The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn (review)

In The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, Calvin Schermerhorn examines the establishment and growth of slave-trading firms and elucidates how ancillary companies, financial institutions, and governmental entities facilitated the trade. In alignment with the recent work of Walter Johnson, Edward E. Baptist, and Sven Beckert, among others, Schermerhorn situates slave-trading squarely within early republican mercantilism. More profoundly, he argues that “ventures that financed, traded, and transported enslaved people” can teach us about the history of American capitalism more “than any other enterprise” (p. 1).

The men who established slave-trading firms are central actors in this book. They were astute entrepreneurs who attentively monitored the slave markets, assessed the businesses of their competitors, measured consumer demand, and supplied buyers with the enslaved people they sought. These men were nimble in their enterprise because they had to be, especially in the early decades of the nineteenth century as the nation spread west, taking slavery with it. One of them, Francis E. Rives, transported African-descended captives from Virginia to the lower South at a time when the domestic slave trade was rudimentary and largely disorganized. Such realities compelled Rives to develop a cost-effective business model while navigating treacherous landscapes and national economic and political infrastructures that were only beginning to take domestic slave speculation into account.

Men like Austin Woolfolk made their fortunes under starkly different circumstances. They exploited filial relationships, technological innovations, and the fiscal and political developments of their day to revolutionize the business. Woolfolk built “a brand name synonymous with the slave trade” through clever and ambitious advertising, and he used familial ties to create a network of agents operating in the most optimal, geostrategically positioned slave markets in the South (p. 35). Not to be outdone, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield upped the ante by implementing cutting-edge business practices, like in-house financing.

Refreshingly, Schermerhorn further belies the alleged moral divide between the North and the South by reconstructing interregional and global networks of finance, charting the voluntary and coerced movement of people from northern to southern states, and highlighting the southern business ventures of northern capitalists. For example, when John Craig Marsh failed as a New York merchant, he exploited the loopholes in the state’s gradual emancipation laws to coerce indentured and free New Yorkers of color into contracts that returned them to a state of slavery. Then, he smuggled them into Louisiana where they toiled on southern plantations for decades.

As the nation won the battle with Mexico over Texas, New York steamboat magnate Charles Morgan reaped the rewards that came with slavery’s expansion into these lands. Alongside the revenue he earned from federal postal and military contracts, Morgan took slave traders’ and slave owners’ money and stuffed enslaved people in the holds of his steamboats along with other cargo. Then, he shipped them from New Orleans to Texas faster than his competitors, becoming “one of the largest shippers of enslaved people in the 1850s” (p. 8).

The Business of Slavery connects many chains that proved absolutely essential to the system’s commercial operation. There were chains of traders, agents, and firms; chains of finance; and chains of enslaved people. However, Schermerhorn does not consider free women to be fundamental to the history of “slavery’s capitalism” or the linkages it produced (p. 3). Occasionally, he mentions white women who crossed paths with his subjects, but they do not do so as capitalists. Yet women like Mathilda Bushy, for example, were prominently engaged in the business of slavery. Not unlike Austin Woolfolk and his male kin, Bushy owned a slave yard, formed a partnership with her nephew, and transacted in slaves for several years. To be fair, there were fewer women than men involved in the trade, but their inclusion would have enriched the story Schermerhorn...