The United States
The United States the Africans found in 1839 was a young nation, widely dispersed through the eastern half of the continent, just beginning to encroach on territories beyond the Mississippi. The union included 26 states, three territories (Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa), and the District of Columbia. And critically for the Africans it was half slave and half free -- a fissure at the heart of American society that politics worked to contain, but one that was growing more pronounced, more politically divisive, more dangerous as the nation expanded.
Demographic Profile: The Census for 1840 counted a free white population of 14 million, coexisting with just under 400,000 free blacks and a slave population of 2.5 million.
In 1839 as the Africans entered U.S. waters:
- Various presidential parties were gearing up for a presidential election. President Martin Van Buren was just winding up a campaign tour....
- Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from Baltimore and slavery the year before, was building a new life for himself and his family in New Bedford, and beginning to speak publicly, in church and meetings, against slavery....
- Herman Melville was crossing the Atlantic on a packet liner -- his second oceanic voyage (the first being his trip over to Liverpool on the same vessel)....
- Shipbuilders in Baltimore were building fast-sailing, clipper-hull brigs and schooners, to sell to Spanish and Brazilian slave traders....
- The House of Representatives for the third year in a row was automatically tabling petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the nation's capital....
- Panics over slave revolts were regularly erupting here and there in the slave states -- a regular feature of southern life....
- Abolitionists were organizing the nation's first national political party devoted to ending slavery....
- Americans were continuing to discuss, debate, ruminate on the issue of race and what role it played in shaping peoples and societies....
- Cherokees were struggling to adapt to life in detention camps far west of their ancestral lands, having been "removed" on a brutal march by the U.S. Army....
- A U.S. Exploring Expedition was extending formal commercial treaties among numerous Pacific islands, archipelagos and coastlines....
