The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America
An award-winning historian's "searing" (Wall Street Journal) account of America's internal slave trade-and its role in the making of America
Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men-who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South-were essential to slavery's expansion and fuelled the growth and prosperity of the United States.In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the centre of capital flows connecting southern fields to north-eastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.Joshua D. Rothman is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama, where he served as Director of the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South from 2010-2016. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, book reviews, and review essays, as well as of two previous prizewinning books Notorious in the Neighborhood and Flush Times and Fever Dreams. Rothman is also the co-editor, with Heather Cox Richardson, of the online magazine We're History (werehistory.org), and he has written for numerous online venues including The Hollywood Reporter, Public Seminar, BloombergView, Aeon Magazine, The Atlantic and the Disunion blog of the New York Times.
Author: Joshua D. Rothman
Format: Paperback, 512 pages, 138mm x 208mm, 440 g
Published: 2023, Basic Books, United States
Genre: Regional History
An award-winning historian's "searing" (Wall Street Journal) account of America's internal slave trade-and its role in the making of America
Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men-who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South-were essential to slavery's expansion and fuelled the growth and prosperity of the United States.In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the centre of capital flows connecting southern fields to north-eastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.Joshua D. Rothman is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama, where he served as Director of the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South from 2010-2016. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, book reviews, and review essays, as well as of two previous prizewinning books Notorious in the Neighborhood and Flush Times and Fever Dreams. Rothman is also the co-editor, with Heather Cox Richardson, of the online magazine We're History (werehistory.org), and he has written for numerous online venues including The Hollywood Reporter, Public Seminar, BloombergView, Aeon Magazine, The Atlantic and the Disunion blog of the New York Times.