Two hundred years after the closing of the transatlantic slave trade in the United States, the country is still feeling the effects of the end of the slave trade, University of Maryland history professor Ira Berlin said last night.
The Boston University African-American Studies Department invited Berlin to give a lecture as the second part of a three-part symposium commemorating the 200th anniversary of the end of the U.S.-Atlantic slave trade. The lecture attracted an audience of about 40 people and was followed by a question-and-answer session.
“We’ve had great participation so far,” African-American Studies Program Administrator Christine Loken-Kim said. “Everybody is really happy with the symposium.”
Loken-Kim said the department came up with the event last year, when Linda Heywood, an African-American studies professor, delivered several abolition talks in Britain, which commemorated its bicentennial anniversary of international slave trade abolition.
The BU African-American studies department noticed there was relatively little being done to observe the anniversary in the United States, in contrast with Britain’s prevalent celebrations, Loken-Kim said.
Berlin is on the list of distinguished university professors in UM’s history department and has written several books about American history and slavery.
Berlin said he thought Congress’s decision to abolish American participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was “one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history.” He discussed how abolition reshaped American demography, economics, politics and culture.
“The U.S. really became a different country after 1808,” Berlin said.
If the international slave trade had not ended, the nineteenth century may have been a time of African immigration, rather than European immigration. Today’s African-American population could have been as high as 30 to 40 percent, estimated Berlin.
By preventing additional African slaves from entering the country, Congress essentially gave slaves a new identity as Americans, rather than as Africans, Berlin said.
The native-born slave population became increasingly knowledgeable about the landscape, language and American conventions, Berlin said. Slaves began to establish family connections and a social network in the United States, making it more feasible for blacks to escape from slavery, he said.
However, Berlin said the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in America was “politically ambiguous.” Though it is often perceived as a “first step” in the path of emancipation, this act also ironically solidified the institution of slavery because it indirectly started a U.S. interstate slave trade. This internal slave trade made slavery a national institution by giving non-slaveholders a financial interest in the continuation of slavery and tying slaves to the American economy as a whole, he said.
Berlin concluded that the closing of the slave trade simultaneously strengthened and destroyed the institution of slavery in the United States.
Future BU visiting scholar Harcourt Fuller said the lecture was a great attempt to raise more awareness about the issue.
“Last year in Britain, there were several symposia and the government released commemorative coins to raise awareness about the importance of this event to the nation’s history,” Fuller said.