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

Calvin Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism comes on the heels of much recent work on slavery’s extensive role in American economic development, including Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013), Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), and Damian Alan Pargas’s Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (2015). But this book does not deserve to fall by the wayside or be overshadowed by its predecessors. Scholars of slavery—especially those interested in the domestic slave trade—should push through any potential topic fatigue and read it.

Despite its broad title, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism is really only about one component of the slavery business: the interstate slave trade. In other words, it is not about the foreign slave trade, the local slave trade, the rental market for slaves, or plantation administration. As Schermerhorn states up front, his book is primarily intended to detail how domestic slave-trading firms forcibly transported one million enslaved people from the mid-Atlantic states to the sugar- and cotton-growing regions of the lower Mississippi valley and Texas. Historians have long known the general contours of this commercial system. By focusing on one discrete subject per chapter, however, Schermerhorn is able to shed new light on how the interstate traffic worked in practice, from both an operational and a financial standpoint. In the process, he reveals that slave traders were savvy business insiders rather than social pariahs. According to Schermerhorn, slave-trading firms were also on the vanguard of the market revolution. His book therefore “examines progressions from sail to steam, rough trails to iron rails, and the financial wizardry that permitted enslavers to leverage their bondspersons on financial markets” (3).

Schermerhorn is at his best when describing the effect of these “progressions” on the development of the domestic slave trade. He argues convincingly that interstate slave traders—at least the successful ones—were early adopters and innovators who were quick to employ state-of-the-art modes of transportation, take advantage of government support, and create new financial instruments to facilitate their business operations. In that regard, they did more than traffic slaves from one region to another; they made markets more efficient, fostering the growth of American capitalism itself. For instance, it was a slave trader named Jean Baptiste Moussier who thought of the idea to enable members of an association of stockholders to leverage their own plantation property to buy similar assets (including slaves). Two financiers in New Orleans then used Moussier’s idea to create a property bank called the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana, which was backed by the state of Louisiana. The Consolidated Association sold bonds abroad, producing an explosion in credit among sugar planters, who, in turn, purchased more land, improved their plantations, and bought fresh slaves.

Such tales of “financial wizardry”—the transfer of debt instruments from one party to another—might be difficult to follow, let alone explain. Thankfully, Schermerhorn is a very good storyteller and a strong writer, despite indulging in a convoluted metaphor or two. He is also careful not to lose sight of the victims while recounting how slave traders operated. Schermerhorn constantly reminds his readers that slave traders ripped apart families, committed appalling acts of brutality, and sexually assaulted their captives. Unlike some others, however, he resists the urge to wax eloquent about lashings, rape, and death. Instead, he mostly lets his sources do the talking for him. As a writer, then, Schermerhorn employs the same technique as the subject of one of his chapters: “I draw a veil over a scene,” wrote Solomon Northup, “which can better be imagined than described” (203).

Northup’s considerable...