Internal Slave Trade — One Million People Sold 1808–1860

With the 1808 international ban, the domestic slave trade became the primary mechanism of slavery's expansion into new cotton and sugar territories. Historians estimate that between 1808 and 1860, approximately 1 million enslaved people were sold from the Upper South to the Deep South, the majority through professional slave traders. The trade systematically destroyed families; roughly one in three marriages was broken by sale.