System of oppression · 1808–1865
The Domestic Slave Trade (the Second Middle Passage)
After the Atlantic trade was banned in 1808, slavery's growth ran on an internal market that marched roughly a million people from the Upper South to the Deep South, a vast, liquid market in human beings.
When Congress banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, slavery did not contract, it reorganized. Its expansion onto the cotton and sugar frontier of the Deep South was fed by an internal market: an estimated one million enslaved people were sold from the Upper South (Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas) to the Deep South between 1790 and 1860, marched overland in chained "coffles" or shipped in the coastwise trade from ports like Alexandria, Richmond, and Baltimore to New Orleans and Natchez.
Historians call it the Second Middle Passage. It tore apart perhaps a third of enslaved families in the Upper South, and it was, above all, business: human beings were simultaneously the labor, the inventory, the collateral, and the profit. Firms like franklin-armfield industrialized the traffic, while banks turned the people being traded into financial assets (see slave-backed-securities). This is greed in its rawest commercial form, a market in people that enriched traders, planters, shippers, and financiers across the whole country.
On the timeline
- 1808Domestic Slave Trade Coffles: One Million Enslaved People Marched South After 1808
Following the 1808 import ban, the domestic slave trade became the engine of American slavery's expansion. Slave trading firms, including Franklin & Armfield of Alexandria, Virginia, purchased enslaved people from the Chesapeake and marched them in iron-linked coffles (chains) hundreds of miles to markets in Natchez, New Orleans, and Mobile. Eyewitness accounts describe columns of men chained at the neck, women carrying infants, children struggling to keep pace. An estimated 1 million people were sold interstate between 1808 and 1865. Studies of slave manifests show that roughly one in three Upper South marriages was broken by sale, and a majority of children in the Upper South were separated from at least one parent.
- 1819Congress Refuses to Regulate the Domestic Slave Trade
Despite growing Northern discomfort, Congress repeatedly refuses to regulate or restrict the interstate slave trade in the 1810s and 1820s. Proposals to ban the transport of enslaved people across state lines are defeated by Southern blocs. The trade expands enormously as cotton frontier opens in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The US government thus actively enables the largest forced migration in American history.
- 1820Domestic Slave Trade Explodes: One Million People Sold 1820–1865
With the Atlantic slave trade legally closed after 1808, a massive domestic trade emerged supplying enslaved labor to cotton and sugar frontiers in the Deep South. Historians estimate approximately one million enslaved people were sold in the interstate trade between 1820 and 1865, roughly equivalent to the entire transatlantic trade to North America. Enslaved people were marched in coffles (chained columns) hundreds of miles south and west. The trade separated families systematically: scholars estimate one-third of first marriages and half of all parent-child relationships were broken by sale.
Resources
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations, the links rarely drawn together.
- profited from (incoming)·InstitutionFranklin & Armfield
The largest firm in the internal slave trade.
- caused (incoming)·ThreadGreed, The Root
A market in people was slavery's most direct cash engine.
- part of·ThreadChattel Slavery
The internal trade fed and expanded the slave economy.