How Extensive Was The Border State Slave Trade?: A New Look

How Extensive Was The Border State Slave Trade? A New Look William Calderheacl Just forty years ago this spring American historians welcomed the appearance of Frederic Bancroft's Stove Trading in the Old South. The theme was not new, but it was an interesting and significant one, and the book was considered definitive in its field. By combining the results of earlier research with new research and findings of his own, Bancroft came to the conclusion that a vast exodus of slaves had been flowing from the border slave states to the virgin and expanding farm areas of the Southwest. These findings were considered important, for they helped explain the facility of the rapid growth of slavery in the frontier South, its persisting and continuing value in the border states that now became an important feeder region, and the feelings in the South as a whole that if slavery could be constitutionally protected, especially in the new territories, its institutional form would have a long and profitable life. When it was published, Bancroft's book was well received. The major reviewers were sympathetic toward it and found it to be "a contribution of lasting importance, scholarly, and exhaustive" and its author was an historian who wrote "with the vehemence of a Boston pamphleteer ."1 The book's theme also fitted nicely with the revisionist spirit of historical writing of the early 1930s. The preceding generation had followed the teachings of Ulrich B. Phillips, who had placed no great emphasis on the significance of slave trading and who had argued that the chattel labor system itself was not conducive to economic profit. Now Phillips was cut down in both respects; and for good measure the border states, which had escaped their share of the blame for the evils of slavery, was now singled out for engaging in the most dire feature of the whole system: namely, slavemongering. In more recent years, as the interest in Black history has increased, a goodly number of books on slavery and on its secondary theme, the slave trade, have made their appearance. Almost without exception these writers cite Bancroft as the authority and quote his findings without challenge or hesitation. Thus current writers such as Kenneth Stampp in The Peculiar Institution, Richard Wade in his Shvery in the Cities, 1 Marion Knight and M. M. James (eds.), Book Review Digest, 1931 (New York, 1932), p. 53. 42 SLAVE TRADE43 or Eugene Genovese in The Political Economy of Slavery fully accept and freely quote from Bancroft's earlier work. In fairness to all concerned, it should be noted that no grave error was committed here. Bancroft, for his part, used standard research techniques , cited valid items of evidence, and used basic logic in reaching his conclusions. Those men who quoted him were writing about the broader theme of slavery and his findings concerning the trade in slaves were just a small feature of their broader framework. If they had been doing research on the features of the trade itself, particularly of a single border state or a county within that state, they might have come up with some very different and contradictory results. It was this very feature that I chanced upon when doing research recently on the decline of slavery in one of the slave counties in Maryland in the thirty years before the Civil War. The numbers of slaves being sold South from that county was far less than its proportional share should have been according to Bancroft's findings.2 There were two possible explanations for this. Either the county was not representative of the entire state of Maryland or Bancroft was wrong in his estimates at least as far as that border state was concerned. Further research covering the trade in the entire state of Maryland indicated that the county profile of trading was representative. The conclusion was fairly clear: contrary to Bancroft's view, Maryland did not participate extensively in the interstate trade. It will be the purpose of the remainder of this paper to examine three features of the problem now stated. First an examination will be made of the estimates of Bancroft and others of the size of the...