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Book Review
| Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808. By Ernest Obadele-Starks. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007. x, 270 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-858-5.)The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown, USA: Spirit of Our Ancestors. By Natalie S. Robertson. (Westport: Praeger, 2008. xiv, 256 pp. $44.95, ISBN 978-0-275-99491-4.)
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| Both books under review here share not only a controversial and tragic subject—the roughly half century of illegal African slave trade to the United States from abolition in 1808 through the 1860s—but daunting methodological hurdles as well. As Hugh Thomas observed just over a decade ago in The Slave Trade (1997), his four-century survey of the Atlantic slave trade, "The subject of this illegal slave trade has, remarkably, been avoided by historians of North America" (p. 616). Fortunately, both authors resolve the bulk of the source and method dilemmas posed by their subject and prove estimable exceptions to Thomas's still largely valid claim. |
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Assessing the sketchy historiography of America's illegal African commerce, Ernest Obadele-Starks notes that recent scholarship has largely been concerned with quantifying that traffic, producing estimates of American slave imports from 1808–1863 near 200,000. Obadele-Starks's estimate places that number significantly higher at 786,500. More importantly, he contends, the debatable numbers game has resulted in the "absence of a well-developed historical framework" within which to ground further study of the illegal slave trade (p. 9). Providing such a framework is Obadele-Starks's principal aim in Freebooters and Smugglers. |
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He first turned to the voluminous cache of slave manifests in the U.S. Customs House. Careful scrutiny of ship names, ports, departure dates, and demographic data on individual slaves in those overlooked maritime records eventually allowed him "to tap into a historical rhythm regarding slave trans-shipments" (p. 12). When those ship names and slave statistics were combined with court cases, U.S. Marshals Service reports, and naval records, Obadele-Starks was able "to draw certain conclusions and to make plausible inferences about the post-1808 foreign slave trade" (p.12). |
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The sum total of his findings is both less and more than the book's subtitle would suggest. Although a number of American slave trading ports, both North and South, are referenced, the focus throughout is on two: New Orleans and later Galveston. The work is therefore not a broad analysis of "The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808," but it is something more instructive. Obadele-Starks has produced a comprehensive social history of the region surrounding these two key slaving ports and in the process has illuminated every dimension, phase, and agent in the complex chain of slave smuggling. |
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There are familar faces to be sure; Louisiana's infamous Lafitte family played a significant role in the front end of the process, often highjacking slavers heading for New Orleans from Africa or the Caribbean. The workings and overall success of the slave-trading enterprise are fully revealed only when Obadele-Starks fully examines the long and complicated transshipment stage, the focus of the book's six main chapters. Slave cargoes were distributed through companies and agents to individual buyers in a rapidly growing frontier slave economy in which most residents readily accepted illegal foreign slave trading as being necessary because the region was ill-supplied by legal imports. Government agents and institutions—customs officials, marshals, judges, courts, and legislatures—were likewise complicit in a system rife with bribery, intimidation, and violence. |
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