Two hundred and four years ago – May 15, 1820 – to be exact, the United States Congress amended The Act of 1819 to ban the country’s participation in the wretched Atlantic Slave Trade that transported enslaved Africans to the shores of America beginning around 1619. The ban, which was slow and difficult to enforce, is sometimes called “The 1820 Piracy Law ” or “An Act.”
“The 1820 Piracy Law stipulated that If any person or persons whatsoever shall, on the high seas, commit the crime of piracy, as defined by the law of nations, and such offender or offenders shall afterward be brought into or found in the United States, every such offender or offenders shall, upon conviction thereof…be punished by death.
According to Alfred P. Rubin, an International Law scholar, “The piracy statute of 1819 does not mention the slave trade. However, the renewing statute of May 15, 1820, explicitly makes it ‘piracy’ with a penalty of death for Americans to be engaged in the slave trade abroad or to detain a ‘negro’ or ‘mulatto’ with the intent to enslave, except for the recapture of persons already held in slavery by the operation of the law of a state of the United States.”
Why was the slave trade reference added to The Act of 1820? Some history scholars believe that The Act of 1820 was amended because of the uptick of real pirates commandeering slave ships for various reasons.
“Many of the records of the Royal Africa Company that have remained intact from the 17th and early 18th century attest to the persistent issue of piracy and plunder in the slave trade,” wrote Angela Sutton in her Master of Arts in History thesis at Vanderbilt University over a decade ago. “The allure of barrels of fragrant beeswax packed alongside ivory tusks, planks of exotic hardwoods, ‘human cargo’ and chests of Africa’s gold proved to be a prize commensurate to the coveted Spanish silver galleons; one that few pirates could resist.”
It’s well known that slave traders, slave ship owners and crews, and the White people in the United States who bought Black slaves didn’t consider those captured and transported as human beings; they were only valued as cargo and property to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Some historians believe that “An Act” was enacted to protect the commerce associated with the business side of slavery by keeping the so-called Black cargo and property safe for White entities and individuals to garner the profits of slavery themselves. Other theories claim that legislation to stop the Atlantic Slave Trade was based on humanitarian reasons of slave owners finally seeing the heinous wrongness of slavery. At the same time, some believe America was only posturing to reinvent its wicked image of a nation built off the blood and sweat of enslaved Black Africans.
Regardless of the reason, for the first time, the United States took a strong and unequivocal stance against the African slave trade. However, even with The Act of 1819 and the subsequent amended 1820 Piracy Law, it was a hard sell to convince slave traders, shipping companies, and plantation owners to back away from the lucrative industry of free labor at the expense of enslaved Africans.
Although the Piracy Act of 1820 had a lot of bark, there wasn’t much bite to curb or stop the Atlantic Slave Trade, even if the death sentence was dangling as the endgame. It was too much money to be made by all involved in the slave trade, excluding the enslaved Africans. And it just wasn’t plantation owners across the South that pushed the envelope of the 1820 Piracy Law.
According to the Schomburg Center Research in Black Culture in Harlem, in collaboration with the New York Public Library, following the abolishment of slavery in the state of New York on July 4, 1827, after New York enacted a series of laws between 1799 and 1827 that incrementally freed slaves, the city’s shameful history of discrimination, racism, rigid segregation, and anti-black violence continued. The two research entities concluded, “By the 1850s, New York City was dominating ‘the illegal international slave trade’ to America’s South, Brazil, and Cuba.”
Riveting revelations were also revealed a decade ago on WNYC News Public Radio, which reported that Africans who passed through the Wall Street slave market contributed to the prosperity of some very famous companies, some of which are still around: Aetna, New York Life, and JPMorgan Chase, to name a few. Various units of these and other financial companies bankrolled southern plantations, insured slaves as property, and used slaves as collateral for loans.
While slavery in America was highly profitable and made a lot of people and companies rich off the backs of enslaved Africans, the illegal slave trade manifested itself into an issue that divided the nation, especially the South. There was a great divide following the election of Abraham Lincoln, who took office as president in 1860.
Lincoln moved against the slave trade by permitting the British to search U.S. vessels through the Lyons-Seward Treaty, and the president refused to commute the death sentence for a slaving captain, Nathaniel Gordon, who became the only American executed under The Act of 1820. By 1863, the American slave trade had finally ended, two years after the start of the Civil War.
According to Naval History and Heritage Command’s Nation Museum of the U.S. Navy, Anti-slave trade ships patrolled the Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of America and West Africa from 1848 to 1861.
“The U.S. Navy’s role in the struggle against slavery began in 1820 when warships deployed off West Africa to catch American slave ships,” a museum curator said. “Enforcement of the slave trade ban was sporadic until the Navy deployed a permanent African Squadron in 1842. This deployment was due to the Webster-Ashburton Treaty between the United States and Great Britain to suppress the slave trade. Despite the vigilance of American ships, as well as British and French warships in African waters, ‘the overseas slave trade increased’ in the 1850s.”
Yet, the “last known slave ship” to dock in America was in the summer of 1860 when the Clotilda, with 110 African men, women, and children, sailed under the cover of night into Mobile Bay just north of Mobile, Alabama. The ship, according to historians, was scuttled and burned to conceal any evidence of it transporting enslaved Africans in the face of The Act of 1820.
In 1897, the penalty for violating the 1820 Piracy Law was changed from the death sentence to life in prison with hard labor. In 1909, the penalty was just life in prison, minus the hard labor. Since 1909, the piracy law has not been modified.
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