“No Money, and No Confidence”: Slave Trading, Secession, and the Panic of 1860

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 examines the development of the slave trade in the decades preceding the Civil War before describing the effects of the secession crisis on the slave market. It uncovers white Southerners’ fears of what the election of Abraham Lincoln, an anti-slavery Republican, might mean for the future of slavery. It then explores the detrimental impact of disunion on slave commerce. Lincoln’s election and the secession of many slaveholding states threw the slave market into chaos. This was in part because enslavers worried about the ways in which Lincoln might impede slavery’s growth and expansion (and over how the enslaved would respond to his election), but much more because secession destabilized the financial system that facilitated the slave trade. The first days of the Civil War thus depressed the slave market, though less because of a lack of confidence in slavery than because of a widespread financial crisis.