American Slavers

Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865

De: Sean M. Kelley

Narrado por: Christopher Douyard

The first telling of the unknown story of America's two-hundred-year history as a slave-trading nation

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.

Engaging with both African and American history and addressing the trade over time, Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island.

In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders.

©2023 Sean M. Kelley (P)2023 Tantor

“American Slavers”may clarify many of your long held beliefs about the North Atlantic Slave Trade.

If your ancesters came from Africa and partularly if you have some details regarding the region of the Africa Coast they came from or were captured in, “American Slavers” may be quite helpful in giving you a better sense of where in the East Coast of the Brittish Colonies they may have been brought to in the pre and post “Revolutionary War” periods. Would you be surprised to hear that Rhode Island, Boston and New York were major ports where slave ships with tens of thousands of men and women were brought in, in chains, and sold? Or that in the early decades of the trade many slaves were sold to New England and New York area businesses and families? If you just want to learn more, in extraordinary detail, about this evil institution, this book was researched in more detail than any other I’ve read on the subject. Better yet, it puts the American Slave Trade in context, as compared to the vast numbers of slaves brought into Barbados, Brazil and especially Cuba (many of these ships were built and owned by Brittish and later, American owners, but sailed by captains and crews from other nations. ) Spoiler alert: if you get bored, the epilog is an excellent summary with “the big picture. “

Excellent

A thoroughly detailed and expansive analysis that provides a heretofore unexamined aspect of the slave trade and provides new insight on the subject. Five stars!

Loud breathing 😳

This is such an important part of history, but hopelessly distracting was the audible uptake of breath at the end of every. gasp. single. gasp. sentence.