The Ledger and the Chain

How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

The Ledger and the Chain
Joshua D Rothman
RRP:
NZ$ 60.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 45.00
Hardback
h235 x 152mm - 512pg
13 May 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781541616615
Out Of Stock
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In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation. Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who ran Franklin and Armfield, and none were more influential. Drawing on source material from more than thirty archives in a dozen states, Rothman follows the three traders through their first meetings, the rise of their firm, and its eventual dissolution. Responsible for selling between 8,000 and 12,000 slaves from the Upper South to Deep South plantations over a period of eight years in the 1830s, they ran an extensive and innovative operation, with offices in New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana and Natchez in Mississippi. They advertised widely, borrowed heavily from bankers and other creditors, extended long term credit to their buyers, and had ships built to take slaves from Virginia down to New Orleans. Slavers are often misremembered as pariahs of more cultivated society, but as Rothman argues, the men who perpetrated the slave trade were respected members of prominent social and business communities and understood themselves as patriotic Americans. By tracing the lives and careers of the nation' s most notorious slave traders, The Ledger and the Chain shows how their business skills and remorseless violence together made the malevolent entrepreneurialism of the slave trade. And it reveals how this horrific, ubiquitous trade in human beings shaped a growing nation and corrupted it in ways still powerfully felt today.
"Wide ranging and meticulously documented. . . A must read account that sheds light on the interdependence of slavery and capitalism in the United States. "--Library Journal "Rothman employs his wide breadth of knowledge about the era to vividly depict the human and economic impacts of the domestic slave trade as it burgeoned in the early 19th century. . . An excellent work of vast research that hauntingly delineates the ' intimate daily savageries of the slave trade. ' "--Kirkus "Through meticulous archival research, Rothman debunks the myth that slave traders were social outcasts and tracks how their brazen advertisements and abusive treatment of captive men, women, and children were used by abolitionists to stoke public outrage. This trenchant study deserves a wide and impassioned readership. "--Publisher' s Weekly "The story of the international slave trade is well known to many. Much less known are the workings of the domestic slave trade in the United States that sent tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans from the Upper South to the cotton and sugar fields in the Deep South. With exhaustive research and piercing insight, Joshua Rothman' s The Ledger and the Chain brings that history alive through the stories of three men who sat at the nexus between Southern cotton producers and Northern financial institutions. As the tragic legacies of these men are still with us, this book should be read by all who are interested in our current racial predicament. "--Annette Gordon-Reed, coauthor of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs "Antebellum America was simultaneously a robust marketplace of strivers and a landscape of horror for the millions who were enslaved. In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Rothman reveals the intimate connection between the two. His study of the under-examined slave trade shows how it was integral to the rise of interstate commerce, the flow of credit, and the establishment of new transportation routes. He also underscores its systematic cruelty, in which men gloried in rape and casually sold children from parents yet stood as respected members of the community. The Ledger and the Chain is detailed, incisive, and devastating. "--T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon and Custer' s Trials "Joshua Rothman carefully and empirically builds from a forensic accounting of the lives and practices of those Frederick Douglass termed the ' man-drovers' and others called the ' soul drivers' to a social autopsy of the whole of American slavery in the nineteenth century. Essential. "--Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America "We are sometimes told that the quintessential American story is the tale of the small business that makes it big. If that' s the case, there' s no more American story than The Ledger and the Chain, Joshua Rothman' s brilliant new history of the slave-trading entrepreneurs Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard. "--Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told
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.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781541616615
Published: 13 May 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Basic Books
Publisher: Basic Books
Format: Hardback
Height: 235mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 512

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