“Why may not our country be enriched by that lucrative traffic?”: The slave trade and the failed politics of federal proscription in the early American Republic (1787-1808)

• Main Author: Andy Cabot
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 2020-12-01
• Series: XVII-XVIII
• Subjects: transatlantic slave trade; early American Republic; abolitionism; commerce; the Age of Revolutions
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/1718/6037
• ISSN: 0291-3798; 2117-590X

This article proposes to explore the commercial dimensions of the slave trade suppression in the United States during the early national period. It draws attention to recent scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade and the politics of slavery in the early American republic to show that the slave trade shaped the national debate on slavery throughout the twenty-year period after the Constitution. It did so by opposing two groups in Congress and in the states who had varying interests in defending or opposing the trade, and who clashed mainly over the extent of federal power on the trade. These groups fixed the terms of the debate by both emphasizing the primarily commercial aspect of the traffic as well as the government’s proper role about its continuation. Thus, the article argues that the political debate on trafficking was above all a debate on the place of trade within the early republic, where antagonistic conceptions on the role of the state in the regulation of trade were mobilized by the actors of the debate to support the political legitimacy of their opposition to or support of the trade.