Teaching Themes from the Revolutionary Era with Documents on the Stevens Family

Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas

Polygyny rates are higher in western Africa than in eastern Africa. The African slave trades help explain this difference. More male slaves were exported in the transatlantic slave trades from western Africa, while more female slaves were exported in the Indian Ocean slave trades from eastern Africa. The slave trades led to prolonged periods of abnormal sex ratios, which affected the rates of polygyny across Africa. In order to assess these claims, we present evidence from a variety of sources. We find that the transatlantic slave trades have a positive correlation with historical levels of polygyny across African ethnic groups. We also construct an ethnic group level data set linking current rates of polygyny with historical trade flow data from the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. We find that the transatlantic slave trades cause polygyny at the ethnic group level, while the Indian Ocean slave trades do not. We provide cross-country evidence corroborating our findings.

Lynnell L. Thomas, <i>Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory</i>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $83.57 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Reviewed by: The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 by Leonardo Marques Mary Draper The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867. By Leonardo Marques. ( New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 313. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-300-21241-9.) The involvement of the Portuguese, British, and French in the transatlantic slave trade is more well known than that of the United States. Drawing on the vast data of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Leonardo Marques's The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 chronicles the "deep transformation in the nature of US involvement in the transatlantic slave trade between the American Revolution and the Civil War" (p. 3). During those nine decades, "[a]pproximately five million enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas" (p.11). And, despitethe United States formally abolishing the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, American participation in transatlantic slaving voyages endured throughout the nineteenth century. Marques uncovers this American collusion, weaving an international, interimperial narrative that integrates the North and South Atlantic. In doing so, Marques demonstrates the importance of viewing the United States from not only an Atlantic perspective but also a hemispheric one, even in the nineteenth century. In each chapter Marques traces slave traders as they strategically adapted to the changing legal, economic, and geopolitical landscapes of the Atlantic world. He begins in the early republic. The years between the American Revolution and the Slave Trade Act of 1807 saw the rapid growth of U.S. slave trading. Tied to a burgeoning maritime sector, slave trading linked American ports such as Bristol, Rhode Island, to Africa, the U.S. South, Brazil, and—of particular importance after the Haitian Revolution—Cuba. Following passage of the 1807 and 1820 anti–slave trade laws, which outlawed the transatlantic slave trade and made involvement in slave trading into piracy, Americans sold their expertise. They worked as captains, crew members, and agents on Spanish and Portuguese slaving vessels destined for the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. Naturalized U.S. citizens were particularly desirable. In the event of capture, they could evade punishment better than native-born Americans. In other instances, American expertise was material; U.S.-built vessels, usually clippers from Baltimore, became a hallmark of the nineteenth-century transatlantic trade. In myriad ways, Americans continued to profit from and be complicit in the transatlantic slave trade decades after condemning it. The American Civil War effectively eradicated the transatlantic slave trade by galvanizing Spanish and Cuban elites to suppress the remaining traffic after the abolition of slavery in the United States. [End Page 442] Those interested in the history of the American South will find the region largely absent from Marques's book. Southern planters, as complicit as they were in the domestic slave trade, were less active in the transatlantic trade. The book's geographic scope, however, is one of its most valuable assets. Attuned to political, economic, and agricultural developments in England, the United States, the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and Brazil, Marques admirably writes a sweeping yet nuanced history that captures the extensive, shifting ties between Americans and their southern neighbors. Developments in Africa, however, are overlooked. Methodologically, Marques's scholarship underscores the immense value of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Peppered with statistics and charts, the book exhibits empirical rigor. Yet even with this plethora of numbers, Marques incorporates ample narrative as he traces ships and slavers throughout the Atlantic. That narrative takes readers from the High Court of Admiralty to the shores of Cuba and Brazil and the sea lanes in between. In each of these locales, Americans and others debated what constituted legal involvement in a business that many, including some Americans, saw as a crime against humanity. Mary Draper University of Virginia Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Reviewed by: The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 by Leonardo Marques Craig Hollander (bio) KEY WORDS Slavery, Slave trade, Transatlantic history The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867. By Leonardo Marques. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. 262. Cloth, $40.00.) It was way back in 1896 when W. E. B. Du Bois famously contended that America’s prohibition against the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 [End Page 727] was, in effect, a dead letter.1 Yet, it was only during the past two decades that historians like Don Fehrenbacher, Matthew Mason, David Ericson, and, ahem, your humble reviewer began to challenge that claim. And, at the same time, Du Bois’ indictment of American complicity in the slave trade continued to recruit new adherents, including Ernest Obadele-Starks, Gerald Horne, and, most recently, Stephen Chambers. Mercifully, Leonardo Marques’s new book, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867, provides a much-needed synthesis of this burgeoning research. It is an admirably cogent and comprehensive overview of American participation in the slave trade. Along the way, Marques also offers keen new insights into the intricacies of the traffic. As he shows, various government initiatives—both American and foreign alike—had a pronounced effect on the role that Americans played in the business of trafficking Africans throughout the Americas. Scholars of the transatlantic slave trade will not be particularly surprised by Marques’s overall characterization of American involvement in the traffic—that it intensified during the early national period, waned following the Napoleonic Wars, and then surged in the years leading up to the American Civil War. Such ebbs and flows were already apparent from reading the existing historiography on the topic. Much like his PhD adviser David Eltis—the human repository of all things concerning the slave trade—Marques is at his most original when he’s assessing the impact of specific policy measures on American participation in the traffic, especially to Brazil and Cuba. In that regard, this book is reminiscent of Eltis’s Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987). To illustrate, Marques succinctly explains the significance of Spain’s decision in 1825 to cede control of Cuba’s contraband slave trade to the local captain general. This subtle change in Spain’s colonial governance enabled Cuba to become (along with Brazil) the primary destination for American slave traffickers until well into the Lincoln administration. Marques also calls attention to the changing nature of American participation in the slave trade over time. To be sure, many Americans—members of the D’Wolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island, most [End Page 728] notoriously—served onboard slave ships and financed their own slave voyages. A few certainly smuggled slaves into the United States. However, Marques makes it clear that scholars cannot rely on these identifiable forms of participation to be the benchmark for gauging American involvement in the slave trade, particularly during the illegal period. Instead, he repeatedly reminds his readers that American participants in the slave trade were astute businessmen (and savvy criminals), who, with each new regulation, adjusted their roles in the traffic to evade detection. Sometimes they served as auxiliaries to Portuguese or Spanish slavers. Sometimes they built the ships. Prior to the Civil War, some Americans merely provided a safe harbor in New York for foreigners to organize their own voyages. Such tactics made it difficult to determine the “national” character of slave ships, confounding authorities, statesmen, and historians alike. Not that American complicity was limited to those responsible for the voyages, either. As Marques points out, it was largely the American demand for coffee and sugar that created the markets for slaves in Brazil and Cuba. So this is the perfect book to assign for your unit on the American slave trade, right? Not so fast. Ever notice how the most successful historians of the slave trade either recount the intricacies of a single voyage or employ a set of sources to offer insight into a portion of the traffic? There’s a good reason for their approach. The...

The aim of the study is to examine alternative interpretations of the history of the United States' founding within the context of the sociopolitical discourse that took place in 2019–2021 in academic and political circles. The scientific novelty is determined by the author's perspective on the issues of conflicting views of American history, which allows tracing the current state of problems with historical memory and its impact on the interpretation of history by American society. Furthermore, it highlights the main topics of public interest in U.S. history and distinguishes the «fault lines» in Americans' views on their history. Additionally, the author of the research pays attention to specific elements in the adaptation of historical memory of African Americans in the context of reframing the historical narrative of the United States. The author concludes that the study marks the beginning of a process of actualization of historical events related to the inception of slavery in America and the system of segregation within the framework of the further national debate regarding American history. Thus, in the context of these processes, the impact of the memorable date of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the British colony of Virginia is noted. The author comes to the conclusion of the existence of two mutually exclusive views of U.S. history: on the one hand, a patriotic-triumphant narrative of «progress» and on the other hand – a narrative of the «original sin» of the country's founding. Therefore, the study highlights the influence of past events on the present within the context of the public discussion of alternative interpretations of the country's founding history and the importance of studying the issues of historical memory within the African-American community for the national history of the United States.

Reviewed by: Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801by William Harrison Taylor Tammy K. Byron Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801. By William Harrison Taylor. Religion and American Culture. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 186. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1945-8.) By 1758, American Christians were seeking a spiritual rationale for the French and Indian War that had been plaguing the colonies since 1756. American Presbyterians concluded that the war was a sign of God's displeasure with the church's recent schism; subsequently, the Presbyterians sought not only the reunification of their church but also the fostering of inter-denominational unity for the good of Christendom and the nation. In Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801, William Harrison Taylor examines their efforts, concluding that rather than achieving long-term church and national unity, the Presbyterians' late-eighteenth-century efforts actually increased religious division and national sectionalism by the turn of the century. Taylor begins by examining the Presbyterian reunion in 1758 and the Presbyterians' ensuing efforts to cultivate Christendom by encouraging cooperation among Christian denominations. However, in addition to facing continuous internal conflict, Presbyterians found that interdenominational and political enmities complicated Christian cooperation between the mid-1750s and mid-1760s. Despite this struggle, Christians increasingly came together to face Great Britain's threat to American political liberties by the Revolutionary period. As they did so, their focus naturally became more political than religious, and by the end of the war, Presbyterians struggled to shift inter-denominational cooperation back to the goal of uniting Christendom. Taylor shows that the success of these interdenominational efforts varied by region and were more successful in the North than in the South. In the North, Presbyterian churches found similarly minded denominations, such as the Congregationalists, who shared their desire to create the Plan of Union of 1801 for the good of Christendom and the nation. However, southern churches, Taylor argues, suffered from a deficiency of regular leadership and an emphasis on local concerns that weakened southern churches' connections not only to other churches but also to the Presbyterian Church's national body. As a result, more Presbyterians came to believe that their needs could be better met by separating from the national church. Thus, Taylor shows, while Presbyterians succeeded in achieving their goal of community with other Christian denominations, they also inadvertently fostered division and sectionalism, leading southern members to draw away from a church that they believed could not meet their needs. While much literature exists on the history of late-eighteenth-century Christianity, Taylor's work adds to this scholarship by specifically examining the Presbyterian effort to foster Christian unity during this era and demonstrates how that effort resulted in fracturing both the church and American national unity. Much of the research on American sectionalism focuses on political clashes and the slavery debate as exacerbating sectionalism; Taylor, however, adds a new dimension to this historiography by illustrating the implications of the Presbyterians' religious divisions on Presbyterians in the southern states. [End Page 424] A significant part of the author's success is rooted in his use of a multitude of relevant sources, including lectures, sermons, and personal correspondence of leading Presbyterians. Taylor also references hymnals, books of poetry, and official Presbyterian Church records, such as the minutes of the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly and those of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia. Moreover, his book includes a strong survey of the secondary literature relating to late-eighteenth-century Presbyterian and political history. Taylor's work is also highly readable and understandable, due in large part to its clear and logical organization. Its five chapters are ordered chronologically, with the last two chapters organized by both period and region. The work is also peppered with interesting, relevant quotations from primary sources, which draw the reader into the period while supporting the thesis. Thus, both the layperson and the scholar will find Taylor's argument convincing and easy to follow. Tammy K. Byron Dalton State College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Africa experienced two major crisis in its history; slave trade and colonialism. At a time of both events Africa was integrated into global market in unequal and exploitative ways. But, slave trade in general and trans- Atlantic slave trade in particular lasts for long time and holds the lion share in underdevelopment of Africa. As such, this paper analysis the long term effect of trans-Atlantic slave trade for modern African political economy. To do so, the work employs qualitative research methods and secondary source of data.Before trans-Atlantic slave trade, African peoples were egalitarian, have their own values and civilizations. They were self sufficient and autonomous and there was no huge gap between Africa and Europe. However, Trans -Atlantic slave trade lead to intensification of the gap between Africa and Europe as result of its exploitative nature and deterioration of African values and norms. Hence, large numbers of African were shipped crossing Atlantic Ocean and works on large scale plantation in the new world and these numbers reaches its climax at 18 th c.Trans-Atlantic slave trade brought untold causalities on African political economy at time of its occurrence and even at modern time. Thereby, limitation of African economy to monoculture, perverted institution, and creation of fertile ground for colonialism because of weak and fragmented states, decline in population, disturbing family and reducing fertility rates were the major short term impacts of trans-Atlantic slave trade. Moreover, Trans- Atlantic slave trade also serves as important variable to analysis the modern political economy of Africa because of its long term effect.Accordingly, trans-Atlantic slave trade discourages state formation and this in turn obstructs creation of modern economy, laws and public goods. The current absolutist and patrimonial state existing in Africa also trace their origin to the era of trans-Atlantic slave trade. Trans-Atlantic slave trade also responsible for ethnic stratification existing in Africa today as result of mistrust and break down of social bond between peoples so that it lays the basis for intensification of ethnic conflict in modern Africa. Furthermore, it serves as pre-colonial source of modern corruption and modern racism from which Africa is still suffering.Therefore, lingering problems in modern African political economy embedded within trans-Atlantic slave trade so that it plays crucial role for current underdevelopment of the continent . DOI: 10.7176/IAGS/92-01 Publication date: December 31 st 2021

THE SLAVE TRADE AND ABOLITION REVISITED Herbert S. Klein. The Atlantic Slave Trade. New Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xx + 242 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Appendix. Bibliographic Essay. Index. $90.00. Cloth. $24.99. Paper. David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbies, eds. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xii + 315 pp. Preface. Notes on Contributors. Introduction by the Editors. Tables. Graphs. Index. $34.95. Paper. Derek R. Peterson, ed. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. II + 235 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Series Editor's Preface. Acknowledgments. Bibliography. Contributors. Index. $64.95. Cloth. $28.95. Paper. $25.00. In the past five years, the world has witnessed an efflorescence of symposia, museum exhibitions, and public commemorations focused on slavery and the slave trade. There have been many events in West Africa, North America, and Europe marking the bicentennial of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade, the two hundredth anniversary of the 1808 U.S. ban on the importation of enslaved labor, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, and the tenth anniversary of France's declaration that slavery and the slave trade constitute crimes against humanity. And last year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Kimoon designated December 2 as the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. Simultaneously (and perhaps not coincidentally), these same years have also witnessed a tremendous growth in the already large body of scholarly literature on the slave trade, slavery, and abolition. The three books reviewed here, The Atlantic Slave Trade by Herbert Klein, Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R. Peterson, and Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, edited by David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz, and Anthony Tibbies, are significant contributions to this literature. The first two do not focus on a single country, region, or continent but engage, rather, in the kind of transnational history that charts the trajectories of often separate, yet interconnected, decisions and events that came to connect and effect so many different peoples from around the world over long stretches of time. The third, Liverpool, focuses on die history of this port's involvement in the Adantic slave trade, but it does so by also positioning Liverpool within the larger British context. Each book addresses a specific set of questions central to the histories of the slave trade, slavery, and imperial studies. But each also brings new information to bear on these questions as well as new perspectives. The Atlantic Slave Trade (2010), for example, is a new edition of Klein's earlier book of the same tide, first published in 1999. But his incorporation in this latest edition of David Eltis's updated and gready expanded quantitative data set on the involvement of Portuguese and Spanish ships in die Adantic trade strengthens his already compelling arguments about the importance of the South Adantic to this enterprise. Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery expands upon an already good body of literature on the ports that were so central to the trade in Africa and the Americas, but the authors in this edited volume bring to this area of inquiry the kinds of quantitative data that historians of the ports in Africa would love to access in regard to African ports. It is this quantitative approach that allows the contributors to explain in convincing detail how and why Liverpool outstripped the other major ports in Britain (i.e., London and Bristol) in terms of its involvement in the slave trade while also becoming a center for abolitionist activity. The scholarly literature has long noted the connection between the abolition movement in Britain and Britain's imperialist ambitions. …

Polygyny rates are higher in Western Africa than in Eastern Africa. The African slave trades explain this diff erence. More male slaves were exported in the trans-Atlantic slave trades from Western Africa, while more female slaves were exported in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea slave trades from Eastern Africa. The slave trades led to prolonged periods of abnormal sex ratios, which impacted the rates of polygyny across Africa. In order to assess these claims, we present evidence from a variety of sources. We find the trans-Atlantic slave trades have a positive correlation with historical levels of polygyny across African ethnic groups. We also construct an ethnic group level data set linking current rates of polygyny with historical trade flow data from the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. We find the trans-Atlantic slave trades cause polygyny at the ethnic group level, while the Indian Ocean slave trades do not. We provide cross-country evidence corroborating our findings.

Using culturally sensitive language for race.

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery1 follows last year's special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional t...

This paper examines issues of the slave trade and slavery in the Momo River valley of Cameroon. Using primary sources (oral tradition and archival materials) and secondary sources, the paper shows the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in the region not only in the slave trade and slaving activities but also in the transformation of some old social institutions and the emergence of new ones. The paper argues that the transatlantic slave trade introduced capitalists in this part of Africa, who continued to make profits from legitimate commerce after the abolition of the slave trade through the persistent enslavement of other Africans to work in the palm oil industry. The Momo River valley continued to be a major source of these slaves. This paper therefore brings into the limelight slavery and the slave trade in an area which contributed to the transatlantic and the post-transatlantic slave trade but which has still not received adequate scholarly attention.

Reviewed by: The History of American Slaveholders by Wang Jinhu 王勇 [Wang Yong] 美国奴隶主史 [The History of American Slaveholders]. By 王金虎 [Wang Jinhu]. (Beijing, China: Peking University Press, 2019. Pp. [viii], 574. ISBN 978-7-301-30144-9.) American history is a hot field for Chinese historians who study world history. For Chinese scholars, American history is national and federal history, the history of the United States as a whole, and the importance of regionalism or sectionalism, or the history of a specific region or state, has been almost unanimously neglected. One reason for this approach is Chinese historians' misperception of the United States based on Chinese politics. Another reason is the influence of traditional class struggle ideology, which overemphasizes class struggle and denies regionalism as a driving force of American history. When interpreting American history, Chinese historians deem the American South a loser and an outsider with little significance in the historical development of the country. As a result, there are very few Chinese academic works on the history of the American South. Although some scholars of American literature have shown interest in southern literature and culture, the South as a region has been almost forgotten by Chinese scholars more broadly. American history is interpreted as a process dominated by the North, especially the Northeast. For Chinese scholars of American history, diplomatic history and social history are attractive fields, while the history of American slavery is an understudied field with few modern implications. Wang Jinhu, a professor at China's Henan University, is a leading Chinese scholar of U.S. history who has been studying the topic for almost twenty years. Fifteen years ago, the author [End Page 900] published a monograph based on his doctoral dissertation called The Slaveholders and the Civil War (Beijing: People's Press, 2005), which apparently was the first published book in China on U.S. slavery. The History of American Slaveholders, the fruit of Wang's ten-year effort, is an outstanding book that pioneers U.S. slavery studies and American southern studies in China. The History of American Slaveholders presents a comprehensive history of slaveholders from the early seventeenth century to the end of the Civil War. In the beginning, the author defines the slaveholders' impact on American history as the most persistent, most powerful, and most profound: "White slaveholders existed for over two and a half centuries, from the British colonists' establishment of the first colony in North America to the end of the American Civil War. Slaveholders controlled southern society for two and a half centuries; from the formation of the country to the 1850s, they even dominated the federal government. The inequality between the blacks and the whites created by the slaveholders lasts until today; thus their impact on American society is indeed deep and far-reaching" (p. i). The book illustrates several important topics chronologically. The rise of the slaveholders is the topic of chapter 1. The transatlantic slave and economic trade nurtured the rise of slaveholders in North America. The rise of the slaveholders is well illustrated by the impressive family stories of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and several other well-known figures. The topic of chapter 2 is slaveholders and the American Revolution, and the chapter covers a series of actions and events such as North America's protests and resistance, the War for Independence, the formation of a republican confederation, and the creation of a federal state. "In this epoch-making transformation, among the elite groups that led the Revolution, the slaveholders' role was the most significant," Wang writes (p. 71). In the American Revolution, the elite slaveholders were important revolutionaries, becoming leaders of the cause. However, Wang also writes that "the slaveholders, as a very influential group, stubbornly refused to abandon enslaving the black people; thus the principle of equality and human rights proclaimed by the revolutionaries did not apply to the black slaves" (p. 72). This dilemma is well explained in this chapter through the vivid illustration of the Founding Fathers' complicated attitudes toward slavery. Chapter 3 talks about the expansion of the slave economy. The further development of the Atlantic world market pushed by the industrial revolution, the increase of the enslaved population...