American Slave-Trade - An Account of its Origin, Growth and Suppression

Twenty Africans put ashore in Virginia in 1619; a slaver captain hanged in New York in 1862. Between those two dates lies the whole story told in The American Slave-Trade.

John Randolph Spears (1850-1936) was a journalist and maritime historian, and this book grew out of his research for a history of the United States navy. It shows in the detail: the tonnage and fitting-out of the vessels, the goods carried to the West African coast and bartered for captives, the arithmetic by which an owner counted his profit, and the conditions below deck on the Middle Passage. Twenty chapters carry the account from colonial cargoes and the old-time slaving captains through the abolition statutes, the ruling that made slaving piracy, the naval squadrons sent to stop it, the Amistad case, and the smugglers who kept working until the end came in the 1860s.

First published in 1900, it quotes freely from the letters and papers of the men who ran the ships - among them Captain David Lindsay, whose eighteenth-century voyages fill an early chapter.

This edition features:

• The complete text in twenty chapters, running from the Dutch ship of 1619 to the last of the smugglers
• The original illustrations drawn for Charles Scribner's Sons by the American artist Walter Appleton Clark
• Chapters on the vessels and their outfitting, the West African coast, the Middle Passage, and the profits
• The suppression story in full: the abolition statutes, the piracy ruling and the anti-slaving naval patrols
• Useful groundwork for readers of Atlantic history, abolition studies and nineteenth-century maritime writing