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The Final Victims
Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810
James A. McMillin
With this detailed study of the importation of slaves to North America in the decades
following the American Revolution, James A. McMillin tests long-standing assumptions
about an enterprise thought to have waned in the wake of the United States’ successful revolution against Great Britain. Combing through previously untapped public
and private sources, McMillin uncovers data that challenges entrenched beliefs about
the slave trade and, as a result, has far-reaching implications for our understanding of
American life in the early republic.
McMillin examines the volume and business of importing slaves from 1783 to 1810,
the African origins of those captives, and their treatment by shippers and North American merchants. Tracing a shift in North American slaving commerce from New England
to the lower South, McMillin tracks the vessels that imported slaves to America, particularly into Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. McMillin suggests that previous
scholars have underestimated the number of slave voyages and consequently the
magnitude of American overseas slave trading during this era. He maintains the founding fathers did little to discourage the importation of slaves and asserts that—with the
lengthening duration and distance of the notorious “middle passage”—conditions for
African captives most likely worsened after the Revolution.
To his revisionist narrative McMillin appends, on a searchable CD-ROM accompanying the volume, the massive data that led him to these conclusions. The information
includes places of origin for the captives; names of vessels, captains, and owners; size
of slave cargoes; ports of arrival; and other data pertinent to his investigation.
The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World
David Gleeson, Simon Lewis and John White, series editors
James A. McMillin holds a Ph.D. from
Duke University. The associate director
of Bridwell Library and an associate
professor of American religious history
at Southern Methodist University, McMillin was a contributor to Warm Ashes:
Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of
the Twenty-First Century, published by
the University of South Carolina Press
in 2003. He lives in Dallas.
2013, 224 pages, 13 illustrations
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