Combat
West Africa Anti-Slavery Patrol
The West Africa Anti-Slavery Patrol was the decades-long American naval effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade along the African coast.
After Congress declared the international slave trade piracy in 1819 and authorized warships to hunt slavers, the first American squadron was sent to African waters in 1820, though no permanent presence followed until the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 committed the United States to keep a standing force, the Africa Squadron, patrolling alongside the Royal Navy. Over roughly four decades the patrol stopped and searched suspected slave ships, sending captured vessels in for adjudication and landing recaptured Africans, many of them resettled in Liberia. Marines served throughout as shipboard guards, boarding parties, and landing forces. The American effort was thinly resourced and far less effective than the British squadron, hampered by the great distances, too few ships, and the politics of slavery at home, but it captured roughly a hundred suspected slavers over its life. The last landing came in 1860, when Marines and sailors from the sloop USS Marion went ashore on the West African coast to protect American lives and property, on the eve of the Civil War that ended the patrol.
Engagements in this conflict (8)
Record no. 264