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.
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.
The history of slavery in Tennessee began when it was the old Southwest Territory and thus the law regulating slavery in Tennessee was broadly derived from North Carolina law, and was initially comparatively "liberal." However, after statehood, as the fear of slave rebellion and the threat to slavery posed by abolitionism increased, the laws became increasingly punitive: after 1831, "punishments were increased and privileges and immunities were lessened and circumvented." Tennessee was one of five states that allowed slaves the right of a jury trial, and one of three states that never passed anti-literacy laws, although the punishment for forging a slave pass was up to 39 lashes.
Ziba Burrill Oakes was a broker of slaves and real estate in Charleston, South Carolina. Oakes is significant in the history of American slavery in part due to his construction of what he called a "shed" at 6 Chalmers Street. The shed still stands and is now Charleston's Old Slave Mart Museum. The site as a whole, once a much larger assemblage of buildings and pens, was generally known as Ryan's mart or Ryan's nigger-jail, and shut down in late 1864 or early 1865, supposedly "when owners Thomas Ryan and Z.B. Oakes went off to fight in the war." Come the end of the American Civil War, writer and abolitionist James Redpath took it upon himself to visit Charleston's negro mart and liberate the slavery-related business documents that remained therein. The 652 letters to Z.B. Oakes looted by Redpath were eventually turned over to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and in 1891 became a part of the anti-slavery special collections at the Boston Public Library. The letters remain a significant primary source in the study of the 19th-century American slave trade.
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States.
Louis Daniel DeSaussure, scion of a historic and wealthy South Carolina family, was the most important and prosperous slave broker in the city of Charleston in the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. After the military defeat of the Confederacy he worked as an investment broker, president of a phosphate-mining company, and director of a regional railroad. During Reconstruction he was an activist in support of Democratic South Carolina politicians such as Wade Hampton III.
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.
Alonzo James White was a 19th-century businessman of Charleston, South Carolina who was known as a "notorious" slave trader and prolific auctioneer and thus oversaw the sales of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of enslaved Americans of African descent in his 30-year career in the American slave trade.
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.
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. John Hagan was also a cotton factor, meaning he ran a cotton brokerage and de facto private bank and business office for cotton plantation owners.
Seth Woodroof was a slave trader based in Lynchburg in central Virginia, United States. He was an interstate trader who ran what the Lynchburg Museum called the "most active and infamous" slave pen in the city. He is believed to have been actively trading from approximately 1830 until the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. Woodroof sat on the Lynchburg city council from 1858 to 1865.
Robert H. Elam, usually advertising as R. H. Elam, was an American interstate slave trader who worked in Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Griffin & Pullum, later Griffin, Pullum & Co., was a 19th-century American interstate slave-trading company. The principals were Pierce Griffin and William A. Pullum. They mainly bought people in Kentucky and sold them in Mississippi.
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.
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.
New Orleans, Louisiana was a major, if not the major, slave market of the lower Mississippi River valley of the United States from approximately 1830 until the American Civil War. Slaves from the upper south were trafficked by land and by sea to New Orleans where they were sold at a markup to the cotton and sugar plantation barons of the region.
John W. Lindsey was a slave trader based in Montgomery, Alabama, United States in the 1840s and 1850s.
The Richmond, Virginia slave market was the largest slave market in the Upper South region of the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. An estimated 3,000 to 9,000 slaves were sold out of Virginia annually between 1820 and 1860, many of them through Richmond. Richmond's slave traders clustered their jails and auction rooms on Wall Street, a narrow alley in a section of the city called Shockhoe Bottom, the valley created by Shockhoe Creek, which bisected the city. Traders also used the offices and meeting rooms at the Exchange Hotel, St. Charles Hotel, City Hotel and Odd Fellows' Hall. A visitor of 1852 reported, "There are four [slave depots], and all in the same street, not more than two blocks from the Exchange Hotel, where we are staying. These slave depots are in one of the most frequented streets of the place, and the sales are conducted in the building, on the first floor; and within view of the passers-by. There are small screens, behind which the men of mature years are taken for inspection; but the men and the boys are publicly examined in the open store, before an audience of full one hundred." He reported that only three of 20 men so exhibited had "clean backs" unmarked by whip scarring.
