Coastwise slave trade

View of the port of New Orleans in the 1850s, etching by Scattergood in Lloyd's Steamboat Directory

The coastwise slave trade existed along the southern and eastern coastal areas of the United States in the antebellum years prior to 1861. Hundreds of vessels of various capacities domestically traded loads of slaves along waterways, generally from the Upper South which had a surplus of slaves to the Deep South where new cotton plantations created high demand for labor.

International tensions developed when ships were forced by weather or incident into ports in Bermuda and the British West Indies, as the British freed the slaves as part of the banned trade on the high seas, even before its abolition of slavery in its territories in 1834. There were several cases: Comet (1830), Encomium (1833), Enterprise (1835), Hermosa (1840), and, most notably, the Creole case of 1841, the result of a ship slave revolt that forced the vessel into Nassau, Bahamas. British officials freed the 128 slaves who chose to stay in the Bahamas.


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