Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-22dnz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T05:11:54.291Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The United States Navy, Slave-Trade Suppression, and State Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

DAVID F. ERICSON*
Affiliation:
Cleveland State University

Abstract

The mission of the United States Navy expanded significantly because of the presence of the institution of racial slavery on American soil. Most important, both proslavery and antislavery forces favored, for very different reasons, a substantial naval buildup in the late 1850s. The navy had, however, long been engaged in securing the nation’s borders against slave smuggling, an activity that also seemed to have broad support at the time. Finally, somewhat more controversially, the navy had been associated with the American Colonization Society’s Liberian enterprise from its very inception, deciding to deploy vessels to Africa in an otherwise unimaginable time frame. The relationship between the presence of slavery and the pre–Civil War activities of the navy is a largely untold—or, at best, half-told—story of American state development.

Type
Article
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. See Edling, Max M., A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American State-Building,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson, and Shefter, Martin (Princeton, 2002), 82110;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mayhew, David R., “Wars and American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005): 473–93;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pollack, Sheldon D., War, Revenue, and State-building: Financing the Development of the American State (Ithaca, 2008);Google Scholar Tilley, Charles, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, , Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda (Cambridge, 1985), 169–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. See Ericson, David F., “The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic,” Studies in American Political Development 31 (Spring 2017): 130–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. See Historical Statistics of the United States Millennial Edition Online, Table Ea636–643, http://hsus.cambridge.org.

4. See Karp, Matthew, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. See Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, 1975), 161–62; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York, 2001), 241; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2, Secessionists Triumphant (New York, 2007), 349–51; Earl M. Maltz, “Slavery, Federalism, and the Structure of the Constitution,” American Journal of Legal History 36, no. 4 (October 1992): 494.

6. See Karp, Southern Empire, 225; Benjamin Franklin Sands, From Reefer to Rear-Admiral: Reminiscences and Journal Jottings of Nearly Half a Century of Naval Life (1899; rep., London, 2015), 241–71; David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War (Columbia, 2001); Craig L. Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York, 2012).

7. See Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, 2005), 33; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 175; P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (1961; rep., New York, 1980), 205–06; Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black & White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill, 2007), 2.

8. See Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, 1990), 13, 63; Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006), 7–8; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 5; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2002), 22; Richard R. John, “‘Affairs of Office’: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, 2003), 67; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge, 2004), 88.

9. For works emphasizing these measures of state development, see Daniel R. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputation, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1920 (Princeton, 2001); Orren and Skowronek, American Political Development; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, 1982); Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

10. See Statutes at Large I (1794): 347–49.

11. See Statutes at Large II (1800): 70–71.

12. See Judd Scott Harmon, “Suppress and Protest: The United States Navy, the African Slave Trade, and Maritime Commerce, 1794–1862” (Ph.D. diss., College of William & Mary, 1977), 238 (Appendix E).

13. See John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, 2007), 27. Mississippi Territory initially included the future states of Mississippi and Alabama.

14. See Hammond, Slavery and Expansion, 30–31; John Craig Hammond, “‘They Are Very Much Interested in Obtaining an Unlimited Slavery’: Rethinking the Expansion of Slavery in the Louisiana Purchase Territories, 1803–1805,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 353. Louisiana Territory initially included the entire Louisiana Purchase. In response to local protests, Congress allowed the territorial ban on the domestic slave trade to lapse in 1805 when it reorganized the territory into Orleans (Louisiana) and Upper Louisiana (Missouri) territories. See Hammond, “Very Much Interested,” 354, 374; Hammond, Slavery and Expansion, 31, 47, 50, 187 n. 22.

15. See Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 97–103; Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 263–90.

16. See American State Papers: Foreign Relations I: 25 (“Message to Congress,” December 2, 1806), 68–69.

17. See Annals, 9th Cong., 2nd sess., 231–32, 266–67, 626; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896; rpt., New York, 1954), 97–111; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 144–47; Matthew E. Mason, “Slavery Overshadowed: Congress Debates Prohibiting the Atlantic Slave Trade to the United States, 1806–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 20, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 64–68; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York, 1971), 324–38; Statutes at Large II (1807): 426–30.

18. See Eugene C. Barker, “The African Slave Trade in Texas,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 1 (July 1902): 145–49; Box 622; SG–Illegal Service, including blockade running, piracy, smuggling, and filibustering; Subject File, U.S. Navy, 1775–1901; 0–1910; Office of Naval Records and Library, Record Group 45; National Archives; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1989), 11–12; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 149; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 123–24; David Head, “Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers: The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 450–54; David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, ed., Encyclopedia of the War of 1812 (Annapolis, 2004), 286; John S. Kendall, “Shadow over the City,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (January 1939): 146.

19. See Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 113–14; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 149; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 118–21; Frances J. Stafford, “Illegal Importations: Enforcement of the Slave Trade Laws along the Florida Coast, 1810–1828,” Florida Historical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (October 1967): 126–27.

20. See Clyde N. Wilson et al., ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun (Columbia, 1959–2003), vol. 632 (Calhoun to David B. Mitchell, 16 February 1821); Royce Gordon Shingleton, “David Brydie Mitchell and the African Importation Case of 1820,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 3 (July 1973): 327–40; Stafford, “Illegal Importations,” 129–30.

21. See American State Papers: Foreign Relations 5:343 (“Foreign Vessels Engaged in Smuggling through Florida,” 13 January 1821); Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 114, 166; H. R. Doc. No. 107, 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1819, 8–9; H. R. Doc. No. 36, 16th Cong., 1st sess., 1820, 5–6; H. R. Doc. No. 42, 16th Cong., 1st sess., 1820, 6–12; Stafford, “Illegal Importations,” 129–32.

22. See Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1934–69), 22:34 (Andrew Jackson to [Colonel] Robert Butler, 12 April 1821); 22:38–39 (Jackson to the Secretary of State [John Quincy Adams], 1 May 1821); 22:57 (The President [James Monroe] to Jackson, 23 May 1821).

23. See The Merino 22 U.S. 391 (1824), at 407–8. American soldiers (illegally) occupied Pensacola during the First Seminole War.

24. See Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 117–18; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 195–96

25. See H. R. Doc. No. 168, 19th Cong., 1st sess., 1826, 87.

26. See Stanley L. Engerman, “Slavery and Its Consequences for the South in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York, 2000), 337, 350; Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971), 3–4.

27. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 149–50, 386 nn. 66–68; Head, “Slave Smuggling,” 461; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 130–31, 145–46; Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837–1862 (1963; rpt., Westport, CT, 1976), 154, 302–3 n. 22; H. R. Doc. No. 148, 28th Cong., 2nd sess., 1845; H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 36th Cong., 3rd sess., 1860; Kenneth Kiple, “The Case Against a Nineteenth-Century Cuba-Florida Slave Trade,” Florida Historical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (April 1971): 345–55; S. Ex. Doc. No. 73, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., 1852. But cf. Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 126, 130, 165–66, 185.

28. See Statutes at Large III (1820): 600–601.

29. See Soodalter, Ron, Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader (New York, 2006), 222–25Google Scholar.

30. See Hidetaka Hirota, “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99, no. 4 (March 2013): 1092–1108; Gerald L. Neuman, “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776–1875),” Columbia Law Review 93, no. 8 (December 1993): 1833–1901.

31. See American State Papers: Foreign Relations 5:343 (Foreign Vessels Engaged in Smuggling Through Florida, 13 January 1821), 77; Carter, Territorial Papers, 23:404 ([Colonel] George M. Brooke to the Quartermaster General [Thomas S. Jesup], 1 January 1826); Gene A. Smith, “U.S. Navy Gunboats and the Slave Trade in Louisiana Waters, 1808–1811,” Military History of the West 23, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 140–41.

32. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 238–39 (Appendix E).

33. See Duncan J. Macleod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1974), 36–37; Duncan Rice, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery (New York, 1975), 227–28; Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, 224; George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2010), 28.

34. See Statutes at Large III (1819): 532–34.

35. See Annual Reports of the American Colonization Society (1818–1910; rpt., New York, 1969), 4 (1821): 27–28; H. Doc. No. 11, 16th Cong., 1st sess., 1819.

36. See H. Rep. No. 101, 19th Cong., 2nd sess., 1827.

37. See ACS, Annual Reports, 4 (1821): 7–13; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 59–62.

38. See ACS, Annual Reports, 5 (1822): 15; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 62.

39. See ACS, Annual Reports, 5 (1822): 8–17, 64–66; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 63–65.

40. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 239 (Appendix E).

41. See Du Bois, African Slave-Trade, 291 (Appendix C).

42. See 26 F. Cas. 832 (C.C.D. Mass. 1822; No. 15551); John T. Noonan, Jr., The Antelope: The Ordeal of the Recaptured Africans in the Administrations of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams (Berkeley, 1977), 69–74.

43. See Noonan, The Antelope, 76–77; S. Doc. No. 3, 20th Cong., 1st sess., 1827, 16–17.

44. See ACS, Annual Reports, 6 (1823): 25; 7 (1824): 12, 26–27; 8 (1825): 32; 9 (1826): 50; 10 (1827): 53; 11 (1828): 38; “Letter from Treasury Department, 4th Auditor’s Office, in response to Senate Resolution of February 25, 1843,” December 1, 1843; Record Group 45; National Archives; S. Doc. 3, 20th Cong., 1st sess., 1827, 10–29; S. Doc. No. 1, 20th Cong., 2nd sess., 1828, 139–40.

45. See ACS, Annual Reports 7 (1824): 19–20; Staudenraus, African Colonization, 89–90.

46. See ACS, Annual Reports 7 (1824): 26–27; H. Doc. No. 193, 20th Cong., 1st sess. (1828), 7, 11.

47. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 254–56 (Appendix H).

48. See ACS, Annual Reports 6 (1823): 59.

49. See ACS, Annual Reports 13 (1830): 13.

50. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 239 (Appendix E).

51. See H. R. Doc. No. 54, 21st Cong., 2nd sess., 1831, 3–4. When the Grampus arrived to aid the Kremlin, the Fenix was on the far side of the ship, shielded from view.

52. See “Letter from Treasury Department,” National Archives.

53. All estimates of American slave-trade expenditures and seizures are the author’s; available upon request. For the British estimates, see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987), 92 (Table 2), 99 (Table 4). The time spans do not quite match because Eltis aggregated British slave-ship seizures in five-year intervals.

54. See Matthew E. Mason, “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 59, no. 3 (July 2002): 671.

55. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 107–08; ACS, Annual Reports, 24 (1840): 7.

56. See Statutes at Large VIII (1842): 576.

57. See S. Ex. Doc. No. 20, 27th Cong., 3rd sess., 1843.

58. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 233 (Appendix D); Howard, American Slavers, 239 (Appendix E).

59. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 232–37 (Appendix D); S. Ex. Doc. No. 39, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 1858, 16.

60. See S. Ex. Doc. No. 40, 31st Cong., 1st sess., 1850, 3.

61. In 1843, the federal government shifted to a July 1–June 30 fiscal year.

62. See Eltis, Economic Growth, 99 (Table 4); Howard, American Slavers, 214–23 (Appendix A). Harmon did not distinguish ship seizures in terms of those with and without Africans aboard but his figures for the 1843–1859 seizure totals of the respective African squadrons were 24 (US) and 574 (GB). See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 206 (Table 2).

63. Cf. ACS, Annual Reports, 26 (1843): 28–30; George E. Brooke, “The Role of the US Navy in the Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” American Neptune 21, no. 2 (January 1961): 33; Donald L. Canney, Africa Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the Slave Trade, 1842–1861 (Washington, 2006), 57–58, 226–27; Du Bois, African Slave–Trade, 185–86; Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 173; Sharla M. Fett, Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slaver Trade (Chapel Hill, 2017), 22; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 2–3; Howard, American Slavers, 13, 41, 67–68; Karp, Southern Empire, 52–53; David F. Long, Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers, 1798–1883 (Annapolis, 1988), 320; Ted Maris-Wolf, “‘Of Blood and Treasure’: Recaptive Africans and the Politics of Slave Trade Suppression,” Journal of Civil War Era 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 57–58.

64. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 104, 35th Cong., 2nd sess., 1859, 3.

65. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 104, 35th Cong., 2nd sess., 1859, 7–8, 11.

66. See New American State Papers: Explorations and Surveys 9: 133 (“M. C. Perry to [British Admiral] John Foote Esq.,” 4 March 1844).

67. See New American State Papers: Explorations and Surveys 9: 160 (“M. C. Perry to Hon. Secretary of the Navy,” 18 May 1844).

68. See House Journal, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., 13 April 1854, 634; House Journal, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., 31 July 1854, 1241.

69. Prior to the Buchanan administration, seven of the African Squadron’s nine navy secretaries were from Southern states. On the Southern dominance of the navy during this time, see Karp, Southern Empire, 202–8; Langley, Harold D., Social Reform in the United States Navy, 1798–1862 (Urbana, 1967), 30;Google Scholar Long, Gold Braid, 314; Schroeder, John H., Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1828–1861 (Westport, CT, 1985), 58–59, 187–88.Google Scholar

70. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 157–65; H. R. Rep. No. 283, 27th Cong., 3rd sess., 1843, 478–729; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 71–75; Howard, American Slavers, 8–12; Edward Keene, “A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century,” International Organization 61, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 320–23; Matthew E. Mason, “‘Keeping Up Appearances’: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 66. no. 4 (October 2009): 820–28.

71. See Brandon Mills, “‘The United States of Africa’: Liberian Independence and the Contested Meaning of a Black Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 105; Eugene S. Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists: The U.S. Navy and Liberia, 1819–1845,” Journal of the Early Republic 31, no. 4 (Spring 2011): 132–34.

72. See Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 76.

73. See [James Buchanan], Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), 261–62; S. Ex. Doc. No. 39, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 1858.

74. See S. Rep. No. 195, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856.

75. See House Journal, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 15 December 1856, 105–6. In analyzing this vote, I classified all fifteen slave states as Southern states.

76. See Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000), 174–75; Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade, 224.

77. For the multiple motives behind Buchanan’s decision, see Robert Ralph Davis Jr., “James Buchanan and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1858–1861,” Pennsylvania History 33, no. 4 (October 1966): 457–59; Fett, Recaptured Africans, 22–23; Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 54–55; Karen Fisher Younger, “Liberia and the Last Slave Ships,” Civil War History 54, no. 4 (December 2008): 431–32.

78. See Davis, “Buchanan and the Slave Trade,” 452; Fett, Recaptured Africans, 22; Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 140, 192, 236–37 (Appendix D); Howard, American Slavers, 59, 240 (Appendix E); Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 59.

79. See Barton J. Bernstein, “Southern Politics and Attempts to Reopen the African Slave trade.” Journal of Negro History 51, no. 1 (January 1966): 25–30; Leonardo Marques, The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas (New Haven, 2016), 228–30; Sinha, Counterrevolution, 142, 145; Takaki, Pro-Slavery Crusade, 117–21.

80. See Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 21 February 1856, 366 (Appendix).

81. See House Journal, 34th Cong., 3rd sess., 15 December 1856, 109–10. In analyzing this vote, I classified Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri as upper-South states; South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas as lower-South states.

82. See Andrew H. Foote, Africa and the American Flag (New York: D. Appleton, 1854), 359–61, 383–84.

83. See Foote, American Flag, 384.

84. See H. Ex. Doc. No. 1, 33rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1854, 387

85. See Karp, Southern Empire, 197; Buchanan’s Administration, 279; William P. MacKinnon, “Hammering Utah, Squeezing Mexico, and Coveting Cuba: James Buchanan’s White House Intrigues,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 132–51; Maris-Wolf, “Blood and Treasure,” 60.

86. Beside Karp’s work, see Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009); Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013); David C. Keehn, Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2013); Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 18541861 (Baton Rouge, 1973).

87. See Howard, American Slavers, 218, 223 (Appendix A).

88. See Fehrenbacher, Slaveholding Republic, 198; Howard, American Slavers, 224–35 (Appendix B); Soodalter, Hanging Captain, 9. A naval vessel had originally taken Townsend to Boston, where a conviction would have been more likely, but US Commissioner Edward G. Loring ruled he should be tried in the judicial district closest to the location of his alleged offense. See Sinha, Counterrevolution, 161.

89. See Harmon, “Suppression and Protest,” 206, Table 2; Howard, American Slavers, 220–23 (Appendix A).

90. See Statutes at Large XII (1860–1861): 21, 40–41, 132, 219.

91. See Historical Statistics, Table Ea636–643.

92. See Eltis, Economic Growth, 92–93 (Table 2); B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (London, 1988), 587–88 (Public Finance 4); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–1993 (New York, 2007), 911–13 (Table G5). Because of the way Eltis aggregated the British data, I could not compare the number of British and American seizures of slave-laden ships during these two years.

93. See Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 84, 142, 199; Howard, American Slavers, 59.

94. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 57, 37th Cong., 2nd sess., 1862.

95. Cf. Bruce W. Hetherington and Peter J. Kower, “A Reexamination of Lebergott’s Paradox about Blockade Running during the American Civil War,” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (June 2009): 528–32; Stanley Lebergott, “Through the Blockade: The Profitability and Extent of Cotton Smuggling, 1861–1865,” Journal of Economic History 41, no. 4 (December 1981): 867–88; William N. Still Jr., “A Naval Sieve: The Union Blockade in the Civil War,” Naval War College Review 36, no. 3 (May–June 1983): 38–45; David G. Surdam, “The Union Navy’s Blockade Reconsidered,” Naval War College Review 51, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 85–107.

96. On the distinction between state-centered and society-centered models of state development, see Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, 4–6.

97. See Pamela L. Baker, “The Washington National Road Bill and the Struggle to Adopt a Federal System of Internal Improvement,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 437–64; John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001); Stephen Minicucci, “Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790–1860,” Studies in American Political Development 18, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 165–80; Daniel M. Mulcare, “Restricted Authority: Slavery Politics, Internal Improvements, and the Limitation of National Administrative Capacity,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 2008): 671–85.

98. See Deyle, Steven, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2006), 4.Google Scholar

99. See H. R. Ex. Doc. No. 7, 36th Cong., 3rd sess., 1860, 632–36; Davis, “Buchanan and the Slave Trade,” 450; Robert Ralph Davis Jr., “Buchanan Espionage: A Report on Illegal Slave Trading in the South in 1859,” Journal of Southern History 37, no. 2 (May 1971): 271–78; Howard, American Slavers, 147–54; Tom Henderson Wells, The Slave Ship Wanderer (Athens, 1967), 7.

100. See Van Sickle, “Reluctant Imperialists,” 118–29.

101. Harmon, “Suppress and Protest,” 237 (Appendix D); Historical Statistics, Tables Ea636–643, Ed26–47; Paul H. Silverstone, The Sailing Navy, 1775–1854 (Annapolis, 2001), 40, 42–44, 63, 75; Paul H. Silverstone, Civil War Navies, 1855–1883 (Annapolis, 2001), 15, 22, 45–46.

102. See Stephen Tucker, ed., The Civil War Naval Encyclopedia (2 vols.; Santa Barbara, 2011), 132–33, 195–97, 611.

103. See Sands, From Reefer to Rear-Admiral, 253.