Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the [American] Civil War".
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and wrote the popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which depicts the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans. The book reached an audience of millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and in Great Britain, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential both for her writings as well as for her public stances and debates on social issues of the day.
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, except as a punishment for crime, 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. Slavery as a punishment for crime is still legal in the United States.
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.
Isaac Franklin was an American slave trader and plantation owner. Born to wealthy planters in what would become Sumner County, Tennessee, he assisted his brothers in trading slaves and agricultural surplus along the Mississippi River in his youth, before briefly serving in the Tennessee militia during the War of 1812. He returned to slave trading soon after the war, buying enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland, before marching them in coffles to sale at Natchez, Mississippi. He introduced John Armfield to the slave trade, and with him founded the Franklin & Armfield partnership in 1828, which would go on to become one of the largest slave trading firms in the United States. With a base of operations in Alexandria, D.C., the company shipped massive numbers of the enslaved by land and sea to markets at Natchez and New Orleans.
Twelve Years a Slave is an 1853 memoir and slave narrative by Solomon Northup as told to and written by David Wilson. Northup, a black man who was born free in New York state, details himself being tricked to go to Washington, D.C., where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South. He was in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before he was able to secretly get information to friends and family in New York, who in turn secured his release with the aid of the state. Northup's account provides extensive details on the slave markets in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, and describes at length cotton and sugar cultivation and slave treatment on major plantations in Louisiana.
Calvin Ellis Stowe was an American Biblical scholar who helped spread public education in the United States. Over his career, he was a professor of languages and Biblical and sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary, Dartmouth College, Lane Theological Seminary, and Bowdoin College. He was the husband and literary agent of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the best-seller Uncle Tom's Cabin.
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.
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade 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.
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.
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.
Tribune was one of three brigs used as slave ships that were owned by the American slave-trading firm Franklin & Armfield. Tribune was 161 tons and was built by the shipbuilder Hezekiah Childs in Connecticut in approximately 1831. Tribune was initially used as a packet-style coastwise transport between Alexandria, Virginia and New Orleans, Louisiana. Her sisters were Isaac Franklin and Uncas. As of approximately 1836, the master of Tribune was Samuel Bush. According to a report of the Albany Evening Journal that same year, "The after-hold will carry about 80 women, and the other about 100 men...On either side were two platforms running the whole length, one raised a few inches, and the other about half way up to the deck...They were about 5+1⁄2 or 6 feet deep. On them they lie as close as they can stow away." Around 1837 she was sold to slave trader William H. Williams, owner of the Yellow House in Washington, D.C.
William Harker was a 19th-century American slave trader, known for his extensive career spanning over two decades. Operating primarily in Maryland, Harker played a significant role in the domestic slave trade, actively engaging in the buying and selling of enslaved African Americans from 1835 to 1859. His longevity in the trade was notable during a time when many slave traders came and went.
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.
John W. Lindsey was a slave trader based in Montgomery, Alabama, United States in the 1840s and 1850s.
Calvin Schermerhorn 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.
John D. James, Thomas G. James, and David D. James were brothers and 19th-century American businessmen who worked as interstate slave traders for the 30 years prior to the American Civil War. They also opened a bank in 1855.
