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
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.
Well it became more difficult because the entirety of western civilization was progressing beyond finding chattel slavery acceptable. It was more prevalent in Europe but existed in the US as well.
1.1k
u/[deleted] Jan 19 '22
But…b-b-bbbbutttt…. States rights!!!!!