The World the Abolitionists Made: Reconsidering the Domestic Slave Trade

Steven Deyle. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. x + 398 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

Nineteenth-century abolitionists saw the buying and selling of human beings as the essence of slavery. They believed the practices characteristic of the domestic slave trade—the exchange of human beings for cash, the separation of families, and the poking and prodding of people as if they were livestock—revealed the entire southern regime as founded on cruelty and dehumanization. They knew the domestic slave trade was harder to defend than slavery itself, and they believed that slavery would collapse without the market in human beings. For all these reasons, Steven Deyle shows, abolitionists of the 1830s and 1840s made the domestic slave trade the centerpiece of their campaign against slavery.

Like the abolitionists, Deyle sees the domestic slave trade as the keystone of the antebellum South and, like them, he argues that the "painful" story of the domestic slave trade must brought to light "before we can truly understand southern slavery and antebellum American life" (p. 14). In the first three chapters of Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life, Deyle examines the political and economic implications of the domestic slave trade from its origins in the late eighteenth century through the onset of the Civil War. Then, in a series of thematic chapters, he explores the trade as part of a "market revolution" and from the perspectives of abolitionists, slaveowners, and enslaved people themselves. Supplementing other recent scholarship that has argued for the slave trade's looming importance in the antebellum South, Carry Me Back is particularly valuable for its kaleidoscopic examination of its subject.¹ The scope of Deyle's book and his deep research in personal papers, newspapers, and published sources make Carry Me Back an important synthesis that deserves wide readership and a touchstone in the growing literature on internal slave trades, forced migrations, and the commodification of human beings.

In critical respects, however, the book's close alignment with the abolitionist worldview diminishes its impact and originality. The problem is not that Carry Me Back is generically "neo-abolitionist" but, rather, that it swallows too uncritically the abolitionists' worldview. The book has a tendency to coast on abolitionist logic, rather than striking out in new interpretive directions. Echoing the abolitionists' penchant for polemic, Deyle too often asserts the slave trade's importance without proving it, and he offers a definition of the slave trade that is more tendentious than illuminating. Indeed, his wholehearted adoption of the abolitionists' perspective seems to preclude a critical analysis of abolitionist views on the slave trade or slavery itself. Thus, even as Carry Me Back's abolitionist perspective gives it an organizing principle and a moral compass, it also imposes limitations on Deyle's analysis and conclusions.

One of the book's most important arguments is that the slave trade was "a regular part of everyday life" in the South. Whereas historians of the slave trade typically have focused on professional slave traders and interstate trading routes, Deyle emphasizes that many more people were instrumental in the buying and selling of human beings.² In its heyday, the slave trade was characterized not just by large urban slave markets or overland slave coffles, but also by routine exchanges in front of courthouses, in rural hamlets, and on farms and plantations. Deyle estimates that more than two-thirds of the slave sales between 1820 and 1860 involved local transactions rather than interstate ones. Among the crucial participants were local traders, who rarely went on interstate trips but trolled for slaves to buy and sell in the same vicinity, and slaveowners, who did not consider themselves traders but who sold and speculated nonetheless. Vast numbers of local sales also occurred at public auctions, where agents of the state sold off the slaves of owners...