This is a list of slave traders of the United States, people whose occupation or business was the slave trade in the United States, i.e. the buying and selling of human chattel as commodities, primarily African-American people in the Southern United States, from the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 until the defeat of the Confederate States of America in 1865. People who dealt in enslaved indigenous persons, such as was the case with slavery in California, would also be included. This list represents a fraction of the "many hundreds of participants in a cruel and omnipresent" American market. [3]
The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was passed in 1808 under the so-called Star-Spangled Banner flag, when there were 15 states in the Union, closing the transatlantic slave trade and setting the stage for the interstate slave trade in the U.S. Over 50 years later, in 1865, the last American slave sale was made somewhere in the rebel Confederacy. [4] In the intervening years, the politics surrounding the addition of 20 new states to the Union had been almost overwhelmingly dominated by whether or not those states would have legal slavery. [5] Slavery was widespread, so slave trading was widespread, and "When a planter died, failed in business, divided his estate, needed ready money to satisfy a mortgage or pay a gambling debt, or desired to get rid of an unruly Negro, traders struck a profitable bargain." [6] A slave trader might have described himself as a broker, auctioneer, general agent, or commission merchant, [7] and often sold real estate, personal property, and livestock in addition to enslaved people. [8] Many large trading firms also had field agents, whose job it was to go to more remote towns and rural areas, buying up enslaved people for resale elsewhere. [4] Field agents stood lower in the hierarchy, and are generally poorly studied, in part due to lack of records, but field agents for Austin Woolfolk, for example, "served only a year or two at best and usually on a part-time basis. No fortunes were to be made as local agents." [9] On the other end of the financial spectrum from the agents were the investors—usually wealthy planters like David Burford, [10] John Springs III, [11] and Chief Justice John Marshall [12] —who fronted cash to slave speculators. They did not escort coffles or run auctions themselves, but they did parlay their enslaving expertise into profits.
Countless slaves were also sold at courthouse auctions by county sheriffs and U.S. marshals to satisfy court judgments, settle estates, and to "cover jail fees"; individuals involved in those sales are not the primary focus of this list.
Note: Research by Michael Tadman has found that "'core' sources provide only a basic skeleton of a much more substantial trade" in enslaved people throughout the South, with particular deficits in records of rural slave trading, already wealthy people who speculated to grow their wealth further, and in all private sales that occurred outside auction houses and negro marts. [11]
List is organized by surname of trader, or name of firm, where principals have not been further identified.
Note: Charleston and Charles Town, Virginia are distinct places that later became Charleston, West Virginia, and Charles Town, West Virginia, respectively, and neither is to be confused with Charleston, South Carolina.
We must have a market for human flesh, or we are ruined.
— Frederick Douglass, on the predominant message from the Southern states to the U.S. government before the American Civil War, The Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. II, p. 405
It's old Van Horn, de nigger trader
Hilo! Hilo!
He sold his wife to buy a nigger
Hilo! Hilo!
He sold her first to Louisianner
Hilo! Hilo!
And den from dat to Alabammer
Hilo! Hilo!— said to be a fragment of a much longer "negro corn-shucking song," also called a working song or field holler; published 1859 [496]
I never knew a slave-trader that did not seem to think, in his heart, that the trade was a bad one. I knew a great many of them, such as Neal, McAnn, Cobb, Stone, Pulliam, and Davis, &c. They were like Haley, they meant to repent when they got through.
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: CS1 maint: others (link)Boyd, Wm. L. Jr., general agent and dealer in slaves, 50, north Cherry st., residence, 6, north Cherry st.
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: CS1 maint: others (link)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.
Charles F. Hatcher, typically advertising as C. F. Hatcher, was a 19th-century American slaver dealing out of Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He also worked as a trader of financial instruments, specie, and stocks, and as a land agent, with a special interest in selling Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas real estate to speculators and settlers.
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 Franklin and Armfield Office, which houses the Freedom House Museum, is a historic commercial building in Alexandria, Virginia. Built c. 1810–1820, it was first used as a private residence before being converted to the offices of the largest slave trading firm in the United States, started in 1828 by Isaac Franklin and John Armfield. Another source, using ship manifests in the National Archives, gives the number as "at least 5,000".
The Forks of the Road was a slave market in Natchez, Mississippi in the United States. The Forks of the Road 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.
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States.
Shadrack Fluellen Slatter, usually listed as S. F. Slatter in advertisements and often called Col. Slatter in later life, was a 19th-century American slave trader and capitalist. In the 1830s and 1840s he was part of the coastwise slave trade in partnership with his older brother Hope H. Slatter, who bought slaves in Baltimore for S. F. Slatter to sell at New Orleans. It was typical for interstate traders like the Slatters to have a buying location in the Upper South and a selling location in the Lower South. After quitting the retail slave trade, he was a real estate developer and landlord in New Orleans. In the late 1850s he was heavily involved in promoting and funding the freelance invasion of Nicaragua by William Walker. Fort Slatter in Nicaragua was named in Slatter's honor.
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.
Jordan Arterburn (1808–1875) and Tarlton Arterburn (1810–1883) were brothers and interstate slave traders of the 19th-century United States. They typically bought enslaved people in their home state of Kentucky in the upper south, and then moved them to Mississippi in the lower south, where there was a constant demand for enslaved laborers on the plantations of King Cotton. Their "negroes wanted" advertisements ran in Louisville newspapers almost continuously from 1843 to 1859. In 1876, Tarlton Arterburn claimed they had taken profits of "30 to 40 percent a head" during their slave-trading days, and that Northern abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe had visited the Arterburn slave pen in Louisville while researching Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. There is now a historical marker in Louisville at former site of the Arterburn slave jail, acknowledging the myriad abuses and human-rights violations that took place there.
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 Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave.
William A. Pullum was a 19th-century American slave trader, and a principal of Griffin & Pullum. He was based in Lexington, Kentucky, and for many years purchased, imprisoned, and shipped enslaved people from Virginia and Kentucky south to the Forks-of-the-Road slave market in Natchez, Mississippi.
Thomas McCargo, also styled Thos. M'Cargo, was a 19th-century American slave trader who worked in Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Louisiana. He is best remembered today for being one of the slave traders aboard the Creole, which was a coastwise slave ship that was commandeered by the enslaved men aboard and sailed to freedom in the British Caribbean. The takeover of the Creole is considered the most successful slave revolt in antebellum American history.
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".
Robert H. Elam, usually advertising as R. H. Elam, was an American interstate slave trader who worked in Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
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." Slaves in the United States were considered chattel, meaning they were legally treated as personal property, akin to livestock.
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.
Calvin Morgan Rutherford, generally known as C. M. Rutherford, was a 19th-century American interstate slave trader. Rutherford had a wide geographic reach, trading nationwide from the Old Dominion of Virginia to as far west as Texas. Rutherford had ties to former Franklin & Armfield associates, worked in Kentucky for several years, advertised to markets throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, and was a major figure in the New Orleans slave trade for at least 20 years. Rutherford also invested his money in steamboats and hotels.
John T. Hatcher was a 19th-century American slave trader. He was the younger brother of slave trader C. F. Hatcher; they worked together in Natchez, Mississippi and New Orleans, Louisiana. Two days before Christmas 1858, he whipped an enslaved woman to death and fled New Orleans to avoid the consequences.
Matthew Garrison was an American interstate slave trader who bought in Kentucky and sold in Louisiana and Mississippi from the 1830s into the 1860s. He ran one of the major slave jails in antebellum Louisville, Kentucky. Garrison left his entire estate to two women of color and their combined six children by him.