Skip to content
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL DOMESTIC ORDERS $35+
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL US ORDERS $35+
The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

Availability:
in stock, ready to be shipped
Save 5% Save 5%
$21.99
$21.99 - $21.99
$21.99
$20.99
$20.99 - $20.99
$20.99
An award-winning historian’s “searing" (Wall Street Journal) account of America's internal slave trade—and its role in the making of America

Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States.

In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.

ISBN-13: 9781541616608

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 10-24-2023

Pages: 512

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Joshua D. Rothman is professor of history and chair of the department of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Flush Times and Fever Dreams and Notorious in the Neighborhood. He lives in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Origins, 1789-1815 9

2 Choices, 1815-1827 53

3 Associates, 1827-1830 97

4 Currencies, 1830-1833 149

5 Dissolutions, 1833-1837 203

6 Reputations, 1837-1846 257

7 Legacies, 1846-1871 309

Epilogue the Ledger and the Chain 357

Acknowledgments 367

Abbreviations in Notes 375

Notes 379

Index 467