The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867

For some scholars, US citizens' involvement in the transatlantic slave trade after the United States and Britain made it illegal in 1807 is a familiar, though perhaps nebulous, topic. Leonardo Marques brings much-needed clarity to our understandings of this dubious trade, as The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867 adds depth, substance, and nuance by meticulously detailing Americans' willingness to illicitly engage in the nineteenth-century buying and selling of African bodies, primarily shipped to Cuba and Brazil. While most scholarship on the illegal slave trade is informed by and follows the trajectory of W. E. B. Du Bois's classic study The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1904), Marques focuses on the “nearly ignored” slave traders, financiers, shipbuilders, and merchants who facilitated this trade. The thesis of Marques's book hinges on two main arguments. The first assertion is that...