This is a list of American slave traders working in Georgia and Florida from 1776 until 1865.
Note 1: The importation of slaves from overseas was prohibited by the Continental Congress during the American Revolutionary War but resumed locally afterwards, including through the port of Savannah, Georgia (until 1798). [1] Especially in the 1790s, slavers sailing out of Rhode Island would go directly to Africa and trade rum for captives and then sell them in either Cuba or Georgia, wherever the prices were better that season. [2]
Note 2: It was technically illegal to import slaves into Georgia from other states from 1788 until the law was repealed in 1856, [3] but there was no law prohibiting the sale of slaves just across the border in the lands of the Cherokee Nation in what became the northwest quadrant of the state after Indian Removal, or across the Savannah River in Hamburg, South Carolina, maybe across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus in Alabama, or perhaps in Tallahassee in the Florida Territory.
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.
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.
Crawford, Frazer & Co. was a slave-trading business located in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1860s. The principals of Crawford, Frazer & Co. were Robert Crawford, Addison D. Frazer, and Thomas Lafayette Frazer. In company with a man named Robert Clarke, Crawford, Frazer & Co. may have been among "the largest of the city's slave brokers." The business opened in January 1863 and was dissolved in April 1864. All parties continued separately as negro traders, at another location in Atlanta (Crawford), and in Montgomery, Alabama (Frazers), until forced to cease operations due to the defeat of the Confederacy, concluding the American Civil War. Crawford, Frazer & Co. is remembered today because the company's negro mart appears in a notable photo of pre-burning Civil War Atlanta.
Prior to 1856, there was a substantial cluster of slave-trading businesses in what is now the ghost town of Hamburg, South Carolina, which was located directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia.
Jonathan Means Wilson, usually advertising as J. M. Wilson, was a 19th-century slave trader of the United States who trafficked people from the Upper South to the Lower South as part of the interstate slave trade. Originally a trading agent and associate to Baltimore traders, he later operated a slave depot in New Orleans. At the time of the 1860 U.S. census of New Orleans, Wilson had the second-highest net worth of the 34 residents who listed their occupation as "slave trader".
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.
John M. Gilchrist was a 19th-century slave trader of Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Gilchrist seems to have been engaged in interstate trading to some extent, primarily to Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. Gilchrist was also seemingly bolder than many slave traders in openly advertising individual children for sale, separate from their families of origin, potentially setting himself up for abolitionist opprobrium. Gilchrist's trading was a primary trigger for the 1849 Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion. There is little record of Gilchrist's life outside of his work as a trader.
John W. Lindsey was a slave trader based in Montgomery, Alabama, United States in the 1840s and 1850s.
Andrew J. Orr and Dickinson W. Orr, typically advertising as A. J. & D. W. Orr, were brothers, merchants, planters, railroad contractors, and slave traders based in Macon, Georgia, United States. The Orrs were originally from the Charlotte, North Carolina area, but moved to central Georgia early in their lives and remained there, first working as local merchants and then transitioning into the interstate slave trade, buying in the Carolinas and Richmond, Virginia, and selling to planters in the vicinity of Macon and Augusta, Georgia. They then became railroad contractors as well, using groups of enslaved men to build three separate Georgia railroad lines. A. J. Orr was beaten to death by a slave in 1855. D. W. Orr continued working as a railroad contractor until at least 1863. He died in 1867.
Elmore H. Simmons, generally signing documents as E. H. Simmons, was an American slave trader. He is primarily known from receipts for purchases and sales of slaves that are held in various slavery document collections held in U.S. libraries. Simmons was active as a slave trader from 1847 until 1852 in the U.S. states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
The Ponder brothers were four siblings, William G. Ponder, Ephraim G. Ponder, James Ponder, and John G. Ponder, who worked as interstate slave traders in the United States prior to the American Civil War, trafficking people between Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, and the Florida Territory. William G. Ponder was a Georgia state senator and delegate to the 1861 Georgia secession convention. Ephraim G. Ponder's old house in Atlanta, Georgia, was heavily shelled during the Atlanta campaign of the American Civil War and a photograph of the damaged building was widely published as "the Potter House."