[Mountains of material expose the depravity of the men who ran the
largest domestic slave trading operation in American history and
reveal the fortitude of the enslaved people they trafficked as
merchandise.] [[link removed]]

THE BRUTAL SLAVE TRADE IN THE US HAS BEEN LARGELY WHITEWASHED FROM
HISTORY  
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Joshua D. Rothman

The Conversation

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_ Mountains of material expose the depravity of the men who ran the
largest domestic slave trading operation in American history and
reveal the fortitude of the enslaved people they trafficked as
merchandise. _

A trade card with printed black type for the domestic slave traders
Hill, Ware and Chrisp, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum
of African American History and Culture

 

For my recently published book, “The Ledger and the Chain
[[link removed]],”
I visited more than 30 archives in over a dozen states, from Louisiana
to Connecticut. Along the way, I uncovered mountains of material that
exposed the depravity of the men who ran the largest domestic slave
trading operation in American history and revealed the fortitude of
the enslaved people they trafficked as merchandise.

But I also learned that many Americans do not realize that a domestic
slave trade existed in the U.S. at all.

[A domestic slave trader's newspaper ad from 1844 says 'CASH FOR
NEGROES.']
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Slave trader Joseph Bruin placed this advertisement in the Alexandria
Gazette on March 20, 1844. City of Alexandria, Virginia
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Mentioning my research to others repeatedly provoked questions about
Africa, not America. They obviously assumed that a scholar working on
the slave trade must be working on the trade that brought millions of
Africans to the Western Hemisphere via the terrifying Atlantic Ocean
crossing known as the Middle Passage
[[link removed]].

They did not appear to know that by the time slavery ended in 1865,
more than 1 million enslaved people
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had been forcibly moved across state lines in their own country, or
that hundreds of thousands more had been bought and sold within
individual states.

Americans continue to misunderstand how slavery worked and how vast
was its reach – even as the histories of race and slavery are
central to ongoing public conversations
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Indifference to suffering

Enslaved people were bought and sold within the boundaries of what is
now the United States dating back to the Colonial era. But the
domestic slave trade accelerated dramatically in the decades after
1808.

That year, Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people from
overseas
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and it did so at a moment when demand for enslaved laborers was
booming in expanding cotton and sugar plantation regions of the lower
South.

[Two vintage posters from the 1840s advertising slave trader services
in Kentucky.]
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Two posters advertising the services of slave traders L.C. Robards,
top, and Silas Marshall and Bro, bottom, Lexington, Ky. Smith
Collection/Gado/Getty Images
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Growing numbers of professional slave traders stepped forward to
satisfy that demand. They purchased enslaved people primarily in upper
South states like Maryland and Virginia, where a declining tobacco
economy
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left many slaveholders with a surplus of laborers. Traders then forced
those enslaved people to migrate hundreds of miles
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over land and by ship, selling them in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana
and other states where traders hoped to turn a profit.

The domestic slave trade was a brutal and violent business. Enslaved
people lived in constant fear that they or their loved ones would be
sold.

William Anderson, who was enslaved in Virginia
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seeing “hundreds of slaves pass by for the Southern market, chained
and handcuffed together.” Years after he fled the South, Anderson
wrote of “wives taken from husbands and husbands from wives, never
to see each other again – small and large children separated from
their parents,” and he never forgot the sounds of their sorrow.
“O, I have seen them and heard them howl like dogs or wolves,” he
recalled, “when being under the painful obligation of parting to
meet no more.”

Slave traders were largely indifferent to the suffering they caused.
Asked in the 1830s whether he broke up slave families in the course of
his operations, one trader admitted that he did so “very often,”
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because “his business is to purchase, and he must take such as are
in the market.”

‘So wicked’

Domestic slave traders initially worked mostly out of taverns and
hotels. Over time, an increasing number of them established offices,
showrooms and prisons where they held enslaved people whom they
intended to sell.

By the 1830s, the domestic slave trade was ubiquitous in the slave
states. Newspaper advertisements blared “Cash for Negroes.
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Storefront signs announced that “dealers in slaves” were inside.
At ports and along roads, travelers reported seeing scores of enslaved
people in chains
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[A handwritten letter announcing the opening of a slave trading
company at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia.]
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An 1852 letter from James B. Hargrove quotes the market prices for
enslaved men, women and children. Library of Virginia
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Meanwhile, the money the trade generated
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credit that financed it circulated throughout the country and across
the Atlantic, as even European banks and merchants looked to share in
the gains.

The more visible the trade became, the more antislavery activists made
it a core of their appeals. When abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy,
for example, asked white Americans in the 1820s
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how long they could look at the slave trade and “permit so
disgraceful, so inhuman, and so wicked a practice to continue in our
country, which has been emphatically termed THE HOME OF THE FREE,”
he was one among a rising chorus.

But abolitionists made little headway. The domestic slave trade ended
only when slavery ended in 1865.

Propaganda obscures history

Vital to the American economy, important to American politics and
central to the experience of enslaved people, the domestic slave trade
was an atrocity carried out on a massive scale. As British traveler
Joseph Sturge noted, by the 1840s, the entire slaveholding portion of
the United States could be characterized by division “into the
‘slave-breeding’ and ‘slave-consuming’ States
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Yet popular historical knowledge of the domestic trade remains hazy,
thanks largely to purposeful forgetting and to a propaganda campaign
that began before the Civil War and continued long past its
conclusion.

White Southerners made denial about the slave trade an important tenet
in their defense of slavery. They claimed that slave sales were rare,
that they detested the slave trade and that traders were outcasts
disdained by respectable people.

Kentucky minister Nathan Lewis Rice’s assertion in 1845 that “the
slave-trader is looked upon by decent men in the slave-holding States
with disgust
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was such a common sentiment that even white Northerners sometimes
parroted it. Nehemiah Adams, for example, a Massachusetts resident who
visited the South in 1854, came away from his time in the region
believing that “Negro traders are the abhorrence of all flesh
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[Four slave traders with guns guarding enslaved people they were
transporting south from Virginia.]
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Franklin and Armfield slave trading company partner John Armfield
watching over enslaved men and women chained together who he and
several employees were moving south from Virginia. John Murray/Library
of Virginia
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Such claims were almost entirely lies. But downplaying the slave trade
became a standard element of the racist mythology embedded in the
defense of the Confederacy known as the Lost Cause
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whose purveyors minimized slavery’s significance as they discounted
its role in bringing about the Civil War.

And while the Confederacy may have lost on the battlefield, its
supporters arguably triumphed in the cultural struggle to define the
war and its meaning. Well into the 20th century, significant numbers
of white Americans throughout the country accepted and embraced the
notion that slavery had been relatively benign.

As they did so, the devastations of the domestic slave trade became
buried beneath comforting fantasies of moonlight and magnolias evoked
by movies like “Gone With the Wind.
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Recent years have seen monuments to the Confederacy coming down
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in cities and towns across the country. But the struggle over how
Americans remember and talk about slavery, now perhaps more heated and
controversial than ever, arguably remains stuck in terms that are
legacies of the Lost Cause.

Slavery still conjures images of Southern farms and plantations. But
the institution was grounded in the sales of nearly 2 million human
beings in the domestic slave trade, the profits from which nurtured
the economy of the entire country.

Until that history makes its way more deeply into our popular memory,
it will be impossible to come to terms with slavery and its
significance for the American past and present.[The Conversation]

Joshua D. Rothman
[[link removed]],
Professor of History, _University of Alabama
[[link removed]]_

This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

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