The American Life of Jourdan Saunders, Slave Trader

Abstract

The American Life of Jourdan Saunders, Slave Trader Joshua D. Rothman (bio) On February 13, 1830, Jourdan M. Saunders sent a letter from New Orleans to David Burford in Smith County, Tennessee, about fifty miles east of Nashville. Burford was Saunders's brother-in-law and his business partner, the two having pooled $4,000 between them a few years earlier to create J. M. Saunders and Company, an enterprise that operated "in the negro speculation business." Returns from the company's first two seasons in the slave trade had been mixed, and Burford had been wavering about putting more money into the partnership. Saunders was writing with information that he thought would help Burford make up his mind.1 Saunders had gone to New Orleans to sell slaves, and while he was there he made the acquaintance of Isaac Franklin, a fellow Tennessean and a partner in the slave-trading colossus known as Franklin and Armfield. Franklin had taken a liking to Saunders. He had allowed Saunders to live with him "on the cheapest terms" at Franklin's rented offices and sales compound at the intersection of Esplanade Avenue and Francais Street in the Faubourg Marigny, just outside what is today the French Quarter. And now, Saunders told Burford, Franklin had asked Saunders if he wanted to become a purchasing agent for Franklin and Armfield, combining his money with that of Franklin's company to buy enslaved people in Virginia who would be shipped to Franklin in New Orleans for sale. All profits and losses would be split evenly between the two businesses.2 [End Page 227] Saunders made the pretense of seeking Burford's counsel, writing that his "confidence and prepossession" for Franklin made him perhaps a little too eager to accept the proposition. In truth, Saunders was neither especially concerned that Franklin had overawed him nor genuinely asking Burford for advice. It was an offer he was not going to refuse. Franklin's "experience and acquaintance in this market gives him a decided advantage in the making of sales over allmost any other person engaged in the business," Saunders wrote, "and upon the whole I have little or no doubt of it being an excellent arrangement for me." All Saunders really wanted to know was whether Burford was in or out. If Burford was disposed to keep his money in the trade, Saunders would relay the message to Franklin. But "if not," Saunders continued, "I feel no hesitation in deciding for myself."3 The recent profusion of scholarship on the relationship between slavery and capitalism in the United States has significantly expanded our understanding of the domestic slave trade and its centrality to the development of the South and the nation alike. Edward E. Baptist and Calvin Schermerhorn, for example, have illustrated how the trade's integration with banks, credit networks, and cotton production helped fuel national economic growth. Robert H. Gudmestad, Steven Deyle, and Maurie D. McInnis have shown how the trade shaped the commercial and moral values of white southerners, how their efforts to justify their participation in the trade could not entirely resolve political and cultural tensions within the region, and how the ubiquity and visibility of markets in human beings exacerbated sectional conflict. Walter Johnson, Daina Ramey Berry, and Damian Alan Pargas, meanwhile, have taken us inside those markets to demonstrate the impact of the trade on the enslaved themselves, who were aware they could be sold at any moment, who fought to shape the circumstances of forced migration and sale when it became unavoidable, and who always knew their value was not reducible to a price tag.4 [End Page 228] Yet we are only just beginning to learn about the men who actually conducted the domestic trade. Thousands of slave traders collectively took more than a half million enslaved people on forced migrations from the upper South to the lower South during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, and they moved hundreds of thousands more within the boundaries of individual states. We know relatively little, however, about who these traders were or where they came from, and we have few detailed accounts of how they...