The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810.

The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810. By James A. McMillin. The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. [xiv], 207. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-546-6.)

James A. McMillin's The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783-1810 surveys the importation of slaves into North America from the end of the American Revolution to the close of the era of legal slave importation. This brief and admirable monograph is valuable for its new estimate of the total number of slaves imported into North America, its analysis of the origins and destination of the slaves, and its depiction of Charleston during the post-Revolutionary revival of slave importation.

McMillin carefully combines census data, newspaper and port records, and estimates of the carrying capacity of slavers arriving in North America to derive a new tally of the number of slaves imported into North America from 1783 to 1810. He lucidly explains the uncertainties that figure into his calculations, which include our murky knowledge of the slave population's natural rate of reproduction during this era and the many gaps in the documentary record of slave ships arriving in North America (especially those that smuggled slaves into the continent).

All in all, McMillin concludes that 170,300 slaves were transported to North America from the Caribbean and Africa during these years. Higher than some estimates but lower than others, McMillin's revision is not so different from previous estimates as to fundamentally change our understanding of the relative importance of slave importation and natural reproduction for the overall growth of the North American slave population. Still, McMillin's thorough analysis of the sources makes his the new scholarly benchmark.

Also useful is McMillin's account of where imported slaves originated and where they ended up in the post-Revolutionary era. Almost 40 percent of Africans came from West-Central Africa, and another 21 percent came from Sierra Leone. West-Central Africans were especially numerous during South Carolina's revival of slave importation from 1804 through 1807. Although South Carolina was the principal destination of slavers from 1783 to 1810, more than 40 percent of slaves ended up in the deeper South, from Georgia to Louisiana, where the expansion of the cotton and sugar economies generated demand for slave labor.

McMillin argues that conditions for slaves transported to the United States worsened in the first decade of the nineteenth century when Charleston's merchants dominated the trade. McMillin's anecdotal evidence vividly reveals that disease and death followed enslaved people off the ships and into the ports where captives were collected and sold. Though The Final Victims has little to say about how slaves who survived the extraordinary hardships adjusted to their new circumstances, other scholars may build on McMillin's findings to provide a richer understanding of the captives' experiences and to examine the sociocultural impact these new arrivals had on slave society in North America's importing regions.

Lest the book's title mislead readers, it is worth noting that the slaves transported to North America between 1783 and 1810 were not the "final victims" of the transatlantic slave trade. Not only did slavers continue to smuggle enslaved people into North America well after 1810, but slavers also carried another 2.3 million enslaved Africans to Cuba, Brazil, and other destinations through the 1860s. (Among these were the Congolese slaves pictured on the book's cover, who were rescued from an American slaver off the coast of Cuba in 1860.) Without post-Revolutionary opposition to the transatlantic slave trade, North American slave owners and merchants might have participated even more vigorously than they did.

The Final Victims comes with a CD-ROM containing McMillin's database of slaving voyages destined for North America from 1783 to 1810, which supplements Davis Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (New York, 1999). The PDF format of the data is easy to search but hard to manipulate for more complex analysis.

Georgetown University

ADAM ROTHMAN