Wealth & Money Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

A historian’s calm phrasing can still land like an indictment. Hart’s “Many attempts had been made” sounds almost administrative, but it’s doing heavy argumentative work: it positions slavery not as an unstoppable economic tide, but as a policy choice repeatedly confronted at the local level. The line quietly reroutes blame away from the convenient story that “everyone wanted slavery” and toward a messier reality of contested power, conflicting interests, and imperial override.

The key tactic is the passive voice. “Had been made” and “to cut off or to tax” drains the sentence of actors, which mirrors the way institutions launder moral responsibility through procedure. Legislatures, not enslavers, appear as the main agents; “importation,” not kidnapping, is the action. Yet that bureaucratic chill is also the point: Hart is reconstructing how slavery was administered through the dull machinery of law, where evil often arrives with paperwork.

Context matters. Writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, Hart belonged to an era of professional history that prized documentation and “objectivity,” even as the country was hardening Jim Crow segregation and sanitizing national origins. Emphasizing colonial efforts to restrict the slave trade can serve two competing ends. It can complicate the Founding myth by revealing early discomfort and political conflict. It can also, if read lazily, offer a gentler origin story: look, some tried. The subtext lives in that tension, between archival nuance and the temptation to turn attempted limits into retrospective absolution.