Slavery in America – Soul by Soul

By the 1820s, and certainly by the early 30s, the American South had become a full-blown slave society. The domestic and legal trading of slaves became one of the economic engines of southern industry. It’s quite a story.
by Charlie Leck

Foreign slave trade in the United States of America was ended by law in 1808. Domestic slave trade continued to boom. Domestic slave trading continued and the slaves owned in the northern part of the south were encouraged in many way to continue to breed and repopulate the slave culture. The land in the great slave centers in Virginia, Kentucky and the Carolinas, where tobacco had been the king of agricultural endeavor, was beginning to play-out; however, cotton was becoming the new product of choice, with a world-wide demand, in the new and expanding south – into Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Slaves were needed for the quickly developing cotton product and they were shipped there in great numbers.

There were more than 100 slave traders in Charleston (SC) in the 1820s, 30s and 40s. Charleston and Richmond (VA) were the centers of trade in the South, gathering slaves to be shipped further south and southwest. These traders were constantly advertising in southern newspapers: “Negroes wanted!” Many of the ads appended specifics, like: “With good front teeth and sound bodies!”

Hector Davis was one of those big-time slave dealers. In his biggest week, in 1859, his books show he made a $120,000 profit. (What is that in today's dollars?)

From the 1820s, into the early 1860s, a slave child had a 30 percent chance of being sold away from his parents before his 10^th birthday.

I’m currently reading a remarkable book by Walter Johnson: Soul by Soul (Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market), published in 1998 by Harvard University Press. It’s an extraordinary book that few will read. I’m pleased that I was somehow led to it.

The story centers itself around a slave market in New Orleans, which, Johnson says, “was throughout the antebellum period unsurpassed in one respect. Not far from the levee was North America’s largest slave market.”

The remarkable, historical story that Johnson tells is an account of separation – the separation of slave families. Husband and wives were separated by slave trades. Fathers were taken from children. Children were taken from mothers and siblings.

“…a world in which hundreds of thousands of slave sales, many of them breaking marriages, most of them dividing families, all of them destroying communities, underwrote the history of the antebellum South.

“The history of the slave trade is as much the story of those left behind as it is the story of those carried away. It is the story of separated lovers and broken families, of widows, widowers, and orphans left in the wake of the trade, only, perhaps, to be sold themselves at some later date.”

The one sense of meaning that the slave in the original south had was one of family and community. It might have been a slave community, but in it there was something of stability and identity. There were lovers, husbands and wives, children, uncles, aunts and community friends and playmates. When the huge slave markets were opened in the 1820s to meet the demand for slaves in the deeper South, most of those families and communities were broken asunder. Slaves became commodities. They were graded, rated and sold; and then they were moved off in chains – coffles – to be sold in places far away from their families and communities.

So many haunting songs came out of the slave communities of the American South. They speak more than of history. Often they speak of the agony of the soul.

No more children stole from me
No more, no more
No more children stole from me
Many thousand gone

No more slavery chains for me
No more, no more
No more slavery chains for me
Many thousand gone

I recommend Soul by Soul, by Walter Johnson, to you -- especially if you enjoy reading Civil War or Antebellum History.