Author | Frederic Bancroft |
---|---|
Published | 1931 |
Publisher | J.H. Fürst Co., Baltimore |
Pages | 415 |
OCLC | 426282 |
326.10975 | |
LC Class | 31002005 |
Slave-Trading in the Old South by Frederic Bancroft, an independently wealthy freelance historian, is a classic [1] history of domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States. Among other things, Bancroft discredited the assertions, then common in Ulrich B. Phillips-influenced histories of antebellum America, that slave traders were reviled outcasts and that slave trading was a rare exigency. [2] Bancroft's book "provides still unrivalled profiles of great numbers of traders, many of whom he found to have the highest social standing." [3]
The comprehensiveness of his scholarly attack on the "benevolent paternalism" theory of slavery was such that, per the Journal of Negro History book review in April 1931, "It will be necessary [for slavery apologists] to work out another program to cover up the truth for another fifty years." [4] Henry Steele Commager wrote that it was "a contribution not only to the history of slavery, but to the history of Southern society and psychology, of lasting importance." [5] William Allen White wrote "a curious and terrible book is this...a scholarly piece of work, documented carefully and written with some sense of historical perspective." [5] Broadus Mitchell wrote "He knocks all the props from under the sentimentalists...The book is as packed with human interest as any you will find, and is quite as surely packed with thorough scholarship." [5]
Bancroft was one of the first historians to use first-person testimony from former slaves, [6] and he also corresponded with former slave traders or their families and collected their memories of the slave business in America. [2] Some footnotes from Slave-Trading show that this research could not be conducted today:
Apart from what the advts. show, the statements as to the locations etc. are based on the recollections of two residents of that time. The father of one of them in 1859-60 kept a store and bakery next door to the Brown pen, when it was in the middle of the block and on the north side of Market st.
Capt. J. Thompson Brown of the Confederate artillery, for nearly half a century a very successful real estate agent and auctioneer in Richmond, remembered 15 of these traders, 4 of the private jailors and 9 of the auctioneers. "I return the list [from the Directory for 1852] you sent me with [my] (X) cross-mark opposite the names of those I personally knew were "nigger- traders," as they were called by the vulgar..."'fo' de war." I personally knew...Ed. D. Eacho, Newton M. Lee, E. A. J. Clopton and others." — Letter of July 30, 1917, to the author.
Bancroft's book thus became a "definitive study of the domestic slave trade" for decades. [6] The book has a recognizable quality of "moral outrage" but "the evidence he presents has stood the test of time...research that followed has confirmed many of his points." [7] Contemporary researchers continue to draw on Bancroft's work: a journalist-turned-local historian studying newspaper coverage of slavery in East Tennessee wrote in 2022 that while doing his research, "I bought several books on slavery, the best of which was one titled Slave Trading and the Old South[ sic ], printed in 1931."
Slave Trading in the Old South was reprinted in 1959 by Ungar, with an introduction by Allan Nevins, [8] and again in 1996, by the University of South Carolina Press, with an introduction by Michael Tadman. [2] According to historian Jacob E. Cooke in 1959, other unpublished Bancroft manuscripts on the history of American slavery "can stand comparison, not disadvantageously, with any history of the South yet published. [9] The Frederic Bancroft papers are held in the Columbia University Libraries. [10]
I. Some Phases of the Background
II. Early Domestic Slave-Trading
III. The District of Columbia: "The Very Seat and Center"
IV. The Importance of Slave-Rearing
V. Virginia and the Richmond Market
VI. Here and There in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri
VII. Slave-Hiring
VIII. The Height of the Slave Trade in Charleston
IX. Dividing Families and Selling Children Separately—Restrictions.
X. Savannah's Leading Trader and His Largest Sale
XI. Minor Trading in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee
XII. Memphis: The Boltons, the Forrests, and Others
XIII. Various Features of the Interstate Trade
XIV. Some Alabama and Mississippi Markets
XV. New Orleans, the Mistress of Trade
XVI. High Prices and "The Negro-Fever"
XVII. The Status of Slave-Trading
XVIII. Estimates as to Numbers, Transactions and Value
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between male slaves and women or girls, forced pregnancies of female slaves, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
The history of slavery in Tennessee began when it was the old Southwest Territory and thus the law regulating slavery in Tennessee was broadly derived from North Carolina law, and was initially comparatively "liberal." However, after statehood, as the fear of slave rebellion and the threat to slavery posed by abolitionism increased, the laws became increasingly punitive: after 1831, "punishments were increased and privileges and immunities were lessened and circumvented." Tennessee was one of five states that allowed slaves the right of a jury trial, and one of three states that never passed anti-literacy laws, although the punishment for forging a slave pass was up to 39 lashes.
Ziba Burrill Oakes was a broker of slaves and real estate in Charleston, South Carolina. Oakes is significant in the history of American slavery in part due to his construction of what he called a "shed" at 6 Chalmers Street. The shed still stands and is now Charleston's Old Slave Mart Museum. The site as a whole, once a much larger assemblage of buildings and pens, was generally known as Ryan's mart or Ryan's nigger-jail, and shut down in late 1864 or early 1865, supposedly "when owners Thomas Ryan and Z.B. Oakes went off to fight in the war." Come the end of the American Civil War, writer and abolitionist James Redpath took it upon himself to visit Charleston's negro mart and liberate the slavery-related business documents that remained therein. The 652 letters to Z.B. Oakes looted by Redpath were eventually turned over to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and in 1891 became a part of the anti-slavery special collections at the Boston Public Library. The letters remain a significant primary source in the study of the 19th-century American slave trade.
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States (1775–1865, with a measurable increase in activity after 1808, following the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves).
Louis Daniel DeSaussure, scion of a historic and wealthy South Carolina family, was the most important and prosperous slave broker in the city of Charleston in the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. After the military defeat of the Confederacy he worked as an investment broker, president of a phosphate-mining company, and director of a regional railroad. During Reconstruction he was an activist in support of Democratic South Carolina politicians such as Wade Hampton III.
Capt. Montgomery Little, CSA was an American slave trader and a Confederate Army cavalry officer who served in Nathan Bedford Forrest's Escort Company. Little was killed in action during the American Civil War at the Battle of Thompson's Station.
Bernard Moore Campbell, often listed professionally as B. M. Campbell, operated an extensive slave-trading business in the antebellum U.S. South. Campbell, in company with Austin Woolfolk, Joseph S. Donovan, and Hope H. Slatter, has been described as one of the "tycoons of the slave trade" in the Upper South, "responsible for the forced departures of approximately 9000 captives from Baltimore to New Orleans."
Alonzo James White was a 19th-century businessman of Charleston, South Carolina who was known as a "notorious" slave trader and prolific auctioneer and thus oversaw the sales of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of enslaved Americans of African descent in his 30-year career in the American slave trade.
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part.
Theophilus Freeman was a 19th-century American slave trader of Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He was known in his own time as wealthy and problematic. Freeman's business practices were described in two antebellum American slave narratives—that of John Brown and that of Solomon Northup—and he appears as a character in both filmed dramatizations of Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave.
John Hagan was a well-known American interstate slave trader who operated slave jails in both Charleston and New Orleans, as well as maintaining strong business and personal ties to the Richmond slave markets. He partnered with his brothers Hugh Hagan and Alexander Hagan, as well as with his maternal uncles, Hugh McDonald and Alexander McDonald.
George Kephart was a 19th-century American slave trader, land owner, farmer, and philanthropist. A native of Maryland, he was an agent of the interstate trading firm Franklin & Armfield early in his career, and later occupied, owned, and finally leased out that company's infamous slave jail in Alexandria. In 1862, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts mentioned Kephart by name in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate as one of the traders who had "polluted the capital of the nation with this brutalizing traffic" of selling people.
Jonathan Means Wilson, usually advertising as J. M. Wilson, was a 19th-century slave trader of the United States who trafficked people from the Upper South to the Lower South as part of the interstate slave trade. Originally a trading agent and associate to Baltimore traders, he later operated a slave depot in New Orleans. At the time of the 1860 U.S. census of New Orleans, Wilson had the second-highest net worth of the 34 residents who listed their occupation as "slave trader".
Seth Woodroof was a slave trader based in Lynchburg in central Virginia, United States. He was an interstate trader who ran what the Lynchburg Museum called the "most active and infamous" slave pen in the city. He is believed to have been actively trading from approximately 1830 until the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. Woodroof sat on the Lynchburg city council from 1858 to 1865.
Robert H. Elam, usually advertising as R. H. Elam, was an American interstate slave trader who worked in Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Griffin & Pullum, later Griffin, Pullum & Co., was a 19th-century American interstate slave-trading company. The principals were Pierce Griffin and William A. Pullum. They mainly bought people in Kentucky and sold them in Mississippi.
Isaac Neville, also known as Ike Neville, sometimes spelled Nevil or Nevill, was an American slave trader based in Memphis, Tennessee in the United States.
James Franklin Purvis was an American slave trader, broker, and banker who worked primarily in Baltimore. He was a nephew of Isaac Franklin of Franklin & Armfield, and traded in Maryland, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the 1830s and early 1840s. In 1842 he became a devout Methodist, quit the slave trade, and transitioned into real estate, banking, and stock brokering. After his bank failed in 1868, he retired to Carroll County, Maryland, where he died of a heart attack in 1880 at age 72.