The Domestic Slave Trade and the United States Constitution

Abstract

In recent years, historians have turned an eye toward examining the internal slave trade of the United States. This attention is surprising, not because the internal slave trade is an unimportant topic, but because it has taken so long for historians to address adequately the forced movement of African Americans during the antebellum period. The progenitor of this historiographical trend is Michael Tadman, whose Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989) was the first in-depth treatment of slave trading since Frederic Bancroft's Slave Trading in the Old South (1931). In Speculators and Slaves, Tadman examined the slave-master relationship and the claims by slave owners that they were paternalistic while they actively bought and sold African Americans as commodities. The slave trade that permeated the antebellum South, according to Tadman, occurred, not because of crippling debt or the death of owners, but overwhelmingly for speculative reasons (p. 210). White slave owners reasoned that the disruption to the lives of African American individuals and families was minimal and temporary; presuming that blacks were inferior emotionally and intellectually allowed them to depict themselves as paternalistic protectors even as slave families were torn apart. Other historians have built upon Tadman's work. Walter Johnson's Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) examined the New Orleans slave market from the perspectives of the slave, the master, and the trader. Where Tadman used quantitative data to make his case, Johnson relied upon slave narratives, court cases, slave owners' correspondence, and bills of sale to describe in exquisite language the horrors of the slave trade for African Americans. Johnson also edited The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (2004), a collection of essays placing the internal slave trade of the United States within the broader context of slavery in the Western Hemisphere.