The Leder And The Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, by Joshua D. Rothman

There are different kinds of historical works. Some historical works are monographs that seek to study in some degree of depth a very focused set of people or a certain event, while other works are more broad and systematic works that are based on a large variety of existing monographs that allow for a synthesis and broader insights. This book has the title of the latter kind of work, but at its heart this book is a somewhat narrowly focused monograph that does not focus on the slave trade as a whole, but specifically on one firm of slave traders formed out of the cooperation between three men and a few of their associates that exploited and pushed new developments in the domestic slave trade to turn declining slave states like Virginia and Maryland into the sources of profitable excess slaves to sell for a profit in the growing slave states of Mississippi and Louisiana, and later Texas. Where the author stays close to the historical record, which is most of the time, the book is effective in its analysis of the way that the domestic slave trade was deeply rooted in the trends of its time and also had some major implications for the future. Where the author tries to argue that sharecropping was a uniquely black phenomenon, the author demonstrates a lack of awareness of the reality of poor whites in the postbellum South, and this lack of knowledge and lack of sympathies with poor Southern whites makes this book less insightful and certainly less enjoyable to read than it could have been had the author had broader and more just sympathies than simply trying to blame whitey for the historical and contemporary difficulties of blacks in America.

This book is a chronological examination of three people, their family backgrounds, and their business and personal behavior extending over a long period from the late 18th century to the period just after the civil war, with some looks that go to the modern period, where one of the slave plantations owned and managed by one of the trio at the center of the book makes a cameo appearance as one of the worst prisons of the state of Louisiana, known by the name of Angola. Beginning with a short introduction, the book covers nearly 375 pages of core material, beginning with the origins of its main characters–one Isaac Franklin, one Rice Ballard, and one John Armfield (1), moving on to the choices that brought them all into the slave trade in different ways (2), as well as their decision to become associates starting in the late 1820s (3). The author then discusses their profitable ventures in dominating the interstate slave trade through a mastery of credit, logistics, and transportation (4), their long and fortunate dissolution as a slave trading firm just before the Panic of 1837 (5), their desire to protect their reputations as they married and stayed active in various sorts of business (6), and their legacies after they started dying from 1845 to 1871 (7). After this there is a chapter that ties up the book with a look at the contemporary relevance of these people, acknowledgments, abbreviations, notes, and an index.

One of the great mysteries of the book is why it chooses to have such a narrow focus as a book while having a title and subtitle that try to promote the book as being a broader and more synthetic account. It is perhaps the case that the domestic slave trade has not been written about to a great enough extent to where a broad synthetic account can be written. The author himself comes close to the truth–though he does not appear to understand the implications of what he says–when he points out that wealthy slave traders like Franklin, Ballard, and Armfield did not suffer socially for their involvement in the slave trade, but that the less-cultured and more pushy underlings who were personally responsible for pushing slaveowners to sell surplus slaves, divide black families for personal profit or debt repayment, or even kidnap slaves and free blacks to sell downriver did receive social opprobrium for their lack of grace and greater merchandising behavior that may have struck more genteel Southern elites as being too Yankee-like. By focusing so much of his discussion on the issue of race, the author fails to understand the issue of class that was also involved in the ambitions of Franklin, Ballard, Armfield, and many others. By and large, though, this book ignores poor whites, focusing on elite Americans, especially Southerners, and those they held as property and exercised mastery over, sometimes in deeply repellant ways. Still, insofar as this book focuses on elites, the way that the book combines a detailed examination of the personal letters as well as the litigation and ledgers of an immensely successful slave trading firm is an example for other monographs, so long as they do not try to mislead the reader into thinking that they are broader than they really are in the way that this one does.