Historians of US foreign relations have much to gain by incorporating some of the methodological interventions made by scholars of race and Ethnic Studies. Drawing on research on US–Caribbean and US–Central American relations, this chapter tackles the following questions: What does it mean to study race as a central component, and not just a byproduct of US foreign relations? How does race appear in and outside of government archives? And what are some assumptions that require reassessment to ensure that US foreign relations scholars are not using –race– as a mere descriptor of –other–? A core component of the chapter is its combined use of field-specific observations and personal reflections amassed over the course of twenty years of research and writing. It does not propose one unified meaning of “race,” nor one specific method for examining race as an idea and practice. Instead, it maps out how the fields of African Diaspora Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies have expanded our understandings of racialization and racial formation, provides examples of effective approaches that draw from specific events and published works, outlines questions to ask before, during, and after conducting research, and invites researchers to recognize how archives function as racialized spaces.

The slave trade was immediately raised as a matter for debate in the First Federal Congress. In February and March 1790, Quaker petitions on the subject were presented to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, a body mainly composed of Quakers, took the lead in presenting these memorials and some of their members, notably James Pemberton and Warner Mifflin, were especially active in providing support. South Carolina’s delegates in Congress tried hard to divert attention away from the moral claims of the memorialists. The issue proved to be too divisive for extensive consideration by Congress at a time when politicians were putting all their efforts into the sustained operation of a national government. For most of the 1790s the American Convention of Abolition Societies met annually to coordinate anti-slave trade activity and to pressurise Congress to act in relation to those aspects of the slave trade where it could legitimately intervene. It never translated its good intentions into a wide-ranging anti-slave trade campaign, but it did pressurise Congress to introduce laws in 1794 and 1800 to restrict the participation of American citizens in the foreign slave trade. The elephant in the room of slave trade restriction in the 1790s was South Carolina, which kept its ports closed to African importations throughout the decade and up to 1803. A sectional divide had emerged in South Carolina between upland planters who needed to recruit additional Africans to grow cotton and indigo and tidewater planters who had sufficient black workers cultivating rice. Many smuggled slaves were brought into South Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century and it only needed a change in the state’s prospective economic circumstance to put pressure on a change to laws relating to the slave trade.

The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States was the result of proscribing the traffic step by step. It was determined by complex contingent factors and not by a wave of anti-slave trade campaigning. This was partly because the attack on the slave trade moved at different paces in various parts of North America; partly because of the location of political sovereignty; and partly because the issue of the slave trade was bound up with broader concerns over slavery and politics in the transition from the thirteen British colonies in North America to the new federal nation. Quakers, emphasising moral and humanitarian arguments against the slave trade, made significant inroads into banning the slave trade in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the generation before the American Revolution, and their influence later spread throughout the northern colonies and states and into the Chesapeake by the 1780s. But the Quaker anti-slave trade stance did not spread sufficiently among other groups in North America to produce widespread disapprobation of the Guinea traffic by the time of the American revolutionary war. Thus, there was no national consensus against the slave trade when the United States was created.

Between 1774 and 1787, greater condemnation of the slave trade occurred from mainly Christian individuals and groups, notably Quakers, than was the case before the American War of Independence. The humanitarian arguments made, however, did not translate into coordinated campaigning against continuance of the slave trade. Both Continental Congresses banned slave importations as part of a wider package of non-importation measures on British goods, but neither had any authority to impose enforcement measures. Jefferson’s attempt to insert a clause into the Declaration of Independence to prohibit slave importations backfired as he penned words stretching far beyond the required remit of such a clause and was forced to withdraw his statement. The Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation lacked the political authority to deal with slave imports. Yet positive activity occurred at state level. Delaware and Vermont banned the slave trade in their state constitutions of 1776 and 1777 respectively. The Bill of Rights included in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 proscribed slave imports. The New Hampshire state constitution of 1783 also banned slave imports. In 1778 Virginia passed a statute to end slave importations to the state. The Pennsylvania gradual abolition of slavery law in 1780 incorporated a bill in the same state from the previous year that banned slave imports. Abolitionist views spread widely as a result of efforts by Anthony Benezet and other Quakers, but there was no national campaign against the slave trade. South Carolina was the state where the most acrimonious arguments occurred over the slave trade. The state legislature reopened Charleston to slave importations in 1783 and over the next four years thousands of Africans were imported. Divisions underscored the reality that proscribing the entire slave trade to the United States could only happen under the aegis of national political authority and that was absent in 1787.

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.