were stowed away out of sight on loose
shelves over the cargo. "Where the 'tween decks space was two feet high
or more, the slaves were stowed sitting up in rows, one crowded into the
lap of another, and with legs on legs, like rider on a crowded
toboggan." (Spears, p. 71.) There they stayed for the weeks or the
months of the voyage. "In storms the sailors had to put on the hatches
and seal tight the openings into the infernal cesspool." (Spears, p.
71.) The odor of a slaver was often unmistakable at a distance of five
miles down wind.

The terrible revolt of the slaves in the West Indies, beginning in
1781, gave the growing anti-slavery sentiment an immense impetus. It
also gave the slave owners pause. The cotton-gin had not yet been
invented. Slavery was on a shifty economic basis in the South. Great
Britain passed the first law to limit the slave trade in 1788; the
United States outlawed the trade in 1794. In 1824 Great Britain declared
the slave trade piracy. During these years, and during the years that
followed, until the last slaver left New York Harbor in 1863, the trade
continued under the American flag, in swift, specially constructed
American-built ships.

As the restrictions upon the trade became more severe in the face of an
increasing demand for slaves, "the fitting out of slavers developed into
a flourishing business in the United States, and centered in New York
City." _The New York Journal of Commerce_ notes in 1857 that "down-town
merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying
and selling African Negroes, and have been, with comparatively little
interruption for an indefinite number of years." A writer in the
_Continental Monthly_ for January, 1862, says:--"The city of New York
has been until of late the principal port of the world for this infamous
commerce; although the cities of Boston and Portland, are only second to
her in distinction." During the years 1859-1860 eighty-five slavers are
reported to have fitted out in New York Harbor and these ships alone had
a capacity to transport from 30,000 to 60,000 slaves a year.[20]

The merchants of the North pursued the slave trade so relentlessly
because it paid such enormous profits on the capital outlay. Some of the
voyages went wrong, but the trade, on the whole, netted immense returns.
At the end of the eighteenth century a good ship, fitted to carry from
300 to 400 slaves, could be built for about $35,000. Such a ship woul