Slave traders may not have been social outcasts after all

Historian Joshua Rothman uses the lives of three prosperous slave traders to explode myths about pre-Civil War American society. 

|
Basic Books
"The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" by Joshua D. Rothman, Basic Books, 512 pp.

At the heart of historian Joshua Rothman’s amazing, disturbing new book “The Ledger and the Chain” is the slaying of a persistent myth. Rothman looks at a typical view of pre-Civil War American society – that people North and South, in all walks of life, grudgingly accepted the presence of slave-traders in their midst but scorned them and considered them soiling presences in any civilized gathering – and he seeks to dispute and displace that view. 

“Slave traders,” he writes, “worked in open collusion with legions of slaveholders, bankers, merchants, lawyers, clerks, judges, sheriffs, and politicians, who all recognized their indispensability, and as in most occupations, their standing, both in society and the business world, depended on perceptions of their integrity and reliability.” The claim that slave traders were reviled social outcasts was, he insists, mostly a myth. 

In order to flesh out his case, Rothman makes the masterful dramatic stroke of putting three prosperous slave traders front and center: Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard. “The Ledger and the Chain” is in large part a biographical study of these men, both as individuals and as symbols of Rothman’s larger argument. Readers watch them preen and hustle and manage their finances, and although Rothman regularly reminds us that these men were very comfortable with “the intimate daily savageries of the slave trade,” he does an eye-opening job of making these three vile men three-dimensionally human. They gorge on onions, they dote on their families, they form deep friendships, all while engaged in “an undertaking as intricate as it was diabolical.” 

The business of enslaving other human beings was highly lucrative. According to Rothman, in the first 60 years of the 19th century American slaveholders sent roughly 1 million Black people from the Upper South to the Lower South, a trade that dwarfed the size of the North American transatlantic slave trade from Africa. By 1860, Rothman writes, the market value of the slave trade was worth more than the country had invested in manufacturing, railroads, and banks combined.  

And Rothman’s central and most damning point is that a mass of wealth and commerce so enormous could be laundered into many kinds of respectability if the broader society that benefited from it was willing to look the other way, to rationalize, and to accommodate. Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard were able to enter the finest emporiums and drawing rooms precisely because the industry of men like them helped to build those clean, well-lit rooms. “Their America incentivized entrepreneurialism, financial risk, and racial slavery, and no one made more of the junction among those things than they did,” writes Rothman about his unholy trio. “They became some of the richest men in the country as a result.”

The thoroughness of Rothman’s research occasionally seems to work against him. He asserts that the vast amounts of money commanded by men like Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard bought them acceptance in genteel Southern society. But his own narrative often gives the impression that most people they met in the course of their business dealings actually did scorn them. Maybe these men were just uncouth (or maybe it had something to do with all those onions), but it seems possible that there was also a deeper stain on their characters than Rothman is willing to admit.

In his own exhortative prose, that stain isn’t just professional – it’s intensely personal. Slavery wasn’t just merely what these men did, he insists, it was who they were. Being a slave trader required more than a simple willingness to hurt and terrorize enslaved people. “It required a commitment to those things, an enthusiasm for them … the collaborative pleasure they took in inflicting pain on the enslaved helped make them successful.” 

That success was enormous, and as Rothman notes, it arose as much through ledgers and bills of exchange as it did through whips and chains. “We do not really understand American history if we do not understand the slave trade,” he writes, “and we do not really understand the slave trade if we do not understand those who made it work.” 

“The Ledger and the Chain” is a stunning, unsettling account of a guilt shared more widely and more enthusiastically than many Americans like to think. Everyone knew what men like Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard did for a living, but their money spoke louder than their sin. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Slave traders may not have been social outcasts after all
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2021/0528/Slave-traders-may-not-have-been-social-outcasts-after-all
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe