Slave trade in the United States

The history of the domestic slave trade can very clumsily be divided into three major periods: • 1776 to 1808: This period began with the Declaration of Independence and ended when the importation of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean was prohibited under federal law in 1808; the importation of slaves was prohibited by the Continental Congress during the American Revolutionary War but resumed locally afterwards, primarily through the ports of Wilmington, North Carolina (until 1785), Savannah, Georgia (until 1798), and Charleston, South Carolina (reopened the transatlantic slave trade in December 1803 and imported 39,075 enslaved people of African descent between 1804 and 1808). Some slaves shipped to these ports were resold locally, others were forwarded on the Natchez and New Orleans slave markets of the lower Mississippi. One New Orleans historian found evidence of that the "queen of the trade", as New Orleans was later known, was open for business in the first years of the 19th century, but "it was not till the 1820s had well set in that the number of American slave merchants grew to impressive proportions" and by 1827 "New Orleans had become the chief center of the slave trade in the lower South". , 1906) • 1830s to American Civil War: This period began when the combination of new lands open for settlement and higher profits for cotton growers led to a massive population transfer of enslaved people from the Chesapeake region to the Mississippi River basin. End of the slave trade The domestic slave trade wilted during American Civil Warthere was a measurable price drop between 1860 and 1862, due to "market uncertainty" discouraging speculators. Still, the business remained brisk and prices rose in the protected interior of the CSA, and according to historian Robert Colby, "Confederates nevertheless interpreted the health of the slave trade as embodying that of their nation." Times got still harder for traders when the Union blockade and total U.S. military control of the Mississippi River prevented the trafficking of people from, say, rural Missouri to New Orleans. But the slave trade, as an integral part of slavery, persisted throughout Confederate-controlled territory until very nearly the end of the war. Ziba B. Oakes was still listing slaves in Charleston newspaper ads in November 1864. A handful of American-flagged ships were still moving enslaved people from Africa to Cuba and Brazil until 1867, when American participation in the slave trade ended once and for all. ==Economics==

Slavery was a massive element of the U.S. national economy and even more so the economy of the South: "In 1860, enslaved people were worth more than $3 billion (~$ in ) to their owners. In today's economy, that would be equivalent to $12.1 trillion or 67 percent of the 2015 U.S. gross domestic product...The unpaid fruits of their labors created an interest so strong that between 1861 and 1865, Confederate leaders staked hundreds of thousands of lives and the future of their civilization on it." As told by historian Frederic Bancroft, "Slave trading was considered a sign of enterprise and prosperity." It is estimated that between 1790 and 1860 approximately 835,000 slaves were relocated to the American South. The biggest sources for the domestic slave trade were "exporting" states in the Upper South, especially Virginia and Maryland, and as well as Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri. From these states most slaves were imported into the Deep South, to the "slave-consuming states," especially Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman attribute the larger proportion of the slave migration due to planters who relocated their entire slave populations to the Deep South to develop new plantations or take over existing ones. Contributing factors Soil exhaustion and crop changes Historians who argue in favor of soil exhaustion as an explanation for slave importation into the Deep South posit that exporting states emerged as slave producers because of the transformation of agriculture in the Upper South. By the late 18th century, the coastal and Piedmont tobacco areas were being converted to mixed crops because of soil exhaustion and changing markets. Because of the deterioration of soil and an increase in demand for food products, states in the upper South shifted crop emphasis from tobacco to grain, which required less labor. This decreased demand left states in the Upper South with an excess supply of labor. Cotton gin slave market at 8 Whitehall Street, photographed by George N. Barnard during the Atlanta campaign, 1864 (Library of Congress Digital)|left At the same time, the invention of the cotton gin in the late 18th century transformed short-staple cotton into a profitable crop that could be grown inland in the Deep South. Settlers pushed into the South, expelling the Five Civilized Tribes and other Native American groups. The cotton market had previously been dominated by the long-staple cotton cultivated primarily on the Sea Islands and in the coastal South Carolina Lowcountry. The consequent boom in the cotton industry, coupled with the labor-intensive nature of the crop, created a need for slave labor in the Deep South that could be satisfied by excess supply further north. A more recent estimate, given by Jonathan B. Pritchett, has this figure at about 50 percent, or about 835,000 slaves total between 1790 and 1850. Robert Gudmestad found that "Disentangling the various strands of forced migration is like trying to untie the Gordian knot. Migration with owners, planter purchase, and the interstate trade blended together to form a seamless whole." Importation, piracy, and interstate kidnapping The transatlantic slave trade was not prohibited under federal law until 1808. Imports from Africa to Southern states were ongoing from 1776 until that time, most often through the ports of Charleston and Savannah. Imports to Cuba, Brazil, and America often involved similar personnel and practices. Post-1808 importation of slaves to the United States from the Caribbean, South America, and Africa was illegal but piracy continued until the opening of the American Civil War. Piracy was most active in the 1810s, with New Orleans and Amelia Island off Spanish Florida being key centers, and in the 1850s, when pro-slavery activists sought to drive down slave prices by illegally importing directly from Africa. Kidnapping into slavery in the United States was an ongoing issue. Unaccompanied children and people of color traveling to port cities and border states were particularly vulnerable. There are multiple accounts of armed gangs breaking into the homes of free people in the dead of night and carrying away whole families. The lucky ones were sometimes redeemed from the local slave jail by friends or lawyers before they were shipped south. Breeding of slave children for sale According to Frederic Bancroft in Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931) young female slaves were also considered an excellent financial investment: "Not only real estate, but also stocks, bonds and all other personal property were little prized in comparison with slaves.... Absurd as it now seems, slaves, especially girls and young women, because of prospective increase, were considered the best investment for persons of small means." Kotlikoff suggested that the net effect of the inter-regional slave trade on the economy of the Old South was negligible, if not negative. Caroline Donovan endowed a chair at Johns Hopkins in 1889 using part of the fortune accumulated by her late husband, Baltimore trader Joseph S. Donovan. ==Markets and traders==

shipping companies in Alabama '', July 15, 1842 In their day, slave traders were called everything from broker, the generic term favored in Charleston, a term that appears in both slave traders' own descriptions of themselves in oral interviews and in records of African-American folk music of the era. Negro trader, negro speculator, and slave dealer were common occupational titles that appeared in census records and city directories. Slaves sometimes spoke of the Georgia-man who would take them away to, if not the geographical Georgia, an allegorical "Georgia," elsewhere in the cotton and sugar lands far south from where they were raised. In the earliest years of the market, "dozens of independent speculators... bought lots of ten or so slaves, generally on credit, in Upper-South states like Virginia and Maryland." In 1836 a Philadelphia paper characterized the work of negro brokers: "They conceive the business of pawn brokers and merchandize brokers. They lend money on the security of slaves, taking the latter as a pledge, to be sold if the pledge be not redeemed. They advance cash on slaves to be sold at auction or private sale, deducting from the proceeds of sale their commission and expenses. They buy and sell slaves upon commission, to suit their customers, and sometimes doubtless, buy and sell free people of color on pretence of their being slaves." The argument has been made that the domestic slave trade was one that resulted in "superprofits" for traders. But Jonathan Pritchett points to evidence that there were a significant number of firms engaged in the market, a relatively dense concentration of these firms, and low barriers to entry. He says that traders who were exporting slaves from the Upper South were price-taking, profit-maximizers acting in a market that achieved a long-run competitive equilibrium. Using an admittedly limited set of data from Dunning School historian Ulrich Phillips (includes market data from Richmond, Charleston, mid-Georgia, and Louisiana), Robert Evans Jr. estimates that the average differential between slave prices in the Upper South and Deep South markets from 1830–1835 was $232. In 1876, Tarlton Arterburn told a newspaper reporter that they'd made an average profit of 30 to 40 percent "per head". Evans suggests that interstate slave traders earned a wage greater than that of an alternative profession in skilled mechanical trades. Washington Robey's slave pen and tavern in Washington, D.C., Turner Brashears of Brashears' Stand along the Natchez Trace, as well as the notorious Patty Cannon ring in Delaware. Chesapeake cities like Baltimore, Alexandria, Washington, D.C., and Richmond were "slave collecting and resale centers." Major slave-buying markets were located Charleston, Savannah, Memphis, and above all, New Orleans. Economists estimate that more than 135,000 enslaved people were sold in New Orleans between 1804 and 1862. Some traders only bought and sold locally; smaller interstate trading companies would typically have both upper south and lower south locations, for buying and selling, respectively. There was a trading season, namely winter and spring, because summer and autumn were planting and harvesting time; farmers and plantation owners generally would not buy or sell until that year's crop was in. Historian Frederic Bancroft, author of Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931) found—to the contrary of Phillips' position—that many traders were esteemed members of their communities. Members of the "best families," and a number of leading lights of the early Republic, including Chief Justice John Marshall and seventh President Andrew Jackson, were engaged in slave speculation. Contemporary researcher Steven Deyle argues that the "trader's position in society was not unproblematic and owners who dealt with the trader felt the need to satisfy themselves that they acted honorably," while Michael Tadman contends that "'trader as outcast' operated at the level of propaganda" whereas white slave owners almost universally professed a belief that slaves were not human like them, and thus dismissed the consequences of slave trading as beneath consideration. An enslaved woman named Charity Bowery told Lydia Child that she was sold to a trader sometime before 1848 but "Bowery had often served the man oysters from a food stand she operated, even when he was unable to pay. The slave trader remembered her kindness, and after he bought Bowery and several of her children, he set her and one of the children free as recompense." Multiple sources attest that Baltimore slave trader James F. Purvis quit the human-trafficking business and devoted himself to banking and charity projects after a religious conversion, and New Orleans trader Elihu Creswell emancipated his 51 slaves upon his death and even funded their transportation to free states. As historian Deyle put it in Carry Me Back (2005): "While there is no record of any slave traders feeling guilt over what they did for a living, the actions taken by the New Orleans dealer Elihu Creswell do raise some questions." Abolitionist Lewis Hayden wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, "I knew a great many of them, such as Neal, McAnn [Neal McCann?], Cobb, Stone, Pulliam, and Davis, &c. They were like Haley, they meant to repent when they got through." '' Stowe commented on slave traders in ''A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (1853), in reference to her fictional character Mr. Haley: ==Product and price==

's Slaves Waiting for Sale—Richmond, Virginia was painted 1861 from a sketch made 1853 while he was touring the United States with the writer William Thackeray Male slaves were worth more than female slaves; one study found that on average males sold for nine percent more than females. Prime age slaves were those ages 10 to 35, or more broadly enslaved children older than eight and enslaved adults younger than 40, because people of those ages were presumed to be able work and/or reproduce for an extended period of time. Overall, buyers competed most for male field hands aged 18 to 30, so "the selling price of this class supplied something of a basis for the sale of all Negroes". As a rule, there was an inverse correlation between age and price for enslaved people over 40. For example, in 1835 South Carolina, when Ann Ball spent almost to buy 215 enslaved people from the estates of her deceased relatives, she made a point to buy several apparently elderly slaves (Old Rachel, Old Lucy, Old Charles) and the lowest-priced single person was Old Peg, purchased for , compared to an average price of $371 per. Another illustration of comparative slave prices is from the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation program: "The highest priced slave was a blacksmith worth $1800, and the lowest [priced was] a two-months-old mulatto baby, worth $25." On the other end of the price spectrum from old women and babies is the amount men would pay for sexual access to physically attractive young female slaves, the so-called "fancy girls," such as was the case is this post-war boast by former slave trader Jack Campbell: "Long as you ask about it, I remember the biggest money I ever got for a nigger was $9,000 for a devilish pretty quadroon wench that I sold in Louisville, about '52 or '53. She was only 18, and was about as white as you or me, and her two children had light, curly hair. Her master lived down near Bowling Green, and though he didn't want to part with her he was so down on his luck that he had to sell her. I heard, too, that his wife swore that nigger must leave the plantation or she would go home to her family. My instructions were not to take less than $6,000 for the girl, and I was to get a big percentage on all over that, so when they put her on the block I talked her up for all she was worth.... There was more than twenty men bidding for her, and the fellow that got her for $9,000 was a rich and gay young bachelor from Tennessee, who happened to be in the city on a spree and was attracted by curiosity to the sale. He was a little drinky and wasn't caring anything for his ducats. He was so set on having the girl, I believe he would have given $20,000 for her if anybody had bid her up that high. He carried her home that day, and I ain't going to tell you anything more about him than that he made a big name in the Southern army and was killed at the head of his soldiers. One of this woman's children by her first master lives in a Massachusetts town now and is a rich man. There isn't a sign of black blood in him." The amount $9,000 in 1853 would be over $250,000 today. Another example of the value of enslaved girls most likely sold for sex compared to slaves sold for field labor is found in the papers of slave trader Joseph Erwin. Slave prices were high in the year 1818, and records show Erwin sold $19,000 worth of people that year. The highest prices were paid for three prime-age male field hands, Hooper, Sam, and Peter, priced at $1,250, $1,200, and $1,500, and for "a quadroon, Chloe, aged 12 and warranted a slave for life... sold to Dominie DeVerbois for the price of $1,800." 's will, 140 "Iron Works Negroes, Forgemen, Furnacemen, Colliers, and Mechanics of all kinds" were to be sold at auction, "in families as far as practicable," and "Negro traders and non-residents of Tennessee" were expressly forbidden under the terms of the will "from purchasing any of the slaves" (The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky., Feb. 12, 1856)|left There were several broad categories of work for which enslaved people were purchased: agriculture, domestic service, mechanical, and commercial-industrial. Agricultural workers grew and processed cash crops like cotton and sugar, or managed herds of cattle in Texas, etc. Domestics worked in the household or in hotels and taverns, cooking, cleaning, laundering clothes, producing household goods, and providing childcare, including supplying the free white babies they cared for with their own human milk. Mechanics were expensive and prized: these were the smiths, builders, craftsmen, etc. Finally, commercial-industrial slaves were put to work all over the south in ironworks, salt mines, steamboat boiler rooms, on railroads, at gin-houses, bagasse-burners, lumber mills, turpentine stills, and so forth. The owner of a slave might or might not be a slave's employer: owners often rented, leased, or "hired out" their slaves. According to historian Bancroft, in the great slave market that was New Orleans, enslaved people imported from Virginia, and to a lesser extent Maryland and South Carolina, were advertised as an especially desirable product, whereas "the many slaves brought from Missouri and Kentucky" were rarely advertised by their place of origin. In 1858 the Wiregrass Reporter of Georgia advised estimating "the value of enslaved Black people by a formula of '$100 for every cent per pound of cotton.' The example given suggests that if cotton is 10 cents per pound, you should pay $1000 for an enslaved person." In 1860, the editors of the Vicksburg, Mississippi, city director reported that the wealth of city included 1,236 slaves collectively valued at $876,300. According to economist Laurence Kotlikoff, as the American Civil War was beginning in 1861, the typical price of a prime-age male slave sold in New Orleans was . Per Kotlikoff's calculations, "Throughout the ante-bellum 1800s, positive premia were paid for males, skilled slaves, slaves with guarantees, and children sold with their mothers." ==Routes==

There were four main methods of forced transportation of the enslaved. Initially, transport was either on foot or by sailing ship, but following the popularization of the railroad and the steamboat in the 1840s, both were commonly used. • Overland transport: In many cases slaves were relocated simply by walking them in chains, double-file, in groups of 50 to 200, between counties or states. Chained columns of slaves could be expected to travel about a day. • Transportation via navigable inland rivers: Before 1820, keelboats, flatboats, and barges were used for riverine transport of slaves. River steamboat, by the 1850s, reduced the journey between St. Louis to New Orleans to just a few days. Specific routes • Montgomery became the leading slave market in Alabama because of its accessibility by both water and land, due to its connection to both the Federal Road and the Alabama River, the latter of which saw steamboats shipping slaves up the river from Mobile. • The Wilderness Road connected Virginia to Kentucky and east Tennessee, and from there through the Cumberland Gap to Georgia and Alabama. • The Natchez Trace was used to bring slaves from middle Tennessee and to the Forks of the Road and Vicksburg slave markets in Mississippi. ''The Devil's Backbone'', a history of the Trace, states that one "traveler on the road described such 'a long procession' of slaves going down the Trace 'like a troop of wearied pilgrims.' The slow pace, the fatigued air, and their tattered garments 'gave to the whole train a'sad and funereal appearance.'" • Slave trader Byrd Hill was one of the promoters of the Memphis and Hernando Plank Road. • The South Carolina Rail Road allowed Charleston traders to sell slaves to Georgians "for personal use" at the Hamburg slave market on the Savannah River. • Kentucky slave traders, for their part, used the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and the southern branches of the present Illinois Central railroads to deliver enslaved people to the Deep South. • The Forrest brothers no doubt used the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad to deliver enslaved people from Memphis to the wye at Grenada, Mississippi, where some of Forrests were known to have traded and lived. Combining modes was also common, for example, as reported in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1849: ==Law==

, June 1, 1860) In the early 19th century several slave states had unenforced statutes prohibiting the interstate slave trade in hopes of minimizing the increase of black populations within those states. These laws were undermined in many ways; according to one contemporary newspaper: Hamburg, South Carolina was built up just opposite Augusta, for the purpose of furnishing slaves to the planters of Georgia. Augusta is the market to which the planters of Upper and Middle Georgia bring their cotton; and if they want to purchase negroes, they step over into Hamburg and do so. There are two large houses there, with piazzas in front to expose the 'chattels' to the public during the day, and yards in rear of them where they are penned up at night like sheep, so close that they can hardly breathe, with bull-dogs on the outside as sentinels. They sometimes have thousands here for sale, who in consequence of their number suffer most horribly.Similarly, in Alabama, a historian explained in 1845 that a ban had been undermined to the point that it was ultimately abandoned entirely: The people of Alabama at one time became alarmed at the evils which they properly anticipated would grow out of this traffic. Their Legislators enacted laws against it, and for a short time they exercised salutary restraints; but soon they were evaded. The Creek Nation was then an Indian Territory, under the jurisdiction of the General Government, lying immediately on our eastern border. Here Negro Traders sought a shield for their operations, and our citizens went there to make purchases. Worn out at last with such subterfuges and shifts, the Legislature repealed this restrictive law When Louisiana banned slave traders from out of state in 1832, Austin Woolfolk set up operations at Fort Adams, Mississippi, which was the first steamboat landing beyond the state line. Similarly, the organizing act for Mississippi Territory prohibited the introduction of slaves from outside the U.S. but "the foreign trade ban seems to have been ignored." == Music ==

'' that are not attributed to white abolitionists; the other one, "Stolen We Were," with "words by a colored man," starts with much the same language: "...stolen from Africa...brought to America..." Mike Seeger called it "an abolitionist song" and according to the Library of Congress, "the language of the song does not seem to match historic descriptions of songs coffle gangs were made to sing by slave traders" The slave trade appears in the lyrics of working songs sung by African-American slaves in the antebellum U.S.: {{poem quote| text=It's old Van Horn, de nigger trader Hilo! Hilo! He sold his wife to buy a nigger Hilo! Hilo! He sold her first to Louisianner Hilo! Hilo! And den from dat to Alabammer Hilo! Hilo! {{poem quote|text=You're selling me to Georgy But you cannot sell my soul Thank God Almighty God will fix it for us some day! I hope my old gran'mother Will meet poor John some day I knows I won't know him, when I meets him Cause he was so young when Dey sold him away {{poem quote|text=Ladies, ain't you sorry! Packet sails to-morrow, Sails to Looisiana. Ladies, ain't you sorry! See, de trader got me! Ladies, fare you well. ==See also==