The Problem of Paternalism and the Domestic Slave Trade in Antebellum America

This essay examines a number of documents contained in Series II of the Indentured Servitude and Slavery Collection (“Slavery Documents”) located in the Special Collections Research Center of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.  Included in this analysis are several dozen advertisements for runaway slaves, bills of sale, deeds, estate inventories, letters written by slaveowners, notices of emancipation, and the receipts from the sale of slaves that originated in various states including Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina.  The bulk of the documents considered are legal instruments, written with the expressed purpose of ascertaining the ownership of individual persons as pieces of property.  The language of these documents challenges much of the scholarship that has contended American slavery was a paternalist institution.

Ulrich B. Phillips, for example, sought to absolve slaveholders of the charges levied by abolitionists that slavery was sinful, immoral, and inhumane.  Phillips argued that slavery was not unethical, and that slaves stood to benefit from their relations to benevolent masters.  His interpretation of slavery as a paternalist institution was based on the assumption that slaveowners who sought to restrict the freedom of their slaves acted out of their slaves’ best interest.[1] Phillips’ critique of slavery was limited to its economic inefficiencies and he defended the Southern institution by presenting a portrait of slaveholders as magnanimous and compassionate plantation patriarchs.  As Richard Hofstadter remarked in his review of American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), Phillips’ most influential books “can best be placed in the course of our intellectual history when it is realized that they represent a latter-day phase of the pro-slavery argument.”[2] Hofstadter further criticized Phillips for his “casual treatment of the slave’s resistance to slavery,” arguing that Phillips’ interpretation of the southern slave system was “highly misleading, not merely as to the character of the slave but also upon critical aspects of race relations.”[3]

Yet despite the abundant criticisms of Phillips’ view of slavery as a paternalist institution, his model of master-slave relations remained predominant for several generations.[4] In Roll, Jordan, Roll (1972) Eugene Genovese echoed Phillips’ formulation of the Southern “family” to describe the dialectical relationship between masters and slaves, a relationship that he also characterized as “paternalist.”[5] Genovese interpreted the master-slave relationship in terms of not only antagonism and loathing but also mutual understanding and reciprocity, arguing that it was “influenced heavily by the context of coercion, violence, and sale as a well as a genuine desire (on both sides) to find accommodation that could make life in a slave society bearable at last for the short term.”[6]

More recent scholarship has taken issue with this view of slavery, illustrating the many ways in which slaveowners violated any sense of mutual understanding that may have existed between masters and slaves.  By turning attention to the forcible separation of families, the commodification of human bodies, and the effects of financial speculation, recent studies of the domestic slave trade has done much to overturn the thesis of paternalism.  The domestic slave trade has been the core focus of scholars like Steven Deyle, Ariela Gross, Walter Johnson, and Michael Tadman.  These historians have shown how the domestic slave trade compromised the integrity of slaves and their families while protecting the wealth of the slaveowning class.[7] As Tadman has described in Speculators and Slaves (1989), the domestic slave trade had a disastrous effect on black families: it destroyed marriages and tore children away from their parents.[8]

Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul (1999) also offers a rebuttal to Phillips and Genovese’s analysis of “paternalism.”  Rather than seeing the slave-master relationship as symbiotic or mutually beneficial, Johnson emphasizes that slaveholders reaped tremendous profits from the subjugation of their slaves.  Johnson’s’ emphasis on the sale of slaves in particular undermines arguments put forth by slaveholders themselves and later by scholars like Phillips and Genovese that slavery united masters and their slaves in a mutually dependent and beneficial paternal relationship.  Johnson shows that the men and women who bought and sold slaves were more motivated by the utility and potential commercial value of slaves than their contributions as members of the plantation community or as extensions of the domestic “family.”  These scholars have shown that actions taken by slaveowners were clearly at odds with the view of slavery as a paternalist institution.

The legal documents analyzed here reveal that slaves were regarded as much as a source of labor as they were a form of wealth.  In the eyes of slaveholders, their health was valued only insofar as it was profitable.  The correspondence of slaveholders highlights the contradiction between the genuine concern of slaveowners and their acts of outright coercion and hostility.  Inventories of deceased slaveowners’ estates show that slaves were regarded primary as chattel.  The liquidation of slaveowners’ estates by local and state governments, often effected at public auctions, resulted in the separation of sons and daughters from their mothers and fathers.  Southern laws and legal instruments, including trusts and notarized bills of sale, offered protection to white families often at the expense of black families.

Moreover, these documents reveal that emancipation was rarely a truly liberating experience for slaves.  The manumission of slaves, which often occurred when they were aged or infirm, exposed slaves to additional hazards and dangers, not the least of which was being apprehended and sold into slavery again.  In the trading houses of major urban centers such as Charlestown, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, the domestic slave trade facilitated the negotiation of complex financial transactions and legal agreements that further dehumanized slaves, reducing them to speculative financial investments that were bought, sold, and traded on the open market for considerable sums of money.  These activities constituted the operation of the southern slave system and Southerners from all walks of life were complicit in the perpetuation of these practices.

The correspondence of slaveowners suggests that a genuine feeling of paternalism may have existed at times.  And there were instances in which slaveowners assumed full responsibility for their slaves, even going so far as to emancipate a fortunate few.  But actions and statements plainly demonstrating the unequal relationship that existed between masters and slaves often qualified even slaveowners’ most benevolent gestures. For example, on June 30, 1778, Isaac Sandberris composed a letter addressed to the wealthy tobacco trader Alexander Hamilton in Piscataway, New Jersey, regarding the health of one of Hamilton’s slaves who had recently fallen ill.[9] “Joe still continues to say he has got the fouls,” Sandberris wrote, and since he could not find a physician to determine what ailed him Sandberris advised, “I think you had better take him home and have him Examined.”  The circumstances surrounding Sandberris’ relationship with Joe and his owner were not spelled out in his correspondence.  However, it is clear from this letter that he was genuinely concerned for the slave’s health.  Sandberris claimed he would be “very willing” to look after Joe: considering the “Service he has done me . . . I am obliged to keep him.”  Yet the apparent concern that Sandberris expressed, vowing “you Cannot Expect I will suffer him to be with my Negros whilst he has that Disorder,” sat uneasily with a pointed acknowledgment of Joe’s subordinate position and his status as a slave.  This blending of genuine feelings of empathy and bald statements of prejudice were common within the writings of slaveholders and representative of what Phillip Troutman has referred to as “the sentimental language of paternalism.”[10] Troutman has argued that sentimental language “appealed to emotional bonds of family (including the paternalistic ‘family, black and white’) but could not eclipse the economic coercion of the slave market.”[11] While, on the surface, Sandberris seems to have had an earnest interest in Joe’s well-being, the compassionate tone of his letter was inconsistent with his lament that “I plainly see I shall get little or no work by him without inflicting such punishment on him as will be very disagreeable to me and perhaps also to you.”  Sandberris’ threat to punish Joe clearly betrayed his professed interest in the slave’s health and happiness.

Such contradictory attitudes of slaveholders could also be seen in the advertisements that they issued for runaway slaves.  A. D. Wroe of Prince William County, Virginia, posted a notice for the reward of two slaves who he fled from his residence in Freestone Point.[12] Wroe offered “$200 if taken in Virginia, and $300 if taken in the District of Columbia, Maryland, or Pennsylvania.”  Despite the suggestion that Wroe may have felt affection toward two slaves, one of which was described as having “a very pleasant countenance,” the two men’s decision to flee from their owner betrayed the sincerity of this compliment.  The monetary value that Wroe ascribed to the two men discredited any sense of an authentic paternal bond shared between them.  Ultimately, the two runaway slaves were reduced to superficial descriptions and financial figures that denied them the very agency they demonstrated in the act of running away.  The faux-paternalist sentimentalism expressed by slaveowners like Isaac Sandberris and A. D. Wroe were representative of a particular strain of the proslavery discourse that matured in the early decades of the nineteenth century.[13] The paradoxical and often contradictory attitudes of slaveowners toward their slaves could also be found in planters’ manuals, their essays concerning the care of slaves, and periodicals like DeBow’s Review and Southern Agriculturalist.

The ambivalent attitude of some Southerners toward slavery was also evident in the statements of public officials and politicians. In the political speech made in the chambers of state legislatures there were signs that even stalwart proponents of the Southern slavery recognized the moral defects of the system they sought to defend.  For example, in a memorial drafted by Alabama’s general assembly and approved by governor Clement C. Clay in January of 1836 there was a blunt acknowledgment of the social and political problems that slavery had fomented in that state.[14] “We were born in a land of domestic slavery,” the memorialists stated, and “like our liberties [,] it descended from our fathers.”  These Southerners claimed, “we were innocent of its introduction,” and, furthermore, “if it have evils they are own, which time and wisdom of experience must avert.”  These statements, which prefaced an admonishment of abolitionists’ “intermeddling upon the subject,” exposed the conflicted conscience of the slaveholding class, their doubts, and insecurities as well as the logic undergirding the protection and perpetuation of a practice that they acknowledged possessed “evils.”

The memorandum that the members of Alabama’s general assembly issued in 1836 was a direct response to the abolitionist petition and mailing campaigns that were launched during the previous year.[15] The memorialists criticized the “dark, deep, and malignant designs of the Abolitionists, who are settled amongst you [in the Northern states] and sending to our country their agents and incendiary pamphlets and publications, lighting up fires of discord in our slave population.”  They called upon the “Sister States” to “finally put an end to the malignant deeds of the Abolitionists, calculated to destroy our peace and sour this Union.”  They denied “the right of the citizens of any other state to claim an interference in the domestic affairs of the Southern and Middle States.  “If it be an evil,” the general assembly argued, “it is their business to say so, and remove it.”  This classic states’ rights argument underscored the ardent opposition to abolitionism that existed in states like Alabama while at the same time revealing the feelings of uncertainty, compunction, and perhaps even guilt that the assembly associated with being “born in a land of domestic slavery.”  Governor Clay and the Alabama general assembly’s acknowledgement of slavery’s moral shortcomings was remarkable for its candidness and, in many ways, quite anomalous.  Few Southern slaveholders wished to draw attention to the accusations of abolitionists, and for this reason the slave trade was a particularly sore subject among those citizens who held blacks in bondage.

Slaveowners and defenders of the system sought to distance themselves from the domestic slave trade, and the slave trader was a figure reviled throughout the South. They argued that most owners were reluctant to sell their slaves and that they almost never did so for economic gain..[16] Yet, the extant records of slaveowners’ estates demonstrate that even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bondsmen and their enslaved families were regarded primarily as chattel.  For example, When Moses Linton died in 1759 in Fairfax County, Virginia, an inventory of his estate shows that he owned seventeen slaves collectively valued at £450.[17] The impersonal nature in which Linton’s estate was tabulated suggested that these individuals were perceived as possessions, not people, and certainly not “family.”  The inventory of Linton’s estate included “the Negro child called Drusilla” and an “old Negro man called Will,” among others, with little information besides their names and their appraised monetary value.  Similarly, the death of Arthur McClure in 1796 in Lincoln County, Kentucky, prompted officials representing the county court to record and appraise his property, which included a family of slaves.[18] The “Negro Man Named Sambo” was valued along with his unnamed wife and child at £170.  They, too, were listed side by side with other possessions that once belonged to McClure, including nine sheep, a bull, and three plows.

The dehumanization of enslaved blacks in the states of the Upper South was a process facilitated not only by the slaveowners who held men, women, and children in bondage but also by the legal system that mandated such individuals were to be assigned a price and sold on the open market.[19] Estate or “probate” sales were an important source of slaves for organized markets throughout the South.  Slaveowners insisted that estate sales provided a way to purchase slaves for the purpose of reuniting divided families or keeping them together.[20] Yet since the death of a slaveholder often opened certain opportunities for traders and speculators to turn a profit, such sales were crucial for the perpetuation of the southern slave system and often resulted in the coerced division of families.  As Steven Deyle has argued, “very little worried enslaved Americans more than the death of their owners, since that often meant that sales would occur to divide and settle their estates.”[21] Slaves who were separated from their families after the death of their owners and the liquidation of their owners’ estates were often sold at auction.  Such was the case that prompted Solomon Holland to issue a printed announcement for the public sale of a slave family consisting of “ONE NEGRO WOMAN, Aged about thirty years, and her Five Children, Consisting of three likely boys and two girls.”[22] This particular sale, scheduled to commence at “2 o’clock P.M.” on August 31, 1826, at the residence of Abraham Dawson in Rockville represented only one instance of the systematic pattern of buying and selling of humans as property that Deyle shows was “a regular part of everyday life.”[23] In his study of the domestic slave trade, Deyle found that judicial sales, such as the one advertised by Holland, differed from commercially oriented sales made by professional traders in urban centers like New Orleans or Charlestown in that they “remained primarily a neighborhood affair.”[24] Like the estimated two million of other such sales of human chattel that took place in the South, the value accorded to this unnamed woman and her five children was largely determined by the open market.

Such public sales attracted large crowds, were regarded as noteworthy social events, and effectively gave legitimacy to the enterprise.  Since the expressed purpose of such public auctions was the sale or disposal of property that was not claimed by the heirs of deceased citizens, the amounts paid for slaves that were acquired in this manner could be well below market prices.   For example, when Jacob Collins of Baldwin County, Alabama, died in the winter of 1847 his slave Charity was put up for sale and “knocked off” the auction block by the highest bidder, Thomas Humphries, for $495.[25] Since the bill of sale formalizing this transaction contained few details about the parties involved, it is impossible to determine from this document alone whether Humphries would seek to resell Charity at some point in the future in order to gain a return on his investment.  However, what it is possible to discern from this receipt is that the “Honorable Inferior Court of Baldwin County” was an active agent in the cyclical sale of slaves—a process that made the existence of a speculative market both possible and profitable.[26] Like the public auction in Rockville, which was effected by order of the chancery court of Montgomery County, Maryland, the sale of Charity in Alabama was a sale ordered by a southern court of law.

Few of the bills of sale that formalized the status of slaves contained details that would allow historians to discern the attitude of slaves themselves.  However, the circumstances under which the estate of Beverly Broaddus was allotted and divided amongst the slaveowner’s heirs suggests that there was significant resistance to the forced separation of families.  On September 7, 1855, the Lincoln County Court issued an order appointing Major James Miller, R. W. Graham, and S. O. Middleton as commissioners to “allot & Divide between the Heirs of Beverly Broaddus Deceased the negroes belonging to said Estate to the Best of their ability.”[27] That these three men were needed to execute the division of the ten slaves that comprised the Broaddus estate suggests that physical force may have been necessary.  In the report that Miller subsequently issued to the court in the following month he enumerated the name and ascribed value of each slave, but he did not include any additional details indicating whether the commissioners had succeeded in dividing the family.[28]

Estate sales and public auctions represented only a small fraction of the domestic slave trade.  Far more common were the local simple-fee sales and private bargains through which individual slaves were sold.  Deyle found that “[o]f the more than 2 million slaves who were sold in America between 1820 and 1860, more than two-thirds were sold to local buyers.”[29] Gideon Evans, who was a resident of South Carolina’s Barnwell District, initiated several such transactions.  On March 15, 1844, Evans sold Matilda and her son George for $700 to James Johnson.[30] The bill of sale that formalized the transfer of the mother and child to the new owner contained a provision guaranteeing all subsequent children born by Matilda would also legally belong to the purchaser.  The cruel fate of the unborn was predetermined by the words that Evans scribbled: “I warent and for Ever Defend of Sd Johnson his heirs and assngs for Ever the futer Isue of Sd woman.” Such transactions compounded the denial of self-ownership with the negation of the woman’s claim to her own children.

The emergence of the lucrative interstate slave trade engendered a new market for slaves in which young women in particular were regarded as especially valuable commodities.  Their monetary value was derived not from their potential as laborers but for their biological fertility, which slave traders, plantation owners, and people who owned only one or two slaves saw as a source of potential wealth.[31] The changing attitudes toward black women and the increased value assigned to their reproductive potential was a direct result of the expanding domestic market for slaves.  This development was clearly visible in the contract that Gideon Evans negotiated with Sovereign S. Evans (presumably a relative) on April 4, 1853, in which “a Negro slave named Rose . . . together with her future increase” were sold for $500.[32] The language of the bill stated that Rose’s status as a slave would be inherited by her children (“her future increase”) and that the ownership of those children could be freely exchanged between parties and across generations.  Unlike Evan’s prior sale of Matilda and her son George to James Johnson in 1844, it seems that Evans had a personal stake in the sale of Rose that went beyond the motive of profit alone.  This particular sale represented a legal trust that Evans established “in Consideration of the love and affection which I have for my daughter Lucretia.”  In transferring the ownership of “Rose together with her future increase” to a trustee, Evans sought to secure the pecuniary value of the slave property “for the sole and Separate use of my Said Daughter Lucretia for and during her life” while protecting her from the risk of “future debts[,] contracts or engagements of her present or future husband.”  Through the legal device of the trust, Evans sought assurance that his daughter could enjoy the benefits that accrued from owning a slave; in other words, he desired to protect his own family while simultaneously approving the destruction of his slave’s.

The double standard that Evan imposed upon Rose’s yet unborn children was especially apparent in the provision concerning the distribution of the trust in the eventuality of Lucretia’s death.  The contract stated, “should the said Lucretia die leaving Issue [children] alive at the time of her death and in that case In Trust to convey and deliver the Said Slave Rose and her increase to the Said Issue of the Said Lucretia to be Equally divided and deed by them in Severalty to themselves and their heirs and assigns forever, freed and discharged from all further and other trusts.”  The separation of Rose’s family was predetermined by the terms of the contract, even if Lucretia herself bore no children.  Under such circumstances, it was stipulated that Rose and her increase would be conveyed to the unnamed “Brothers and Sisters . . . or children of a deceased Brother or Sister.”  Through the complex and all-encompassing language of this legal trust, the potential security of Evan’s heirs was carefully guarded as the future separation of Rose from her own children and the destruction of her family was virtually guaranteed.[33]

While the language of the bills of sale revealed a great about the desires and fantasies of slaveowners, they often contained limited information about the people who were regarded as items of exchange.  The vast majority of slave sales were prosaic in nature and the language of the contracts underscored this fact.  Occasionally, the bills of sale included physical details that could be used to identify certain slaves. But the omnipotent language of the slave sale rendered almost all personal details pertaining to the individual being sold superfluous.[34] Such sales were often contingent upon the health or “soundness” of the persons being sold.  The warranty laws (or redhibition laws, as they were called in Louisiana) were designed to protect buyers.  Ostensibly such laws would have protected the health of slaves, but they in fact did nothing to safeguard slaves’ health.  For example, in the bill of sale by which Rufus Reid sold the slave Rachel and her daughter Elizabeth for $1,004, the trader noted that he warranted the two “to be sound & good property except for Rachel[‘]s breasts, which I have not sold as sound.”[35] Similarly, when Z. T. Smith sold “a negro girl about fifteen years old by the name of Sarah” to B. J. Brockman for $1,000 on May 3, 1856, in South Carolina’s Laurens District, was described as “sound in body and mind and a slave for life.”[36] Thus, her sale was a testament to her energy and mental acuity while at the same time a negation of her physical vitality and consciousness as a person.

Even when masters sought to demonstrate their good-will towards their slaves through the ostensibly benevolent gesture of emancipation, the prejudice and inequality perpetuated by the Southern slave system remained evident.  For example, in 1823 Betty Allen of Harrison County, Kentucky, publicly announced that they wished to emancipate their four slaves, George, Simon, Henry, and Jack, for “divine causes and considerations.”[37] The hypocrisy of this act was apparent in the fact that manumission of the four men was not scheduled to occur until after the death of their owner: “said negroes & their increase are to be free & not before.”  In other words, the Allen’s declaration of their intent to “hereby emancipate & let at liberties our negroes” was conditional upon “the reserving [of] their service to us for and during the life of the undersigned.”  This could also be seen when on April 1, 1844, George Dooley “emancipated his negro Rhoda alias Rhoda Brown” and issued a five hundred bond of indemnity in order to “prevent the Slave from becoming chargeable” to Lincoln County.[38] Although the circumstances surrounding Dooley’s decision to emancipate Rhoda were rather murky, it is clear than in issuing the bond, which would protect him against any adverse claims, Dooley sought to shield himself at Rhoda’s expense.

Free people of color living in slaveholding states like Louisiana vulnerable targets of slave traders, and those living in northern free states were also constantly in danger of being illegally apprehended and carried away to be sold in the Southern slave markets.[39] Such was the case when on July 12, 1848, Benjamin Morgan declared his intent to emancipate his fifty-five-year old slave Helen in New Orleans.[40] His notice was to be posted in the First District Court for the duration of forty days, during which time “Every person having any legal opposition to said emancipation” was required to file a petition.  Despite whatever benevolent intentions Morgan may have had in emancipating Helen, even if no one did submit a petition, she would still remain at risk of being enslaved again.  Helen’s freedom may not have been secured even by her owner’s formal acknowledgment of emancipation.  Given Helen’s age (fifty five) and the public declaration of her legal emancipation, it may have been possible that she could avoid being sold into slavery.  However, the interconnected nature of the domestic slave trade that knit together the Upper and Lower South made the perpetual enslavement of people of color not only possible but practically inevitable.

With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, people of color who managed to escape from bondage in the South were exposed to additional hazards.  Whether legally free or considered a “fugitive,” those who were apprehended under the 1850 federal law  were at the mercy of citizens who were authorized by local and state courts “to use such reasonable force and restraint as may be necessary, under the circumstances of the case, to take and remove such fugitive person back to the State or Territory whence he or she may have escaped.”[41] The law empowered slave traders, sanctioning the seizure and detention of alleged fugitives and validated the systemic dislocation of blacks from the Upper and Middle South (as well as from free states and territories in the North).  Local, state, and federal courts played an important role in granting  citizens the authorization necessary to “to seize or arrest and transport such person to the State or Territory from which he escaped.”[42] It is difficult to calculate the effect of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act on the free black populations in the United States, yet the expansion of the domestic slave trade in the decade after its passage suggests that the law was of critical importance to the full maturation of the southern slave system at mid-century.

With a shift to the urban trade in the 1840s and 1850s, professional slave markets became an increasingly vital feature of the interregional traffic in American slaves.  The intercity commerce and coastal trade was a crucial link in the slave-trading network, connecting slave traders in the exporting regions of the Upper and Middle South with purchasers in the Lower South, the interior, and the developing territories in the Southwest. Organized, professional auction houses in cities like New Orleans provided the venues through which slaves were “transformed from vessels of their own feelings and hopes into vehicles of their owners’ plans and receptacles of their masters’ fantasies.”[43] Thomas Bondar of New Orleans clearly articulated the mindset of the professional slave trader when on March 2, 1849, he wrote a letter to his associate in Norfolk, Virginia, to acknowledge the sale of one slave and to recommend the sale of another.  Bondar worked in New Orleans as the representative for the Virginia slave dealer, W. W. Hall.  With his correspondence, Bondar included a check for “past proceeds of woman Julia Downing sold at six hundred & twenty five dollars” and noted that he had recently been “offered five hundred dollars for Anthony payable in 12 month no interest without guaranty.”[44] Bondar seems to have been intimately familiar with the dynamics of the slave market and the perceived urgency of such fast-paced market transactions, yet he deferred to Hall’s judgment in the matter of accepting the offer made for Anthony, stating, “I will not take it unless you say so.”  But Bondar also offered his view of the business opportunity, noting, “The paper is good” and he advised, “The only chance that I will have of sending him back [to Virginia] will be by then Gone.”

Slaves like Julia Downing and Anthony who had been transported to New Orleans from Norfolk, Virginia, represented but a small proportion of the New Orleans trade.[45] Far more common were the sale of slaves whose owner’s had recently passed away and were brought to be sold in the auction houses.[46] Estate and other judicial or court-ordered sales constituted the bulk of the sales made in New Orleans and other urban centers in the South that had professional slave-trading markets.  For example, upon the death of Marie Emmeline St. Martin in New Orleans in December of 1850, the Second District Court of New Orleans ordered the sale of St. Martin’s six slaves.[47] These included: Theodore, identified as a twenty-eight-year-old “mulatto Boy” and a house servant was sold to Eugene Lorraine for $720; Thomas, a thirty-three-year-old “negro man” was identified as having “a fistula” (an ulcer) who was sold to P. R. Barnes for $350; and Sally, “a negro aged about 45 years” who was identified as a cook.  She was sold along with her twelve-year-old son Jean Baktisto and her fourteen-year-old daughter to George Y. Bright, Esq. for $1,230.  The bill of sale that recorded the purchase of these six individuals noted that the transaction occurred “at auction at 12 o’clock at the St. Lewis Exchange” with the expense of the transactions being paid to the auctioneers.

The New Orleans slave markets facilitated the sale of slaves through complex financial transactions that further dehumanized the people being sold.  On October 6, 1858, Ursin and Alfred Dellardes purchased “[a] certain slave for life named Charles or Charlot aged about nineteen years” from Charles Arthur Gayarre, Jr. for $1,100.[48] The bill of sale recording this transaction noted that Gayarre had come to own Charles in the following manner: “one half” by purchase from another slave dealer on February 19, 1857, and “the other undivided half by virtue of an act” sealed on March 4, 1858.  The provenance of Charles’s past shows that he had been halved, assigned various values, sold, and resold at multiple points in his recent past.  It was precisely through such seemingly banal operations of the New Orleans auction houses that hundreds of thousands of slaves like Charles were reduced to “a person with a price.”[49]

The professional vendors who worked in the New Orleans auction houses facilitated such complex financial transactions involving the sale of slaves.  But traders were not the only individuals who used the trade to commodify the bodies of slaves.  The receipts of other transactions reveal that ordinary customers who wished to buy slaves were also complicit in perpetuating the market-oriented system.  For example, when the widow Madam Marie Justine Poche entered into an agreement with Bertrand Salay and, she made a considerable profit by selling her twenty-year-old slave Olivia and her two-year-old daughter Adele.[50] Madam Poche exchanged the mother and her daughter for Aimeé, who was “aged about forty years” and valued at $300 dollars less than her own slaves.  This exchange allowed the widow to pocket a substantial sum of cash while at the same time the trader Salay became the legal owner of two slaves who were expected to appreciate in value.  From the perspective of both buyer and seller, Olivia and her daughter represented a speculative investment and, according to the sordid logic of the slave market, they offered both parties an opportunity to turn a profit.  Salay could either sell them both immediately or wait until Olivia’s daughter reached an age at which another buyer would be willing to purchase her separately from her mother.[51]

Well-organized urban auction houses like the St. Lewis Exchange in New Orleans encouraged speculation, and ordinary citizens like Madam Poche and professional slave traders like Bertrand Salay reaped ever-greater profits from the sale of slaves.  While the prices paid for slaves tripled over the course of the nineteenth century, the less visible, more improvisational, and often less expensive sales that occurred through the loosely connected rural trading network remained “the real glue that held the southern slave system together.”[52] Public auctions in rural locales had an equally devastating effect on black families than the types of complex transactions that took place in the urban markets. While “Southerners insisted that owners loved their people, as they liked to call them, and would just as soon part with a member of their family than one of their slaves,” the evidence of black families being sold even in rural settings are clearly inconsistent with this paternalist defense.[53] For example, it is unlikely that A. Brooks, the administrator of an auction held in Mobile County, Alabama, harbored any paternal feelings toward the family he sought to sell on behalf of the District Court in the early years of the Confederacy.[54] The very fact that Brooks advertised the public sale of what clearly constituted a family unit—”Jim, a laborer, about 26 years old, and his two Girl Children, one about 6 years old, and the other about 2 years old” along with his wife “Clara, a washerwoman, about 23 years old”—as “property” clearly undermined the notion that the Southern slave system was paternal in nature.  The paramount importance of the slaves as a source of wealth was readily apparent the “Terms of Sale” which stipulated: “The Negroes will be sold for cash.”[55]

Even under the extenuating circumstances of the Civil War, Southern courts upheld the legal terms by which slaves had been sold as property.  On behalf of Ellen Haygood, V. J. Williamson petitioned the Barnwell District Court of Equity for the sale of a certain unnamed slave on March 2, 1863.[56] Earlier that year the court had “declared that the prayer be granted & that the commissioner of the court, after fifteen days of advertisements in the Barnwell Sentinel at Barnwell Court House, on some convenient day sell the slaves mentioned in the petition.”  Under these circumstances, the Commissioner in Equity James Patterson sold to Sovereign S. Evans a slave named Judy for the sum of nine hundred dollars, along with “the future issue and increase of the said female.”  This transaction demonstrated that even through the early 1860s slaveowners and slave traders like Sovereign S. Evans continued to pay substantial amounts of money in order to own more slaves.  The involvement of the courts in this transaction also demonstrates that the state and local governments throughout the South remained implicated in the domestic slave trade through such court-ordered sales.  The fact that government officials chose not to extricate themselves from the slave market, and that the market itself did not collapse as a result of the Civil War by 1863 (the year in which this sale was made) underscores the extent to which the trade was entrenched within the Southern slave system and, indeed, provided the legal and economic infrastructure through which it could operate.

The court-ordered sale of slaves remained an important feature of the slave system well through antebellum period and up until the final years of the Confederacy.  The complicity of local and state governments is evident in many of the documents examined in this essay.  Local and state governments facilitated the various types of transactions that made the sale of slaves possible, including estate sales and public auctions.  Probate courts oversaw the dispensation of deceased slaveowners’ estates.  Courts throughout the South like the Inferior Court of Baldwin County, Alabama, and the Barnwell District Court of Equity in South Carolina, and the Second District Court of New Orleans discussed here validated trusts and other complex legal agreements that breached slaveholders’ professed concern for “family, black and white.” These legal practices exposed the system’s hypocritical protection of white families at the expense of black families.  The warranty and redhibition laws they upheld likewise demonstrated that slaves were regarded primarily as a form of wealth and that their health was an issue of concern of slaveowners only insofar as it was profitable.

This sample has also revealed that emancipation in the South before the Civil War was for many slaves not a liberating experience.  Rather, emancipation was often a ruse that slaveowners used to manipulate their slaves.  Even in cases in which slaves did achieve a degree of freedom, their liberty was severely compromised by the hazards of re-enslavement perpetuated by the domestic slave trade, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and related laws.  With the shift to the urban trade, the dislocation of individuals and the destruction of families accelerated.  In the auction houses of Charlestown and New Orleans southern courts also played a key role in authorizing the complex financial transactions and legal agreements conducted by professional traders that abetted the division of families, reduced slaves to speculative financial investments.  These actions, too, clearly violated slaveowner’s alleged concern for their slaves.  In the process, these actors contributed to what Walter Johnson has described as “a history of subjection that in demographic scale, cultural impact, and sheer psychological terror ranks as one of the most obscene in human history.”[57]

These records of the domestic slave trade in the antebellum South describe the contours of a culture that could be more accurately described as capitalist than “paternalist.”  The domestic slave trade facilitated the rapid expansion of the South’s agricultural economy and the massive accumulation of wealth by slave traders and speculators while simultaneously destroying families, uprooting and displacing an already racially oppressed and socially stigmatized population.  The slave trade contributed to a dependency on slavery not only to supply the labor that sustained the agricultural economy but also to underwrite the capital value of slaves in order to maintain its solvency.  The trade constituted the core of the southern slave system and without it the South’s economy was at risk of imploding and collapsing, as it did with the abolition of slavery and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865.

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[1] See Ulrich B. Philips, American Negro Slavery (D. Appleton and Company, 1918) and Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Little, Brown, and Company, 1929).

[2] Richard Hofstadter, “U. B. Phillips and The Plantation Legend,” in The Journal of Negro History 29:2 (April 1944), 122.

[3] Ibid.

[4] See Eugene D. Genovese, “Race and Class in Southern History: An Appraisal of the Work of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips,” in Agricultural History 41:4 (1967): 345-358.

[5] See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).  See also  Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1961).

[6] Lacy Ford, “Reconsidering the Internal Slave Trade: Paternalism, Markets, and the Character of the Old South,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Yale University Press, 2004), 150.  See also James D. Anderson, “Aunt Jemima in Dialectics: Genovese on Slave Culture,” in The Journal of Negro History 61:1 (1976): 99-114 and Walter Johnson, “A Nettlesome Classic Turns Twenty-Five: Re-Reading Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll,” in Common-Place 1:4 (July 2001).

[7] See Steven Deyle,  Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford University Press, 2005), Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2000), Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999), Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

[8] Tadman calculated that 60 percent of the 1.1 million slaves who migrated from one state to another between 1790 and 1860 moved as a result of the internal slave trade.  See Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989)  See also Michael Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of the U.S. South,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Yale University Press, 2004): 117-42.

[9] Isaac Sandsberris to Alexander Hamilton regarding sick slave named Joe, Piscataway, New Jersey, June 30, 1778.  SISC, Folder 35, SCRC UCL.

[10] Phillip Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, eds., New Studies in the History of American Slavery (University of Georgia Press, 2006), 211-42.

[11] Troutman has further argued that “Far from representing a relationship bound by common paternalistic values, sentimental language exposed the contingency, the tentativeness, or the downright absence of any such relationship.”  Ibid., 213.  See also Phillip Troutman, “Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2000.)

[12] Poster offering $300.00 reward for two runaway slaves, put out by A.D. Wroe, Prince William Country, Virginia, n.d.  SISC, Folder 33, SCRC UCL.

[13] See Paul Finkelman, ed., Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003).

[14] Memorandum concerning northern abolitionist sentiment, from the General Assembly of Alabama to the General Assemblies of the several states in the Union, signed by C.C. Clay, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1836 January 9.  SISC, Folder 41, SCRC UCL.  See also SISC, Folder 42, SCRC UCL.

[15] With the passage of the so-called “gag rule” in Congress that prohibited the reading and discussion of petitions against slavery beginning in 1836 abolitionists turned to a new tactic of deluging Southern states with antislavery propaganda.  See Ford, “Reconsidering the Internal Slave Trade,” 144 and Deyle, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America,” 104.  See also Lewis H. Lapham, Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy (New York: Penguin Press, 2004)

[16] Steven Deyle, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America: The Lifeblood of the Southern Slave System,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Yale University Press, 2004): 109. Steven Deyle, “‘The Irony of Liberty’: Origins of the Domestic Slave Trade,” in The Journal of the Early Republic 12 (Spring 1992): 40.

[17] Inventory of the estate of Moses Linton, Fairfax County, Virginia, October 18, 1752.  SISC, Folder 26, SCRC UCL.

[18] Inventory and appraisement of the estate of Arthur McClure, Lincoln County, Kentucky, November 23, 1796.  SISC, Folder 27, SCRC UCL.

[19] Such was also the case that brought the thirty-one-year old slave Peter to be sold in 1797. After the death of his former owner, Nathan Farris, Peter was bought by Jonathan Forbis from the executors of the Farris estate “for & in consideration of the sum of one hundred & fifteen pounds current money” at the courthouse in Lincoln County, Kentucky.  He was warranted to be “healthy, sound, sensible & clear of any impediments or disorders whatsoever.” Bill of sale for slave, Peter, sold to Jonathan Forbes by John Fitzgerald and John Robertson, Lincoln County, Kentucky, June, 1797.  SISC, Folder 9, SCRC UCL.

[20] Steven Deyle,  Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford University Press, 2005): 212.

[21] Ibid., 249.

[22] Announcement of a trustee sale of one Negro woman and her five children, to be held on September 20, Rockville, n.p., August 31, 1826.  SISC, Folder 30, SCRC UCL.

[23] Deyle, Carry Me Back, 144.

[24] Ibid., 171.

[25] Bill of sale for slave, Jules, sold to Eugene Hacker by George W. Dunbar, New Orleans, L.A., February 8, 1862.  SISC, Folder 24, SCRC UCL.

[26] The public nature of selling slaves at auctions and the high visibility of slave coffles drew negative attention to slavery, and even Southern advocates of the system found these spectacles unsettling, but “as time went on and the demand for and prices of slaves kept soaring in the Old Southwest, planters became more open about such transactions.” Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Yale University Press, 2004): x.

[27] Order appointing commissioners to allot and divide the Negro slaves of Beverly Broaddus between his heirs, Lincoln County, Kentucky, September 7, 1855.  SISC, Folder 45 SCRC UCL.

[28] Report of the commissioners on the allotment of the slaves of the ten slaves belonging to Beverly Broaddus amongst his heirs, Lincoln County, Kentucky, September 8, 1855.  SISC, Folder 46, SCRC UCL.

[29] Deyle, Carry Me Back, 157.

[30] Bill of sale for slave, Matilda and her son George, sold to James Johnson by Gideon Evans, Barnwell District, South Carolina, March 15, 1844.  SISC, Folder 13, SCRC UCL.

[31] This bias was evident in Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm.” Edwin M. Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book (Princeton, 1953) quoted in Deyle, “ The Irony of Liberty,’” 51.

[32] Bill of sale for a slave, Rose, sold to S.S. Evans by Gideon Evans, Barnwell District, South Carolina, April 4, 1853.  SISC, Folder 16, SCRC UCL.

[33] In a similar transaction conducted on July 1, 1861, Gideon Evans appointed Milledge T. Holly (the former husband of his deceased daughter Martha) as the trustee of an estate comprised of “a Negro slave named Anmary about Nineteenth years of age and her child named Giney about two years of age.”  They, along with “their future issue and increases” were to be held in trust “for the use[,] benefit and behoof [sic]” of Martha’s two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth  See Bill of sale for slave, Anmary and her child Giney, sold to Milledge T. Holly by Gideon Evans, Barnwell District, South Carolina, July 10, 1861.  SISC, Folder 23, SCRC UCL.

[34] For example, in the advertisement A. D. Wroe of Prince William County, Virginia, had printed, the runaway slaves Enoch and Charles Chinn were described as “a dark copper-color, about 37 years of age, about 5 feet 8 inches high” and “about 37 years of age, about 6 feet high, and has a very pleasant countenance.”  See Poster offering $300.00 reward for two runaway slaves, put out by A.D. Wroe, Prince William Country, Virginia, n.d.  SISC, Folder 33, SCRC UCL.

[35] Bill of sale for slave, Rachel and her daughter Elizabeth, sold to an unknown person by Rufus Reid, n.p., July 1836.  SISC, Folder 11, SCRC UCL. Walter Johnson found that these provisions were “comparatively rare, appearing on only six percent of the Acts of Sale notarized by buyers in the New Orleans market.” See Johnson, Soul by Soul, 133.

[36] Bill of sale for a slave, Sarah, sold to B.J. Brockman by Z.T. Smith, Laurens District, South Carolina, May 3, 1856.  SISC, Folder 18, SCRC UCL.

[37] Manumission from John and Betsy Allen to their Negro slaves, George, Simon, Hester, Hannah, Jack, Scipio, approved in the Harrison County October Court, Kentucky, 1823.  SISC, Folder 38, SCRC UCL.

[38] Bond of indemnity to prevent emancipated slave, Rhoda, from becoming chargeable to the County, Lincoln County, Kentucky, April 1, 1844.  SISC, Folder 43, SCRC UCL.

[39] As Deyle as observed, “the growing free black population of the North and Upper South [became] an easy target for unscrupulous traders.” Deyle, “‘The Irony of Liberty,’” 52.

[40] Sheriff’s notice of the intention of Benjamin Morgan to emancipate his slave, Helen, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1848 July 12.  SISC, Folder 31, SCRC UCL.

[41] “An Act to amend and supplementary to, the Act entitled, ‘An Act respecting Fugitives from Justice and Persons escaping from the Service of their Masters.’ approved February 12, 1793, approved September 18, 1850” (9 Stat. at L. 462).  See Paul Finkelman, “The Kidnapping of John Davis and the Adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793,” The Journal of Southern History 56:3 (1990): 397-422.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Johnson, “The Future Store,” 6.

[44] Thomas Bondar, New Orleans, to W.W. Hall, slave dealer of Norfolk, Virginia, regarding proceeds of the sale of a Negro woman, Julia Downing, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1849 March 2.  SISC, Folder 44, SCRC UCL.

[45] Michael Tadman calculated that the coastal traffic between Richmond, Virginia, and New Orleans represented no more than 5 percent of the trade. Michael Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of the U.S. South,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Yale University Press, 2004): 127.

[46] Deyle, Carry Me Back, 118.

[47] Bill of sale for six slaves sold and prices brought at an auction, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 28, 1851.  SISC, Folder 15, SCRC UCL.

[48] Bill of sale for slave, Charles of Charlot, sold to Ursin and Alfred Dellardes by Charles Arthur Gayarre, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 8, 1858.  SISC, Folder 21, SCRC UCL.

[49] Johnson, Soul by Soul 2.

[50] Bill of sale for the exchange of slaves named Aimeé, her daughter Adele, and Olivia between Bertrand Salay and Marie Justine Poche Keller, New Orleans, 1862.  SISC, Folder 25, SCRC UCL.

[51] Young children were typically, although not always, sold with their mothers.  For example, thirty-six-year old Betsey was sold with her five children, aged fourteen, twelve, seven, three, and an infant “about two or three months.”  Purchased from Bartholomew and Jeanette M. Labuzan by John W. Munn for $3,500 on April 22, 1857, in Mobile County, Alabama, it is likely that this partial family unit would remain intact until it became convenient or profitable for their new owners to be sold separately.  See Bill of sale for six slaves, Betsey, Roberta, Henry, John, an unnamed boy and an infant, sold to John W. Munn by Bartholomew and Jeanette M. Labuzan, Mobile County, Alabama, April 22, 1857.  SISC, Folder 19, SCRC UCL.

[52] Deyle, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America,” 95.  Deyle, Carry Me Back, 144.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Printed notice of a forthcoming auction of Negroes and Real Estate, to be held on Monday May 11, at 10 a.m., Mobile County, Alabama, n.d.  SISC, Folder 32, SCRC UCL.

[55] The advertisement posted by the District Court of the Confederate States of the Southern Division of the District of Alabama also announced that “Confederate States Treasury Notes and Bonds will be received in payment.”  Ibid.

[56] Grant of a petition for the sale of certain slaves, and bill of sale for one of them, sold to S.S. Evans by James Patterson, Barnwell District, South Carolina, March 2, 1863.  SISC, Folder 47, SCRC UCL.

[57] Johnson, “The Future Store,” 6.