1870
(Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 774.
- ^
a
b
Matt D. Childs, "Cuba, the Atlantic Crisis of the 1860s, and the Road to Abolition" in
American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s
(ed. Don H. Doyle: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
- ^
Grindal, Peter (2016).
Opposing the Slavers. The Royal Navy's Campaign against the Atlantic Slave Trade
(Kindle ed.). London: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd.
ISBN
978-0-85773-938-4
.
- ^
Erskine Clarke,
By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey
(Basic Books, 2013), p. 324.
- ^
Erik Calonius,
The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set Its Sails
(St. Martin's Griffin, 2006), pp. 43?43.
- ^
Edward P. Crapol,
John Tyler, the Accidental President
(University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 247?48.
- ^
McPherson, James M. (1988).
Battle cry of freedom : the Civil War era
. New York. pp. 98?102.
ISBN
0-19-503863-0
.
OCLC
15550774
.
{{
cite book
}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link
)
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Channing, Edward (1921).
A History of the United States: Federalists and Republicans, 1789?1815
. Macmillan. pp. 432?436.
- Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt (1904).
The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638?1870
. Longmans, Green and Company.
ISBN
9780722272848
.
- Lyles, J.A. (August 1856).
"The Union and its Compromises ? Characteristics of the North and the South ? where we stand, and to what we are drifting"
.
De Bow's Review
.
21
(2): 177?186.
- Marques, Leonardo.
The United States and the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, 1776?1867
(Yale University Press, 2016).
- Marques, Leonardo. "Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition"
Journal of the Early Republic
32#2 (2012) pp. 233?260
online
External links
[
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]