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The African American slave trade was widely discussed in print both before and during the American Civil War, and most of the abolitionist arguments were often understandably, purely moral in nature. A few writers, however, attempted to bolster the moral argument against slavery and the slave trade with a pragmatic one--namely, that slavery weakened the American economy. This set is a collection of the leading nineteenth-century texts on the subject by authors such as abolitionist Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Irish economist John Elliott Cairnes, and American economists Henry Carey and Thomas Ellison.