A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry in the United States

[5fish]

Well there was a slave breeding industry in America like there are cattle breeding ranches/farms in todays America. I more one looks into slavery the more amazed how the south did turn humans into a commodity.

Link: https://kottke.org/16/02/a-history-of-the-slave-breeding-industry-in-the-united-states

In fact, most American slaves were not kidnapped on another continent. Though over 12.7 million Africans were forced onto ships to the Western hemisphere, estimates only have 400,000-500,000 landing in present-day America. How then to account for the four million black slaves who were tilling fields in 1860? “The South,” the Sublettes write, “did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people.” Slavers called slave-breeding “natural increase,” but there was nothing natural about producing slaves; it took scientific management. Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia’s capital stock by four percent annually.

Here is how the American slave-breeding industry worked, according to the Sublettes: Some states (most importantly Virginia) produced slaves as their main domestic crop. The price of slaves was anchored by industry in other states that consumed slaves in the production of rice and sugar, and constant territorial expansion. As long as the slave power continued to grow, breeders could literally bank on future demand and increasing prices. That made slaves not just a commodity, but the closest thing to money that white breeders had. It’s hard to quantify just how valuable people were as commodities, but the Sublettes try to convey it: By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, “most of it in the North,” the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South’s total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined.

Snip... so ending the slave trade created "slave breeding farms" is not capitalism great to find away to fell a void...

Virginia slaveowners won a major victory when Thomas Jefferson’s 1808 prohibition of the African slave trade protected the domestic slave markets for slave-breeding

Snip...

growing slave populations, southern states were literally manufacturing more political representation due to the Three-Fifths clause in the US Constitution. They bred more slaves to help politically safeguard the practice of slavery...

Snip... slave backed securities...

In the 1830s, powerful Southern slaveowners wanted to import capital into their states so they could buy more slaves. They came up with a new, two-part idea: mortgaging slaves; and then turning the mortgages into bonds that could be marketed all over the world.

First, American planters organized new banks, usually in new states like Mississippi and Louisiana. Drawing up lists of slaves for collateral, the planters then mortgaged them to the banks they had created, enabling themselves to buy additional slaves to expand cotton production. To provide capital for those loans, the banks sold bonds to investors from around the globe — London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris. The bond buyers, many of whom lived in countries where slavery was illegal, didn’t own individual slaves — just bonds backed by their value. Planters’ mortgage payments paid the interest and the principle on these bond payments. Enslaved human beings had been, in modern financial lingo, “securitized.”

The Planation class was amazingly... creative with slavery...

 

[5fish]

Here is the book...

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

https://www.amazon.com/American-Sla...eeding+Industry&qid=1568686283&s=books&sr=1-1

Amazon's summary...

The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of “breeding women” essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves’ children, and their children’s children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit. This was so deeply embedded in the economy of the slave states that it could only be decommissioned by Emancipation, achieved through the bloodiest war in the history of the United States. The American Slave Coast is an alternative history of the United States that presents the slavery business, as well as familiar historical figures and events, in a revealing new light.

 

[5fish]

Here … wiki input...

Link: Slave breeding in the United States - Wikipedia

Slave breeding in the United States was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically forced the reproduction of slaves to increase their returns.[1] Slave breeding included coerced sexual relations between male and female slaves, forced pregnancies of slaves, and favoring female slaves who could produce a relatively large number of children.[1] The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the termination of the Atlantic slave trade.[2]

Snip... we ended the import of slaves as plantations were taking off...

At the same time that the importation of slaves from Africa was being restricted or eliminated, the United States was undergoing a rapid expansion of cotton, sugar cane and rice production in the Deep South and the West. Invention of the cotton gin enabled the profitable cultivation of short-staple cotton, which could be produced more widely than other types; this led to King Cotton throughout the Deep South. Slaves were treated as a commodity by owners and traders alike, and were regarded as the crucial labor for the production of lucrative cash crops that fed the triangle trade.[

the Upper South had an excess number of slaves because of a shift to mixed-crops agriculture, which was less labor-intensive than tobacco. To add to the supply of slaves, slaveholders looked at the fertility of slave women as part of their productivity, and intermittently forced the women to have large numbers of children. During this time period, the terms "breeding slaves", "child bearing women", "breeding period", and "too old to breed" became familiar.[11]

In a study of 2,588 slaves in 1860 by the economist Richard Sutch, he found that on slave-holdings with at least one woman, the average ratio of women to men exceeded 2:1. The imbalance was greater in the "selling states", where the excess of women over men was 300 per thousand.[15]

Snip... here come Fogel...

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman reject the idea that systematic slave breeding was a major economic concern in their 1974 book Time on the Cross.[17] They argue that there is very meager evidence for the systematic breeding of slaves for sale in the market in the Upper South during the 19th century. They distinguish systematic breeding—the interference in normal sexual patterns by masters with an aim to increase fertility or encourage desirable characteristics—from pro-natalist policies, the generalized encouragement of large families through a combination of rewards, improved living and working conditions for fertile women and their children, and other policy changes by masters. They point out that the demographic evidence is subject to a number of interpretations. Fogel argues that when planters intervened in the private lives of slaves it actually had a negative impact on population growth.[2]

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia’s capital stock by four percent annually.

I have not read your link, but do you know of any recorded response to Jefferson's statement by Washington?

 

[5fish]

Jefferson's statement by Washington?

I have not found where it come s from except from Ned Sublette book mention above and I found other places that use Ned Sublette quote...

Here is another book review and more detail:

Link: https://psmag.com/social-justice/a-future-history-of-the-united-states

This book is more than just about "slave breeding". He tries to disperse the myth around historical figures, History and slavery like Thomas Jefferson he gave away his slave children...

Snip...ending slave trade killing the competition...

One of the central misconceptions the Sublettes seek to debunk is the subordination of American slavery to the transatlantic trade. Conceptually locating the center of the slave trade offshore is good for America’s self-image, and it’s an old line. The Sublettes quote Southern slavers who blamed English firms for forcing the barbaric mode of transportation on America. In schools, the 1808 ban on capturing and shipping slaves is taught as part of the end of slavery, but the Sublettes re-frame it as simple protectionism: Domestic producers wanted to lock out foreign competition.

Snip... slaves as commodities

Mapping 20th-century labor models onto slavery spares us from reckoning with the full consequences of organized dehumanization, which lets us off too easy: To turn people into products means more than not paying them for their work.

Snip... our fight for independence as I have shown in another thread,..

Preserving slavery was a central motive in the American colonies’ fight for independence.

Snip... our leaders...

From rapist Jefferson who gave away his own daughter as a wedding present, to Andrew Jackson driving slaves shackled at the neck for Spanish gold, to Ben Franklin personally selling slaves on consignment as a newspaper publisher, to James Polk overseeing his brutal plantation from the floor of Congress, to young Woodrow Wilson at his father’s side while the latter preached the Christian virtue of white supremacy, there’s no end to the vicious degradation of Africans as America’s very foundation.

Francis Scott Key is best remembered as the song’s author, but he was also Washington, D.C.’s rabidly white-supremacist district attorney in the 1830s, where he prosecuted abolitionists for pamphlet possession and let anti-black mobs run wild. He also co-founded the American Colonization Society, which encouraged the self-deportation of free black people.

The book seems to be correct I check Jefferson children out and it was true I check out Francis Scott Key it check out... And Wilson dad check out...

Link to Key... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smit...is-scott-keys-slave-holding-legacy-180959550/

Snip from wiki... Jefferson treated his own kids as slaves... unlike Mr. Bell...

Mary Hemings had six children:

• Daniel Farley (1772-after 1827), Jefferson gave him to his sister[2]),
• Molly Hemings (1777-after 1790), Jefferson gave her to his daughter Martha as a wedding gift,[2]) together with seven other slaves;[3]
• Joseph Fossett (1780-1858), his father was William Fossett, a white workman at Monticello.[4] He was freed by Jefferson in his 1826 will after decades of service; and
• Betsy Hemmings, b. 1783. Her descendants say their family oral tradition is that Betsy was fathered by the recently widowed Thomas Jefferson, whose wife died in 1782.[5] The historian Lucia Stanton found documentation that her mother Mary Hemings was one of the household slaves whom Jefferson took to Williamsburg and Richmond to care for the family when he was governor, from 1779-1781.[1][6] Jefferson gave Betsy Hemmings at the age of 14, and 29 other slaves,[7] as a wedding gift to his daughter Mary Jefferson and her new husband John Wayles Eppes. Betsy lived with the Eppes family for the rest of her life. Her descendants say she was his concubine from about age 21, after he was widowed, and through his second marriage.[5]

During Jefferson's stay in Paris as US minister to France, his overseer hired out Mary Hemings (with her two younger children) to Thomas Bell in Charlottesville. Mary Hemings became partner to Thomas bell, They had two children together:

• Robert Washington Bell and
• Sally Jefferson Bell.

At Mary's request, after his return Jefferson sold Mary and her two younger children to Bell in 1792. Bell informally freed the three of them that year, acknowledging the children as his. (Jefferson told his superintendent to "dispose of Mary according to her desire, with such of her younger children as she chose." Jefferson kept Mary's slightly older children, Joseph Fossett, age 12, and Betsy, then age nine, at Monticello, splitting up the family. They were likely cared for by aunts and a grandmother.[8][9])

Thomas and Mary Bell lived the remainder of their lives together, and Thomas Bell became a good friend of Jefferson. Mary Hemings Bell was the first of Betty's children to gain freedom.[10] When Thomas Bell died in 1800, he left Mary and their Bell children a sizable estate, treating them as free in his will. The property included lots on Charlottesville's Main Street. He depended on his neighbors and friends to carry out his wishes, which they did.[11] Mary Hemings finished her days in Charlottesville. Her grave site remains unknown.

here Wilson dad... from wiki...

Joseph and Jessie Wilson had moved to the South in 1851 and came to fully identify with it, moving from Virginia deeper into the region as Wilson was called to be a minister in Georgia and South Carolina. Joseph Wilson owned slaves, defended slavery, and also set up a Sunday school for his slaves. Wilson and his wife identified with the Confederacy during the American Civil War; they cared for wounded soldiers at their church, and Wilson briefly served as a chaplain to the Confederate States Army.[6]

 

[5fish]

I found this about the end of international slave trade...

https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/slave-ship-manifests.html

In 1807, Congress outlawed the African slave trade effective on January 1, 1808 (2 Stat. 426), and in 1820 declared it to be piracy punishable by death (3 Stat. 600-601). Remaining unimpaired, however, were the rights to buy and sell slaves, and to transport them from one slave state to another.

Snip... passed a law... coastal slave trade...

The act of March 2, 1807 (2 Stat. 426), which outlawed the slave trade, also imposed regulations on the coastal transportation of slaves. Effective January 1, 1808, vessels under 40 tons in coastwise trade were prohibited from transporting slaves. The captain or master of vessels over 40 tons in coastwise trade was required to provide a manifest of slave cargo to the collector of customs at the port of departure and at the port of arrival, or to the surveyor if there was no collector of customs at the port. Specifically, the act provided as follows:

Sec. 9. . . . That the captain, master, or commander of any ship or vessel of the burthen of forty tons or more . . . sailing coastwise, from any port in the United States, to any port or place within the jurisdiction of the same, having on board any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, for the purpose of transporting them to be sold or disposed of as slaves, or to be held to service or labour, shall, previous to the departure of such ship or vessel, make out and subscribe duplicate manifests of every such negro, mulatto, or person of colour, on board such ship or vessel, therein specifying the name and sex of each person, their age and stature, . . . whether negro, mulatto, or person of colour, with the name and place of residence of every owner or shipper of the same, and shall deliver such manifests to the collector of the port, if there be one, otherwise to the surveyor, before whom the captain, master, or commander, together with the owner or shipper, shall severally swear or affirm to the best of their knowledge and belief that the persons therein specified were not imported or brought into the United States [after January 1, 1808], and that under the laws of the state, they are held to service or labour; whereupon the said collector or surveyor shall certify the same on the said manifests, one of which he shall return to the said captain, master, or commander, . . . and authorizing him to proceed to the port of his destination.

Sec. 10. . . . That the captain, master, or commander . . . shall, previous to the unlading or putting on shore any of the persons aforesaid . . . deliver to the collector, if there be one, or if not, to the surveyor residing at the port of her arrival, the manifest certified by the collector or surveyor of the port from whence she sailed, as is herein before directed, to the truth of which, before such officer, he shall swear or affirm, and ... the collector or surveyor . . . shall thereupon grant a permit for unlading or suffering such negro, mulatto, or person of colour, to be put on shore. . . .

Snip the traffic...

As cotton growing expanded from Alabama to Texas, the lower South's need for slaves increased also. At the same time, the planters of the upper South had an oversupply of slave labor. Tobacco-raisers in such states as Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky were suffering from the continued exhaustion of the soil and decline of their export trade. As a consequence, surplus slaves were transported from the one region to the other by slave traders. In 1836, the peak year of this traffic, over 120,000 slaves from Virginia alone were sold in the lower South. In the 1840s and 1850s, the domestic slave trade slowed somewhat due to a revival of agriculture in the upper South that was partly due to the discovery of better methods of curing tobacco and the introduction of new and superior varieties. [See John D. Hicks, The Federal Union: A History of the United States to 1865, p. 497 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937)].

 

[5fish]

Here is a another manifest site... there is a link to slave ship names...

https://www.archives.com/experts/brandt-kathleen/using-ship-manifests-for-slave-research.html

Snip...

It is estimated that over 1 million slaves were transported using either coastwise ships to the southern ports along the Atlantic, or channeling them along the southern coast and the Mississippi River using southern tributaries. The Abolition Act of 1807 prohibited the import of slaves into the United States, effective 1 Jan 1808; however, domestic slave trading from one slave state to another was legal until 2 July 1864. An overlooked treasure for slave researchers are the ship manifests that document the legal trade and migratory path of slaves transported by water within the jurisdiction of the United States.

Surviving manifests suggest that New Orleans was not only the largest slave market but also a "slave-shipping terminal." It was the destination port for the mid-Atlantic vessels and the origin of embarkation to the lower southern ports. Once slaves arrived at the port of destination they were often sent to neighboring areas. In a recent search we were able to locate a slave arriving in Charleston and within days exchanged in Augusta, Georgia.

Snip... details...

The manifests contained the name of the shipper or slave owner as well as their residence. They specified the name, sex and age of each slave to include a physical description - stature and designation of "negro, mulatto or person of colour."

To fulfill the law that required proof that slaves were not illegally imported into the United States after 1808, manifests of cargo carrying slaves were submitted at both ports of departure and arrival with appropriate statements swearing that the slaves listed "have not been imported into the United States since the first day of January, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Eight..."

 

[5fish]

I found another book on Slave breeding....

Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0...9f-6dd1-4952-ac60-7da748e756f5&pf_rd_i=283155

Summary:

“A thought-provoking piece of scholarship that sheds light on the complex history of slave breeding in America. Smithers’s book will be hotly debated in the profession.”—Michael L. Ondaatje, University of Newcastle, Australia

“As engaging as it is compelling, bold, and captivating, Smithers’s Slave Breeding pulls the reader through its pages with heart-wrenching exposition of the dark and ugly chapter of what could rightly be characterized as the sexual zeitgeist of American national history.”—Tunde Adeleke, Iowa State University

For over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history. From nineteenth-century abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new generations of slaves for profit.

In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South. By placing African American histories and memories of slave breeding within the larger context of America’s history of racial and gender discrimination, Smithers sheds much-needed light on African American collective memory, racialized perceptions of fragile black families, and the long history of racially motivated violence against men, women, and children of color.

 

[5fish]

The interstate trade in slaves made many men wealthy...

Link: https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Slave_Sales

Example snip...

Slave traders were often among the richest men in their communities. In Alexandria, Franklin and Armfield made annual profits of more than $100,000, which made Isaac Franklin a millionaire and gave John Armfield an estate worth $500,000. In Richmond, Hector Davis's firm took in nearly $1 million during just the first quarter of 1860. About that same time, total slave sales in Richmond amounted to between $7 million and $8 million per year.

Snip...

Between 1790 and 1860, more than 1 million enslaved men, women, and children were sold from the Upper South—mostly Virginia—to the Lower South. Two-thirds of those were the result of sales taking place in hubs such as Richmond and Alexandria. As early as 1787, the Richmond slave trader Moses Austin placed an ad in the Virginia Independent Chronicle offering to purchase "One hundred Negroes from 12 to 30 years old … to be sent out of state."

Snip...

Enslaved men, women, and children, and even some who were free, were placed on the market for sale in a variety of ways. As the demand for slaves increased in the cotton states, some slave dealers from the Lower South arrived in Virginia to buy slaves for sale back home. One of these men was H. M. Cobb, who traveled to Virginia, purchased slaves, and brought them back to Georgia, where he auctioned them off. Similarly, Alabama slave traders traveled to Prince Edward County and arranged with slaveholders there to transport their slaves south for sale. The Prince Edward slaveholders agreed to furnish clothing, coffins for any slaves who died on the journey, and the expenses of transporting the human cargo. In return they received two-thirds of the proceeds of the slaves' sale.

Snip... slave jails...

Before and immediately after sale, enslaved men, women, and children were confined to so-called slave jails, on or near the sellers' premises. These properties often included boarding houses where buyers stayed until their slaves sold. From 1828 to 1836 John Armfield lived adjacent to the jail in a three-story brick house on Duke Street, in Alexandria. At any one time, the Franklin and Armfield jail held about 100 male and female slaves in sex-segregated, partially roofed yards surrounded by high walls, gates, bars, grated windows, and iron doors secured with bolts and padlocks. The slaves ate at long tables placed in the yards and spent their nights in a two-story wing attached to the main house. In 1861, when Union forces occupied Alexandria, Price, Birch, and Company owned the jail, and northern photographers captured its image multiple times.

Travel... snip...

When it came time to transport enslaved men, women, and children to the Lower South, their new owners marched them overland in coffles, or groups containing anywhere from two dozen to hundreds of captives. During the course of a several-week journey, the male slaves walked handcuffed to each other, usually with iron collars locked to their necks, while the women were tied with rope and the children carried in wagons. Armed traders traveled by horse, carriage, and wagon. John Armfield generally rode at the head of his coffles, armed with a gun and a whip as he led them westward from Alexandria, over the Little River Turnpike, and to Winchester. Armfield's coffle then marched through the Shenandoah Valley, a route traveled frequently enough by coffles for locals to complain about jammed-up the thoroughfares.

Some slaves traveled to the Lower South by water, with Franklin and Armfield using a packet-line service. Vessels initially departed once a month but soon began making runs twice monthly.

Snip... Slave traders mixed...

Among the prominent Richmond traders Prentis, Tait, Omohundro, and Davis, only Prentis entered into a traditional marriage relationship, with Catharine Dabney of Henrico County. The others fathered children with African American women. Between 1843 and 1848 Tait fathered four children with Courtney Fountain, a free black woman with connections to the abolitionist movement, and in 1851 Tait and Fountain moved to Massachusetts. Tait continued to manage his business from afar, and his biographer, Hank Trent, has noted that slave traders endeavored to "compartmentalize" the manner in which they perceived non-whites. Omohundro had children with at least three different women, including his slaves Louisa Tandy and Corinna Hinton. In his will, he took the unusual step of acknowledging his children with Hinton and referred to her as "my woman" and "a kind, faithful, and dutiful woman to me and an affectionate mother." Davis had several children with an enslaved woman he owned, Ann Banks Davis, whom he moved to Philadelphia about 1860 and freed in his will. The Richmond trader Robert Lumpkin had five children with an enslaved woman named Mary.

 

[5fish]

There was a 52 years of slave trade from the upper south to the lower south...

In those slave manifest they should be able to figure if the slaves being transported to the lower south came from "sex farms" or "slave breeding farms" or not...

I could picture the first 20 years the excess capacity in slaves in the upper south could have kept the lower south supplied with slaves but after time were the majority of the slaves shipped to lower south came from either Slave breeding or just the nature procreation in the upper south or a combo of both...

Those ships manifest should be able to answer it?

 

[5fish]

I found some historical quotes...

Link:

From a Mississippi paper of 1837:
“so large has been the return of slave labor, that purchases by Alabama of that species of property from other states, since 1833, have amounted to about ten million dollars annually.”

There was an attempt in the Virginia legislature to free the slaves several years before the Civil War. It came surprisingly close to passing but was unfortunately blocked, largely by the efforts of a Professor Dew, who said:
“A full equivalent being left in the place of the slave (the purchase-money), this emigration becomes an advantage to the state, and does not check the black population as much as at first view we might imagine; because it furnishes every inducement to the master to attend to the Negroes, to encourage breeding, and to cause the greatest number possible to be raised… Virginia is, in fact, a Negro-raising state for the other states.”

Mr. Goode of VA, in a speech before the VA legislature in January of 1832:
“The superior usefulness of the slaves in the South will constitute an effectual demand, which will remove them from our limits. We shall send them from our state, because it will be our interest to do so. But gentlemen are alarmed let the markets of other states be closed against the introduction of our slaves. Sir the demand for slave labor must increase.”
The South’s answer to this ‘need’ was to insist on breaking any compromise attempts and opening the territories for slaves- in fact, his very next words were about acquiring the territory of Texas as a slave state because then the economic value of this ‘product’ would rise again.

Judge Upshur in the 1829 debates of the VA convention said that
“The value of slaves as an article of property depends much on the state of the market abroad. In this view, it is the value of land _abroad_, and not here which furnishes the ratio. Nothing is more fluctuating than the value of slaves. A late law of Louisiana reduced their value twenty-five percent in two hours after its passage was known."

Snip... implies only 2.5% of the slaves need come from local women ahveing children....

The Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge, LA in a report published in 1829 suggest that included in the costs of managing a ‘well-regulated’ sugar estate the annual net loss of slaves above the supply by propagation is 2.5 percent. Mr. Samuel Blackwell, American owner of a sugar refinery in England often visited the plantations that supplied him. He stated often that the planters told him that during the sugar working season the slaves worked so hard that it used them up in seven or eight years. Mr. Dickinson, in company with numerous plantation owners, stated that the sugar planters in La felt it was so expensive to maintain enough slaves all year long to accomplish the labor during the sugar season that it was more profitable to use fewer hands and sacrifice the occasional pair of hands. Professor Ingraham’s Travels in the Southwest documented the labour of slaves on sugar plantations. They worked, he said, from 18-20 hours, for three months, without breaks for the Sabbath or consideration for whether it was day or night.
This “situation” was only resolved through importation of new slaves from the slave breeding states, so the breeding of slaves by the states of the upper south was beneficial to the slave holding states of the lower south.

Snip...

“The Virginia times (a weekly newspaper, published at Wheeling, Virginia) estimates, in 1836, the number of slaves exported for sale from that state alone, during the ’12 months preceding,’ at forty thousand, the aggregate value of whom is computed at twenty-four millions of dollars. Allowing for Virginia one-half of the whole exportation during the period in question and we have the … sum of eighty thousand slaves exported in a single year from the breeding states. Maryland ranks next to Virginia in point of numbers, North Carolina follows Maryland, Kentucky North Carolina, then Tennessee and Delaware. The Natchez (Mississippi) Courier says ‘that the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, imported two hundred and fifty thousand slaves from the more northern states in the year 1836"

 

[MattL]

A great overview on a very hard topic.

 

[5fish]

I found this great site about the Interstate trade of slaves from the Upper south to the Deep south... and about slave trade in general...

They dressed them up for sale...

Link: http://www.virginiamemory.com/online-exhibitions/exhibits/show/to-be-sold
Link: http://www.virginiamemory.com/online-exhibitions/exhibits/show/to-be-sold

“Richmond is the great Slave Market for the South”

The Upper South cities of Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Norfolk, and Richmond became slave-collecting and resale centers. A large network of traders worked in the surrounding counties, purchased people, and sold them in the urban markets. Before being sold to traders who supplied labor for the cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South, the enslaved were kept in special jails, commonly a small compound of buildings that consisted of a dwelling house where the trader lived, a kitchen, and a building with bars on the windows, where those awaiting sale could be locked up. Most compounds also had an outdoor space where the people awaiting sale were exercised in order to prepare them for sale. The men and women sent to these jails remained there for a matter of days or sometimes for weeks. As one owner directed the trader R. H. Dickinson, "Offer [Richard] for sale at public auction at your auction room if they are selling tolerably well…" but if they are not, "confine him in gaol" until the prices rise.

Many people were held in jail for weeks or months, some until their physical condition improved and others until prices rose to maximize the traders' profit. Former slaves reported that while there they were fed, given medical treatment, and made to look young and healthy. John Brown, who was traded from Virginia to Georgia to New Orleans, recalled "There was a general washing, and combing, and shaving, pulling out grey hairs, and dying the hair of those who were too grey to be plucked without making them bald." The enslaved received new clothes and shoes. They were dressed for sale.

Slave traders used the threat and practice of physical punishment to control those they were about to sell. Buyers examined the people they planned to buy, looking for evidence of scarring from earlier beatings. Slave traders themselves developed a range of descriptions to measure the evidence: "not whipped," "a little whipped," and "considerably scarred by the whip." Evidence of multiple incidents suggested that the person ran away frequently. Old scars meant that a person’s behavior had been modified.

The slave trade is extensively documented through the daily scraps of paper that detailed business transactions. Ledgers, receipts, insurance policies, and price lists coldly record the business of selling people. Traders' letters to one another obsessively discussed prices, as did those from slave owners who were considering selling. It was such a regular part of the business that some traders even had forms printed so that they could fill in the latest "state of our Negro market." As seen on these circulars, the people being sold were classified: "Extra," Second rate," or "Ordinary" were terms applied to men and women. Children were usually priced according to height.

 

[5fish]

Here is a site that shows the changing position of states by their slave populations... It base off the census...

There were 4 million enslaved people counted in the 1860 census and zero in the 1870 count. The change didn't happen all at once.

Explore data from the first nine censuses, showing how the number of slaves changed across states.

usafacts.org

Every 10 years between 1790 and 1870, the federal government conducted a census that included a count of enslaved people in each state. In 1860, the government counted 4 million slaves. That count fell to zero in the 1870 census.

 

[diane]

This really is a hard topic. Thanks for putting all this in a thread - it shows some real horror about the 'peculiar institution'. Virginia did indeed supply a great many slaves for Mississippi and Louisiana. A slave trader could pay $250 for a prime field hand in Virginia and resell him for as high as $2500 in Mississippi. There was a large market for 'breeding slaves', and an incentive to breed one's own 'stock'. Not hard to go from a livestock seller to a slave trader, and that involves a very, very unpleasant mindset. Had to have a seared conscience, that's for sure.