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BThe first telling of the unknown story of America's two-hundred-year history as a slave-trading nation/BBR / BR / A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.BR / BR / Engaging with both African and American history and addressing the trade over time, Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island.BR / BR / In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders.

From 1754 to 1755, the slave shipHarecompleted a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States-a journey that transformed more than seventy Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny. But most importantly, Kelley tracks the cohort of slaves aboard theHarefrom their purchase in Africa to their sale in South Carolina. In tracing their complete journey, Kelley provides rare insight into the communal lives of slaves and sheds new light on the African diaspora and its influence on the formation of African American culture.In this immersive exploration, Kelley connects the story of enslaved people in the United States to their origins in Africa as never before. Told uniquely from the perspective of one particular voyage, this book brings a slave ship's journey to life, giving us one of the clearest views of the eighteenth-century slave trade.

This article examines the phenomenon of New World-based slave trading, which encompasses slave-trading voyages that embarked from ports in the Americas. Much of the existing literature takes a European-based ‘triangular trade’ as the norm in the slave trade, but it is now clear that almost 40 per cent of all transatlantic slaving voyages sailed from ports in the New World. Slave traders based in the Americas needed to find appropriate and economical trade goods, which was difficult since European and Asian manufactures dominated African markets for captives. A comparative examination of the four largest American slave-trading polities (Barbados, Brazil, Cuba and British North America/the United States) reveals that all of them succeeded in converting plantation produce—sugar, molasses and tobacco—into African trade goods. However, all of these powers also sought to acquire the more valuable textiles and manufactures in order to improve their ‘assortments’. This finding is significant because it forces historians to consider the slave trade not merely as a ‘triangular’ trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas, but as a truly global system of exchange.

The present article examines the North American rum-for-captives trade, which like other New World-based trades, relied heavily on sugar cane-derived alcohol. It argues that African consumption patterns played a key role in shaping the American rum-for-captives trade during the years 1730–1807. Most interpretations of the rum trade offer what might be termed a “supply-side” interpretation of the slave trade, with an emphasis on voyage planning and decision making on the part of European and American slave traders. While these were important factors, an examination of the rum trade highlights the important demand-side factors that shaped the slave trade. The most important market for American rum was the Gold Coast, but slave traders still needed to adopt a range of practices in order to cope with the problem of oversupply. The Upper Guinea Coast served as secondary market, but here the expansion of Islam, in part a response to the growing trade in captives, imposed limits on the demand for alcohol. After independence in 1783, American merchants were able to gain access to French and Dutch India goods, which allowed them to diversify their assortment of trade goods, especially after 1793. Carrying textiles in addition to rum helped the United States to become the third-largest carrier immediately before abolition in 1808.

Kelley and Lovejoy talk about the population of African-born slaves in antebellum Texas which was quite sizable, in proportion perhaps larger than any other southern state. The first professional historian to write about them was Eugene C. Barker in 1902, who interviewed several eyewitnesses who had encountered the Africans in the 1830s.

According to this version, news of the attacks on the African coast soon leaks out and a legal case ensues. The Massachusetts General Court charges the Rainbow's captain, James Smith, and mate Thomas Keyser with murder, \"man-stealing\" (a capital offense under the 1641 Body of Liberties,) and \"Sabbath-breaking\" (since the attack apparently occurred on a Sunday). [...]the HCA documents offer correctives to the basic chronology and other details of the voyage. [...]more importantly, they provide specific information regarding events on the African coast.

Decades after the fact, the man recalled the moment when he knew his enslavement was permanent. Born in the Kissispeaking region that straddles modern-day Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, he was an adolescent in 1797 when several raiders from the Vai ethnic group grabbed him as he gathered fruit with his aunt. The youth’s captors marched him to Cape Mount, fifty miles northwest of today’s Monrovia, where he was eventually sold to Captain Edward Boss of Newport, Rhode Island. The youth had never seen a white man before, so he quickly deduced that Boss was “the devil,” something he continued

Robert, whose story began this book, understood the American slave trade better than we ever will. His journey from upper Guinea to Georgia took him to the heart of the American slave system. By 1802, he was serving as an enslaved body servant to Jabez Bowen of Savannah, where extreme mistreatment was a commonplace. Still, nothing compared to what he saw happen to a young woman named Delia when she spilled gravy on her mistress while waiting at table. Another diner dragged Delia outside and slit her throat, almost decapitating her, then casually returned to finish his meal. Delia’s murder

All things considered, Gabriel Manigault thought the sale had gone well. In the context of the larger market, theHarecaptives were “poor quality,” with too many women and too many of them “not young.” And Manigault did have to deal with a small postsale hitch: one of the purchasers demanded a rebate after discovering that one of his captives was “wanting a finger.” He remedied the problem by granting a small “abatement” in the price. But timing is everything, and the Vernons’ risky decision to send captives to the South Carolina market in the early springtime had paid off.