The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638-1870

In 1896, W. E. B. Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard with this groundbreaking dissertation, a work that fundamentally reshaped the study of American history. Rather than merely documenting the suppression of the slave trade, Du Bois exposed the tangled web of economic interest, political maneuvering, and moral contradiction that defined America's relationship with human bondage. He traced the arc from the colonial period through the Constitutional Convention, the Haitian Revolution's terrifying example to Southern slaveholders, and the complex legislative battles that eventually banned the trade, all while revealing how Northern capital and Southern cotton interests sustained the institution longer than moral suasion ever could. This is not a distant academic exercise but a carefully argued case for understanding how a nation grappled, fitfully and incompletely, with its original sin. The work remains essential not for its conclusions alone but for its methodology: Du Bois demanded that slavery be studied with the same rigor applied to any other historical phenomenon, refusing to let discomfort shield the subject from scrutiny. For readers seeking to understand the deep roots of American racism, the economic foundations of slavery, or the intellectual legacy of Du Bois himself, this remains the essential starting point.