Slave trade in the United States

[10] 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.

"[11] 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.

"[12] 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.

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.

[18] 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.

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.

[21] 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 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.

[21] 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.

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.

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.

[31] 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.

[35] 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.

[43] 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.

[22] The seasonality of the trade is visible in the record books of Missouri trader John R. White, which show that "Over 90 percent of the slaves imported to New Orleans were sold in the six months between November and April.

"[22] 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.

[45] Members of the "best families," and a number of leading lights of the early Republic, including Chief Justice John Marshall[46] and seventh President Andrew Jackson,[47] were engaged in slave speculation.

[16] 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.

[51] 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.

"[52] Abolitionist Lewis Hayden wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, "I knew a great many of them, such as Neal, McAnn, Cobb, Stone, Pulliam, and Davis, &c. They were like Haley, they meant to repent when they got through.

"[53] 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.

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.

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.

While talking we advanced a few steps, which brought us opposite the Jim Crow car, in which were seated a clerk or runner from Donovan's slave-pen, with five slaves, a young man and woman, the exact picture of despondency and desolation, and three children, who seemed satisfied with the novelty of the scene about them.

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.

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.