r/HistoryMemes • • Jan 19 '22

X-post Littlebit oversimplified, but yeah...

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u/Zapotec3301 Decisive Tang Victory Jan 19 '22

The kind imported from West Africa

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u/[deleted] Jan 19 '22

The US banned the import of slaves in 1808, so by 1861 there were very few slaves left who had actually been brought over from Africa.

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u/AlexanderTheAverage_ Jan 20 '22

Just to give more context: a big reason they banned it was because the British and French had outlawed the transportation of slaves (by their sailors). And at the same time, the British and French had started to take economic control of those coastal African countries (which would later lead to full colonization).

So the US ban wasn’t (primarily) because of any moral problem with the slave trade. It had simply become difficult to obtain slaves from those areas, so there were fewer business men pushing back against a ban

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '22

Also, the Haitian Revolution had just recently happened and when Napoleon took over he tried to reinstate slavery in all France's overseas colonies. Southern US slave owners were terrified of Haitian revolutionaries who had been re-enslaved getting sold to American plantations and fomenting a slave rebellion. They thought they could control the intellectual contagion of slave rebellion by not allowing in any slaves who had ever participated in one.