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The United States Navy, Slave-Trade Suppression, and State Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

DAVID F. ERICSON
DAVID F. ERICSON*
Affiliation:
Cleveland State University
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Abstract

The mission of the United States Navy expanded significantly because of the presence of the institution of racial slavery on American soil. Most important, both proslavery and antislavery forces favored, for very different reasons, a substantial naval buildup in the late 1850s. The navy had, however, long been engaged in securing the nation’s borders against slave smuggling, an activity that also seemed to have broad support at the time. Finally, somewhat more controversially, the navy had been associated with the American Colonization Society’s Liberian enterprise from its very inception, deciding to deploy vessels to Africa in an otherwise unimaginable time frame. The relationship between the presence of slavery and the pre–Civil War activities of the navy is a largely untold—or, at best, half-told—story of American state development.

Keywords

U.S. Navyslaveryslave tradeAfrican colonizationLiberiastate development

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Article
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 231 - 255
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

The mission of the US navy expanded significantly because of the presence of the institution of racial slavery on American soil to encompass much more than its conventional military duties. In the early republic, naval vessels were engaged in securing the nation’s borders against slave smuggling. The navy also assisted the expatriation project of the American Colonization Society (ACS) almost from its inception, deploying ships to Africa in a time frame unimaginable absent the society’s Liberian colony. Finally, the major navy expansion program of the late 1850s served multiple agendas to the extent naval vessels could now support more determined efforts to suppress illegal slave trading as well as protect an envisioned Caribbean empire for slavery. The relationship between the presence of slavery and pre–Civil War activities of the navy is a largely untold—or, at best, half-told—story of American state development.

In the last two decades, a number of scholars, including Max Edling, Ira Katznelson, David Mayhew, and Sheldon Pollack, have situated the U.S. army at the epicenter of early-American state development, improvising on Charles Tilly’s famous aphorism that “states make wars, wars make states” by indicating how the army engaged in state-building activities in the absence of major interstate wars.Footnote 1 In a recent study, I extended their insights by demonstrating how the presence of slavery influenced the army’s pre–Civil War activities, which, in turn, served to increase the capacities of the American state to accomplish several major policy initiatives, including forcibly removing multiple Native-American nations across the Mississippi River in the 1830s.Footnote 2 None of these works, however, analyzed the navy’s role in early-American state development, much less how the presence of slavery affected its far-flung activities. This neglect is somewhat surprising because, after the army, the navy was the department that received the most federal funds during the 1791–1861 decades.Footnote 3

Hence, Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire is an important addition to the literature in framing Southern political support for the 1850s navy expansion program as the cornerstone of a proslavery imperialist ideology. Southern executive and congressional leaders moved to assert American naval power much more aggressively in the Caribbean. Depending on the source, they connected this policy goal to a number of objectives, such as assisting filibustering expeditions in the Caribbean basin, pursuing gunboat diplomacy against vulnerable Latin American nations, reviving a transatlantic trade in African slaves, and, most broadly, repulsing foreign threats to the institution of slavery in its remaining New World strongholds, Brazil and Cuba, as well as the American South. Negatively, southern slaveholding elites were committed to counteracting British naval power in the Caribbean. The proslavery imperialist vision of the Western Hemisphere recast the Monroe Doctrine in identifiably racial terms.Footnote 4

This policy episode is doubly ironic. At the same time southern politicians supported a navy expansion program to protect their slaveholdings, they advocated a broad range of restrictions on federal powers with the same goal in mind. Yet this was far from the only instance they were caught in a bind between protecting slavery and their professed states-rights principles. The enforcement of fugitive-slave law was another notable case where they sided with federal against state powers to safeguard their slaveholdings.Footnote 5 The second irony is that the 1850s expansion program positioned the navy to take a more active role in dismantling the institution of slavery once the southern states had seceded from the union. The Civil War naval blockade impaired the Confederate war effort, while the Union navy also played an instrumental role in capturing several key port cities.Footnote 6

What is left out of the “proslavery imperialism” narrative is, first, how northern executive and congressional leaders supported the expansion program and, second, how the presence of slavery affected the institutional development of the navy in prior decades. In addition to sharing the same capacious faith in the nation’s manifest destiny as their Southern colleagues, many Northern politicians had antislavery, or at least antislave trade, motives, for supporting the expansion program. After all, it resulted in the navy stationing more vessels off the west coast of Africa as well as in the Caribbean. During the early republic, Southern and Northern officeholders were more likely to share similar motives in supporting the navy’s efforts to interdict slave smuggling and assist the ACS’s colonial enterprise given that society officials consciously pursued a “big tent” philosophy to appeal to both antislavery and proslavery audiences and also prominently featured slave-trade suppression among its goals.Footnote 7 The relationship between naval development and the presence of slavery was a prolonged, multifaceted affair, not simply driven by the imperialist motives of Southern slaveholding elites during a certain time frame. The relationship between the two institutions also shows the limits of a common trope in the literature that depicts the presence of slavery as depressing state development in the United States because Southern slaveholders feared the capacity of a strong central government to abolish the institution.Footnote 8 In some cases, the slaveholders’ calculus clearly worked in reverse, to favor an expansion of federal capacities.

Besides increasing federal capacities, the US navy’s efforts to suppress the slave trade prompted American state development according to other widely used measures of state development. The navy’s slave-trade suppression efforts were part of a durable shift in governing authority from the state to the federal level over deterring both slave trading and smuggling in the early republic. While engaging in slave-smuggling interdiction, navy personnel also participated in the initial federal efforts to control the national borders. In publicly opposing a slave-trade revival movement that gained considerable traction among Southern Democrats in the 1850s, the Department of Navy asserted its institutional autonomy from partisan pressures. These state-building developments—increasing state capacities, shifting governing authority, controlling borders, and strengthening institutional autonomy—would not have occurred within the same time frame without the presence of slavery on American soil. As we will see, this case is a prime example of the American state “thickening” to absorb international and domestic pressures generated by the heavily contested nature of slavery in the United States and broader Atlantic world rather than in reaction to its own internal dynamics.Footnote 9

Early Naval Activity Against Slave Smuggling and Trading

Congress first acted against the slave trade in 1794 when it passed a law outlawing American participation in the trade.Footnote 10 Then in 1800, it passed new, stronger slave-trade legislation that also prohibited US citizens from owning interests in foreign slave-trading ventures.Footnote 11 From the time Congress created the Department of Navy (1798) until the effective date of its slave-import ban (1808), naval vessels seized five ships on the suspicion they were slave ships, though none with Africans aboard.Footnote 12

While the responsibility for prohibiting slave imports and interdicting slave smuggling into existing states remained a state responsibility until 1808, they were a federal responsibility in the territories. The first Mississippi territorial constitution (1798) contained a ban on slave imports.Footnote 13 The first Louisiana territorial constitution (1804) prohibited bringing slaves into the territory, both from other countries and from other states and territories, except when they were brought by bona fide settlers for their personal use.Footnote 14 In the meantime, the Louisiana Purchase had induced the South Carolina legislature to allow its ban on slave imports to lapse in 1803 to capitalize on the demand for slaves in the new southwestern territories, thus adding pressure on Congress to ban slave imports on a national level when it was constitutionally authorized to pass such legislation.Footnote 15

On March 2, 1807, Congress invoked its constitutional authority and passed a federal slave-import ban with an effective date of January 1, 1808. President Thomas Jefferson had encouraged Congress to act early on the matter in his 1806 annual message to the body. In his most exalted language, Jefferson advocated sanctioning “all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.”Footnote 16 The ensuing debate revealed nearly unanimous congressional sentiment to enact a slave-import ban. The final vote was 103–5, with only three Southern dissenters. Sectional differences, though, emerged over the enforcement of the ban in coastal waters, the severity of criminal penalties for violating the ban, and the disposition of Africans seized in the process of enforcing it. Congress fashioned Southern-leaning compromises on each issue. The new law only regulated intercoastal slave shipments on vessels of forty or more tons, established criminal sentences of five-to-ten years for slave-trade violations rather than, as James Sloan (DR-NJ) had proposed, death, and, for the lack of one vote, permitted state officials to determine the status of recaptured Africans instead of uniformly freeing them. John Randolph (DR-VA) spearheaded the opposition to placing any restrictions on intercoastal slave shipments as a violation of the rights of property. Somewhat hyperbolically, he warned such restrictions would establish “the pretext of universal emancipation.”Footnote 17

With the passage of a national slave-import ban, the federal government had assumed authority over all aspects of this policy area from the state governments. It could enact laws against both slave trading and smuggling and enforce them through interdiction activities, internationally as well as domestically. While federal officials did not immediately bolster naval efforts to interdict suspected slave ships in international waters, they did move more aggressively against slave smuggling on the domestic front.

In 1811, Orleans territorial Governor William C. C. Claiborne dispatched Captain Andrew Hunter Holmes and forty dragoons on a mission to suppress slave-smuggling activities in the bayou country southeast of New Orleans. Jean Paul Lafitte was merely one of many slave smugglers who operated out of the area. Holmes took Lafitte into custody, but he was released on bond and, in the end, Holmes’s mission proved ineffectual. In 1814, the army and navy launched a more concerted effort to suppress slave-smuggling operations in the vicinity, which was the occasion for Lafitte “volunteering” to assist General Andrew Jackson in defending New Orleans from imminent British invasion. After the War of 1812, however, he resumed his slave-smuggling activities on the other side of the state, where he teamed with another frontier hero of questionable fame, Jim Bowie. Finally, the Department of Navy dispatched the USS Enterprise in 1820 to shut down their highly lucrative Galveston operation.Footnote 18

In 1817, the army and navy also combined to invade Amelia Island, near the Florida-Georgia border, to suppress slave-smuggling operations on that frontier.Footnote 19 Creek Indian agent and former Georgia governor David B. Mitchell had allegedly profited from those operations. Even though Mitchell was never prosecuted, the evidence against him was strong enough for President James Monroe to dismiss him from federal service.Footnote 20 The military invasion was only a temporary success. Slave smuggling continued in the area until the United States occupied Florida in 1821 under the terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty.Footnote 21 One of Jackson’s missions as the first provisional governor of the territory was to suppress slave-smuggling operations on the peninsula.Footnote 22

On the western side of the Florida peninsula, army, navy, and treasury personnel combined to capture three American ships carrying a total of 109 slaves in June 1818. Spanish colonials had hired the ships to transport their slaves from Cuba to Pensacola, which at the time was Spanish territory. The USS Surprise seized the Louisa and Merino on June 21. A Treasury revenue cutter captured the Constitution eight days later. The seizures were subject to lengthy litigation until the Supreme Court finally decided in 1824 that the owners of the eighty-four slaves seized from the Constitution were owed restitution. In an opinion written by Associate Justice Bushrod Washington, the court ruled in favor of the appellants on grounds that the Constitution had first been seized in Pensacola harbor by American soldiers and only later recaptured by the revenue cutter in international waters after the soldiers had released the ship.Footnote 23

By the time the case reached its final resolution, only sixty-nine of the slaves remained in federal custody in Mobile. In accordance with the Supreme Court ruling, the federal district court allotted fifty-four slaves for an auction sale to reimburse the Constitution claimants and the other fifteen to the state of Alabama, which also auctioned its share.Footnote 24 In 1825, Congress reimbursed the Merino and Louisa claimants a sum of $16,156 for their losses in compliance with a Florida territorial court decision based on the terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty, which required the federal government to redress the outstanding claims of Spanish colonials against the United States or its citizens.Footnote 25

The occupation of Spanish Florida made slave smuggling on the southeastern frontier more difficult. The emergence of a relatively autonomous slaveholding region and then republic in Texas reversed the flow of slaves on another frontier where such activity had been prevalent. The natural increase of slaves in the Southern states and strong interstate market in slaves meant the demand for new African slaves was relatively weak.Footnote 26 Finally, moral censure against slave smuggling probably had a deterrent effect, especially because the profits to be gained from smuggling slaves into the United States were much more uncertain than from carrying them to Brazil or Cuba, where the demand was stronger and sanctions against slave trading weaker. As a result, the federal slave-import ban was largely self-enforcing.Footnote 27

On the other hand, the federal laws against American participation in the slave trade were more difficult to enforce. The “frontier” for slave trading was much more expansive than for slave smuggling. Any moral censure against slave trading was also less effective because of the enormous profits to be reaped from the trade and greater promise of impunity in pursuing it. The enforcement of federal laws against American participation in the trade would have required a substantial commitment of resources, as became clear when the Buchanan administration finally made such a commitment in the late 1850s. Prior to that time, slave-trade suppression lost out in the competition for scarce federal resources because it was not a priority to any major political bloc. Even though Congress passed a new slave-trade law in 1820 declaring participation in the trade a form of piracy, which was a capital offense, the barriers to convictions remained steep.Footnote 28 Typically, US attorneys decided to merely libel the ship and not prosecute the captain, crew, or owners, or else prosecute them on lesser charges than piracy. They were rarely convicted in any case, especially if their ships had been captured without Africans aboard. The first and only public execution in a slave-trade case occurred during the Civil War.Footnote 29

Still, by the 1820s, federal officials had moved to control the nation’s borders more effectively. In a development that has not received nearly enough scholarly attention, American authorities performed this critical state function to exclude illegally transported African slaves long before they targeted unwelcome Asian or European laborers, belying the notion that the federal government did not engage in immigration control until the late nineteenth century.Footnote 30 Furthermore, the joint interdiction efforts of the Departments of Navy and Treasury required them to increase state capacities. Navy officials procured gunboats to chase slave smugglers in tidal waters. Treasury officials purchased revenue cutters and opened custom stations to deter such activity.Footnote 31 As a result, naval vessels captured more suspected slave ships—a total of eight from 1809 to 1819, and two with Africans aboard.Footnote 32 Even if antislavery sentiments were relatively weak, antislave-trade sentiment was broad and deep enough to sustain a state commitment to the interdiction of illegal slave smuggling and trading.Footnote 33 This policy area may not have been a priority to any major partisan or sectional bloc, but equally no faction had yet dedicated itself to opposing federal efforts to suppress the trade.

The Navy in Africa

In 1819, Congress passed new slave-trade legislation that promised to expand federal efforts to suppress illegal slave trading by appropriating $100,000 to fund such activities.Footnote 34 However, the potential impact of the law went largely unrealized, at least until 1843, when the navy finally established a separate African squadron.

Instead, President Monroe diverted this initial slave-trade appropriation to the ACS to assist it in founding a colony for expatriated African Americans on the west coast of Africa. Monroe’s diversion did not seem inappropriate given that the new law required Africans seized from suspected slave ships to be resettled outside the territorial limits of the United States rather than remaining subject to the disposition of state officials. The ACS’s prospective colony could serve as a resettlement site. Society officials also predicted that the presence of such a colony would act to depress the slave trade.Footnote 35 At least initially, Congress acquiesced in Monroe’s diversion.Footnote 36 The practical effect, though, was that the money was not spent to establish a new African squadron. Federal efforts to interdict illegal slave trading remained sporadic and ineffective for the next four decades.

The navy, in the meantime, became heavily involved in Liberian affairs. Indeed, the colony would probably not have been founded without its intervention.

The first group of eighty-six colonists sailed to the west coast of Africa in 1820 aboard the Elizabeth, which the Monroe administration had chartered and provisioned with $33,000 in bills of exchange from the ACS’s $100,000 federal endowment. The USS Cyane escorted the Elizabeth to Africa. Malaria and other tropical diseases inflicted heavy causalities on this expedition at its temporary location on Sherbro Island. The death toll included fifteen colonists as well as the three colonial agents who headed the expedition. The Cyane and another naval vessel, the USS John Adams, transported the surviving colonists to the shelter of the British free-black colony of Sierra Leone.Footnote 37

The next year the federal government chartered another ship, the Nautilus, to transport a second expedition of thirty-three colonists to Africa along with four new colonial agents. The agents’ mission was to find and purchase a healthier, permanent colonial site on the mainland and then settle the surviving members of the first two groups of colonists, now both temporarily housed in Sierra Leone, on the site. They proceeded to negotiate a treaty with local African leaders to cede land for a settlement, but the society’s board of managers rejected it because of a provision requiring that $300 be paid as an annual tribute to the leaders.Footnote 38

Later that same year the ACS’s board of managers sent another agent, Eli Ayres, to secure a colonial site. Ayres traveled to Africa aboard the USS Shark, under the command of Lieutenant Matthew C. Perry, who would later become the first commander of the African Squadron before finding enduring fame in Japan. Once in Sierra Leone, Ayres encountered a group of very restive colonists and was unable to initiate any negotiations to purchase land. Finally, in late 1821, Lieutenant Robert T. Stockton, who had taken a deep personal interest in the project, convinced Navy Secretary Smith Thompson to send him to Africa aboard the USS Alligator to secure a colonial site. Together, Ayres and Stockton were able to purchase land in what is now Liberia in exchange for goods valued at merely $300. The deal was consummated at the point of Stockton’s gun.Footnote 39

During the early years of the Liberian settlement, naval vessels were active off the west coast of Africa in conjunction with the assistance they provided the colony. In 1820–21, the Alligator, Cyane, and Hornet seized a total of nine suspected slave ships in the vicinity.Footnote 40 Although three of the ships were released shortly after their captures, prize navy crews sailed the other six back to the United States to be libeled.Footnote 41 In the case of the French ship La Jeune Eugénie, Associate Justice Joseph Story, sitting on the Massachusetts circuit, remanded the ship to French authorities after deciding that American courts lacked jurisdiction in the case.Footnote 42 During its return voyage to the United States, the Hornet seized the French ship La Pensée from a Columbian privateer in the Caribbean with 220 Africans aboard on November 8, 1821. In this case, the Monroe administration decided to turn both the ship and recaptured Africans over to French authorities to forestall litigation.Footnote 43

In addition to their other duties, naval personnel protected the colony against local raiding parties and supplied it with weapons and other goods because the society had not raised nearly enough funds to supply the colony itself.Footnote 44 In 1822, several African leaders who had agreed to the treaty of acquisition seized the opportunity presented by the absence of naval vessels to attack the colony. Fortunately for the colonists and new ACS agent Jehudi Ashmun, a British man-of-war was in the area. British marines joined the colonists in repelling the assault.Footnote 45 When he received word of the attack, Captain Robert T. Spence sailed the Cyane, which had only recently left Liberia, back to the colony. By the time it arrived, British naval officers had negotiated a truce, but Spence’s crew constructed fortifications in Liberia to protect it from further attack.Footnote 46

Thereafter, the US naval presence in the vicinity dwindled to occasional visits of vessels assigned to the Pacific Squadron enroute to and from the Indian Ocean.Footnote 47 The Missouri Crisis and reemergence of partisan and sectional divisions during Monroe’s second administration seemed to dissipate whatever political will had existed to appropriate resources for interdicting illegal slave trading. At times it appeared as if Congressman Charles Francis Mercer (NR-VA), who had shepherded both the 1819 and 1820 slave-trade laws through Congress, was a lone voice in the wilderness in calling for more strenuous efforts to enforce those laws. In supporting an 1823 House resolution urging the United States to enter into negotiations with other maritime powers to take measures to more effectively eradicate the trade, he explained that “we have seen that this cannot be effected by the few vessels occasionally dispatched to the coast of Africa with instructions to search no vessels but such as bear the American flag.”Footnote 48 By this juncture, the navy had adopted a minimalist policy of timing slave-trade patrols along the west coast of Africa to the occasional visits of its ships to Liberia. This policy did not entail much additional spending. It also did not require the reallocation of existing ships or construction of new ones, as a separate African squadron would have required. The consequence was a conspicuous lack of deterrent effect. According to eyewitness reports from Liberia, American participation in the African slave trade had returned to precolonization levels by 1830.Footnote 49

From the effective withdrawal of the US navy from Africa in 1823 until the establishment of the African Squadron in 1842, naval vessels captured only three suspected slave ships.Footnote 50 The sole seizure with slaves aboard, moreover, occurred inadvertently and in the Caribbean, not the eastern Atlantic. In 1830, the USS Grampus captured the Fenix with eighty-two Africans aboard when it sailed to assist the Kremlin, an American ship in distress in Haitian waters, which, unbeknown to the Grampus crew, had been seized by the Fenix privateers.Footnote 51 In this case, the federal district court in New Orleans took a more askance view of the Spanish claimants and decided all the surviving Africans should be resettled in Liberia.Footnote 52

In comparison to Great Britain, American efforts to suppress the slave trade were negligible until the establishment of the African Squadron. The US government spent an estimated $480,000 in this policy area from 1819 to 1842, and the British government an estimated $18.4 million. The US navy captured two slave-laden ships with a total of 302 Africans aboard over those years, while the British navy captured 292 slave-laden ships with a total of approximately 74,500 Africans aboard from 1821 to 1840.Footnote 53 The most significant effect of this policy area was its impact on Anglo-American relations. British officials wielded the slave-trade issue as an ideological weapon against the United States in international contexts, endeavoring to disparage its status as a “liberator nation.”Footnote 54 In 1839, President Martin Van Buren finally responded to this diplomatic pressure by authorizing more regular naval cruises to the west coast of Africa.Footnote 55

During the negotiations that culminated in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), the British government demanded more, and Secretary of State Daniel Webster agreed that the United States would finally establish its own permanent African squadron. The treaty committed the United States to a squadron of at least eighty guns, minimally two frigates.Footnote 56 Once again, the nation seemed poised for a substantial increase of federal activity in this policy area.

While the federal government committed a higher level of resources to slave-trade suppression following the treaty, the level remained relatively low until the late 1850s. Indeed, President John Tyler’s Navy Secretary, Abel Upshur, reassured Congress in January 1843 that the new African Squadron would only require a reallocation of existing naval vessels and resources to minimally meet the nation’s treaty obligations.Footnote 57

Initially, the Department of the Navy met those obligations by reassigning four vessels, with a total of ninety-four guns, from the Pacific to African Squadron.Footnote 58 Over the next fifteen years, however, the department only sporadically fulfilled them, punctuating Upshur’s prediction that the squadron would not require an expansion of the navy’s fleet.Footnote 59

Upshur’s assertion that the African Squadron would not require new money is more debatable. Even at its initial size, the squadron was relatively expensive because of the logistics of supplying its African base of operations. The squadron’s estimated annual cost was $384,500.Footnote 60 This sum was an additional fixed cost the navy would have to absorb every year the squadron existed even if it were never enlarged. In total, the federal government spent an estimated $6.6 million on slave-trade suppression from FY1843 to FY1859, an almost 1,400 percent increase from the previous two decades.Footnote 61

Yet, the African Squadron’s success rate in capturing suspected slave ships with Africans aboard remained extremely low. From 1843 to 1859, it seized only one slave-laden ship carrying approximately 900 Africans. The squadron’s success in capturing the Pons in 1845 was not repeated for another fifteen years. Again, for comparative purposes, the British government spent an estimated $28.2 million on slave-trade suppression from 1843 to 1859 and its navy captured 151 slave-laden ships with a total of approximately 56,700 Africans aboard from 1841 to 1860.Footnote 62

Given the African Squadron’s relative lack of success in capturing slave-laden ships, the squadron’s primary mission appears to have been protecting American commerce rather than interdicting illegal slave trading.Footnote 63 Upshur’s initial instructions to squadron commanders emphasized its dual missions.Footnote 64 Another one of Tyler’s five navy secretaries, John Y. Mason, more explicitly downgraded the squadron’s slave-trade mission, asserting that “the rights of our citizens engaged in lawful commerce are under the protection of our flag, and it is the chief purpose as well as the chief duty of our naval power to see that those rights are not improperly abridged or invaded.” Later, he added that “while the United States sincerely desires the suppression of the slave trade … they do not regard the success of their efforts as their paramount interest nor as their paramount duty.”Footnote 65 The fact that Tyler refused to release these instructions to Congress and that they were only released in 1859, after President James Buchanan finally made slave-trade suppression a national priority, also suggests the squadron’s primary mission was protecting American commerce until that time. On the other hand, slave-trade suppression had become a higher navy priority with the creation of the African Squadron and its relative inability to capture slave-laden ships does not appear to have been due to a lack of commitment on the part of its commanders to that goal. Despite overseeing a paucity of ship seizures, Commodore Perry contended that the US navy, equally to the British navy, aspired “to suppress a traffic alike obnoxious to religion and to humanity.”Footnote 66

One critical factor in the African Squadron’s undistinguished record during its first seventeen years was a lack of resources, as the squadron would have required a substantially larger fleet to adequately perform either of its missions. As Perry wrote Mason, “It will be utterly impossible for the few vessels of the American squadron, having in view the various duties assigned to them, to detect these abuses [of the American flag], scattered as the slave marts are along an extent of coast of 2,500 miles.”Footnote 67 Another factor was that seizures of suspected slave ships rarely produced convictions and opened naval officers to countersuits for illegal seizures. In fact, Congress compensated two squadron captains in 1854 for their legal fees in libel suits.Footnote 68 But regardless of the most compelling explanation for the squadron’s failures, American presidents and their mostly Southern navy secretaries clearly had higher priorities than slave-trade suppression at this time.Footnote 69

Partisan and sectional differences emerged in this policy area over the course of the second-party system. A Northern Democratic president (Van Buren) surpassed his Southern predecessor (Jackson) in committing resources to slave-trade suppression and a Northern Whig Secretary of State (Webster) exceeded both. Yet, slave-trade suppression remained a low-valence policy, not a major partisan or sectional issue. International factors also remained salient in this policy area. The creation of the African Squadron was a minimal policy response to incessant British diplomatic pressure on federal officials to commit more resources to deterring American participation in the slave trade short of signing a mutual search-and-seizure treaty with Great Britain, as every other major maritime nation had done except France. American presidents, secretaries of state, and foreign ministers, regardless of their partisan or sectional affiliations, had consistently resisted taking this step ever since John Quincy Adams’s tenure as Secretary of State. In addition to sharing a general antipathy to bilateral treaties as “foreign entanglements,” federal officials were especially reluctant to grant the British navy power to search American ships because of past conflicts over the practice.Footnote 70

Nonetheless, the federal government had created an African squadron in response to British diplomatic pressure and increased its commitment to slave-trade suppression. The US navy had also nurtured an unofficial American colony in Africa and instituted regular cruises to the Continent.Footnote 71 Notwithstanding the relative lack of slave-trade interdiction efforts, the navy had extended its overseas operations in ways it would not have in the absence of slavery.

The Naval Expansion Program

A confluence of factors funneled into Buchanan’s decision to support a substantial navy expansion program in 1858. Despite the emergence of a sectionally polarized third-party system, prominent politicians from both sections and parties supported the program, even if for different reasons.Footnote 72

The primary factor in Buchanan’s decision was geopolitical, to parry a British threat to unilaterally search American ships suspected of participating in the Cuban slave trade. In response to the first reports of British searches of American ships in the Caribbean, Buchanan ordered all available navy ships to the vicinity in May 1858 with instructions “to protect all vessels of the United States on the high seas from search or detention by the vessels of war of any other nation.”Footnote 73

Another factor influencing Buchanan’s decision was a Southern-based movement to legalize American participation in the slave trade. As early as 1854, Senator John Slidell (D-LA) introduced a resolution to abrogate the eighth article of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty under which the African Squadron had been created. Though his resolution was never brought to a vote, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations decided to circulate it confidentially among the other senators, and two years later the full Senate, in executive session, voted to make it public.Footnote 74 In the House, a resolution condemning any proposition to legalize American participation in the trade passed, 152–57, in 1856, but with fifty-five of the seventy-three Southern congressmen who voted on the resolution in dissent.Footnote 75 This vote stands in sharp contrast to the nearly unanimous Southern congressional support for a federal slave-import ban in 1807. In the Senate, Southern Democrats rebuffed William Seward (R-NY) and Henry Wilson (R-MA) in their efforts to commit the federal government to more strenuous efforts to enforce the nation’s slave-trade laws, prompting them to lobby Buchanan to act on his own authority.Footnote 76

Buchanan also had partisan motives for this decision. Ideally, it would function to buttress the Northern wing of the Democratic Party in the face of the continued erosion of its popular support to the Republican Party by demonstrating that it was at least committed to suppressing the slave trade. On a more personal level, Buchanan’s tenures as Secretary of State and US Minister to England had made him the target of persistent British complaints about the lack of American enforcement efforts. As president, Buchanan seemed determined to show British officials as well as interested publics in both sections of the country that he would not allow any slippage on the slave-import ban.Footnote 77

By summer 1858, Buchanan had decided to fortify both the African and Home squadrons for slave-trade suppression. His northern Secretary of the Navy, Isaac Toucey, proceeded to increase the size of the African Squadron from four to eight ships and Home Squadron from five to thirteen. Most of the new vessels were faster, steam-powered vessels, including five the navy had chartered and then purchased, at a cost of $1,350,000, for a bout of gunboat diplomacy against Paraguay. In total, the navy fleet grew from thirty-six ships in 1858 to forty-eight in 1859.Footnote 78

Although Buchanan’s decision leaned northward politically, it also had broad Southern support. After all, Buchanan was the proverbial “doughface,” a Northern Democrat who owed his presidency to Southern electoral votes and whose domestic policies bore an unmistakably Southern stamp. While the slave-trade revival movement attracted significant support in the lower South, including from South Carolina Governor James H. Adams, influential New Orleans editor James De Bow, and former United States senator and future Confederate congressional leader William L. Yancey, it found much less favor in the upper South.Footnote 79 Indeed, an upper-South congressman, Emerson Etheridge (W-TN), had introduced the 1856 House resolution condemning the movement, later confessing in response to his many impassioned congressional and editorial critics that he had “no mock sympathy for those persons who would transform existing piracy into laudable commerce.”Footnote 80 Of the eighteen Southern congressmen who voted for the resolution, seventeen were from the upper South and, as an indication of the partisan dimensions of the issue in the region, all represented either the American or Whig parties.Footnote 81

In his 1854 didactic travelogue, Africa and the American Flag, former African Squadron captain Andrew Hull Foote not only repudiated the initial demands of slave-trade revivalists to recall the squadron but proposed adding eight ships to its fleet.Footnote 82 He claimed to have shown in his book that “the African squadrons, instead of being useless, have rendered essential service,” and that without its presence “the entire [African] coast, where we now see legal trade and advancing civilization, would have been … the scene of unchecked, lawless slave-trade piracy.”Footnote 83 While any increases in the size of the African Squadron would await the Buchanan administration, Pierce’s upper-South Secretary of Navy, James C. Dobbins, strongly supported the existence of the squadron in his 1854 annual report to Congress. Echoing Foote, he contended that “the vessels of this squadron have been actively, and in many instances successfully, engaged in checking the slave trade,” as well as rendering assistance “to our growing commerce … on the African coast.”Footnote 84 Both Dobbin and Foote were, in effect, defending the institutional autonomy of the navy to make its own operational decisions independent of partisan demands.

Nevertheless, Buchanan’s decision to redouble American slave-trade suppression efforts four years later demonstrates the issue was not a major source of partisan or sectional controversy. He certainly had not made any comparable commitment to pursuing policies designed to undermine the institution of slavery in the Southern states, southwestern territories, or, for that matter, the Caribbean basin. Precisely the opposite was the case. In fact, his administration had even attempted to purchase Cuba from Spain, reacting to widespread reports that British emissaries were pressuring Spanish colonial officials to abolish slavery on the island.Footnote 85

Southern Democrats had independent reasons for supporting Buchanan’s decision. Even the fire-eaters in the lower South who would have preferred an unfettered Cuban slave trade could support the navy expansion program on nationalistic grounds. In their Herrenvolk view of the world, American nationalism and racial slavery were not ideologically antagonistic to each other but mutually supportive. Furthermore, the navy expansion program, which included almost tripling the size of the Home Squadron, coincided with their proslavery vision of a Caribbean basin controlled by American sea power. Although they neglect the Northern and African angles to the expansion program, several recent works have highlighted the Southern and Caribbean sides of this early form of American imperialism.Footnote 86

Regardless of the motives behind Buchanan’s decision and how strongly it resonated across partisan and sectional lines, the decision represented the single, most significant increase in the federal commitment to interdicting illegal slave trading and smuggling. The decision also produced almost immediate results.

The first breakthrough occurred on August 21, 1858, when the USS Dolphin, which had been assigned to the newly enlarged Home Squadron, seized the Echo with 318 Africans aboard off the coast of Cuba.Footnote 87 The recaptured Africans were placed in federal custody in Charleston to await transport to Liberia on the USS Niagara. Despite the overwhelming evidence against the crew, local jurors found them innocent of the piracy charges detailed in US Attorney James Connor’s indictment. The captain of the Echo, Edward N. Townsend, was tried separately on Key West and also acquitted. The two verdicts fit a broader pattern. No Southern jury convicted an American citizen of a slave-trade violation after 1846.Footnote 88

Then in 1860–61, the African and Home squadrons combined to capture nine slave-laden ships with a total of approximately 5,300 Africans aboard. The number of seizures of slave-laden ships was more than two times the total for the previous forty years. The number of Africans liberated was more than three times the total.Footnote 89 Only the Civil War halted this major escalation in the navy’s commitment to slave-trade suppression.

To meet the expenses of this surge in ship seizures, Congress appropriated a total of $2,050,000 in FYS 1860–61.Footnote 90 Although the Liberian government received a sizable portion of those funds to defray the settling-in expenses of the recaptured Africans, the operating costs of the African Squadron had increased substantially to an estimated $769,000 per year. At approximately $1.7 million, slave-trade suppression accounted for 6.95 percent of navy expenditures ($23.9 million) and 1.28 percent of federal expenditures ($129.7 million) during FYS 1860–61.Footnote 91 In terms of public expenditures, the American efforts to suppress the slave trade nearly matched the British efforts at this time. Great Britain spent an estimated $2.2 million on slave-trade suppression in those two years, which actually represented a lower percentage of naval (1.94% of $115.7 million) and national (0.32% of $696 million) expenditures.Footnote 92

By the end of FY 1861, eleven Southern states had seceded from the union. The Civil War erupted the next month. The war closed an important episode in the development of the US navy by bringing the African Squadron home for blockade duty.Footnote 93 On April 7, 1862, Secretary of State Seward signed a mutual search-and-seizure treaty with British Ambassador Richard Lyons.Footnote 94 Through these two actions, the federal government effectively ceded enforcement of its own slave-trade laws to the British navy, something that had been an anathema to American officials for four decades. The navy’s slave-trade enforcement efforts had, nonetheless, prepared it for its wartime duties as the skills navy crews had learned capturing slave ships were directly transferable to seizing Confederate blockade runners, a task at which they proved increasingly successful over the course of the war.Footnote 95

Conclusion

From 1791 to 1861, the federal government committed a rising level of resources to the suppression of the slave trade. The pattern was not one of steadily expanding resources indicative of a constant growth in infrastructure costs, bureaucratic capture, or other factors associated with relatively internal processes of state development. Rather, the pattern was one of step increases, in 1819, 1842, and, most significantly, 1858, suggesting the important role societal factors play in generating stochastic patterns of state development.Footnote 96

While partisan and sectional differences existed on the implementation of federal slave-trade laws, especially as the nation moved closer to civil war, a state commitment to enforcing those laws, at least at minimal levels, had emerged during the “Era of Good Feelings.” Thereafter, the 1842 and 1858 step increases were primarily responses to British diplomatic pressure on the United States to enforce its own slave-trade laws more effectively, though in each case domestic considerations were also important.

Several domestic factors were significant in first creating and then sustaining this state commitment. One factor was the relative lack of partisan and sectional differences over the venality of the slave trade. The presence of slavery did not depress state development in this policy area because of bitter sectional proxy disputes, as it may have in the case of internal improvements.Footnote 97 Another factor was the commitment of prominent upper-South politicians, such as Jefferson, Mercer, and Monroe, to slave-trade suppression, a commitment that had both moral and economic dimensions given the existence of an internal trade that moved more than one million slaves from the upper to the lower South between 1790 and 1860.Footnote 98 A third factor was that even after lower-South support for slave-trade suppression began to wane, it was a wholesale, not retail, shift in attitudes, and slave-trade revivalists remained much more interested in building support for disunion than influencing public policy. Lower-South cabinet officers Howell Cobb (Treasury) and Jacob Thompson (Interior) fully participated in the Buchanan administration’s enforcement initiatives against domestic attempts to evade the slave-import ban.Footnote 99 A final reason the American state remained committed to slave-trade suppression was its continued support of African colonization—an enterprise that attracted considerable naval involvement over the years.Footnote 100

The US navy was the major beneficiary of these developments. By the beginning of the Civil War, American officials had finally allocated a substantial amount of resources to slave-trade suppression. In 1860, the Department of the Navy devoted nine ships, approximately 1,300 men, and an estimated $769,000 to the African squadron alone.Footnote 101 By demonstrating a capacity to suppress the trade, the navy was poised to play a more prominent role in defeating the Confederacy during the war. Ironically, the presence of slavery on American soil had made a significant contribution to its ability to perform that role as the navy’s efforts to suppress the slave trade had enhanced its institutional capacities. Slave-trade suppression provided a crucial training ground for navy captains in developing effective routines for intercepting ships at sea. Beside Foote, Thomas Tingey Craven, John Elliott Harts, and Benjamin Franklin Sands were Union naval commanders who had served in the African squadron.Footnote 102 In recounting the capture of one Confederate blockade runner in 1864, Sands noted how the ship’s captain had “hoisted the English flag, thinking we might not fire at it.” This resort to a tactic often employed by the crews on slave ships, however, failed to deter Sands’s own crew from firing on the vessel “as fast as we could load,” causing the captain to surrender “with his cargo of 550 bales of cotton.”Footnote 103

Rather than depressing American state development, the presence of slavery stimulated it in the case of the navy during the decades from 1791 to 1861. The navy’s efforts to suppress slave smuggling and trading contributed to its own development by increasing its institutional autonomy and capacities. Those efforts also buttressed the authority of the American state to control its own borders as well as improved its ability to project itself internationally. Whether, overall, the presence of slavery accelerated more than retarded state development over those years is a matter for further research. Yet, it seems undeniable that both proslavery and antislavery forces favored an active federal government in certain instances, just as they opposed it in others.

References

Notes

1. See Edling, Max M., A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American State-Building,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson, and Shefter, Martin (Princeton, 2002), 82–110;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mayhew, David R., “Wars and American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005): 473–93;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pollack, Sheldon D., War, Revenue, and State-building: Financing the Development of the American State (Ithaca, 2008);Google Scholar Tilley, Charles, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, , Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (Cambridge, 1985), 169–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5. See Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, 1975), 161–62; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 241; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2, Secessionists Triumphant (New York, 2007), 349–51; Earl M. Maltz, “Slavery, Federalism, and the Structure of the Constitution,” American Journal of Legal History 36, no. 4 (October 1992): 494.

6. See Karp, Southern Empire, 225; Benjamin Franklin Sands, From Reefer to Rear-Admiral: Reminiscences and Journal Jottings of Nearly Half a Century of Naval Life (1899; rep., London, 2015), 241–71; David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War (Columbia, 2001); Craig L. Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York, 2012).

7. See Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, 2005), 33; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 175; P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (1961; rep., New York, 1980), 205–06; Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black & White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill, 2007), 2.

8. See Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, 1990), 13, 63; Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006), 7–8; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 5; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2002), 22; Richard R. John, “‘Affairs of Office’: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, 2003), 67; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge, 2004), 88.

9. For works emphasizing these measures of state development, see Daniel R. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputation, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1920 (Princeton, 2001); Orren and Skowronek, American Political Development; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, 1982); Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

10. See Statutes at Large I (1794): 347–49.

11. See Statutes at Large II (1800): 70–71.

12. See Judd Scott Harmon, “Suppress and Protest: The United States Navy, the African Slave Trade, and Maritime Commerce, 1794–1862” (Ph.D. diss., College of William & Mary, 1977), 238 (Appendix E).

13. See John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, 2007), 27. Mississippi Territory initially included the future states of Mississippi and Alabama.

14. See Hammond, Slavery and Expansion, 30–31; John Craig Hammond, “‘They Are Very Much Interested in Obtaining an Unlimited Slavery’: Rethinking the Expansion of Slavery in the Louisiana Purchase Territories, 1803–1805,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 353. Louisiana Territory initially included the entire Louisiana Purchase. In response to local protests, Congress allowed the territorial ban on the domestic slave trade to lapse in 1805 when it reorganized the territory into Orleans (Louisiana) and Upper Louisiana (Missouri) territories. See Hammond, “Very Much Interested,” 354, 374; Hammond, Slavery and Expansion, 31, 47, 50, 187 n. 22.

15. See Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 97–103; Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 263–90.

16. See American State Papers: Foreign Relations I: 25 (“Message to Congress,” December 2, 1806), 68–69.

17. See Annals, 9th Cong., 2nd sess., 231–32, 266–67, 626; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896; rpt., New York, 1954), 97–111; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 144–47; Matthew E. Mason, “Slavery Overshadowed: Congress Debates Prohibiting the Atlantic Slave Trade to the United States, 1806–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 64–68; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York, 1971), 324–38; Statutes at Large II (1807): 426–30.

18. See Eugene C. Barker, “The African Slave Trade in Texas,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 1 (July 1902): 145–49; Box 622; SG–Illegal Service, including blockade running, piracy, smuggling, and filibustering; Subject File, U.S. Navy, 1775–1901; 0–1910; Office of Naval Records and Library, Record Group 45; National Archives; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1989), 11–12; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 149; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 123–24; David Head, “Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers: The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 450–54; David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, ed., Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 (Annapolis, 2004), 286; John S. Kendall, “Shadow over the City,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (January 1939): 146.

19. See Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 113–14; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 149; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 118–21; Frances J. Stafford, “Illegal Importations: Enforcement of the Slave Trade Laws along the Florida Coast, 1810–1828,” Florida Historical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (October 1967): 126–27.

20. See Clyde N. Wilson et al., ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun (Columbia, 1959–2003), vol. 632 (Calhoun to David B. Mitchell, 16 February 1821); Royce Gordon Shingleton, “David Brydie Mitchell and the African Importation Case of 1820,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 3 (July 1973): 327–40; Stafford, “Illegal Importations,” 129–30.

21. See American State Papers: Foreign Relations 5:343 (“Foreign Vessels Engaged in Smuggling through Florida,” 13 January 1821); Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 114, 166; H. R. Doc. No. 107, 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1819, 8–9; H. R. Doc. No. 36, 16th Cong., 1st sess., 1820, 5–6; H. R. Doc. No. 42, 16th Cong., 1st sess., 1820, 6–12; Stafford, “Illegal Importations,” 129–32.

22. See Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1934–69), 22:34 (Andrew Jackson to [Colonel] Robert Butler, 12 April 1821); 22:38–39 (Jackson to the Secretary of State [John Quincy Adams], 1 May 1821); 22:57 (The President [James Monroe] to Jackson, 23 May 1821).

23. See The Merino 22 U.S. 391 (1824), at 407–8. American soldiers (illegally) occupied Pensacola during the First Seminole War.

24. See Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 117–18; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 195–96

25. See H. R. Doc. No. 168, 19th Cong., 1st sess., 1826, 87.

26. See Stanley L. Engerman, “Slavery and Its Consequences for the South in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York, 2000), 337, 350; Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971), 3–4.

27. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 149–50, 386 nn. 66–68; Head, “Slave Smuggling,” 461; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 130–31, 145–46; Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837–1862 (1963; rpt., Westport, CT, 1976), 154, 302–3 n. 22; H. R. Doc. No. 148, 28th Cong., 2nd sess., 1845; H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 36th Cong., 3rd sess., 1860; Kenneth Kiple, “The Case Against a Nineteenth-Century Cuba-Florida Slave Trade,” Florida Historical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (April 1971): 345–55; S. Ex. Doc. No. 73, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., 1852. But cf. Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 126, 130, 165–66, 185.

28. See Statutes at Large III (1820): 600–601.

29. See Soodalter, Ron, Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader (New York, 2006), 222–25Google Scholar.

30. See Hidetaka Hirota, “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99, no. 4 (March 2013): 1092–1108; Gerald L. Neuman, “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776–1875),” Columbia Law Review 93, no. 8 (December 1993): 1833–1901.

31. See American State Papers: Foreign Relations 5:343 (Foreign Vessels Engaged in Smuggling Through Florida, 13 January 1821), 77; Carter, Territorial Papers, 23:404 ([Colonel] George M. Brooke to the Quartermaster General [Thomas S. Jesup], 1 January 1826); Gene A. Smith, “U.S. Navy Gunboats and the Slave Trade in Louisiana Waters, 1808–1811,” Military History of the West 23, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 140–41.

32. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 238–39 (Appendix E).

33. See Duncan J. Macleod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1974), 36–37; Duncan Rice, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery (New York, 1975), 227–28; Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, 224; George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2010), 28.

34. See Statutes at Large III (1819): 532–34.

35. See Annual Reports of the American Colonization Society (1818–1910; rpt., New York, 1969), 4 (1821): 27–28; H. Doc. No. 11, 16th Cong., 1st sess., 1819.

36. See H. Rep. No. 101, 19th Cong., 2nd sess., 1827.

37. See ACS, Annual Reports, 4 (1821): 7–13; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 59–62.

38. See ACS, Annual Reports, 5 (1822): 15; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 62.

39. See ACS, Annual Reports, 5 (1822): 8–17, 64–66; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 63–65.

40. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 239 (Appendix E).

41. See Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 291 (Appendix C).

42. See 26 F. Cas. 832 (C.C.D. Mass. 1822; No. 15551); John T. Noonan, Jr., The Antelope: The Ordeal of the Recaptured Africans in the Administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams (Berkeley, 1977), 69–74.

43. See Noonan, The Antelope, 76–77; S. Doc. No. 3, 20th Cong., 1st sess., 1827, 16–17.

44. See ACS, Annual Reports, 6 (1823): 25; 7 (1824): 12, 26–27; 8 (1825): 32; 9 (1826): 50; 10 (1827): 53; 11 (1828): 38; “Letter from Treasury Department, 4th Auditor’s Office, in response to Senate Resolution of February 25, 1843,” December 1, 1843; Record Group 45; National Archives; S. Doc. 3, 20th Cong., 1st sess., 1827, 10–29; S. Doc. No. 1, 20th Cong., 2nd sess., 1828, 139–40.

45. See ACS, Annual Reports 7 (1824): 19–20; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 89–90.

46. See ACS, Annual Reports 7 (1824): 26–27; H. Doc. No. 193, 20th Cong., 1st sess. (1828), 7, 11.

47. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 254–56 (Appendix H).

48. See ACS, Annual Reports 6 (1823): 59.

49. See ACS, Annual Reports 13 (1830): 13.

50. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 239 (Appendix E).

51. See H. R. Doc. No. 54, 21st Cong., 2nd sess., 1831, 3–4. When the Grampus arrived to aid the Kremlin, the Fenix was on the far side of the ship, shielded from view.

52. See “Letter from Treasury Department,” National Archives.

53. All estimates of American slave-trade expenditures and seizures are the author’s; available upon request. For the British estimates, see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 92 (Table 2), 99 (Table 4). The time spans do not quite match because Eltis aggregated British slave-ship seizures in five-year intervals.

54. See Matthew E. Mason, “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 59, no. 3 (July 2002): 671.

55. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 107–08; ACS, Annual Reports, 24 (1840): 7.

56. See Statutes at Large VIII (1842): 576.

57. See S. Ex. Doc. No. 20, 27th Cong., 3rd sess., 1843.

58. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 233 (Appendix D); Howard, American Slavers, 239 (Appendix E).

59. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 232–37 (Appendix D); S. Ex. Doc. No. 39, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 1858, 16.

60. See S. Ex. Doc. No. 40, 31st Cong., 1st sess., 1850, 3.

61. In 1843, the federal government shifted to a July 1–June 30 fiscal year.

62. See Eltis, Economic Growth, 99 (Table 4); Howard, American Slavers, 214–23 (Appendix A). Harmon did not distinguish ship seizures in terms of those with and without Africans aboard but his figures for the 1843–1859 seizure totals of the respective African squadrons were 24 (US) and 574 (GB). See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 206 (Table 2).

63. Cf. ACS, Annual Reports, 26 (1843): 28–30; George E. Brooke, “The Role of the US Navy in the Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” American Neptune 21, no. 2 (January 1961): 33; Donald L. Canney, Africa Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1842–1861 (Washington, 2006), 57–58, 226–27; Du Bois, African Slave–Trade, 185–86; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 173; Sharla M. Fett, Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slaver Trade (Chapel Hill, 2017), 22; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 2–3; Howard, American Slavers, 13, 41, 67–68; Karp, Southern Empire, 52–53; David F. Long, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers, 1798–1883 (Annapolis, 1988), 320; Ted Maris-Wolf, “‘Of Blood and Treasure’: Recaptive Africans and the Politics of Slave Trade Suppression,” Journal of Civil War Era 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 57–58.

64. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 104, 35th Cong., 2nd sess., 1859, 3.

65. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 104, 35th Cong., 2nd sess., 1859, 7–8, 11.

66. See New American State Papers: Explorations and Surveys 9: 133 (“M. C. Perry to [British Admiral] John Foote Esq.,” 4 March 1844).

67. See New American State Papers: Explorations and Surveys 9: 160 (“M. C. Perry to Hon. Secretary of the Navy,” 18 May 1844).

68. See House Journal, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., 13 April 1854, 634; House Journal, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., 31 July 1854, 1241.

69. Prior to the Buchanan administration, seven of the African Squadron’s nine navy secretaries were from Southern states. On the Southern dominance of the navy during this time, see Karp, Southern Empire, 202–8; Langley, Harold D., Social Reform in the United States Navy, 1798–1862 (Urbana, 1967), 30;Google Scholar Long, Gold Braid, 314; Schroeder, John H., Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1828–1861 (Westport, CT, 1985), 58–59, 187–88.Google Scholar

70. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 157–65; H. R. Rep. No. 283, 27th Cong., 3rd sess., 1843, 478–729; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 71–75; Howard, American Slavers, 8–12; Edward Keene, “A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century,” International Organization 61, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 320–23; Matthew E. Mason, “‘Keeping Up Appearances’: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 66. no. 4 (October 2009): 820–28.

71. See Brandon Mills, “‘The United States of Africa’: Liberian Independence and the Contested Meaning of a Black Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 105; Eugene S. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists: The U.S. Navy and Liberia, 1819–1845,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 4 (Spring 2011): 132–34.

72. See Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 76.

73. See [James Buchanan], Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), 261–62; S. Ex. Doc. No. 39, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 1858.

74. See S. Rep. No. 195, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856.

75. See House Journal, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 15 December 1856, 105–6. In analyzing this vote, I classified all fifteen slave states as Southern states.

76. See Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000), 174–75; Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade, 224.

77. For the multiple motives behind Buchanan’s decision, see Robert Ralph Davis Jr., “James Buchanan and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1858–1861,” Pennsylvania History 33, no. 4 (October 1966): 457–59; Fett, Recaptured Africans, 22–23; Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 54–55; Karen Fisher Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” Civil War History 54, no. 4 (December 2008): 431–32.

78. See Davis, “Buchanan and the Slave Trade,” 452; Fett, Recaptured Africans, 22; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 140, 192, 236–37 (Appendix D); Howard, American Slavers, 59, 240 (Appendix E); Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 59.

79. See Barton J. Bernstein, “Southern Politics and Attempts to Reopen the African Slave trade.” Journal of Negro History 51, no. 1 (January 1966): 25–30; Leonardo Marques, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas (New Haven, 2016), 228–30; Sinha, Counterrevolution, 142, 145; Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade, 117–21.

80. See Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 21 February 1856, 366 (Appendix).

81. See House Journal, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 15 December 1856, 109–10. In analyzing this vote, I classified Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri as upper-South states; South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas as lower-South states.

82. See Andrew H. Foote, Africa and the American Flag (New York: D. Appleton, 1854), 359–61, 383–84.

83. See Foote, American Flag, 384.

84. See H. Ex. Doc. No. 1, 33rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1854, 387

85. See Karp, Southern Empire, 197; Buchanan’s Administration, 279; William P. MacKinnon, “Hammering Utah, Squeezing Mexico, and Coveting Cuba: James Buchanan’s White House Intrigues,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 132–51; Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 60.

86. Beside Karp’s work, see Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009); Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013); David C. Keehn, Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2013); Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973).

87. See Howard, American Slavers, 218, 223 (Appendix A).

88. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 198; Howard, American Slavers, 224–35 (Appendix B); Soodalter, Hanging Captain, 9. A naval vessel had originally taken Townsend to Boston, where a conviction would have been more likely, but US Commissioner Edward G. Loring ruled he should be tried in the judicial district closest to the location of his alleged offense. See Sinha, Counterrevolution, 161.

89. See Harmon, “Suppression and Protest,” 206, Table 2; Howard, American Slavers, 220–23 (Appendix A).

90. See Statutes at Large XII (1860–1861): 21, 40–41, 132, 219.

91. See Historical Statistics, Table Ea636–643.

92. See Eltis, Economic Growth, 92–93 (Table 2); B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (London, 1988), 587–88 (Public Finance 4); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–1993 (New York, 2007), 911–13 (Table G5). Because of the way Eltis aggregated the British data, I could not compare the number of British and American seizures of slave-laden ships during these two years.

93. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 84, 142, 199; Howard, American Slavers, 59.

94. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 57, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., 1862.

95. Cf. Bruce W. Hetherington and Peter J. Kower, “A Reexamination of Lebergott’s Paradox about Blockade Running during the American Civil War,” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (June 2009): 528–32; Stanley Lebergott, “Through the Blockade: The Profitability and Extent of Cotton Smuggling, 1861–1865,” Journal of Economic History 41, no. 4 (December 1981): 867–88; William N. Still Jr., “A Naval Sieve: The Union Blockade in the Civil War,” Naval War College Review 36, no. 3 (May–June 1983): 38–45; David G. Surdam, “The Union Navy’s Blockade Reconsidered,” Naval War College Review 51, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 85–107.

96. On the distinction between state-centered and society-centered models of state development, see Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, 4–6.

97. See Pamela L. Baker, “The Washington National Road Bill and the Struggle to Adopt a Federal System of Internal Improvement,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 437–64; John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001); Stephen Minicucci, “Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790–1860,” Studies in American Political Development 18, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 165–80; Daniel M. Mulcare, “Restricted Authority: Slavery Politics, Internal Improvements, and the Limitation of National Administrative Capacity,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 2008): 671–85.

98. See Deyle, Steven, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2006), 4.Google Scholar

99. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 36th Cong., 3rd sess., 1860, 632–36; Davis, “Buchanan and the Slave Trade,” 450; Robert Ralph Davis Jr., “Buchanan Espionage: A Report on Illegal Slave Trading in the South in 1859,” Journal of Southern History 37, no. 2 (May 1971): 271–78; Howard, American Slavers, 147–54; Tom Henderson Wells, The Slave Ship Wanderer (Athens, 1967), 7.

100. See Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists,” 118–29.

101. Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 237 (Appendix D); Historical Statistics, Tables Ea636–643, Ed26–47; Paul H. Silverstone, The Sailing Navy, 1775–1854 (Annapolis, 2001), 40, 42–44, 63, 75; Paul H. Silverstone, Civil War Navies, 1855–1883 (Annapolis, 2001), 15, 22, 45–46.

102. See Stephen Tucker, ed., The Civil War Naval Encyclopedia (2 vols.; Santa Barbara, 2011), 132–33, 195–97, 611.

103. See Sands, From Reefer to Rear-Admiral, 253.