On a February day in 1862, a slight, bearded prisoner stood beneath the gallows in a New York City prison courtyard, facing death. Captain Nathaniel Gordon was surrounded by Marines and a crowd of invited “guests”—mostly reporters, politicians and officials. Convicted of “piratically confining and detaining negroes with intent of making them slaves,” Gordon was about to become the only man in American history to be executed for the crime of slave trading. The Slave Trade Act of 1794, enacted only five years after George Washington’s inauguration, prohibited exporting slaves from the United States to any foreign country, also declaring it illegal to “build, fit, equip, load, or otherwise prepare” a vessel within U.S. borders for slave trading. The first action taken by any nation against slave traders, it marked the first in what was to be a series of increasingly restrictive laws directed against the lucrative slave trade, culminating in the Piracy Act of 1820, which stated that any U.S. citizen on the crew of a foreign ship, or anyone serving on a U.S. ship that seized a “Negro or mulatto…shall be adjudged a pirate…and shall suffer death.”

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Why were such laws passed even though the South still depended on slave labor throughout the first half of the 19th century? In fact, by 1820 most Southern planters felt they already had enough slaves. White Southerners were terrified that the population of slaves and free Blacks might grow to outnumber their own. They were well aware of what had happened in Haiti only a few years earlier, when the slave population took over the entire island. There had also been sporadic slave revolts in various spots throughout the Southern states in 1800, 1811 and 1831—small, to be sure, and quickly and brutally put down, but frightening nonetheless.

So America’s need for slaves was dwindling. Laws forbidding trafficking were enacted, and the slave trade should have come to an end. But while the Southern states’ demand lessened, Brazil and Cuba were increasingly in need of slaves to work sugar cane and coffee plantations. The bounties paid for workers there were not as high as the price tags fetched on the auction blocks of Charleston, Mobile or Atlanta, but they were still enough to attract thousands of ships to Africa’s coastal slave markets.

And while the newly enacted American laws should seemingly have discouraged slave traders, the U.S. government did virtually nothing to enforce them early in the century. Ships by the thousands sailed from New York and New England for the African coast, packed their stifling holds with slaves, then delivered them to Rio de Janeiro and Havana. Arrests were few, convictions even fewer. Why bother to enforce laws that merely prohibited bringing slaves from Africa to a foreign country when there was no law preventing selling them from, say, Virginia to Louisiana?

That was the situation until 1842, when the American government signed a treaty with England resulting in both countries forming an armed fleet—an “African Squadron”—to curb slave traffic. The British squadron was incredibly successful; within a six-year period it captured more than 500 slave ships transporting some 40,000 captives. In that same period, however, its American counterpart captured just six vessels—one per year. In over four decades not a single slave trader was hanged, and few were punished at all.

For slave traders, even one successful voyage was profitable beyond all reason. In the mid-1800s, a slave purchased in Africa for approximately $40 worth of trade goods would bring an estimated $400 to $1,200. That means a cargo of, say, 800 slaves would bring between $320,000 and $960,000.

Attrition was the inevitable result of any slaving voyage. The death rate among captives varied, depending on the length of the voyage, the severity of conditions and the callousness of captain and crew. It averaged 17.5 percent among American slavers; out of every 1,000 Africans shipped as slaves, approximately 175 perished of disease, thirst, starvation, suffocation, exhaustion, suicide and sometimes simply despair.

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