Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas

Abstract

Through their power to tear families apart, domestic slave trades (also called internal slave trades) brought awful extra layers of suffering to add to the emotional and physical burdens of enslavement. These brutal trades were crucial for the expansion of some major slave economies, most notably the booming 19th-century phases of slavery in the United States and Brazil. In these coerced migrations, enslaved people were sometimes transported by sea, river, or railroad, but much more often they were chained together in coffles and were marched great distances to regions where labor demand and slave prices were especially high. Major urban centers played important roles in these trades, but the grassroots of villages and plantations were far more important both in the buying and in the selling phases of the trade. The domestic trades with which this article is concerned relied on one crucial factor: regional differences in the price of slaves. For a large-scale traffic to be sustained, however, a second factor was of great importance too: slave-exporting areas usually had a naturally increasing population that produced a surplus of enslaved people for distant markets. The dominance of sugar plantations in many slave regimes in the Americas (and the link of sugar planting to natural decrease) limited the potential for domestic slave traffics in many parts of the Americas. The domestic trades that have been most researched share two key features. First, the slave society had ended, or virtually ended, its involvement in the African slave trade, and, second, an antislavery movement was active in drawing public attention to the pain inflicted by these domestic trades. The domestic trade was most prominent in North America from 1807 (the abolition of the African trade) to 1865 (the abolition of US slavery), in Brazil from 1850 (the ending of African importation) to 1888 (the ending of slavery), and in the British Caribbean from 1807 (again, the abolition of the African trade) to the abolition of slavery in 1833. The skew of this article toward North America reflects the far more extensive scholarship on that region as well as fundamental demographic factors that worked against trading in many other areas. For the South American and Caribbean slave regimes generally, however, work on areas of natural increase and decrease, as well as on regional slave prices, could open up new knowledge on domestic trades and their significance. The local selling of enslaved people within neighborhoods existed throughout all slave regimes, but local sales are not central to this article. The long-distance redistribution of newly imported Africans is beyond the scope of the article. It should be noted that some studies have important things to say about several key issues, and they are therefore cited more than once.