Colonial restrictions on the slave trade main took the form of slave import duties. Nine of the thirteen British North American colonies legislated in favour of such duties at one time or another before the War of Independence. Colonies passed such legislation to restrict slave imports when saltwater Africans were not required economically, when there were fears of slave revolts, in order to boost white immigration, manufacturing and trade and when military costs had to be met. South Carolina made particular use of high slave import duties to stop Africans being imported in the wake of the Stono rebellion of 1739, thereby supporting public safety against protesting slaves. The British parliament reserved the overall political and constitutional right to decide on the merits of slave trade restriction and its decisions were binding. The colonies did not combine to form an anti-slave trade stance before the meetings of the First Continental Congress in 1774, and even then the Guinea traffic formed just one element in the North American boycott of British goods in the tense couple of years leading up to the War of American Independence. Moral concerns about the slave trade were fairly muted in North America’s colonies before the War of Independence. The Quakers were at the forefront of anti-slave trade commentary but even they took decades to persuade their own membership to relinquish slave importation and slaveholding. New England clergymen joined by the 1770s in their condemnation of the slave trade. But there was no consensus in the North American colonies that consistent pressure should be exerted to proscribe the transatlantic slave trade. The trade was banned by most colonies in the non-importation protests of 1776–8, 1769–70 and 1774–6, but there were no detailed discussions about the subject at the two Continental Congresses after the Coercive Acts had been implemented in 1774.

By the end of 1803, it appeared that controversies over the transatlantic slave trade had been largely overcome in the United States. All states by then had stopped slave imports, including South Carolina, the most recalcitrant state dealing with this issue. The issue of the slave trade, however, came to the fore dramatically as a political issue with the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory by the United States in 1803 and the subsequent reopening of South Carolina’s slave trade for the first time since 1787. The massive increase in US-owned territory through the Louisiana Purchase held out the possibility of further demand for slave labour, with Charleston acting as an entrepôt for furnishing new African imports across the southwest United States to New Orleans and Natchez. But there was no consensus among politicians either at federal or state level that this was a desirable outcome. The years between 1803 and 1806 were therefore marked by bitter controversies about whether to reopen the slave trade to South Carolina and then, after that had taken place, whether the trade should remain open. Jefferson’s presidential message of December 1806, looking forward to the time when Congress could intervene constitutionally to prohibit the slave trade, gave notice that the issue would be subject to detailed scrutiny in the national legislature at the first available opportunity. Debates on the slave trade accordingly were regularly held in Congress and in South Carolina’s state legislature in late 1806 and 1807 and the final result was for Congress to prohibit the slave trade to the United States from 1 January 1808. This was achieved without significant abolitionist pressure or campaigning. In Congress, few representatives dwelt upon the morality and cruelty of the slave trade but upon the practical measures needed to prohibit it. Slave importations to the United States were banned at the first moment constitutionally that action on this matter could be taken.

Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the transatlantic slave trade delivered millions of Africans to American markets but also encountered serious attempts to dismantle what contemporaries called the ‘Guinea traffic’, all of which were eventually successful. One by one, different nations – Britain, Denmark, the United States, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Brazil – abolished their slave trades for various reasons. The demolition of the slave trade mainly occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century by the same governments who had created it. Moral and humanitarian criticism of what has been described as ‘the cruellest commerce’ was one significant component in the motivation to eradicate the slave trade. But there were always other factors lying behind anti-slave trade sentiment, including economics, political decisions and pragmatic considerations, all of which combined with humanitarian abolitionism, in varying proportions in different countries, to bring about slave trade abolition.

The subject of the slave trade was acrimonious and divisive at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It had never before been discussed at such length by virtually all of the states and many divergent views were expressed. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution signalled that the federal government through Congress would have the right to interpose in regulating the slave trade for the whole of the United States in the future but this could not occur for twenty-one years until 1808. This was guaranteed by Article 5. A compromise had been hammered out between the northern and southern states whereby strong reservations expressed by South Carolina and Georgia over interference with the slave trade were accommodated in order to secure the American union. Constitutional arrangements over the slave trade left plenty of areas of debate on the subject during the ratification conventions of 1787–8. Some commentators were disappointed at the compromise struck there and the effective tying of hands of the federal government on this issue for twenty-one years. Others exercised their patience and were willing to wait until 1808, comforting themselves that action would then be taken promptly. Many northern states expressed their opposition to the slave trade on moral grounds in their ratifying conventions while South Carolina and Georgia avoided public debate about the humanitarian desire to get rid of slave importations. The sheer amount of commentary on the subject indicated that prohibition of the slave trade was a lively topic of political debate that would continue for some years to come.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, America’s breathtaking economic and territorial expansion furnished the context for a Second Great Awakening, Romanticism, and electoral politicking. These accelerated the ascent of individualism and encouraged self-refashioning to pursue new ambitions. Individuals’ choices inspired stories that reveal how the evolving myth of self-made success both symbolized and widened the nation’s social and cultural chasms. High-profile self-fashionings of the period included Eliza Jumel’s rags-to-riches, Henry Clay’s feigned humble origins, and reformer Dorothea Dix’s discarding of traditional roles. Leading preachers, including Charles Grandison Finney, inspired thousands to take on individual spiritual choices and worldly service, while Romanticists beckoned men to accept heroic self-agency as their duty. Chief among the latter, Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted that American men exert their "self-reliance." Amid all this churning, antebellum storytellers shifted use of the phrase “self-made” from a rhetorical tool for moral judgments to one for increasingly secular accolades, preparing the way for a gradual turn to financial measures of success.

Oliver Cromwell was a stern, Puritan dictator from the seventeenth century, and Kylie Jenner is a twenty-first-century pop culture princess and lipstick mogul. They could not be more different, yet they have in common that they’ve been tagged with the provocative and powerful label “self-made.” Their stories bookend the history of how what was once a sin became an accolade. For Cromwell, a claim of self-making would have endangered his social and political standing, as well as his soul. Jenner, in contrast, proudly accepted this label as a badge of esteem, a reward for being a “selfie-made success.” Over the centuries between them, the concept of self-making evolved, always serving storytellers as a tool for judgment. It became socially and politically destructive along the way because storytelling based on its false assumptions and judgments has fostered policies and cultural attitudes that advance inequality and absolve the affluent of community obligations. Although much of its modern persuasiveness comes from claims that it belongs among core American values, the myth’s history reveals that there is nothing intuitive, stable, or tied to the real world about the idea of self-made success.

Industrialists and enabling financial institutions accelerated America’s economic motion, operating organizations so colossal that they commanded economic influence and encroached upon the nation’s cultures and politics. These institutions altered the national face of business and wielded increasing quantities of money, laborers, technological innovations, and political power. Narratives increasingly portrayed businessmen as a new type of hero, “self-made” even if operating within potent networks. They and their advocates portrayed their influence and wealth as proof of their superiority and, by implication, everyone else’s shortcomings. The rhetoric of self-making acquired a new grandeur. The frequency of the term “self-made” reached its nineteenth-century peak in the press around 1890, by which time the concept was well embedded in mainstream culture, and a related term, “individualist,” was climbing rapidly, along with terms like “self-reliance” and “survival-of-the-fittest.” Elites defended their male offspring as “self-made” if they didn’t lose family fortunes. At the same time, laborers and other critics asked whether the rich were “Self-Made or Made for Self”?

The term “self-made” was fully embedded in 1920s popular culture, intertwined with individualism. Master of positive thinking Dale Carnegie dominated armies of cultural entrepreneurs selling tales of success. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression turned many Americans against businessmen’s leadership, but business advocates militantly circulated the myth of self-made success to justify why the privileged still deserved esteem and power. They rejected efforts at systemic change. They used the myth of self-making to explain success and failure as individual matters, and explicitly upheld inequality as a valid outcome of merit alone. To resist the progressive state, conservatives invested enormous resources to attack reformers for threatening freedom and opportunities. Among their rhetorical tools were fantasies of self-made success that they often imagined came from Horatio Alger, distorting his legacy into an individualistic and often harsh “bootstraps” mythology. Into the 1950s, positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale and others magnified the faith that people could “make” their own lives regardless of what the world handed them.

Americans’ zeal for mobility intensified after the Civil War, and self-help recipes offered ways to achieve it. But “self-help” is not the same as “self-made,” as Frederick Douglass explained. Many argued that individuals and communities benefit through mutual assistance. People outside of the mainstream who engaged in collective self-help were often undermined by powerful authorities who attacked communal codes. In 1887, federal legislation further dispossessed Native Americans with the Dawes Severalty Act in the name of individualism. In 1892, Pittsburgh’s highly collaborative industrialists suppressed labor organization using their collective resources of law and armed force. Collective self-help was central to African Americans’ efforts to improve their lives despite the weight of discriminatory laws and social bigotry. The motto “Lifting as We Climb” reflected their sense of mutual obligation. Storytellers in the mainstream rebuffed others’ ethos of collective self-help while claiming self-made success for those they championed. "Positive thinkers" such as Dale Carnegie promised success for those who "believed" enough. "Self-made" success was deeply embedded in 1920s culture.