The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry by Ned Sublette & Constance Sublette

Author:Ned Sublette & Constance Sublette [Sublette, Ned & Sublette, Constance]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Discrimination, Racism, Civil War, United States, African Americans, History
ISBN: 9781613748206
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

1804 7,643

1805 8,592

1806 15,551

1807 23,174

1808 498

total 55,458

Eltis and Richardson show an estimated 12.7 percent death rate, with 47,281 arriving alive. Some estimates of the traffic are higher; James McMillin believes that more than seventy thousand Africans—a phenomenal number—arrived into the Lowcountry during the four years from 1804 to 1807.8

Some of these newly arrived Africans were sent on to Jamaica, Barbados, or other Antillean territories, and it’s unclear how many of them were re-exported to Louisiana. At least five thousand, believes Lacy K. Ford—more than 10 percent of the Eltis and Richardson estimate of Africans trafficked to South Carolina—but the number could be larger.9 There was definitely a commercial corridor in slaves: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Afro-Louisiana database shows that between 1806 and 1810, 76 percent of captives that she was able to obtain documentation for who came into the port of New Orleans arrived from South Carolina, versus only 3 percent for other US ports of origin (a sample that does not include the migration of some ten thousand people, about a third of them enslaved, to New Orleans from eastern Cuba in 1809–10). Her statistics for 1811 and 1812 show 67 percent from South Carolina.10 A committee report to Congress on February 17, 1806, stated flatly, “African slaves, lately imported into Charleston, have been thence conveyed into the Territory of Orleans; and, in their opinion, this practice will be continued to a very great extent, while there is no law to prevent it.”11

Some of the Africans were taken past New Orleans to Natchez, though in the pre-steam days it was hard work getting a boat up the Mississippi River. The Lucy left Charleston on July 4, 1806, “carrying 50 negroes insured from Charleston to Natchez, the premium 7½ per cent.”12 During the Missouri Compromise debate of 1820, South Carolina senator William Smith, arguing in favor of unlimited slavery, entered into the congressional record the following passage about the importations of 1803–07, which shows how little the Carolinians were involved in the actual business of importation (as opposed to selling the captives):

The whole number imported by the merchants and planters of Charleston and its vicinity were only two thousand and six. Nor were the slaves imported by the foreigners, and other American vessels and owners, sold to the Carolinians, only in a small part. They were sold to the people of the Western States, Georgia, New Orleans, and a considerable quantity were sent to the West Indies, especially when the market became dull in Carolina.13

So a number of the slaves brought into Louisiana through 1810 came from Africa through South Carolina via the coastwise trade. The manifests before 1818 were lost, but the one stray surviving manifest from 1807 is for a “new negro man”—i.e., African-born—coming to New Orleans from Charleston.

Probably Charleston was the source from which George W. Morgan received the cargo of thirty people—twenty adults, ten children—from two widely separated regions of Africa that he advertised in the Orleans Gazette and Commercial Advertiser of August 13, 1806, though they

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