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  • Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life
  • Patrick Rael
Steven Deyle . Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. x + 398 pp. ISBN 019-5160401, $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 019-5310195, $19.95 (paper).

Steven Deyle's Carry Me Back demolishes the myths of the domestic slave trade, replacing images of scheming manstealers with a comprehensive, yet lucid, account of the human traffic. It does even more than this, however. Its subtitle promises to discuss the role of the domestic slave trade "in American life," and on this the book fully delivers.

The first three chapters of Carry Me Back offer a broad narrative of the rise and demise of the domestic trade. Deyle argues that the trade arose in the years following the American Revolution as the conscious effort of Chesapeake politicians and slaveholders to profit by the sale of their abundant slaves to the expanding cotton frontier, where the demand for labor was high. Success elevated the value of slaves' breeding capacities, as well as increased the risk of kidnap and family separation. Through the developing trade, slaves became the most important form of wealth in the South, a relatively liquid commodity estimated to value $3 billion in 1860 (land itself accounted for not even $2.5 billion).

It was little wonder, then, that when a Republican was elected president in 1860 on a platform dedicated to exercising federal regulation over slavery and the slave trade, Deep South politicians moved to protect "the most valuable species of their property" (p. 61). The Upper South, now deeply linked to the interests of the cotton states through their investment in the domestic slave trade, had little choice but to fall in line with secession. Some have challenged Deyle for overemphasizing the role of the domestic trade in bringing about secession. We have long known that for the Southern "plantocracy" secession was a preemptive strike designed to protect its interests from the values of Northern free-labor society. Deyle, though, demonstrates that these interests lay largely in the fungibility of the slaves themselves, through the potential profit they represented in sale. It bears remembering that it was the actual labor of slaves that made the possibility of trading them conceivable—a point Deyle would hardly argue with.

Slave traders themselves, Deyle finds, were not the stereotypes portrayed in antislavery propaganda, but a lot so varied that even identifying and defining them is a challenge. Nonetheless, those who engaged in the trade played vital roles in the economic development of the South, trading a range of products and developing critical market institutions. Slave trading was central and omnipresent throughout [End Page 220] the South. In Deyle's analysis, dealing in human beings was a capitalist endeavor structured very much like others, and slave traders embraced an entrepreneurial ethos very much akin to that of Northern businessmen.

Yet the slave trade, Deyle assures us, was in critical ways different from other forms of trade. As white Northerners grew distant from the experience of slavery in their own states, their moral distance from slavery grew, and the trade became the most charged symbol of the entire system. The first and fiercest attacks on slavery targeted the slave trade, and abolitionist converts visiting the Upper South "frequently cited an encounter with a slave coffle or an auction sale as a major turning point in their understanding that slavery was wrong" (p. 176). Over time the moral argument against the trade gave way to political strategies aimed at exercising federal control over the trade between states, and in the territories and the District of Columbia. Deyle might here have explored the critical significance of the trade in defining what it meant for a state or territory to actually permit slavery. In some Northern states, slaveowners could enjoy human property acquired in other states, but to transfer slaves within the state constituted the practice of slavery—a principle Dred Scott's defenders applied to the territories in his famous Supreme Court case of 1857.

The moral evils of the trade also pricked the consciences of Southern slaveholders, challenging them to defend the practice while...

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