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To the horror of antislavery advocates the slave trade from Africa, banned in the United States since 1808, continued well into the 1860s. Slaves were still being captured along the western and southeastern coasts of that continent and despite international agreements to halt the trade. They were still being landed in Cuba, the last place in the Western Hemisphere where it was legal to land African slaves. In an effort to publicize and document the trade and thereby force the U.S. Congress to join with Great Britain in ending this traffic, reports such as this were sent to newspapers across the United States. However, such reports most often appeared in newspapers sympathetic to the ending of the trade, such as this one from Greenfield, Massachusetts.

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