Slave trade in the United States

This article is about the interstate trade in enslaved people, especially after 1808. For the general topic of American chattel slavery, see Slavery in the United States. For the international routes, see Atlantic slave trade.

(1) Charleston S.C. 4th March 1833 The land of the free & home of the brave watercolor by British naval officer Henry Byam Martin; (2a) Broadside advertising sale of slaves in the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans (1858), and (2b) postcard depicting the "Old Slave Block" at the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans (c. 1900); (3a) Manifest of coastwise slave ship from Charleston to Savannah (1843), and (3c) a coffle passing the U.S. Capitol under construction (1825); (4) Richmond Slave Market Auction oil painting by British artist Lefevre James Cranstone (1862)

The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage ^[1] and the interregional slave trade, ^[2] 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.

Economists say that transactions in the inter-regional slave market were driven primarily by differences in the marginal productivity of labor, which were based in the relative advantage between climates for the production of staple goods. The trade was strongly influenced by the invention of the cotton gin, which made short-staple cotton profitable for cultivation across large swathes of the upland Deep South (the Black Belt). Previously the commodity was based on long-staple cotton cultivated in coastal areas and the Sea Islands.

The disparity in productivity created arbitrage opportunities for traders to exploit, and it facilitated regional specialization in labor production. Due to a lack of data, particularly with regard to slave prices, land values, and export totals for slaves, the true effects of the domestic slave trade, on both the economy of the Old South and general migration patterns of slaves into southwest territories, remain uncertain. These have served as points of contention among economic historians. The physical effect of forced labor (on remote plantation camps plagued with yellow fever, cholera, and malaria), and social-emotional effect of family separation in American slavery, was nothing short of catastrophic.

History

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), ^[3] Savannah, Georgia (until 1798), ^[4] 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). ^[5]
• 1808 to Indian removal and invention of long-staple cotton gin (1830s): This period of national expansion can arguably be backdated to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. ^[5] 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" ^{[6] : 151}
• 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. ^[7] This era also saw the rise of the ever-more vocal and organized abolitionist movement in the United States, as chronicled and publicized by journals like The Liberator , which was established in 1831. ^[8]

End of the slave trade

The domestic slave trade wilted during American Civil War—there was a measurable price drop between 1860 and 1862, due to "market uncertainty" discouraging speculators. ^[9] In May 1861, a "Southern Mississippian" who seemed to oppose secession even though "no man in Mississippi has a larger proportion of his property in negroes" wrote the Louisville Courier that "The secessionists are carrying out the principles and wishes of the abolitionists. Likely negroes could not be sold here at $500 in good money. Negro traders are as scarce here as in Boston." ^[10] 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." ^[11]

Times got still harder for traders when the Union blockade prevented the trafficking of people from, say, rural Missouri to New Orleans. ^[12] 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, South Carolina newspaper ads on November 1864. ^[13] 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. ^[4]

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 (~$83 billion in 2023) 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." ^[14] As told by historian Frederic Bancroft, "Slave trading was considered a sign of enterprise and prosperity." ^[15]

When interviewed in 1913 by Myra Williams Jarrell for the Topeka Star, Emily Ford and Mary Shawn of Burlingame, Kansas, recalled an instance of family separation in American slavery due to the slave trade

The internal slave trade among colonies emerged in 1760 as a source of labor in early America. ^[16] It is estimated that between 1790 and 1860 approximately 835,000 slaves were relocated to the American South. ^[17]

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. ^[18] From these states most slaves were imported into the Deep South, to the "slave-consuming states," especially Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. ^[19] 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. ^[20] Walter Johnson disagrees, finding that only one-third of the population movement south was due to wholesale relocation of slave owner and chattel, while the other two-thirds of the shift was due to the commerce in slaves. ^[21]

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. ^[20]

Land availability from Indian removal

With the forced Indian removal by the US making new lands available in the Deep South, there was much higher demand there for workers to cultivate the labor-intensive sugar cane and cotton crops. The extensive development of cotton plantations created the highest demand for labor in the Deep South. ^{[22] [23]}

Cotton gin

"AUCTION & NEGRO SALES": Black man in Union uniform reading in front of the Crawford, Frazer & Co. slave market at 8 Whitehall Street, photographed by George N. Barnard during the Atlanta Campaign, 1864 (Library of Congress Digital)

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. ^[20]

The increased demand for labor in the Deep South pushed up the price of slaves in markets such as New Orleans, which became the fourth-largest city in the country based in part on profits from the slave trade and related businesses. The price differences between the Upper and Deep South created demand. Slave traders took advantage of this arbitrage opportunity by buying at lower prices in the Upper South and then selling slaves at a profit after taking or transporting them further south. ^[20] Some scholars believe there was an increasing prevalence in the Upper South of "breeding" slaves for export. The proven reproductive capacity of enslaved women was advertised as selling point and a feature that increased value. ^[20]

Resolve financial deficits

Although not as significant as the exportation of slaves to Deep South, farmers and land owners who needed to pay off loans increasingly used slaves as a cash substitute. This had also contributed to the growth of the internal slave trade. ^[20]

Statistics

Economic historians have offered estimates for the annual revenue generated by the inter-regional slave trade for exporters that range from $3.75 ^[24] to $6.7 million. ^[20]

The demand for prime-aged slaves, from the ages of 15 to 30, accounted for 70 percent of the slave population relocated to the Deep South. ^[20] Since the ages of slaves were often unknown by the traders themselves, physical attributes such as height often dictated demand in order to minimize asymmetric information. ^[20]

Partial manifest of a coastwise slave shipment made from Baltimore to New Orleans, by Hope H. Slatter, on the ship Scotia, September 1843

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman estimated that the slave trade accounted for 16 percent of the relocation of enslaved African Americans, in their work Time on the Cross . ^[20] This estimate, however, was severely criticized for the extreme sensitivity of the linear function used to gather this approximation. ^[25] 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. ^[20] Without the inter-regional slave trade, it is possible that forced migration of slaves would have occurred naturally due to natural population pressures and the subsequent increase in land prices. ^[24] In 1965, William L. Miller contended that, "it is even doubtful whether the interstate slave traffic made a net contribution to the westward flow of the population." ^[24]

Importation, piracy, and interstate kidnapping

The transatlantic slave trade 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. 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.

Kidnapping into slavery in the United States was a going concern for the duration. 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

Main article: Slave breeding in the United States

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." ^[15]

Profits

Irish economic theorist John Elliot Cairnes suggested in his work The Slave Power that the inter-regional slave trade was a major component in ensuring the economic vitality of the Old South. ^[20] Many economic historians, however, have since refuted the validity of this point. The general consensus seems to support Professor William L. Miller's claim that the inter-regional slave trade "did not provide the major part of the income of planters in the older states during any period." ^[24]

"Slave Trader, Sold to Tennessee" by an unknown artist

The returns gained by traders from the sale price of slaves were offset by both the fall in the value of land, that resulted from the subsequent decrease in the marginal productivity of land, and the fall in the price of output, which occurred due to the increase in market size as given by westward expansion. ^[26] Kotlikoff suggested that the net effect of the inter-regional slave trade on the economy of the Old South was negligible, if not negative. ^[26]

The profits realized through the sale and shipment of enslaved people were in turn reinvested in banking, railroads, and even colleges. A striking example of the connection between the domestic slave trade and higher education can be found in the 1838 sale of 272 slaves by the Maryland Jesuits to Louisiana; a small portion of the proceeds of the sale was used to pay down the debts of Georgetown College. ^[27] 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. ^[28]

In the words of one scholar, slaveholders were, fundamentally, "speculator[s]" who hoped "to endow [their] progeny for generations to come" through the "capital accumulation" represented in the growing numbers of people they enslaved. The returns from slave ownership, therefore, were long-term and intergenerational.

— Robert Crosby, An Unholy Traffic, 2024 ^[29]

Markets and traders

Main articles: Slave markets and slave jails in the United States and List of American slave traders

1844 newspaper icon depicting white man with suit and cane, and shackled enslaved black person

In their day, slave traders were called everything from broker, the entirely generic term preferred in Charleston, ^[15] to nigger-trader (sometimes transcribed as niggah-tradah), ^[30] 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 and slave dealer were common occupational titles that appeared in census records and city directories. ^[15] 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." ^[7] 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." ^[31]

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. ^[20]

Price, Birch & Co. slave pen in Alexandria, Virginia, originally built by Franklin & Armfield; the slave trade was outlawed in the District of Columbia in 1850, local traders simply re-established their operations across the Potomac River

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. ^[20]

Evans suggests that interstate slave traders earned a wage greater than that of an alternative profession in skilled mechanical trades. ^[20] However, if slave traders possessed skills similar to those used in supervisory mechanics (e.g. skills used by a chief engineer), then slave traders received an income that was not greater than the one they would have received had they entered in an alternative profession. ^[20] In addition to full-time traders, so-called tavern traders worked on a small scale, especially in the first quarter of the 19th century, examples being the slave auctions held at Garland Burnett's tavern in Baltimore, ^[33] Washington Robey's slave pen and tavern in Washington, D.C., ^[34] Turner Brashears of Brashears' Stand along the Natchez Trace, ^[35] 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." ^[36] Major slave-buying markets were located Charleston, Savannah, Memphis, and above all, New Orleans. ^[15] Economists estimate that more than 135,000 enslaved people were sold in New Orleans between 1804 and 1862. ^[9] 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. ^[21] Larger interstate firms, like Franklin & Armfield, and Bolton, Dickens & Co., might have locations or traders under contract in a dozen cities. ^[15] Dealers in the upper south worked to collect what they called "shipping lots"—enough people to be worth spending time and money arranging for their transport south. ^[37] 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. ^[21]

"Senator Prall" Louisville Courier-Journal, March 7, 1860

The notion that slave traders were social outcasts of low reputation, even in the South, was initially promulgated by defensive southerners and later by figures like historian Ulrich B. Phillips. ^[38] 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. ^[39] 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. ^[15] Similarly, historian Charles Dew read hundreds of letters to slave traders and found virtually zero narrative evidence for guilt, shame, or contrition about the slave trade: "If you begin with the absolute belief in white supremacy—unquestioned white superiority/unquestioned black inferiority—everything falls neatly into place: the African is inferior racial 'stock,' living in sin and ignorance and barbarism and heathenism on the 'Dark Continent' until enslaved...Slavery thus miraculously becomes a form of 'uplift' for this supposedly benighted and brutish race of people. And once notions of white supremacy and black inferiority are in place in the American South, they are passed on from one generation to the next with all the certainty and inevitability of a genetic trait." ^[37] And yet despite the dehumanizing doctrines of white supremacy that seemingly mandated separatism and black oppression, there is evidence that at least some slave traders were perfectly capable of recognizing enslaved people as human, rather than some form of livestock: a not-insignificant number of white slave traders provided for the families of mixed-raced children they'd formed with women they'd once enslaved, ^[40] 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, ^[41] and New Orleans trader Elihu Creswell emancipated his 51 slaves upon his death and even funded their transportation to free states. ^[42] 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." ^[43]

View of the port of New Orleans circa 1855 by Scattergood from Lloyd's Steamboat Directory

Harriet Beecher Stowe commented on slave-traders in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), in reference to her fictional character Mr. Haley:

The writer has drawn in this work only one class of the negro-traders. There are all varieties of them, up to the great wholesale purchasers, who keep their large trading-houses; who are gentlemanly in manners and courteous in address; who, in many respects, often perform actions of real generosity; who consider slavery a very great evil, and hope the country will at some time be delivered from it, but who think that so long as clergyman and layman, saint and sinner, are all agreed in the propriety and necessity of slave holding, it is better that the necessary trade in the article be conducted by men of humanity and decency, than by swearing, brutal men, of the Tom Loker school. These men are exceedingly sensitive with regard to what they consider the injustice of the world, in excluding them from good society, simply because they undertake to supply a demand in the community, which the bar, the press, and the pulpit, all pronounce to be a proper one. In this respect, society certainly imitates the unreasonableness of the ancient Egyptians, who employed a certain class of men to prepare dead bodies for embalming, but flew at them with sticks and stones the moment the operation was over, on account of the sacrilegious liberty which they had taken. If there is an ill-used class of men in the world, it is certainly the slave-traders; for, if there is no harm in the institution of slavery, if it is a divinely-appointed and honourable one, like civil government and the family state, and like other species of property relation, then there is no earthly reason why a man may not as innocently be a slave-trader as any other kind of trader.

Product and price

Eyre Crowe'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. ^[9] But female slaves came with "increase"—children born enslaved to an enslaved woman were saleable, thus providing excellent return on investment. ^[44] 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. ^[45] 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 US$80,000(equivalent to $2,362,839 in 2023) 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 US$20(equivalent to $590.71 in 2023), compared to an average price of $371 per. ^{[46] [47]} 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." ^[48]

Under the terms of Montgomery Bell'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)

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, 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. ^[15] "Acclimated" slaves known to be immune to yellow fever and other communicable diseases also commanded a premium. ^[49]

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 US$1,381(equivalent to $46,831 in 2023). ^[9] On average the prices for light-skinned female slaves were 5.4 percent higher than the prices for darker-skinned female slaves, ^[9] possibly indicating colorism and sexual attraction as a factor in a market dominated by male buyers. ^[50] 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." ^[9]

Routes

Mississippi River watershed

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 20 mi (32 km) a day. ^[21]
• Ocean-going ship: The coastwise slave trade, in which enslaved people were transported on commercial sailing ships and steamships between the East Coast and the Gulf Coast via the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, was busiest between the Chesapeake Bay region and the cities of the Mississippi Delta, but virtually any ship that departed south of the Mason-Dixon Line to points further south would have likely carried slaves for sale. A typical trip from the port at Norfolk to New Orleans might be a three-week journey. ^[21] A statistical analysis of all known records of Baltimore–New Orleans slave shipments from 1820 to 1860 found that brigs were the type of ship used in about half of all shipments, and voyages commonly lasted between 21 and 35 days. ^[51]
• Transportation via navigable inland rivers: River steamboat, by the 1850s, reduced the journey between St. Louis to New Orleans to just a few days. ^[21] Slaves were transported on virtually every tributary of the Mississippi River watershed where slavery was legal, from as far up the Ohio River as Wheeling, Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky, down the Cumberland River from Nashville, and up the Red River of the South through Louisiana and Arkansas. Any navigable inland waterway or ship that was used to transport goods that were produced with slave labor was also used to transport slaves to buyers: the Delaware River was used to take slaves to market in colonial Pennsylvania; the Savannah River connected planters to the cotton market at Augusta, Georgia and, on the opposite bank, the slave market at Hamburg, South Carolina; the Chattahoochee River was access to the slave markets at Columbus, Georgia, etc.
• Rail transport: As early as 1841, Southern railroad companies bought male slaves to build railroads, with at least 85 of 113 railroads in the former Confederacy having used enslaved labor for construction within and between states. ^[52]

Specific overland routes

Railroad network of the Southern states c. 1861 (West Point Atlas of the American Civil War, 1962)

• 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 Natchez Trace was used to bring slaves from middle Tennessee and to the Forks of the Road and Vicksburg slave markets in Mississippi.
• Kentucky slave traders supplied the Mississippi River valley via the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and the southern reaches of the Illinois Central Railroad. ^[53]
• Slave trader Byrd Hill was one of the promoters of the Memphis and Hernando Plank Road. ^[54]

Law

In 1844, Charlestonians were charged with illegally selling slaves into Savannah; the mayor of Savannah stated "It is hoped that this example will be a warning to others and prevent any fuither attempts to introduce negroes for sale. The laws of our State are severe, inflicting heavy fines and Penitentiary confinement on such as shall be convicted of these offences. Our own safety requires us to be vigilant in preventing the outcasts and convicted felons of other communities from being brought into ours."

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; for example, "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." ^[56] 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..." ^[57]

Bans on interstate slave trading

State	Notes
Alabama	Limitations on interstate slave trading passed 1832 [58]
Delaware	Banned imports and exports of slaves at statehood (1787) [59]
Kentucky	Non-Importation Act passed 1833, [60] repealed 1849
Louisiana	Imports banned 1826–1828; [61] "...slavers circumvented rules like Louisiana's strict requirement that captives entering the state bear certificates of good character by manufacturing fake certificates." [14]
Georgia	Imports banned 1788, repealed in 1856 [62]
Mississippi	Banned in 1832 constitution, never enforced [14]
Tennessee	Banned 1827–1855; unenforced [14]

See also

• Slave Trade Act of 1794
• Slave Trade Act of 1800
• Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves
• Slave Trade Acts § United States
• Treatment of the enslaved in the United States
• Torture of slaves in the United States
• List of largest slave sales in the United States
• Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States

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Further reading

Main articles: Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States and Bibliography of slavery in the United States § Slave trade

• Deyle, Steven (2005). Carry Me Back. The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780195160406.
• Ball, Edward (November 2015), "Retracing Slavery's Trail of Tears", Smithsonian Magazine, Washington, D.C., archived from the original on 28 June 2023

External links

• Texas Domestic Slave Trade Project at University of Texas