The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War

This sober history of the slave trade takes as a starting point the unsettling fact that before the Civil War the term reparation was used by slave owners suing for compensation for lost human “cargo.” Specifically, as historian Forret (Slave Against Slave) explains, the term—a common one in maritime law at the time—was used during court cases pursued by American enslavers against the British crown over captives who had been liberated from slave ships that landed or wrecked in free British territory. Digging into the history of four ships involved in such cases in the 1830s and the legal and diplomatic wrangling that ensued, Forret emphasizes that despite slavery having been abolished in half the country by this time, the federal government nonetheless brought to bear “all the expertise and resources the U.S. diplomatic corps could muster” to recoup slaveholders’ losses, with “Northern-born diplomats such as Martin Van Buren of New York” defending slavery “as ably” as any Southern-born diplomat. Aiming to understand the “stranglehold” slaveholders had over foreign policy, Forret uncovers the strong hand that U.S. insurance companies—which had indemnified the lost “property”—had in shaping the government’s legal stance and international agenda. Weaving together rich character portraits of diplomats, lawyers, and other players involved on both sides of the Atlantic, this is an enlightening examination of what moves the levers of power. (Nov.)