The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua D. Rothman (review)

Abstract

Over the past two decades, historians of antebellum slavery have shifted their attention from the plantation to the auction block. Groundbreaking works by Steven Deyle, Robert Gudmestad, Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, Calvin Schermerhorn, and others have demonstrated that the domestic slave trade was central to the development of the South’s peculiar institution but also to American capitalism more broadly. Once dismissed as peripheral, disreputable elements of white society, slave traders have emerged as important agents in the transformation of the American South. Joshua Rothman’s new book seeks to give a face, or more accurately three faces, to slave traders and thereby illuminate how they were “vital gears in the machine of slavery” and how “they held define the financial, political, legal, cultural, and demographic contours of a growing nation” (6). Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard built the most successful slave trading partnership in the antebellum South, responsible for trafficking more than ten thousand people from Alexandria and Richmond to New Orleans and Natchez. The three men came from different backgrounds, but all shared a common lust for profits and saw opportunities for innovation in the domestic slave trade. Rothman demonstrates that the slave trading firm operated as a modern business within the growing market economy. Its owners employed a network of purchasing agents, owned slave jails and warehouses, deployed complex financial instruments, advertised widely, and purchased steamships to transport their human cargo from the Chesapeake to the Lower South. They worked with bankers, merchants, planters, lawyers, and politicians, and circulated in elite society. Their partnership lasted only a decade, a long time by the standards of slave trading corporations, dissolving just prior to the Panic of 1837. The partners left the business as phenomenally wealthy