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Slavery was prevalent in many parts of Africa for many centuries before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. [78] Slavery was an important part of the economic structure of Africa although its relative importance and the role and treatment of enslaved people varied considerably by society. [79]
By the 1830s, active anti-slavery patrols by both the U.S. and Royal Navies were in operation of the coast of West Africa. Despite the patrols and legal strictures on slave shipments from outside the United States, officials believed that trafficking of enslaved people from Africa, South America, and the Caribbean continued to at least some extent.
Anti-slavery legislators took office under the banner of the newly formed Republican Party. The Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 asserted that one could take one's property anywhere, even if one's property was chattel and one crossed into a free territory. It also asserted that African Americans could not be federal citizens.
Plaque commemorating the founding of the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1833. Angelina and Sarah Grimké were the first female anti-slavery agents, and played a variety of roles in the abolitionist movement. Though born in the South, the Grimké sisters became disillusioned with slavery and moved North to get away from it.
The need for profits in the 18th-century Atlantic market economy drove changes in ship designs and in managing human cargo, which included enslaved Africans and the mostly European crew. Improvements in air flow on board the ships helped to decrease the infamous mortality rate that these ships had become known for throughout the 16th and 17th ...
Far from the Pax Britannica style policing of the 1840s and 1850s, early efforts to suppress the slave trade were often ineffectual due to a desire to keep on good terms with other European powers. The actions of the West Africa Squadron were "strictly Governed" [ 8 ] by the treaties, and officers could be punished for overstepping their authority.
Several cases occurred as anti-slavery agitation increased and abolition was passed: Comet (1830), Encomium (1833), Enterprise (1835), and Hermosa (1840) In each case, the British freed the slaves from the ships that had put into ports in Bermuda and the Bahamas, whether by weather or accident.
While some scholars stress that the history of the "Atlantic World" culminates in the "Atlantic Revolutions" of the late 18th early 19th centuries, [3] the most influential research in the field examines the slave trade and the study of slavery, thus in the late-19th century terminus as part of the transition from Atlantic history to ...