Non-fiction: The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870

Overview
W. E. B. Du Bois's 1896 study "The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870" charts the legal, political and practical history of efforts to end the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans bound for North America. The narrative spans colonial importation, the early federal republic's legal prohibitions, and the international and naval measures that sought to suppress smuggling and illegal trading through the nineteenth century. Du Bois interweaves archival evidence, legal texts and numerical data to show how law, diplomacy and economics intersected in the long struggle against the slave trade.

Scope and Sources
Du Bois draws on a wide range of primary materials, including congressional debates, statutes, court opinions, diplomatic correspondence and shipping records, supplemented by contemporary newspaper accounts and government reports. He compiles quantitative tables to estimate trafficked numbers and patterns, and includes case studies of notable seizures and prosecutions. The work's documentary base reflects rigorous archival work for its time, aiming to reconstruct both official policy and on-the-ground enforcement.

Chronological Narrative
The account begins with colonial-era practices and the embedded economic role of imported enslaved labor, then moves to the revolutionary and early national periods when constitutional and statutory measures emerged. Du Bois traces the 1808 federal prohibition on importation and the patchwork of state and local statutes that followed, documenting how legal bans often collided with persistent smuggling. The narrative follows international developments and naval patrols through the antebellum decades and into the Civil War and Reconstruction era, concluding with the late nineteenth-century status of suppression efforts.

Legal and Political Analysis
A central strand is the tension between formal legal prohibitions and weak enforcement. Du Bois analyzes constitutional clauses, congressional acts and landmark court decisions to show how legal doctrine sometimes undermined or complicated suppression. He emphasizes political factors: sectional interests, local resistance, diplomatic priorities and the limited will to prosecute influential perpetrators. International agreements and British-American cooperation receive attention as necessary but imperfect instruments for policing the Atlantic.

Economic and Social Factors
Du Bois places economic incentives at the heart of continued illicit trade. Profits, fluctuating demand for labor and gaps in enforcement sustained smuggling networks long after official bans. He highlights the complicity of traders, shipowners and corrupt officials, and notes how clandestine supply routes adapted to changing markets. Social attitudes and the entrenched interests of slaveholding regions shaped both the character of illegal traffic and the uneven application of the law.

Method and Significance
Methodologically, Du Bois combines legal history with empirical inquiry and archival synthesis, an approach that anticipates later interdisciplinary scholarship. The study is notable for its attention to evidence and for framing suppression as a complex, contested process rather than a simple legislative triumph. As one of the earliest comprehensive treatments by an African American scholar of a foundational episode in Atlantic and American history, the work also signals a rigorous, critical perspective on race, law and power.

Conclusions
Du Bois argues that suppression of the African slave trade was partial and contested: laws were passed, naval and diplomatic efforts were launched, but economic incentives, local resistance and political compromises often blunted their effect. The study ends with an insistence on the long-term consequences of the trade and its suppression for American legal and social development, suggesting that formal prohibition did not immediately eradicate the networks or inequalities it had created.