Slave-owners and anti-slavery advocates both supported ending the international slave trade

Evidence

Ending the international slave trade was in reality a boon for the largest American slave-owners, as it increased the demand and value of their captives. And so the largest slave-owners and the gradual-emancipation advocates joined hands in cheering on the legal termination of the international slave trade on January 1, 1808. Massachusetts clergyman Jedidiah Morse deemed it a victory. He spoke for most northern assimilationist evangelicals when he proclaimed that since Christianity was finally lighting up the “heathenish and Mahometan darkness” of Africa, “its natives have no need to be carried to foreign lands.” Morse believed that slavery would be gradually abolished, too. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 361

Categorization

• QUESTION: When slave-owners and abolitionists cheered the same law — what does that do to the standard progress narrative of abolition? Worth tracing how later historians handled this awkward alliance.