Banning the international slave trade redirected rather than ended the brutality of slavery

Evidence

It was an empty and mostly symbolic law. The act failed to close the door on the ongoing international slave trade while flinging open the door to a domestic one. Violations of human rights continued when children were snatched from parents, and slave ships now traveled down American waters in a kind of “middle passage” from Virginia to New Orleans, which took as many days as the transatlantic “middle passage” had. Jefferson and like-minded planters of the Upper South started deliberately “breeding” captives to supply the Deep South’s demand. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend. A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 360

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘trees as infrastructure’ article’s analytic habit of asking who benefits from reform — here the largest planters gained value from the ban while human rights were violated harder.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in how ‘progress’ reforms in fact serve entrenched power — echoing the anti-noise and silence books’ pattern of reform serving the powerful.
• CANDY: Jefferson’s chilling quote that an enslaved woman bearing a child every two years is more profitable than the best man is a striking, shareable line.