[In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively
unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.]
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SHIPS GOING OUT  
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James Oakes
August 30, 2023
The New York Review
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_ In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown
history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. _

John Greenwood: Sea Captains Carousing in Suriname, circa
1755–1758. The painting was commissioned by the merchants depicted,
many of whom were slave traders, and two of whom became governors of
Rhode Island., Saint Louis Art Museum

 

Reviewed: 

American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce
in Captives, 1644–1865
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by Sean M. Kelley

Yale University Press, 479 pp., $35.00

In a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Sussex in
1963, the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper denounced
undergraduates who were demanding to be taught the history of Africa.
“Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to
teach,” he said. “But at present there is none, or very little:
there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely
darkness…. And darkness is not a subject for history.”
Trevor-Roper defined history as a form of “purposive movement,”
something Europeans had but Africans did not. To waste time on the
study of Africa was to “neglect our own history and amuse ourselves
with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but
irrelevant corners of the globe.”1  Even in 1963 Trevor-Roper
should have known better than to utter such foolishness, but in the
decades since, historians have demonstrated that not even his beloved
history of Europe can be fully understood without the history of
Africa.

The same is true of the history of the United States. Between the late
sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of
enslaved Africans were forcibly brought to North America. The history
of Africa is also essential to understanding that process, and no
scholar has made this point as effectively as Sean M. Kelley, a
historian at the University of Essex and the author of an excellent
study that traced the voyage of a single slave ship as it sailed
around the Atlantic from its home port in Rhode Island.2

 Kelley has now, in _American Slavers_, surveyed the history of the
Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Straddling several continents over hundreds of years,
it_ _is a work of impressive breadth, deep research, and evenhanded
analysis.

Over the course of nearly 350 years, more than 12 million Africans
were enslaved and sent across the Atlantic as laborers for the mines,
ports, and plantations of European colonies in the Americas. Because a
relatively_ _small percentage of these people—some
388,000—disembarked in North America, general histories have tended
to slight the African slave trade to the colonies that became the
United States. _American Slavers_—at once social, political,
economic, and military history—goes a long way toward filling that
gap.

Kelley begins by distinguishing between “ships coming in” and
“ships going out.” Until now scholarly attention has been focused
on vessels, most of them British, bringing enslaved Africans to North
America. He shifts our focus to a relatively unknown aspect of the
slave trade—the American ships that left American ports to purchase
slaves on the African coast and sell them, usually in the Caribbean.
He also establishes a basic chronology of the trade, to distinguish
among different periods during which American slavers operated.

Perhaps most importantly, Kelley brings a generation of Africanist
scholarship to bear on the history of American slaving. It was
established decades ago by John Thornton and others that European and
American merchants were doomed to failure if they were not familiar
with the regional differences and trading preferences of Africans who,
Kelley writes, “subscribed to very different cultural values.”
This is undoubtedly true. But it is also true that the slave trade
flourished in part because from the earliest years of sustained
contact, Europeans were struck not only by the differences but also by
the similarities between themselves and Africans. Far from being
“heathens,” Africans had recognizable religious practices. They
were organized into states with governing hierarchies. And above all,
Europeans encountered African merchants with whom they could
profitably trade.3Unlike European traders, however, Americans lacked
the commodities—notably textiles—for which Africans were willing
to exchange slaves. As a result, Kelley notes, they could “never be
much more than poachers on the much larger trade of the Europeans.”
Nevertheless some Americans did trade profitably in slaves, and
Kelley’s book chronicles their history.

Before the American Revolution, slave trading was almost exclusively
the business of New Englanders. In the seventeenth century, Kelley
observes, it was a “very small…miniscule” enterprise, “not so
much organized as disorganized.” New England’s maritime industry
grew from cod fishing, of which slave trading was a minor offshoot.
The colonists’ trading networks were “primitive” and their
“links with merchants on the African coast were nonexistent.” But
“perhaps the most important obstacle to a regular, profitable slave
trade…was the lack of suitable trade goods.” Most of those who
traded in Africa went only once, and so there was “no accumulation
of knowledge, no building of networks, no learning from trial and
error.”

New Yorkers likewise did very little slave trading in the seventeenth
century, with the exception of Frederick Philipse’s short-lived
attempt to trade in slaves from Madagascar. Though “more
sophisticated” than the New England trade, the New York trade was
“only marginally less ephemeral.” In the first century of its
existence, American slave trading was experimental and unprofitable.
That changed after 1700, with the rise of Newport, Rhode Island.

For a number of reasons Newport emerged in the eighteenth century as
the only real slave-trading port in North America. Charleston imported
significant numbers of slaves, whether from the intra-American or
Atlantic slave trades, but South Carolina rarely financed or outfitted
its own ships to trade in them. Unlike New York, Boston, and other
northern ports, Newport developed a cohort of merchants and “Guinea
captains” who established the networks and accumulated—and
shared—the knowledge of the geography and customs that were the
prerequisites for successful trading on the African coast. In
Kelley’s words, “Newport’s accrued knowledge of Africa and slave
trading was in this way comparable to Silicon Valley’s know-how in
chip manufacturing and software coding.”

That experience was necessary, but it was never sufficient. Slave
traders needed a commodity Africans wanted to buy in exchange for
slaves, and most of what Americans exported—rice, fish, lumber—was
readily available in Africa. There was a small market for Chesapeake
tobacco, but not enough to sustain a significant trade in slaves. What
Rhode Island had was rum, most of which it distilled from molasses
produced by slaves on the sugar estates of the West Indies, especially
Barbados. “Molasses to rum to slaves,” goes the doleful tune from
the musical _1776. _With good reason the ships and slave traders of
Newport were known as “rum men.”

But conditions in North America were not the most significant part of
the story, Kelley argues. Rum, for example, was not an easy sell in
Africa. In parts of West Africa influenced by the spread of Islam, for
example, alcoholic beverages of any sort could not be exchanged for
slaves. It took time for the African market in rum to develop, and
even when it did it was limited to a couple of areas, such as Upper
Guinea and especially the Gold Coast. Kelley writes, “More than
anything else, it was the demand for rum on the Gold Coast that fueled
Newport’s rise to prominence in the slave trade during the 1730s.”

Political conflict and warfare among African states repeatedly
interrupted the supply of slaves available to Americans, and there was
little they could do about it. Kelley does an outstanding job of
clarifying the history of warfare in those parts of Africa where
Americans could sell rum in exchange for slaves. Unlike British
traders, who arrived with a wide assortment of consumer goods for sale
and could therefore shift their operations to different ports on the
African coast as local conditions warranted, the Americans had only
rum to sell and were therefore unable to move beyond the Gold Coast or
Upper Guinea. It “seems fairly clear,” Kelley concludes, “that
the North American impact” on events in West Africa more generally
“was proportionately small.”

Even as the colonial-era slave trade reached its height in the 1770s,
it remained at the margins of American commercial activity. Only in
Newport was slave trading significant, and yet, Kelley reports, not a
single ship venturing out from it was engaged in slave trading
exclusively: “The North American transatlantic slave trade before
1776 was, in essence, merely another branch of [the] carrying
trade.”

The American Revolution dramatically transformed slave trading in the
new nation. The northern states, besides abolishing slavery, also
banned the importation of slaves. Shutting it down in New York,
Massachusetts, and Rhode Island effectively ended the bulk of the
American slave trade. In 1794 Congress passed a Slave Trade Act that
barred Americans from trading in slaves to be sold in foreign ports, a
crucial statute since most American slavers had been selling their
human cargoes in the Caribbean. No law barred Americans from selling
slaves in the US, however, and slave trading after the Revolution
shifted from the North to the South. Charleston, which had previously
been the major port for “ships coming in,” became North
America’s major port for “ships going out” as well.

Although Newport was substantially shut down as a slave-trading port,
nearby Bristol—politically dominated by slavers—quickly emerged as
the leading northern port for the now-illegal trade. Led by a handful
of powerful families, Bristol slavers eventually established their own
banks and marine insurance companies to finance their business.

The trade in Africa was changing as well, once again in response to
internal developments over which Americans had no control. African
sellers increasingly demanded payment in gold as well as rum, forcing
Americans to find sources of specie. On the Gold Coast, long the major
source of captives, political instability and warfare continued to
interrupt the flow of slaves. In parts of Upper Guinea, the
development of agriculture created a domestic market for slaves that
reduced the number available for export. As a result, fewer were being
sold on the Gold Coast and more were embarking from the area around
the newly established British colony of Sierra Leone. It quickly
became an invaluable source of fresh water and provisions for slave
traders, but slaving was illegal in the colony itself and was
therefore transacted offshore.

By far the most dramatic change in the postrevolutionary American
slave trade came in the years between 1804 and 1807. Driven by the
cotton boom that began in the 1790s, the demand for slaves in the
southern states skyrocketed, and Charleston traders scrambled to
import as many as possible before the federal ban on the slave trade
took effect on January 1, 1808. This was the only period in which as
many slaves came into the United States on American ships as foreign
ones. In three years some 65,000 disembarked. “The toll in human
suffering was similarly unprecedented, probably unparalleled in
American history,” Kelley writes. “South Carolina’s Cooper River
undulated with the decomposing corpses thrown from quarantined ships
to save burial costs.” The majority of the slaves imported during
what Kelley calls the “slave rush” were set to work on the rapidly
expanding cotton plantations of Georgia and the South Carolina
Upcountry. But Charleston also served as the source of slaves
transshipped to the Natchez district along the Mississippi—also in
the throes of the cotton boom—and to the emerging sugar plantations
of southern Louisiana.

Although now based in the South, the trade was still dominated by
British and northern merchants and shippers. Slavers continued to rely
heavily on the export of rum, but they also expanded their business to
include textiles purchased in Britain, which allowed them to operate
in other areas of Africa, in particular the Loango Coast. American
slaving expanded in other ways as well. After Charleston, Cuba was the
largest destination for American slavers, and it became the primary
location for the illicit American slave trade. New England traders
also briefly established a smaller commerce selling slaves in the Río
de la Plata in Brazil.

In the end, Kelley concludes, the years 1804–1807 were an
aberration. The number of American ships deployed and the number of
slaves imported were unusually high. Charleston’s prominence as a
slaving port was short-lived: “Never again would the ships going out
and the ships coming in coincide as they did in this era.” The slave
rush came to an end as suddenly as it had emerged.

In 1807 Great Britain, whose ships had carried most of the slaves
coming into the United States, banned slave trading entirely. The US
Congress followed suit, and in 1808 the legal slave trade came to an
end. With that it became a criminal enterprise, operating in very
different ways and on a much smaller scale.

For all the changes that marked the long history of American slaving,
certain aspects of it remained fairly constant—none more so than the
experience of the captives themselves. Here the history of Africa once
again becomes central. Popular references to the slave trade often
speak of Africans as having been “kidnapped” by Europeans and
Americans. In fact, Kelley writes, the “vast majority of those taken
aboard American slave ships—probably more than 99 percent—were
purchased, not abducted.” Africans controlled the commerce along the
coast. As had been true in dozens of societies across the globe,
stretching back to antiquity, they often enslaved those they
considered “outsiders” from different states or ethnic groups.
Muslim societies, for example, professed to enslave only
“non-Muslims.” However, the taboo against enslaving one’s own
was frequently honored only in the breach.

What the Atlantic slave trade did was dramatically expand the place of
slavery in the African societies engaged in it. The trade transformed
slavery in Upper Guinea “from a social into an economic
institution.” Enslaved labor became more important, and in some
places “agricultural units that can only be described as plantations
began to appear.” As slavery and slave trading spread, travel could
become dangerous—a particular problem if drought and famine forced
people to migrate into areas where they would be seen as outsiders.

By far the most common source of slaves was warfare. This could mean
the enslavement of prisoners captured in battle, but it could also
mean—as it did among the Asante—that the victors demanded
“tributary slaves” from their defeated enemies. Others were
abducted, sometimes en masse_, _but often as individuals. And still
others were enslaved as punishment for crime or indebtedness, both of
which evaded the strong cultural proscription against enslaving
“insiders.”

Most of the slaves purchased by Americans had endured long marches
from the interior to the coast. They might be sold and resold to
different merchants along the way. Kelley writes of one man, named
Sang, who was captured by Fante slavers and sold six times before
arriving at a coastal fort, where he was sold yet again to a slaver
and transported to Jamaica. Traders collected slaves as they moved
from the interior, forming caravans that could include dozens of
slaves by the time they reached the coast. There the captives were
gathered into forts, or barracoons—essentially prisons—where they
were held for inspection and sale to American buyers.

At that point the enslaved Africans were hurled into the notorious
Middle Passage across the Atlantic. In the process their fate as
“outsiders” was reframed in racial terms. “Their status as human
commodities was not what changed,” Kelley explains. They had been
commodified long before they boarded the slave ships. “What changed,
rather, was the racialized nature of captivity.”

The horrors of the Middle Passage have been amply described by others,
none more thorough than Marcus Rediker in his indispensable _The
Slave Ship: A Human History _(2007), and Kelley’s account is
appallingly familiar. Rebellions by captives were so
frequent—estimated to have occurred on 10 percent of all
voyages—that security became the overriding concern. Slaves were
chained together in coffles, kept below deck in sex-segregated
barracks, and allowed into the open air only for an hour of forced
exercise once a day. Kelley quotes a man named Primus who recalled the
captain forcing the captives to “clap their hands together with a
song, whilst eating.” But Primus heard “only lamentations…or
fragments of songs, broken with sobs.”

Slave ships were infamous for their high mortality rates among crews
and captives alike. Disease spread rapidly among slaves, most often
dysentery and diarrhea, but also smallpox, pneumonia, and, among
children, measles. After disease, the biggest cause of death was
violent rebellion by the slaves and its brutal suppression. Kelley’s
account is harrowing:

Rebels shot, bludgeoned, drowned, and slit the throats of crew
members…. Rebels and crew then went at each other with whatever they
could lay their hands on—guns, swords, axes, torches, gunpowder,
handspikes, ropes, lumber…. Crews raked the decks and scuttles with
swivel guns and muskets.

Some unknown number of captives threw themselves overboard to drown in
the ocean.

Even after the Atlantic crossing ended, Kelley notes, “death rates
for newly arrived Africans were extremely high.” The vast majority
were sold as agricultural laborers on plantations—mostly in Jamaica
and Barbados before 1776, and Cuba and North America after the
Revolution. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were especially lethal,
and the rice swamps of the Carolinas were also extremely unhealthy.

Compared to the devastating impact of enslavement on Africans, the
effects of slave trading on places like Newport and Bristol were far
less severe, but they were nevertheless substantial. To be sure, even
at the height of its involvement in the slave trade, fewer than 5
percent of ships clearing Newport were slavers. But the slave trade
depended on the human and material resources available in the
well-established port town.

Sometimes the influence of slaving was subtle. In all port towns and
cities, where men were gone for long periods of time, women had to be
more actively engaged in commercial affairs, despite wives’ legal
subordination to their husbands. But Kelley suspects that Newport’s
unusually high proportion of women—55.7 percent—may have been a
consequence of the high mortality rates among slaving crews.

Though they were a minority of the shippers in Newport, slave-trading
families like the D’Wolfs were disproportionately wealthy, and their
wealth was diversified. They owned stocks in banks, insurance
companies, bridge companies, and cotton factories. On the eve of the
Revolution, 30 percent of Newport’s families owned slaves. Because
political power follows wealth, slave traders were among the most
influential members of the town. This was even more true of Bristol,
where, Kelley writes, “the D’Wolf family could control the town in
the manner of a political machine, which enabled their slave-trading
empire.”

Those who captained slave ships were wealthier than those who avoided
the trade. Captains earned a wage for their services, but they also
earned a percentage of the ship’s profits and were entitled to a few
“privilege slaves” of their own. The same was true, though to a
lesser degree, for first mates. Shipowners, captains, and officers
established a system of “maritime paternalism” supporting the
families of those who were gone for extended periods or who never
returned.

At the bottom of the maritime class hierarchy were the ordinary
seamen, “likely drawn in part from a sizable poor and
often-transient population.” Between 15 and 20 percent of a ship’s
crew died during the voyage, and those who were lucky enough to
survive deserted in unusually high numbers. Unlike the families of the
officers, the wives and children of ordinary seamen could not always
count on community support and could be “warned out” of town if
their husbands did not survive the voyage.

Because of the trade, slaves constituted 10 percent of colonial Rhode
Island’s population, compared to 2 and 3 percent in neighboring
Massachusetts and Connecticut. Newport in particular had a large
Africa-born population, and through a close reading of gravestone
markers Kelley draws some general conclusions about these people. They
were disproportionately adult males, which made family formation more
difficult for Black Newporters. They also died at higher rates than
their white neighbors, “indicative of material hardship and
mistreatment.”

More intriguing, day names used by Akan people appear on over 80
percent of the gravestones, indicating their origins on the Gold
Coast. This is complicated by the fact that not all Akan speakers came
from the Gold Coast, and by the additional fact that the children of
Black Newporters sometimes bore Akan names as well. Though it is
impossible to draw firm conclusions, Kelley suggests that the rituals
associated with Newport’s annual “Negro Election Day”—a
festival held in several New England towns that included a parade and
election, after which the “Sons of Africa,” according to one
observer, “amused themselves with…cudgeling, jumping, wrestling,
playing at the various games, and on the musical instruments of their
native country”—may have had their roots in traditional Akan
practices. It is probable, Kelley concludes, “that Black culture in
Newport was strongly influenced by Akan customs, at least in the
mid-eighteenth century.”

The situation changed after the Revolution. In 1784 Rhode Island
passed an abolition statute that, though technically gradual, resulted
in the rapid emergence of a free Black population. Kelley finds that
“by 1790, the proportion of free people in Rhode Island’s Black
community went from a tiny minority to 78 percent.” The Free African
Union Society, “the first known free Black association in the United
States,” was established in 1780. Its members were also early
supporters of colonization to Sierra Leone. As was true elsewhere,
Newport’s free Blacks celebrated not their distinctive Akan roots
but a more generic Africanness.4

Having emerged from slavery impoverished, Rhode Island’s free Blacks
were subject to the coercive features of the system of poor relief. In
1786 authorities in Tiverton ordered the expulsion of any Blacks who
could not prove legal residence in the town. One escape route for free
Black men was to join the merchant marine, which had a long history of
Blacks serving on crews.

As Kelley notes, after 1835 it becomes tricky to talk about
“American” slave traders. Americans were no longer organizing
slave-trading voyages. American banks would not finance slavers, and
American insurers would not write policies for them. Cuba and Brazil
continued to import slaves, and they did so using American-built
ships, but slave traders were purchasing them secondhand.

Britain patrolled the Atlantic in an effort to suppress the trade, but
the US refused to allow the Royal Navy to board ships flying the
American flag. As a result slave traders hired “flag
captains”—US citizens whose presence enabled ships to fly the
American flag to evade British inspections. The British had likewise
negotiated “equipment clauses” with European nations that
empowered the Royal Navy to inspect and retain ships carrying
equipment used for slave trading but no actual captives. Here again,
US-flagged vessels served as “auxiliaries” to the slave trade.

In 1842 the US and Britain signed the Webster-Ashburton Treaty,
committing Washington to establishing an Africa squadron of its
own—in principle cooperating in the suppression of the slave trade.
In practice, however, the treaty was thwarted by a succession of
American secretaries of state, and not until 1859 did the US seriously
commit itself to suppressing slave ships flying the American flag. By
then even Brazil had shut down the slave trade, and Cuban authorities
began enforcing a ban that had been on the books for some time. The
center of the illegal slave trade moved to New York City, a subject
covered in John Harris’s excellent recent book _The Last Slave
Ships_.5

In these closing years “American” slaving was actually controlled
and financed by Brazilians, or by Cubans who were often based in
Havana, or by Portuguese who were sometimes based in West Central
Africa. Not surprisingly, the illegal post-1835 trade shifted for the
first time from the Gold Coast to West Central Africa, which had long
been the primary destination of Portuguese traders. By then, Kelley
concludes, it was little more than a criminal syndicate.

Ever since 1969, when Philip Curtin published his pioneering census of
the Atlantic slave trade, evaluating the place of North America in its
centuries-long history has been a perplexing exercise. Curtin showed,
and subsequent scholarship has confirmed, that only about 5 percent of
enslaved Africans ended up in what became the United States. Moreover,
before the Revolution nearly 90 percent of that 5 percent arrived in
North America in European, mostly British, ships. It looked as though
the involvement of Americans in the slave trade was insignificant.

Kelley does not so much reject as revise this conclusion. He
acknowledges that Americans were not major participants in the larger
history of the African slave trade, but he worries that cumulative
statistics can understate some of the ways the American trade did
matter. It is only the enormousness—and enormity—of the entire
slave trade that makes it possible to think of the enslavement of
388,000 Africans as a small fraction.

So, too, does the relatively minor place of American slaving obscure
its human cost. Kelley calculates, for example, that American traders
removed 305,000 slaves from Africa and that in the process 52,000
people died. “When we consider that each person transported was a
member of a family and community,” he concludes, those numbers need
to be “multiplied by several times to begin to appreciate the full
impact of the trade.”

The fact that Americans transported “only” 2.4 percent of all the
slaves transported over four hundred years is similarly misleading.
While it is “certainly true that Americans were minor contributors
to the transatlantic slave trade in the aggregate,” Kelley notes,
“it is also true that for nearly eighty years they were substantial
participants, and that for a few years the United States was a major
slave-trading nation.” By not allowing the British to police
American ships after 1808, the US facilitated the transportation of
150,000 slaves to Cuba and Brazil: “In that sense, the United States
was the great enabler of the Cuban slave trade.”

And this is to say nothing of the impact American slavers had on
Africa. Here again aggregate numbers obscure the effects they had at
particular times in specific places. During the years of their
greatest activity, American slavers on the Gold Coast were responsible
not for 2.4 percent of the trade, but closer to 15 percent, and they
were substantially involved in a commerce that drew productive, often
skilled workers from Africa. This fostered the growth of “predatory
states in some places” and spread “insecurity everywhere else.”
In all these matters Kelley’s judgments are remarkably evenhanded,
neither exaggerating nor underestimating the significance of American
slavers.

No historian would think to write the history of Puritan New England
without reference to the history of Puritanism in “Old” England.
Now, thanks to several generations of impressive scholarship by
historians of Africa, it has become unthinkable that the history of
New World slavery, colonial America, and the early republic can be
fully understood apart from the history of Africa. Perhaps Kelley’s
greatest achievement is to have incorporated African history into
American history in a persuasive way. He has given us an outstanding
history of the “ships going out.” We now need a scholar of
comparable skill to produce an equally distinguished history of the
“ships coming in.”

NOTES

1Hugh Trevor-Roper, _The Rise of Christian Europe _(London: Thames
and Hudson, 1965), p. 9.

2_The Voyage of the Slave Ship _Hare_: A Journey into Captivity from
Sierra Leone to South Carolina _(University of North Carolina Press,
2016).

3The classic account stressing the English response to African
“heathens” is Winthrop D. Jordan, _White Over Black _(University
of North Carolina, 2012)_. _More recent scholarship, based on a wider
array of sources, shows that Europeans were often impressed by their
similarities with Africans. See, for example, Herman
Bennett, _African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and
Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic _(University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2019); and John Samuel Harpham, “The
Intellectual Origins of American Slavery” (Ph.D. dissertation,
Harvard University, 2018).

4James H. Sweet, _Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion
in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 _(University of North
Carolina Press, 2003) is a pioneering work that traces the emergence
of a “composite” African culture in Brazil. For a wide-ranging
survey of the African cultural origins of various Black communities in
early America, see David Hackett Fischer’s recent _African
Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals _(Simon and
Schuster, 2022).

5_The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle
Passage_ (Yale University Press, 2021); see my review in these pages,
April 8, 2021.

_JAMES OAKES’s latest book is The Crooked Path to Abolition:
Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution. (September 2023)_

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* U.S. history
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* slavery
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* Slave trade
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* Rhode Island
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* Africa
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* Trade
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* Rum
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* Sugar
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* Slave Trade Act
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* cotton
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* South Carolina
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