The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage

A behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States.

Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were slave traders who moved to New York City after the shuttering of the massive illegal slave trade t...