Famine Pulse

Thomas Jefferson was responsible for the largest expansion of slavery in history. After the collapse of the Virginia tobacco industry, Virginia slaveholders turned to slave trading as their primary source of revenue. But Virginia slave prices were being undercut by Carolina rice farmers with slave imports from Africa's rice coast (Sierra Leone). Jefferson pushed for a ban on the importation of slaves from Africa, not out of altruism, but to protect the burgeoning slave trading industry in his home state of Virginia. Jefferson himself was a Virginia slave trader. After the ban on the importation of slaves from Africa went into effect in 1807, Virginia became the primary supplier of slaves for the Carolina rice farms & the deep South cotton fields. This led to an explosion of slave breeding in Virginia. Throughout the course of slavery, Virginia would go on to breed & sell more slaves than any single African slave empire in the Transatlantic slave trade era. For some perspective, the infamous West African Kingdom of Dahomey at its peak in the mid 19th century sold an estimated 10 thousand slaves a year to Europeans. The city of Richmond, Virginia, exceeded that total in a single month, selling 10 thousand slaves a month to the Deep South Jefferson once boasted, "I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addition to capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption." Jefferson also acquired the Louisiana territories from France and oversaw the westward expansion of slavery. According to Jefferson, neglecting to expand slavery would be "an act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world."