What is the value of a human life? This question has long been a focus of philosophical thought, in some periods of history, the popularity of slavery provided a financial value. Professor Jeff Forret's The Price They Paid Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War examines the cases of four American ships that wrecked off the British controlled Bahamas in the 1830s and the fall out from the American held slaves aboard them being freed. What makes this a key moment of study is that Britain had ended the buying and selling of slaves within the British Empire in 1807 and in 1833 abolished it (aside from apprenticeships) completely. Meanwhile, the US was still divided, and as new states entered the Union efforts were made to maintain balance such as in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state.

The four wrecks, Comet, Encomium, Enterprise and Hermosa were all legally transporting slaves within the US, but when they were stranded in the Bahamas, the British agents on the island either declared them free or left the slaves a choice of returning to their masters or being free residents of the Bahamas. Southern states saw this as international meddling and demanded diplomatic efforts from the US government for return or recompense for the loss of the slavers. And in an effort to maintain some balance, US foreign policy officials did so to the best of their efforts, even if they were northern born or based. Some of this is due to Andrew Jackson's presidency, but Forret also demonstrates the political clout of insurance companies and their influence on agenda setting and policy.

Forret narrates these efforts drawing from congressional records, official communications and other materials to detail the eventually successful efforts of the US government to have the UK's government make good on the loss. He is also clear what records survive, typically the governmental and political discussions and which did not, accounts of the formerly enslaved, a portion of the insurance of the enslaved. Reparation is used here as a word by the slave owners for payment for their lost slaves.

Recommended reading to those interested in United States History, diplomacy between the British Empire and the United States, or those studying linguistics.

Thank you, The New Press, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I just finished The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks and Reparations Before the Civil War, by Jeff Forret.

This book will be released on November 19, 2024.

This book is about four different incidents in which slave ships became shipwrecked while the slaves were being delivered to the United States. In each case, the ship’s owners, financiers of the venture and/or slave traders sued to get their “property” back and then when that wasn’t successful, they demanded reparations as compensation for the loss of their “property.” The United States government was involved in helping them to get their compensation. Government “officials actively and enthusiastically labored to subsidize them for their losses, not unlike the financial rescue of the banks deemed too big to fail during the Great Recession.”

This book was definitely thoroughly researched and is very detailed. Those are big strengths in any history book. But, where this book fell way short was in terms of being interesting. There were occassional interesting pages, but they were buried in a sea of uninteresting accounts and details.

I give this book a C. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a C equates to 2 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

I finished reading this on September 22, 2024.

Extensively researched and compassionate, vividly humanizing, THE PRICE THEY PAID is the nonfiction narrative of a basically untold era of the early 19th century, an era in which International Society and Government (specifically British) began to turn against the Slave Trade, but during which the American domestic Slave Trade continued apace. Because the overland trip from the Upper Mid-Atlantic region (Virginia and Maryland, primarily) was exceedingly fraught with hardships, for the most part Slavery brokers arranged to ship enslaved persons along the East Coast and around Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, heading to the huge slave markets at New Orleans. Author Jeff Forret relates four instances in particular between 1830 and 1841 in which lack of proper navigation plus inclement weather propelled four different slave-transport ships into wrecks in the Caribbean, where governmental entities on the islands refused to let the enslaved be again transported back to the U. S., so that these individuals were finally allowed freedom to an extent. Mr. Forret recounts the strident insistence of American slaveowners and brokers, and the insurance companies covering the enslaved "property," in demanding reparations payments from the British government (which controlled the Caribbean islands).