NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HISTORY 77BROADSIDE ANNOUNCING THE SALE OF
94 PEOPLE FROM “SIERRA LEON.” 18TH
CENTURY, SOUTH CAROLINAIn the antebellum South, enslaved labor had been
powering the region’s economy for hundreds
of years. The international slave trade supplied
much of this labor force during the colonial era,
and the domestic trade took over in the 19th cen-
tury. While the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which
lasted between 1525 and 1866, displaced more
than 12 million Africans by forcibly sending them
to the Americas, the Clotilda’s captives were the
last of an estimated 389,000 brought from Africa
to North America from the early 1600s to 1860.
Banning the Trade
After the War for Independence, the new na-
tion’s divided attitudes toward slavery became
apparent as its founding documents were being
written in the 1780s. To join the free and slave
states, several compromises were made over the
institution, including the legality of the interna-
tional slave trade. The vaguely worded Article 1,
Section 9, says that the government will not in-
terfere in “the Migration or Importation of such
Persons as any of the States now existing shall
think proper to admit” before 1808, protecting
the trade for 20 years.
Two decades later, the Slave Trade Act crimi-
nalized the “importation of any negro, mulatto,
or person of color from any foreign kingdom,
place, or country into the United States for the
purposes of holding, selling, or disposing of such
persons as slaves.” Effective January 1, 1808, the
act further states that violators would be guilty
of a high misdemeanor, punishable by not more
than ten, but not less than five years in prison.
Despite the transatlantic slave trade being
illegal, importation of enslaved Africans did
not stop completely. Smuggling still contin-
ued—not only because it made money, but also
because it rebuffed attempts by the federal gov-
ernment to take away the “states’ rights” to regu-
late imports. More legislative attempts followed
to outlaw the trade, capped off in 1820 when the
United States criminalized slave smuggling as
an act of “piracy,” punishable by death.NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HISTORY 77PUNISHABLE
BY DEATH
BRIDGEMAN/ACIPRIOR TO 1808 slave importation
was legal in South Carolina, Geor-
gia, and Louisiana, but the Act to
Prohibit Importation of Slaves
changed that in 1808. Smugglers
continued to illegally import Af-
ricans for slave labor. Congress
passed several acts to sharpen the
teeth of the act, but none so much
as the Act of 1820 “to... punish
the crime of piracy.” In it, legisla-
tors proclaimed that anyone par-
ticipating in the international slave
trade—financiers, captains, or
sailors—would be committing pi-
racy, a crime punishable by heavy
fines and death. Smuggling of Af-
ricans did continue in violation of
the Piracy Act. According to the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture, about 100,000 people were forcibly brought into
the country between 1800 and 1807. After 1820, they estimate that
10,000 people or fewer were smuggled into the United States.