Bernard M. Campbell and Walter L. Campbell

B. M. 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 9,000 captives from Baltimore to New Orleans.

[2][3] A visualized analysis of slave-trading in antebellum New Orleans found that Bernard M. Campbell was one of the two most prolific and connected traders in the dataset.

[6] Per Bancroft, early in the 1850s the Campbells "were walking in the footsteps of Hope H. Slatter, whose good-will they endeavored to enjoy by advertising that they occupied 'Slatter's old stand.'

"[6] In 1855 a man died in Natchez, Mississippi; the sexton's record notes "(A NEGRO MAN) FEB 18, 1855 GENERAL DEBILITY DR. E. M. BLACKBURN (NOTE: BELONGED TO NEGRO TRADER NAME WALTER L. CAMPBELL, DIED AT PEST HOUSE OF SMALL POX WORST KIND.

Per Bancroft, "The Campbells...established a farm in a healthy and accessible region about eighty miles north of New Orleans, where the slaves that were not sold by June could cheaply and profitably be kept and trained while becoming acclimated.

"[6] The term acclimated here likely refers to, at least in part, acquired immunity to semi-tropical diseases, such as yellow fever, that plagued the Gulf Coast and were a major concern of buyers.

[9] B. M. Campbell also sold slaves from Montgomery, Alabama as part of the probate of estates; in some of these cases he worked with an agent named E.

[16] An advertisement of John G. Campbell, slave trader of Maryland, was noted in William I. Bowditch's Slavery and the Constitution (1849): "NEGROES WANTED.

"[17] He also appears in a chapter of Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) devoted to the slave trade.

[19] In 1884 Jack Campbell (born c. 1812) was interviewed over drinks on Broad Street in Philadelphia:[19] I went into the slave auction business in 1835, and never quit it until the war broke out.

I have sold niggers in Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Louisville, Mobile, New Orleans, Memphis and all along in the other towns of the South.

I don't blow my own trumpet—you know that on their own merits modest men are dumb—but I can say that Jack Campbell had the reputation for showing up the good points of a 'buck' or a 'wench' and drawing out bids that made him in demand wherever there was a big sale...New Orleans, Louisville, Charleston and Baltimore used to be about the same till the cussed black abolitionists got to running the niggers north by the underground railroad.

There was a nest of infernal Quakers up at a place called Christiana, in this State, and they were always lookin' out to rob a man of his honest property.