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 states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.
The Natchez slave market was a slave market in Natchez, Mississippi in the United States. Slaves were originally sold throughout the area, including along the Natchez Trace that connected the settlement with Nashville, along the Mississippi River at Natchez-Under-the-Hill, and throughout town. From 1833 to 1863, the Forks of the Road slave market was located about a mile from downtown Natchez at the intersection of Liberty Road and Washington Road, which has since been renamed to D'Evereux Drive in one direction and St. Catherine Street in the other. The market differed from many other slave sellers of the day by offering individuals on a first-come first-serve basis rather than selling them at auction, either singly or in lots. At one time the Forks of the Road was the second-largest slave market in the United States, trailing only New Orleans.
Slave-Trading in the Old South by Frederic Bancroft, an independently wealthy freelance historian, is a classic history of domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States. Among other things, Bancroft discredited the assertions, then common in Ulrich B. Phillips-influenced histories of antebellum America, that slave traders were reviled outcasts and that slave trading was a rare exigency. Bancroft's book "provides still unrivalled profiles of great numbers of traders, many of whom he found to have the highest social standing."
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States.
Hope Hull Slatter was a 19th-century American slave trader with an "extensive establishment and private jail, for the keeping of slaves" on Pratt Street in Baltimore, Maryland. He gained "wealth and infamy from the trade in blood," and sold thousands of people from the Chesapeake region to parts south. Slatter, in company with Austin Woolfolk, Bernard M. Campbell, and Joseph S. Donovan has been described as one of the "tycoons of the slave trade" in the Upper South, collectively "responsible for the forced departures of approximately 9,000 captives from Baltimore to New Orleans."
Bernard Moore Campbell and Walter L. Campbell operated an extensive slave-trading business in the antebellum U.S. South. B. M. Campbell, in company with Austin Woolfolk, Joseph S. Donovan, and Hope H. Slatter, has been described as one of the "tycoons of the slave trade" in the Upper South, "responsible for the forced departures of approximately 9,000 captives from Baltimore to New Orleans." Bernard and Walter were brothers.
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part. The term slave depot was commonly used in New Orleans in the 1850s.
Forrest's jail, also known as Forrest's Traders Yard, was the slave pen owned and operated by Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. Forrest bought 87 Adams Street, located between Second and Third, in 1854. It was located next to a tavern that operated under various names, opposite Hardwick House, and behind the still-extant Episcopal church. Forrest later traded, for fewer than six months, from 89 Adams. Byrd Hill bought 87 Adams in 1859. An estimated 3,800 people were trafficked through Forrest's jail during his five years of ownership.
Jeffrey Edward Forrest, commonly called Jeff Forrest, was a Confederate States Army military officer who was killed in action. He was the youngest of the six Forrest brothers who engaged in the interregional slave trade in the United States prior to the American Civil War.
Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. As one history put it, "Stinted allowance, imprisonment, and whipping were the usual methods of punishment; incorrigibles were sometimes 'ironed' or sold."
Henry Flewellen Slatter was a 19th-century American slave trader. Among other things, Slatter escorted coastwise shipments of people from slave jail of his father Hope H. Slatter in Baltimore to the slave depot of his uncle Shadrack F. Slatter in New Orleans. H. F. Slatter died of tuberculosis in his father's home state of Georgia.
John W. Lindsey was a slave trader based in Montgomery, Alabama, United States in the 1840s and 1850s.
