Calvin Schermerhorn (born 1975) is an American historian who specializes in the study of slavery, capitalism, and African-American inequality. Educated at Saint Mary's College of Maryland, Harvard Divinity School and University of Virginia, he teaches at Arizona State University. [1]
In 2012, he annotated a newly recovered slave narrative by a man named Henry Goings, at which time Schermerhorn told a reporter, "The 'Old South' of Hollywood legend was actually a very new place by the time Goings was taken to Tennessee and Alabama in the 1820s and when he escaped from Alabama in the 1830s. Goings was a brilliant observer of places, events and human nature. He also was a gifted writer." [2] His 2015 The Business of Slavery was about "how specific decisions and adaptations of individual slavers to changing conditions helped create an American empire of slavery," [3] and "belies the alleged moral divide between the North and the South by reconstructing interregional and global networks of finance, charting the voluntary and coerced movement of people from northern to southern states, and highlighting the southern business ventures of northern capitalists." [4] A review by Peter Kolchin commented, "In arguing that slavery was capitalist, Schermerhorn neatly evades the quandary that tormented Fogel and Engerman of how such an evil system as slavery could be so efficient, and he does so by seeing capitalism itself as being, by nature, rapacious and exploitative." [5] In 2019, following a spike in interest in the slave traders Franklin & Armfield, Schermerhorn observed that they were men who bragged "about raping enslaved people" but for decades if not centuries, standard American histories "let them off scot-free." [6]
Schermerhorn's Unrequited Toil was described as "highly readable" [7] and "a masterful fusion of the latest scholarship." [8]
Schermerhorn was awarded a Fulbright in 2021 to continue his study of "Slavery, Capitalism, and Inequality in the Anglophone Atlantic World" in the United Kingdom. [9]
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based social theories in the antebellum era. He argued that the negro was "but a grown up child" needing the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as practiced by the Northern United States and Great Britain as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another", rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized. Some historians consider Fitzhugh's worldview to be proto-fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race.
Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism. He wrote during the Cold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Proslavery is support for slavery. It is sometimes found in the thought of ancient philosophers, religious texts, and in American and British writings especially before the American Civil War but also later through the 20th century. Arguments in favor of slavery include deference to the Bible and thus to God, some people being natural slaves in need of supervision, slaves often being better off than the poorest non-slaves, practical social benefit for the society as a whole, and slavery being a time-proven practice by multiple great civilizations.
Following Robert Cavelier de La Salle establishing the French claim to the territory and the introduction of the name Louisiana, the first settlements in the southernmost portion of Louisiana were developed at present-day Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702), Natchitoches (1714), and New Orleans (1718). Slavery was then established by European colonists.
Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Austin Woolfolk was an American slave trader and plantation owner. Among the busiest slave traders in Maryland, he trafficked more than 2,000 enslaved people through the Port of Baltimore to the Port of New Orleans, and became notorious in time for selling Frederick Douglass's aunt, and for assaulting Benjamin Lundy after the latter had criticized him.
The following is a list of important scholarly resources related to Andrew Jackson.
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States.
This is a glossary of American slavery, terminology specific to the cultural, economic, and political history of slavery in the United States
Theophilus Freeman was a 19th-century American slave trader of Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He was known in his own time as wealthy and problematic. Freeman's business practices were described in two antebellum American slave narratives—that of John Brown and that of Solomon Northup—and he appears as a character in both filmed dramatizations of Northup's Twelve Years a Slave.
John Hagan was a well-known American interstate slave trader who operated slave jails in both Charleston and New Orleans, as well as maintaining strong business and personal ties to the Richmond slave markets. He partnered with his brothers Hugh Hagan and Alexander Hagan, as well as with his maternal uncles, Hugh McDonald and Alexander McDonald. According to historian Walter Johnson, "John Hagan's yearly routine began in Charleston with slave buying during June and July; he continued in Virginia and then was back in Charleston in September, still buying, before traveling to New Orleans in October." Hagan was both a shipper and consignee of enslaved people who were on the Creole in 1841. Before he died in 1856 he worked assiduously to manumit a young enslaved woman from Virginia named Lucy Ann Cheatam, and her two children, Frederika Bremer "Dolly" Cheatam and William Lowndes Cheatam. He also provided bequests of cash and real estate for her in two versions of his will. Per historian Alexandra J. Finley, these children, and two others who died young, were almost certainly Hagan's biological offspring.
Rice Carter Ballard was a 19th-century American slave trader, plantation owner, and cotton merchant. His slave trading partners were Isaac Franklin and John Armfield. After leaving the slave-trading business, Ballard invested his profits in land and enslaved people. Together Ballard and his investment partner Samuel S. Boyd owned about 500 people in 1860. The University of North Carolina holds an archive of Ballard's correspondence and business that has been uploaded to FromthePage.com, a crowdsourced transcription platform.
A slave mortgage was a financial instrument used by financiers wherein money was lent on the basis of the value of enslaved people. There are records of slave mortgages in the United States and in South Africa. According to scholar Bonnie Martin, "the time lag between the recording of mortgages and foreclosures, when added to the dispersed nature of the mortgage recording process, made this financial engine relatively invisible, allowing potentially large economic and human consequences to remain unrecognized." As historian Calvin Schermerhorn put it, slave mortgages "drew equity out of [slave] bodies to reinvest in [sugar] refinement technology and more enslaved workers". Settlers fleeing a slave mortgage crisis was one of the precipitating factors of the American colonization of the Republic of Texas in the 1830s.
Uncas was one of three brigs used as slave ships that were owned by the American slave-trading firm Franklin & Armfield. Uncas was built in Connecticut in 1833 and weighed 155 tons. The two-masted brig cost US$7,250.
Family separation in American slavery was extremely common. According to one historian of the slave trade in the United States, "The magnitude of the trade, in terms of the lives it affected and families it destroyed, is without a doubt greater than any Civil War battlefield." There is widespread evidence of the pervasive nature of family separation: "A central feature of virtually every slave autobiography and of many of the slave interviews, for example, is the trauma caused slaves by forced family separation."
Elihu Creswell was an "extensive negro trader" of antebellum Louisiana, United States. Raised in an elite family in the South Carolina Upcountry, Creswell eventually moved to New Orleans, where he specialized in "acclimated" slaves, meaning people who had spent most of their lives enslaved in the Mississippi River basin so they were more likely to have acquired immunity to the region's endemic contagious diseases. This gave him a market niche distinct from many of his competitors, who typically imported slaves from Chesapeake region of the Upper South, or from border states as far as west as Missouri. Unique among slave traders, Creswell's will provided for the manumission of his slaves and moreover provided for their transportation to "the free United States of America." His mother, the other major beneficiary of his will, contested this provision. The legal documentation of the case and the "succession of Elihu Creswell" is a valuable primary source on the slave trade in New Orleans and the history of slavery in Louisiana. A judge ultimately rejected Sarah Hunter Creswell's petition and in 1853 when the steamer Cherokee departed New Orleans, among the passengers aboard were 51 free people of color bound for New York.
Sowell Woolfolk was a 19th-century American businessman and politician known for serving as a Georgia state legislator and U.S. state militia officer, working as a slave trader, and dying in a duel at Fort Mitchell, Alabama in 1832.
The Decatur slave-ship mutiny was an act of slave rebellion in the United States that occurred in April 1826 on a coastwise slave ship sailing out of Baltimore, Maryland, bound for the New Orleans slave market. The captain and first mate were thrown overboard. The hijacked ship was twice interdicted by other vessels and captives taken, but upon arriving in New York, 14 former captives escaped. One, William Bowser, was recaptured, tried, and hanged. The other 13 seem to have achieved their freedom.