Peter Williams, Jr.: “Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade”

Context

When the British colonies in North America declared their independence from the mother country in 1776, every colony except Rhode Island had, to some extent, a system of slave labor. During and shortly after the time of the Revolution, many northern states decided to adopt programs of gradual emancipation for their slaves. However, when the Constitutional Congress met in 1787, there was debate about whether the legislative branch of government, which would have power over trade, would be able to prohibit the importation of slaves into the country. The southern states would have none of this, and the northern states knew that if Congress were allowed to prohibit the slave trade right away, many of the slave states would not ratify the Constitution. Thus, a provision was made for keeping open the Atlantic slave trade until at least the year 1808 (Article I, Section 9). This served as a compromise between slaving interests and their opponents: The trade would be banned, but not for twenty years—giving the slave states ample time to build up their labor supply from sources outside the country and to develop a self-sustaining system. Although it was not the best news for southern states, which still earned their economic livelihood through agriculture based upon slave labor, it was better than having the importation of slaves prohibited outright.

Many people opposed the Atlantic slave trade because of the manner in which it was conducted. Africans to be auctioned in the Americas were crowded into a ship so tightly packed that they could not turn over when they slept. The Middle Passage, as the trip across the Atlantic was called, was an ordeal in itself, as sickness was prevalent, conditions horrible, malnutrition rampant, and fresh air and exercise rare. Indeed, every so often one of these human cargo—for they were treated more like cargo than humans—would cast himself overboard rather than see what might lie at the trip’s end.

Philanthropists and humanitarians found this trade abhorrent and worked to stop it. Northern states began to pass their own laws against the external slave trade, and New York itself, the home of Peter Williams, passed legislation ending the overseas importation of slaves into the state in 1788. The pressure of abolitionist groups upon President Thomas Jefferson caused him to recommend strongly in his 1806 year-end address that Congress adopt the bill that Senator Stephen Roe Bradley of Vermont had introduced the year before, designed to ensure the end of the Atlantic slave trade to the United States as soon as the Constitution would allow. On the second day of March in 1807, Congress passed the act that would prohibit the importation of slaves into the United States, effective January 1, 1808. On the very next day President Jefferson signed it into law.

This formal prohibition was hailed as a milestone in abolitionist and antislavery circles. It was tantamount to national recognition of the evils of the slave trade and perhaps slavery itself. The day it took effect in 1808, African Americans and white abolitionists alike celebrated all over the North; New York, with its great numbers of freed slaves and free blacks, was a particularly festive place to be. Nevertheless, an illicit international slave trade persisted in the United States wherever dealers could make a sale, and the legal buying and selling of slaves across state lines continued unabated in the parts of the country where slavery still existed. Not until the formal end of slavery, with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, would all slave trade, internal and external, legal or not, end.