| Freebooters
and Smugglers
The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808
Ernest Obadele-Starks
Why slave smuggling and trafficking
persisted after the Abolition Act
“This book is definitely a winner. It fills a gaping
hole in the scholarly literature about a very important subject,
transcending the strong inclination of historians to confine
themselves to simplistic counting and literal mindedness in
their use of documents and databases.”
—Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, professor emerita
of history, Rutgers University
“Obadele-Starks does a comprehensive job, impressive
in its scope, following the trade as it moves west, telling
the story down to and through the Civil War, dealing with
its inter-national aspects, and putting it within the context
of the struggle over slavery itself. The research that
supports the narrative is prodigious.”
—S. Charles Bolton, professor of history,
University of Arkansas, Little Rock
In 1891 a young W. E. B. DuBois addressed the annual American
Historical Association on the enforcement of slave trade laws:
“Northern greed joined to Southern credulity was a combination
calculated to circumvent any law, human or divine.”
One law in particular he was referring to was the Abolition
Act of 1808. It was specifically passed to end the foreign
slave trade. However, as Ernest Obadele-Starks shows, thanks
to profiteering smugglers like the Lafitte brothers and the
Bowie brothers, the slave trade persisted throughout the south
for a number of years after the law was passed.
Freebooters and Smugglers examines the tactics and
strategies that the adherents of the foreign slave trade used
to challenge the law. It reassesses the role that Americans
played in the continuation of foreign slave transshipments
into the country right up to the Civil War, shedding light
on an important topic that has been largely overlooked in
the historiography of the slave trade.
Ernest Obadele-Starks holds a joint appointment
as an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University-College
Station and Texas A&M University at Qatar. He is the author
of Black Unionism in the Industrial South and has written
several articles examining various political and social aspects
of the African American diaspora. He is currently working
on a comparative study of free black settlements in Canada,
the United States, and Mexico from 1849 to 1867.
November
6 x 9, 230 pages, 11 illustrations and maps, index
$34.95 (s) cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-858-5 | 1-55728-858-5
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