On Constitution Day, on September 17, 2021 at 12:30 pm, Andrew J. B. Fagal, Ph.D., Associate Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson and Craig Hollander, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the TCNJ History Department will present “’A Terror to Others’: Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution, and the Suppression of the Slave Trade Before 1808” on Zoom.
In 1787, the framers of the Constitution struck a bargain to prevent the new federal government from abolishing the transatlantic slave trade until 1808. However, in the two decades following the adoption of the Constitution, there were a number of attempts to limit American participation in the traffic. The Jefferson administration seemed especially willing to push the limits of the Constitutional ban in order to suppress the slave trade. But the administration’s legal and political actions backfired, triggering a massive resurgence of the slave trade to the United States.
Zoom link: https://tcnj.zoom.us/j/91610058230?pwd=YXZqcmplZDNndTBkT2F1RW5BK1pzZz09
Andrew J. B. Fagal is an associate editor with The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University. He has served as an editor since 2014 and has participated in compiling volumes No. 42, onward. A political historian, he completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Craig Hollander graduated from Columbia University in 2004. He then received his Ph.D. in 19th-century U.S. history from The Johns Hopkins University in 2013. University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the TCNJ faculty, Professor Hollander was the Behrman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. His dissertation, titled “Against a Sea of Troubles: Slave Trade Suppressionism During the Early Republic”, won both the 2014 C. Vann Woodward Prize from the Southern Historical Association and the 2014 SHEAR Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.