Jefferson Ended the US International Slave Trade, Avoided Wars with Britain and France
* What: The passage of the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1807, proposed and championed by Jefferson. Jefferson's highly unpopular efforts to avoid wars by passing the Embargo Act and Non Intercourse Act.
* The Number of Lives Saved: Jefferson avoided a war similar to the later War of 1812. There were 20,000 deaths in the War of 1812.
* The number of lives saved by ending the US international slave trade is complicated and difficult to say beyond some estimates. Roughly 600,000 Africans were brought to the American colonies. The slave trade had greatly varying death rates of 10-50%. Thus from 60,000 to 600,000 Africans, could have been killed in crossing the Atlantic and being broken, “seasoned.” Easily that many likely were killed in Africa to capture those 660,000-1.2 million for the crossing. That means perhaps 1.26 to 1.8 million deaths to bring over 600,000 slaves.
* Divided by the slightly less than 200 years of slavery starting in colonial times, that comes from 3,300 to a bit under 9,000 deaths a year to bring in under 3,000 slaves a year. Jefferson's law prevented slightly under 50 more years of the international slave trade to the US. Had the ban been vigorously enforced, it could have stopped the enslavement of perhaps 150,000 Africans and the deaths of as many as 450,000 more.
* But since it was not well enforced, the number of lives saved was perhaps no more than half that, perhaps much less. Weak enforcement was not solely Jefferson's fault. Congress did not push for enforcement as well, and was still dominated by slave owners. Of course the greatest guilt for deaths and enslavement goes directly to slave traders. Slave traders began using faster sloops and took advantage of the huge coastline and open borders.
* We do know that because of the ban, slave owners began treating their slaves more humanely so that slaves could increase in number mostly by giving birth. In absolute numbers the slave population increased from under a million to nearly 4 million in under 60 years, nearly three times the increase in absolute numbers for previous centuries. Thus Jefferson and the US Navy deserve credit for cutting the slave infant mortality rate dramatically.
* Who Also Gets the Credit:
* The Abolitionist movement had been around in the US since colonial times. It began growing in the 1790s, but would not become a strong popular movement until the 1830s.
* Methodist and Quaker churches and much of the Baptist and Catholic churches led the movement against slavery. Among Baptists, there was a split in opinion. Proslavery Baptists founded the Southern Baptists. Some elements of the Catholic Church opposed slavery as early as the Middle Ages. Some of the Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican orders led the fight against enslavement of both Natives and Africans, while other order members justified and profited from the slave trade. Some Popes condemned “unjust” slavery while sanctioning “just” slavery.
* Enlightenment thinkers John Locke, Jean Jaques Rousseau, Voltaire, and fellow founders Benjamin Franklin and John Adams had the greatest influence on Jefferson's ideas on slavery.
* Many of the Founding Fathers were ambivalent and hypocritical about slavery, often sharply critical and opposed in theory, but continuing to own many slaves and live off slavery profits. The Constitution was part of that ambivalent hypocrisy. The Constitution recognized and implictitly protected slavery. Jefferson had originally criticized slavery in the Declaration of Independence, but other slave owning delegates forced that passage's removal.
* The Constitution blocked any ban on the slave trade for twenty years, until 1808. After his reelection in 1804, Jefferson, assured of his popularity, saw an opportunity to end the slave trade to the US for good.
* Banning the slave trade was an issue Jefferson devoted decades of his life to. While still a delegate to Virginia in colonial times, Jefferson successfully pushed for a ban on importing slaves into the state. One state after another followed Virginia's lead. By the time of the nationwide ban, only South Carolina still legally allowed slaves brought in from overseas.
* These bans were part of a growing antislavery movement across the US. Following the American Revolution, more and more people realized the contradiction between a nation theoretically founded on freedom yet still enslaving based on race. In one northern state after another, slavery was banned. This was made in part easier since slavery was not as important to their economy. Antislavery churches were also far more numerous in the north. One out of eight slaves in the US were set free.
* In 1794, Congress banned any US ship, ship owner, or ship captain from taking part in the international slave trade. It was now illegal for any American to own a slave ship, build one, equip a ship to become a slave ship, or captain a slave ship flying under the American flag. Anyone breaking the law forfeited their ship and also faced huge fines. The first prosecution came only a year later.
* There had even been an attempt to ban slavery from all future US states. Congress, again led by Jefferson, tried so only shortly after the American Revolution. The ban failed to pass by only a single vote. Another ban shortly passed, the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery from all territory north of the Ohio River, what would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
* Thus when Jefferson sent his State of the Union message to the nation in 1806, he felt confident it would be well received. He called on Congress "...to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe." Note that his call was a moral call to duty, one appealing to human rights and maintaining Africans were innocent, undeserving of enslavement.
* Congress not only passed the ban. They took it one step further and classified slave trading as piracy, an act punishable by death. Then the US Navy as a regular part of its duties patrolled between the US, Cuba, and South America to catch slave traders, using its African Squadron. The size of the US coast and small US Navy made the ban difficult to enforce. The international slave trade was far more effectively stopped by the British Royal Navy's Africa Squadron, which patrolled close to Africa. Most other nations agreed to allow their ships to be stopped by the British Navy. The US did not. Not until the 1842 Treaty of Webster Ashburton did the two nations cooperate to end slavery.
* The passage of the slave trade ban was the high point of abolitionism until the Civil War. Jefferson remained silent for most of the rest of his life due to fear his relationship with Sally Hemmings would become a public scandal. (See Section Two.) It even led to his turning a blind eye to genocide by the French army during the Haitian Revolution.
* Many slave traders kept shipping in slaves illegally, the best known being pirate Jean Lafitte and his partner Jim Bowie. The internal slave trade became more important to the southern economy. The upper southern states sold off their slaves to the deep south and slave states farther west. In the deep south, Christian ministers sought to convert more slaves to Christianity and encouraged slave owners to think of themselves as father figures. But more and more, slave owners became more entrenched in their defense of slavery. Jefferson had taken limits on slavery to as far as any US president ever would, until Lincoln.
* Europe's Napoleonic Wars affected the US as well. Both nations “impressed,” or more honestly, kidnapped, foreign sailors into their navy, as well as their merchant marines. In a few very public cases, the British Navy fired on or boarded US ships searching for escaped kidnap victims. Some Americans, indignant and more patriotic than sensible, called for war, completely ignoring just how powerful both Britain and France were. Jefferson's compromise was to pass first the Embargo Act and then the Non-Intercourse Act, banning trade between the US and both Britain and France. Jefferson hoped to use this as an intermediate step before war, to give public anger time to cool, and also to prepare for war should it come.
* More than a few historians call Jefferson's presidency a failure. Many point especially to his foreign policy with Britain and France and decry what they call his weakness. Some argue he should have confronted the two nations. His embargo did fail in that it did not harm either Britain or France. British and French goods were smuggled in, while American goods could not be shipped out. Jefferson and his embargo became enormously unpopular.
* But such a focus on punishing enemies or personal popularity misses the main point. For the short term, Jefferson avoided war with Britain, which as the later War of 1812 shows, would have been disastrous, an almost guaranteed heavy loss. Jefferson also avoided war with France entirely, earlier having good enough relations to buy the French claim to the Louisiana Territory. The previous president, John Adams, had blundered so badly that his minister Charles Pickney was forced to flee to Belgium.
* The French foreign minister, Talleyrand, demanded bribes, standard practice at the time. Adams decided to publish the demand, angering the US public enough that the two nations stumbled into what is often called the Quasi War, mostly a buildup of the US military and bluffing. There were also three minor naval battles, each nation capturing one of the other's ships. Only by a combination of Napoleon's naval losses to the British and Jefferson's negotiations did the two countries go from a state of war to the Louisiana Purchase.
* Strangely, some scholars praise Jefferson for the Barbary War against pirates, though that ended in an inconclusive failure. Some historians argue Jefferson should be blamed for US weakness militarily prior to the War of 1812. But most rightly blame the War of 1812 on the appropriately named War Hawks. A hyper nationalistic faction deluding itself they could take on the most powerful empire in the world, their war brought ruin to the US. Some compare them to today's neo conservative movement.
* Jefferson's only alternative would have been to go to war in 1807, one the US would have lost even more disastrously than in 1812. As it is, the War of 1812 was already more of a defeat than the US-Vietnam War, for Washington itself was occupied and the White House and Capital burned down. British troops only withdrew from DC because of storms. It shows both leadership and courage to sacrifice one's popularity and future standing in history for the greater good of the nation. But that is what Jefferson chose to do.