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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.1 | The History Cooperative
40.1  
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Fall, 2006
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REVIEWS

SECTION 2
RACE AND SLAVERY

The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810. By James A. McMillin (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 207 pp. + 1 CD-ROM, $39.95).
Less is known of the details of US slave voyages than about the slave trade of any other national group except the Portuguese. James McMillin has addressed this issue for the period 1783–1810, as well as taken on one of the major unresolved demographic questions on the relationship between the transatlantic flow of African peoples and the black population of the Americas. Several years' research have allowed him to accumulate a database of what he claims as 1,764 separate slave voyages between 1783 and 1810—supplied to readers via a CD-ROM in PDF format slipped inside the back cover of his book. On the basis of these new data he offers three re-interpretations of US involvement in the slave trade. First, "far more foreign slaves were imported than previously thought" into the USA; second, "the Revolution did little to stop... the slave trade"; third, "conditions captives encountered worsened rather than improved" between 1783 and 1810. 1
      On the size of the late US slave trade the author quite properly points to the wide discrepancy that currently exists between the high estimates of African arrivals supported by the demographic approach to measuring the slave trade (291,000), and the low estimates supported by voyage-based data. (92,000 in one case and 113,000 in another). He makes some new assumptions about demographic patterns and calculates a new estimate of 187,843 slaves imported. Turning to his new voyage data set he presents breakdowns of slaves carried into the US (and elsewhere by US ships) from which he derives an estimate of "North American slave-carrying capacity" of 146,000 slaves for the period. He then examines the two separate estimates by region within the US and by decade and develops a preferred series (amalgamating the two approaches) which yields 170,300 slaves disembarked in all the US between 1783 and 1810. . . .
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