by Joshua Rothman

In the opening pages of his new book, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, Joshua Rothman takes us to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1833. Spring rains had revealed three corpses that had been buried the previous year in shallow graves in a ravine. They were victims of the dread disease cholera; but more to the point, they were also enslaved victims of the dread slave trader Isaac Franklin, who had ordered the hasty and secretive disposal. As word spread of the find, there was outrage among the townspeople. In a fit of self-righteous pique, the city fathers sent them all slinking into unceremonious exile. The banishment was of little consequence, however. The traders simply moved to a site that was just beyond the city limits, to

by Joshua Rothman

a place called the Forks of the Road. There, Franklin and his partners John Armfield and Rice Ballard would in fact expand their Natchez operation. The cholera-induced “capital depreciation” which the company had suffered in 1832 would pale in comparison to the profits of 1833 and later. All was well with Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard—and with their company, already the largest slave-trading business in the nation and still expanding. To be clear, as Rothman tells us, the decision to ban the merchandising of humans within Natchez proper had nothing to do with an aversion among its white residents to the merchandizing of humans as an activity. The issue in 1833 had been the danger posed to public health by newly arrived and possibly diseased “stock.” And, beyond that, there had been the upset to decorum to consider. After all, a roving street corner bazaar of enslaved people might perturb the refined sensibilities of those whose refinement had been bought with the stolen labor of enslaved people.

Similarly, today, mention of such things from our past unsettles our present complacency, complacency bought with the coin of willful ignorance, leading us to exile such thoughts to a place outside the bounds of notice. There to be forgotten, though never forgotten. There to flourish like a Forks of the Road of the Mind, festering, metastasizing, sickening the body politic. Fortunately, though, it is a mental illness with a known cure—historical honesty. Natchez, prepare for some therapeutic perturbation. As a teaser event for February’s Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, Joshua Rothman is coming to town this fall, as a guest speaker for the Natchez National Historical Park.

Chair of the History Department at the University of Alabama, Rothman is one of the historians who over the past 25 years have pulled back the curtain on the intricate links between the business of racial slavery in all its aspects and the development of not only the southern economy but also the national economy. In this field, other books tell the story of the internal slave trade in its entirety; and the numbers involved are astounding. Over the years from 1800 to 1860, one million enslaved people were trafficked from the Upper South to the Lower South. Millions more were bought and sold in intrastate trades. But in this book, Rothman focuses on the activities of the three men mentioned above, a story in which Natchez figures prominently. It, New Orleans, and Alexandria, Virginia, were the primary hubs of a business distinctive in its scale but also in its vertical integration of the purchasing, incarcerating, shipping, marketing, and selling of enslaved people.

It is history on a granular level. In the text but also in the nearly ninety pages of endnotes—Professor Rothman plainly paid his archival dues—you get to know the “commodities” of the trade as individual humans with names, unique personal characteristics, families, friends, and homes. But you also get to feel Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard’s predatory breaths on your neck.

Because let’s be blunt about their “business.” As Rothman puts it, these were “the kind of men who sold other peoples’ children for profit,” men who consciously employed “the intimate daily savageries of the slave trade” as tools of their trade to enhance their profits. “The exhilarating thrill of acting with impunity animated

them,” he says, “feeding a roguish swagger and bold ambitions. They knew that beatings, rapes and family separations terrified the enslaved . . .” and “they reveled in it.” He cautions us, though, that it is “too easy to suggest that they are simply monsters. There was considerable monstrosity in their business, but monsters are by definition abnormal and unnatural . . . .” And here’s the crux of the matter— within their world, their monstrous actions are ruthlessly normal and natural.

The commercial exchange of individuals was an essential component of every system of chattel slavery, was in fact the defining feature of it—chattel meaning “movable property.” Chattel could be bought, sold, rented, rented out, bequeathed, inherited, mortgaged, foreclosed upon. In families, or alone. Cared for, exploited, or abused according to the master’s needs and whims. With values varying among healthy manual laborers, skilled craftsmen, female “breeders,” or—the most expensive of them all—young and pretty female “fancies.” Just as there can be no slavery without whips and chains, so there can be no chattel slavery without slave markets and without the motherless child and the raped woman. Rothman makes it plain—“At some point or another, every slaveholder would effectively be a slave trader.” The fact is that all the “kindly” folk who participated in and profited from the inherently monstrous system were also responsible for it and for its abominations.

Of course, southerners at least liked to claim that slave traders were reviled outcasts within their society. Certainly in the case of Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard, Rothman shows otherwise. The members of the southern elite in his text admired these men, sought them out for partnerships and advice, welcomed them into their social circles. Their money-making acumen was the wellspring of their esteem. “Honor” did not enter into the calculation.

Of course, slavery and the slave trade ended long ago. And even before that, Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard got out of the trading business and began to diversify their wealth into varied investments spread across the South, a process that was continued by their heirs. Today, their legacies abound. Out of this blood money, Rothman details, would come the financing for the elite and beautiful University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. And out of it would also come the brutal slave labor camp that became the even more brutal convict-lease camp that became the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It is a revelatory pairing.

How do we reconcile these realities? How do we ease the resentments and mistrust they have engendered? Know that it will not be done easily or quickly. But in Natchez, a town of grand and beautiful mansions that were built on the base ugliness of slavery and on the insanely lucrative cussedness of Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard, we can make some headway toward that goal by reading Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain, and by coming to hear his talk for the Natchez National Historical Park.

A native Mississippian and resident of Natchez, Mississippi, Jim Wiggins, now retired, for forty years was the Instructor of History at the Natchez Campus of Copiah-Lincoln Community College.