Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808

by Ernest Obadele-Starks

Overview

In 1891 a young W. E. B. DuBois addressed the annual American Historical Association on the enforcement of slave trade laws: “Northern greed joined to Southern credulity was a combination calculated to circumvent any law, human or divine.” One law in particular he was referring to was the Abolition Act of 1808. It was specifically passed to end the foreign slave trade. However, as Ernest Obadele-Starks shows, thanks to profiteering smugglers like the Lafitte brothers and the Bowie brothers, the slave trade persisted throughout the south for a number of years after the law was passed. Freebooters and Smugglers examines the tactics and strategies that the adherents of the foreign slave trade used to challenge the law. It reassesses the role that Americans played in the continuation of foreign slave transshipments into the country right up to the Civil War, shedding light on an important topic that has been largely overlooked in the historiography of the slave trade.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557288585
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	11/01/2007
Edition description:	New
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Ernest Obadele-Starks holds a joint appointment as an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University-College Station and Texas A&M University at Qatar. He is the author of Black Unionism in the Industrial South and has written several articles examining various political and social aspects of the African American diaspora. He is currently working on a comparative study of free black settlements in Canada, the United States, and Mexico from 1849 to 1867.

Table of Contents

List of Photographs and Illustrations     viii
Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     3
"A View of Opening a Trade": Post Revolution, Louisiana, Abolition, and the Foreign Slave Trade     15
"A Particular Kind of Force": Judicial Pursuits, Resistance, and Frontier Justice     46
"Turbulent and Bad Men": Transshipments and the Texas Dilemma     75
"Difficult to Repress": Expansion, Runaways, and Maintenance     109
"A Great Frontier Movement": Sanctuaries for the Post-1808 Foreign Slave Trade     144
"No Argument Could Be Made": Secession, the Civil War, and the Politics of Suppression     167
Conclusion: The Post-1808 Foreign Slave Trade in American History     192
Notes     195
Bibliography     229
Index     251

What People are Saying About This

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

"This book is definitely a winner. It fills a gaping hole in the scholarly literature about a very important subject, transcending the strong inclination of historians to confine themselves to simplistic counting and literal mindedness in their use of documents and databases."--(Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, professor emerita of history, Rutgers University)

S. Charles Bolton

"Obadele-Starks does a comprehensive job, impressive in its scope, following the trade as it moves west, telling the story down to and through the Civil War, dealing with its international aspects, and putting it within the context of the struggle over slavery itself. The research that supports the narrative is prodigious."--(S. Charles Bolton, professor of history, University of Arkansas, Little Rock)

Editorial Reviews

This book is definitely a winner. It fills a gaping hole in the scholarly literature about a very important subject, transcending the strong inclination of historians to confine themselves to simplistic counting and literal mindedness in their use of documents and databases.” —Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, professor emerita of history, Rutgers University “Obadele-Starks does a comprehensive job, impressive in its scope, following the trade as it moves west, telling the story down to and through the Civil War, dealing with its inter-national aspects, and putting it within the context of the struggle over slavery itself. The research that supports the narrative is prodigious.” —S. Charles Bolton, professor of history, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

From the Publisher