Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, A.M., fellow of Harvard University, read a scholar­ly and spirited paper upon the "The Enforcement of the Slave-Trade Laws." From 1770 to 1789 the slave trade was prohibited by all the colonies. South Carolina reopened the traffic in 1803. Mr. Du Bois showed that the prohibitory act of 1807 was not enforced. More stringent legislation began in 1818, and the slave trade was classed with piracy. Never­the­less the infamous business was continued, for the United States would not permit the right of search. Even the treaty with England in 1842 failed to suppress the slave trade. Vessels were fitted out for this traffic in every port from Boston to New Orleans. Mr. Du Bois estimates that, from 1807 to 1862, not less than a quarter of a million of Africans were brought to the United States in defiance of law and humanity. [p. 6]

    —Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. are about to issue the first volume of a new series of historical works (Harvard Historical Studies), to be published under the direction of the Department of History in Harvard University, entitled "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870," by William E. Burghardt Du Bois, a Negro, twenty-eight years of age, born at Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Mr. Du Bois was educated in the public schools of his home, at Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., at Harvard University (A.B., '90; A.M., '91; Fellow, '91, '92; Ph.D., '95), and at the University of Berlin, being sent abroad for two years by the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, to study history and political science, in 1892-4. On his return he became Professor of Latin in Wilberforce University, Ohio, an African Methodist institution, and the oldest of schools for Negro youth. After two years' service there, he was appointed Assistant in Sociology in the University of Pennsylvania, to take charge of a special investigation into the condition of the Negro people of the city of Philadelphia, and has just entered upon his work in that place.

 ————————
Note (Citation): Anonymous. "Notes" [Announcement of Du Bois, The Sup­pression of the African Slave Trade]. The Critic, No.766 (October 24, 1896): pp.251-252.

    The History of the Negro in the United States receives much new light from two recent monographs. The first and more elaborate study is that of Dr. W. E. B. DuBois on "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870," published by Longmans, Green & Co., as number one of the Harvard Historical Studies. So far as precision and thoroughness of method are concerned, this is by far the best historical treatment of the slave trade that has been written since Hüne's work in 1820. It is of course more limited in scope, and deals not with the rise but the suppression of the trade. Dr. DuBois's researches have been exhaustive and no pains have been spared to make the book convenient and useful. In addition to his narrative he has prepared a complete calendar of all the colonial and national legislation on the slave trade and a long list of "typical" slavery expeditions from 1619 to 1864.
[The note continues with a brief mention of Charles T. Hickok's The Negro in Ohio, 1802-1870 (1896) (Library of Congress bibliographic data)].

 ————————
Note (Citation): Anonymous. "The History of the Negro in the United States" [Du Bois, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade]. The Yale Review, v.5 (November 1896): 316.

 The same firm [Longmans, Green & Co.] will begin their Harvard Historical Studies, with The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, by William E. Burghardt Du Bois, a colored [sic] graduate of Harvard, a student also at the University of Berlin, Professor of Latin at Wilberforce University, Ohio, etc. Mr. Du Bois is a native of Massachusetts.

    Not the least noteworthy thing in connection with the publication of the initial volume of the Harvard Historical Studies (Longmans) is the fact that the volume is the work of a negro.[sic] It is entitled The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, and deals exhaustively with that subject in its historical relations. The author, Mr. William E. B. Du Bois, is a graduate and former Fellow of Harvard. The second volume in the same series is concerned with the contest over the ratification of the federal constitution in Massachusetts in 1787-88. The author is Samuel B. Harding, some time Morgan Fellow in Harvard University and now assistant professor of history in the University of Indiana. Both volumes are ideal publications of their class as regards typographical arrangement, indexing and bibliographical annotation. This new university series has made a promising start.  [p.748]

     This initial volume [of the Harvard Historical Studies] is entitled The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, by W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, who is a professor in Wilberforce University, an institution devoted to the higher education of the colored race. Dr. Du Bois has shown good judgment in the choice of his subject, and has been most industrious in gathering and arranging his material; for though the substance of his monograph may be reached more succinctly in Lalor's Encyclopaedia of Political Science, he has given a very full array of authorities for all his facts, and has furnished a workmanlike chronological conspectus of colonial, state, national, and international legislation, and a good bibliography. All this apparatus looks well, and Dr. Du Bois has laid students under obligation to him, but his own reasoning and what we may call his hortatory application seem to disclose a lack of appreciation of the subject in its historical proportions.  [p.560]
     [...] The fact, however, that this amendment [the 13th Amendment ending slavery] was not unanimous, being ratified by only thirty-one out of thirty-six States, and that the Fifteenth Amendment, which was the corollary of it, was ratified by only thirty out of thirty-seven States, shows that the opposition complained of by Dr. Du Bois in the thirteen original States still existed, and that the suppression of slavery and the slave-trade was not such a simple matter as he considers it. Perhaps that is what he means in his closing enigmatical remark: "The riddle of the Sphinx may be postponed, it may be evasively answered; some time it must be fully answered." We suspect he has failed in a satisfactory answer to the historical problem involved in his thesis by trying to isolate it too completely, not only from the institution of slavery and the interstate slave-trade, but frum those considerations of the development of ethics which lie at the basis of all final political action. It is not difficult to establish, for example, a chain of witnesses against African slavery, from Las Casas to Garrison, but it is quite another thing to demonstrate a common consciousness of the evil during the same period.  [pp.561-2]

 ————————
Note 1 (Citation): Anonymous Review of Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade. The Atlantic Monthly, vol.79, issue 474 (April 1897): 560-562.
 Note 2: "Colored" was not capitalized in the original text. Book titles were not italicized.
 Note 3: The multiple volumes of John Joseph Lalor (Editor), Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States (various years, 1882-1893) can be accessed at Google Books.

    40An excellent monograph, including this topic, is The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, by W. E. B. DuBois. See especially pp. 7-38, and appendix A. containing an outline of colonial and state legislation (1641-1787) on the importation of negro slaves.

 ————————
Note 1 (Citation): Albert Anthony Giesecke. American Commercial Legislation Before 1789. University of Pennsylvania; NY: D. Appleton and Company, Agents, 1910.
Note 2: In the original text the book title is not italicized or formatted in any way, and "Negro" is not capitalized.
Note 3: Giesecke cited the SAST on other pages of his book: p.33, n.46; p.34, n.51; p.35, n.57; and p.36, n.58.

 [. . . .]

 Why did Great Britain abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, after a nearly twenty-year social movement campaign to end it? This question still continues to puzzle scholars despite the vast amount of historical research conducted on the subject since the beginning of the twentieth century. In this dissertation, I use social movement theory and a two-tiered empirical approach to examine British slave trade abolition. Systematic qualitative and quantitative analyses of the legislative debates on the slave trade underscores the importance of abolitionists' rhetorical strategies and the economic utility of Britain's departure from the trade. A frame analysis of abolitionists' speeches made during the parliamentary debates suggests that a law to end the slave trade was passed when abolitionist MPs deliberately reframed their ideological campaign to include an increased number of economic pleas in their arguments. Drawing on key aspects of social movement theory, I examine the relationship between resource mobilization, cultural framing and opportunity structures (both political and non-political) and British abolition. My findings suggest that cultural, economic and political factors help to explain why the British slave trade was finally abolished.

 The Abolition of the Slave Trade presents more than 8,000 pages of original essays, primary documents—books, pamphlets, articles, and illustrations—as well as secondary sources and original maps. The site is organized around eight themes that tell the forgotten story of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States and, more generally, to the Western Hemisphere. Each theme is presented through an essay, images, and texts.

 The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is the culmination of several decades of independent and collaborative research by scholars drawing upon data in libraries and archives around the Atlantic world. The Voyages website itself is the product of two years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. The National Endowment for the Humanities is the principal sponsor of the project, and it is an Emory University Digital Library Research Initiative.

 3. The political and moral ideas of the age are to be examined in the very closest relation to the economic development.
    Politics and morals in the abstract make no sense. We find the British statesmen and publicists defending slavery today, abusing slavery tomorrow, defending slavery the day after. Today they are imperialist, the next day anti-imperialist, and equally pro-imperialist a generation after. And always with the same vehemence. The defence or attack is always on the high moral or political plane. The thing defended or attacked is always something that you can touch and see, to be measured in pounds sterling or pounds avoirdupois, in dollars and cents, yards, feet and inches. This is not a crime. It is a fact. It is understandable at the time. But historians, writing a hundred years after, have no excuse for continuing to wrap the real interests in confusion.[Note removed] Even the great mass movements, and the anti-slavery mass movement was one of the greatest of these, show a curious affinity with the rise and development of new interests and the necessity of the destruction of the old.  [Ch.13: 211]

     What I needed was to add to my terribly conscientious search into the facts of the slave trade the clear concept of Marx on the class struggle for income and power, beneath which all considerations of right or morals were twisted or utterly crushed. Yet naturally it is too much to ask that I should have been as wise in 1896 as I think I am in 1954. I am proud to see that at the beginning of my career I made no more mistakes than apparently I did.

 This thesis examines the Royal Navy's efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade between 1807 and the mid-1860s. The role of the West Africa squadron in detaining slave ships embarking from the West African coast was instrumental in the transformation of Britain's profile from a prolific slave trading nation to the principal emancipator of enslaved Africans. The wider framework for naval suppression encompassed international law, official policy and diplomacy, but at the operational frontline of the campaign were naval personnel. This history of suppression shifts the emphasis from political and diplomatic contexts to the experiences of naval officers tasked with the delivery of the anti-slavery message, positioning them at the heart of Britain's abolitionist campaign on the West African coast. Through officers' narratives and personal testimonies -- found in letters, journals, report books and diaries -- it examines the reactions, relations and encounters of these agents of change, and their contributions to the exchange of information crucial to Britain's anti-slavery efforts in West Africa.  [p.i]