The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua D. Rothman (review)

In The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, Joshua D. Rothman examines the history of the domestic slave trade through the experiences of John Armfield, Isaac Franklin, and Rice C. Ballard, three of the most notorious slave traders in nineteenth-century America. Organized chronologically from the end of the American Revolution through the Civil War, Rothman's book establishes that historians cannot fully understand American slavery if we do not understand the people who made the domestic slave trade work. In an argument that is sure to push the literature on the internal slave trade in new directions, Rothman contends that traders of enslaved people were not social outcasts who operated in the shadows of the American economy. Instead, they were renegade entrepreneurs who profited from enslaved people's misery and enslavers' insatiable appetites for enslaved labor. Slave traders maneuvered their way to the center of commercial life during the early republican and antebellum eras. They colluded with bankers, investors, judges, and lawyers to capitalize on enslavers' greed for bondpeople. In the process, they upended the lives of tens of thousands of enslaved women, men, and children to become some of the wealthiest people in America.

Few histories of the domestic slave trade have focused on slave traders' day-to-day decision-making practices. Rothman fills this gap, expanding the work of historians such as Steven Deyle and Calvin Schermerhorn, by tracing the evolution of the domestic slave trade, from Alexandria, Virginia, to Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He homes in on the business dealings and machinations of the men who founded Franklin and Armfield, the nation's most prosperous slave-trading firm. The traders of Franklin and Armfield were ruthless businessmen whose desire for wealth and privilege was eclipsed only by their dependence on violence and the sexual exploitation of enslaved women to profit from slavery. From their familial connections to their investments in the technologies of slave transportation, Franklin, Ballard, and Armfield deployed their business acumen with a callousness that ripped enslaved people's lives to shreds.

Rothman's analysis begins with the American Revolution, as Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard were establishing themselves as citizens of the new nation. America's legal involvement in the international slave trade came to an end in 1808. Afterward, the internal slave trade spawned new business ventures for entrepreneurs willing to set their morals aside to enter the dirty business of slave trading. Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard took advantage of the opportunities to make money from the burgeoning business of selling enslaved people from regions of the upper South—Virginia, for example—to the bustling lower South, specifically Natchez and New Orleans. By the 1820s, the firm of Franklin and Armfield was up and running, shipping thousands of enslaved people from Virginia to Louisiana to fulfill enslaver demands. By the 1830s, Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard were the most successful slave traders in America. But Rothman does not valorize the men at the center of his story. By digging into a wide range of primary sources to uncover the details of their lives, he unearths the depths to which these men went to enrich themselves from enslaved people's despair.

Ultimately, Rothman crafts a highly readable narrative that charts the rise of America's most profitable slave-trading firm during the nineteenth century. One of Rothman's strengths is that he recognizes the difficult history that he is telling early in the book. His analysis is the story of the domestic slave trade through the experiences of the trade's most prosperous actors. Overall, Rothman offers an incisive analysis that should be essential reading for any student of American slavery.