Review: John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage
Reviewed by Samantha Payne
In 1896, the historian W.E.B. Du Bois published the first major work exploring the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States. Based on his doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade demonstrated that the international slave trade persisted in the U.S. long after its formal abolition in 1808. Du Bois attributed the US government’s failure to suppress the trade to the weakness of the American anti-slavery movement in the years following the American Revolution.[1] As a result, he argued, “the interests of the few overcame the fears and humanity of the many,” and the Atlantic slave trade endured for another half a century.[2]
The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage
By John Harris
Yale University Press, 2020
312 pages.
Now, more than a hundred years later, John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships: New York City and the End of the Middle Passage reveals how and why the long survival of the slave trade in the United States was related to the politics of slavery across the Atlantic World. During the first half of the 19th century, more than seventy-five percent of enslaved Africans transported to the New World arrived in Brazil.[3] In 1850, Brazil abolished the slave trade — an act which, Harris argues, transformed the inner workings of the illegal traffic in the United States. Beginning in 1850, a small group of slave traders migrated from Brazil to New York City, where they worked to establish a new outpost for human trafficking. Over the next fifteen years, these men, known collectively as “the Portuguese Company,” helped oversee the forced migration of 164,000 human beings, who were transported from West Africa to Cuba aboard slave ships that frequently departed from New York.[4] According to Harris, the arrival of the Portuguese Company in New York City “heralded a new phase of American engagement with slavery and a new challenge for abolitionists across the country and beyond.”[5]
The Last Slave Ships is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of international suppression efforts during the first half of the 19th century. Harris shows that the US government did little to enforce its own anti-slave trade laws between 1820 and 1860.[6] Specifically, the nation’s refusal to concede the right of search to Great Britain made it nearly impossible for the British to enforce slave trade suppression in the North Atlantic. Chapter two explores the financing of the illegal trade during the 1850s. Harris demonstrates that investing in slaving voyages during this period was lucrative, but risky. For successful voyages, the average return on investment was close to ninety-one percent; an almost eighty percent increase from the 18th-century traffic. At the same time, around forty percent of all slavers were captured during the 1850s.[7] Investors in New York City worked closely with their Cuban and African counterparts to avoid the capture of their ships, and as a result, Harris finds, many voyages during this period were funded by investors from all three regions.[8] Chapter three examines one of these slaving voyages at the micro-level. Harris traces the journey of the Julia Moulton, a ship which departed from New York in 1854, in order to demonstrate how “the trade became indelibly marked by efforts to stop it.”[9]
The final two chapters explore transnational efforts to combat the slave trade between 1850 and 1867. Chapter four charts the emergence of “an extraordinary network of spies that ringed the Atlantic World,” funded by the British government to combat the slave trade.[10] In particular, Harris recounts the exploits of Emilio Sanchez, a Cuban-born New Yorker who supplied information on 171 illegal slaving voyages to the British government between 1859 and 1862.[11] The final chapter considers how the US government went from ignoring, and even abetting, the illegal slave trade to helping shut it down completely in 1867. Harris emphasizes Abraham Lincoln’s unprecedented decision to permit the execution of the slave trader, Nathanial Gordon, as a key turning point.[12] The end of the illegal slave trade to the United States, he concludes, can largely be attributed to a “change in administration.”[13]
The Last Slave Ships is the product of extensive archival research. Harris draws on original sources from Spain, Portugal, Cuba, the United States and the United Kingdom, and the result is a multi-faceted narrative that captures the perspectives of the men and women who were involved in the transatlantic slave trade on four continents. In addition, through careful use of the Transatlantic Slave Trade database, Harris creates striking visualizations of the midcentury traffic, revealing where the nearly 200,000 Africans transported to the New World during the 1850s came from, and where they ended up. Finally, chapters one and five provide an able synthesis of the existing literatures on the Atlantic slave trade in the English, Spanish, and Portuguese languages. US historians looking to expand their transnational reach will find these chapters particularly useful, including as a resource for teaching.
At times it is difficult to evaluate the significance of the evidence Harris presents. For instance — can it really be said that the migration of “around a dozen” illegal slave traders to New York City constituted “a new phase of American engagement with slavery”?[14] If so, why? In The Last Slave Ships, Harris never answers this question. As a result, his argument is sometimes disjointed and contradictory. At different points, he argues both that the international slave trade was “indelibly marked” by suppression and that suppression was inconsequential.[15] In chapter four, he claims that the spy, Emilio Sanchez, was the “most important informant in slave trade history;” a few pages later, he describes his career as a failure.[16] At one point, Harris openly wonders, “what difference were spies making?”[17] His readers never find out.
Still, The Last Slave Ships stands as an important historical work in its own right. Harris sheds new light on the lives and experiences of tens of thousands of people caught up in the Atlantic slave trade during the last years of its existence. Moreover, his work knits together the disparate findings of scholars working on the slave trade in three different languages. That accomplishment will surely prove valuable to students of Atlantic slavery for generations to come.
Samantha Payne is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her research interests include the comparative history of slavery and emancipation, race, and the history of capitalism. She is currently at work on an Atlantic history of Reconstruction.
[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1896), 196.
[2] Ibid, 93.
[3] John Harris, The Last Slave Ships: New York City and the End of the Middle Passage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 22.
[4] Ibid, 127-128.
[5] Ibid, 11.
[6] Ibid, 18.
[7] Ibid, 69, 70.
[8] Ibid, 70.
[9] Ibid, 136.
[10] Ibid, 138.
[11] Ibid, 168.
[12] Ibid, 231.
[13] Ibid, 234.
[14] Ibid, 7,
[15] Ibid, 97, 115, 136.
[16] Ibid, 138, 156, 181.
[17] Ibid, 138.