A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (review)

In this important study of the interstate slave trade, Robert H. Gudmestad has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of American slavery and the Old South. Even more so than other historians of this "troublesome commerce," namely Michael Tadman in Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989) and Walter Johnson in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999), Gudmestad examines the differing interpretations that the white residents of the two main subregions of the South (the slave-exporting states in the Upper South and the slave-importing states in the Lower South) held about the interstate slave trade and how those interpretations changed over time. Central to his argument are the concerns that the slave trade initially raised for some white southerners, especially in the early nineteenth century, when it seemed to be a contradiction to their religious beliefs and their understanding of the master-slave relationship. Yet, in response to economic developments, resistance from the enslaved, and increasing outside attacks on their peculiar institution, Gudmestad convincingly shows, the majority of southern whites overcame any conflict they may have had with this trade, primarily by denying its horrible realities.

The development of the interstate slave trade in the early nineteenth century brought great wealth to all parts of the South; however, it also raised many troubling concerns. While many slave owners in the Upper South fully embraced this new form of commerce and had no hesitation about profiting by selling their excess human chattel, a sizeable number of whites in that subregion worried about the harmful effects this development was having upon themselves and their society. Most importantly, the emphasis on speculation associated with the trade threatened the supposedly noble and paternalistic ideals of the master-slave relationship. The Second Great Awakening also had produced large numbers of evangelical Christians who were troubled by the destruction of enslaved families by sale. In the 1810s and 1820s, numerous churches condemned the slave trade and excluded from membership those who engaged in this traffic. On the political front, Gudmestad notes that the first national politician to publicly attack the interstate trade was none other than John Randolph, the ardently proslavery congressman from Virginia.

The growth of the interregional slave trade also caused concern for whites in the Lower South, although their fears were less humanitarian in nature than those in the slave-exporting states. Here whites worried primarily about the types of individuals who were being imported into their subregion. They believed that owners in the Upper South used the interstate trade to dump rebellious, diseased, or otherwise faulty individuals. Unscrupulous slave traders supposedly flooded the Lower South states with undesirable elements, corrupting their slave forces and threatening them with outright slave rebellion. Whites in the Lower South had no qualms about the morality of the slave trade; they merely wanted to control its more harmful effects through (mostly ineffective) legislation that sought to limit the quantity (and regulate the quality) of slaves imported into their states.

While the rise of the interstate slave trade in the early decades of the nineteenth century elicited mixed reactions from white southerners, by the 1830s the majority (in all parts of the South) had come to downplay whatever uneasiness they may once have had about this trade. The most important factor in this transformation was the need to defend their institution, and the essential traffic in humans that sustained it, from increasing outside attacks. No longer was open criticism of the slave trade allowed; the "troublesome commerce," along with all other aspects of the slave system, now had to be defended at all costs. Slaveholders minimized the trade's importance and argued that abolitionists exaggerated its negative effects. They claimed that the slave trade benefited everyone in southern society, including the enslaved themselves. Most central to their argument, they created the stereotype of...