"In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tadman establishes that all levels of white society in the antebellum South were deeply involved in a massive interregional trade in slaves. Using countless previously untapped manuscript sources, he documents black resilience in the face of the pervasive indifference of slaveholders toward slaves and their families ... By exploring the gulf between the slaveholders' self-image as benevolent paternalists and their actual behavior, Tadman critiques the theories of close accommodation and paternalistic hegemony that are currently influential"--From publisher's description.

Overwhelming evidence against the historical view of slavery as a benevolent "peculiar institution" Posting what he called "a most deadly array of facts," Frederic Bancroft exploded deeply entrenched myths about antebellum slavery when Slave Trading in the Old South was first published in 1931. As fresh and informative today as it was then, the classic study returns to print, giving a new generation of historians, students, and history enthusiasts access to Bancroft's pioneering examination of the domestic slave trade. Drawing largely on research that could not be duplicated today—correspondence with individuals involved in the slave trade and interviews with former slaves—Bancroft exposed the commercial aspects of the enterprise, including the "breeding" and "rearing" of slaves for future sale to western states and territories, the separation of slave families, and the profitability of the practice. By showing that the slave trade so thoroughly dominated the South, Bancroft demonstrated antebellum slavery to be an essentially commercial, exploitative, and cruel industry rather than, as many historians have claimed, a benevolent "peculiar institution" in which the selling of slaves was a relatively rare exchange between neighbors. He also discredited the notion that slave traders were social outcasts, finding instead that they came from even the highest ranks of Southern society. Michael Tadman's new introduction offers a comprehensive, thoughtful analysis of the evolving historical literature on the subject, reminding readers of the devastating effects the slave trade had both on Southern society as a whole and on its principal victims.

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Robert H. Gudmestad provides an in-depth examination of the growth and development of the interstate slave trade during the early nineteenth century, using the business as a means to explore economic change, the culture of honor, master-slave relationships, and the justification of slavery in the antebellum South. Gudmestad demonstrates how southerners, faced with the incongruity of maintaining their paternalistic beliefs about slavery even while capitalistically exploiting their slaves, coped by disassociating themselves from the brutality and greed of the slave trade and shifting responsibility for slavery’s realities to the speculators. In tracing the trans- formation of a troublesome commerce into a southern scapegoat, this pro- vocative work proves the interstate slave trade to be vital to the making—and understanding—of the paradoxical antebellum South.

This wide-ranging book presents the first comprehensive and comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas. While most scholarly attention to slavery in the Americas has concentrated on international transatlantic trade, the essays in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern states of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade. The contributors cast new light upon questions that have framed the study of slavery in the Americas for decades. The book investigates such topics as the illegal slave trade in Cuba, the Creole slave revolt in the U.S., and the debate between pro- and antislavery factions over the interstate slave trade in the South. Together, the authors offer fresh and provocative insights into the interrelations of capitalism, sovereignty, and slavery.

A series of penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World, written by a team of leading international contributors.