A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade.

A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. By Robert H. Gudmestad. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 246. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-8071-2922-4; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8071-2884-8.)

The last few years have seen a succession of significant studies on the domestic slave trade. Like Walter Johnson in Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), Robert H. Gudmestad writes of angst-ridden white southerners struggling to reconcile notions of paternalism with the realities of speculation in enslaved people. Gudmestad focuses on the period from about 1810 to 1840 and argues that by eventually accepting the notion of two sets of traders--first, an outcast set of disreputable itinerant, small-scale operators and, second, a group of respectable, permanent, and substantial traders--the white South was able to turn the trade into a proslavery propaganda asset that could unite the upper and lower South.

According to Gudmestad, the trade was small and loosely organized until the 1820s. As the trade grew, evangelical Christians and others in the slave-exporting states increasingly worried that it both corrupted white morals and debased black people. In the buying states of the lower South, by contrast, there was little concern over these moral questions, but there were worries that imported slaves might pose violent threats. Gudmestad argues, however, that by the 1830s, in the face of abolitionist onslaughts, the white South closed ranks. Leading traders worked hard to improve their image in the South, and white southerners readily accepted the fiction that they dealt only with respectable traders, treating as outcasts those speculators who broke up families.

Gudmestad's formulation is ingenious, but important elements of his evidence could be read differently. A rereading might reduce both the sense of transformation over time and the level of angst felt by whites. First, it might be that Gudmestad underestimates the scale of the early trade. His essential evidence is that children under ten years of age (too young to be of much interest to traders) made up a huge part of early slave movements. However, his statistics do not apply to individuals under ten years old: they are instead for slave cohorts who were under ten at the start of a given decade and under twenty by the end of that decade. Such age ranges were in practice crucial for the trade. Gudmestad also seems to greatly exaggerate the importance of the Chesapeake to the New Orleans trading route and to underestimate the importance and sophistication of itinerant and other traders across the South.

Gudmestad does show that some evangelical Christians in the upper South were uneasy about the trade. But since he finds only very limited condemnation from the state organizations of southern churches, it is unclear how to read such evidence. Other sets of documentation on southern angst are also inconclusive. When, for example, in official documentation on coastwise shipping, an owner recorded that he was "not a dealer in human flesh," this is seen as evidence of widespread disquiet over speculation (p. 15). In the several hundred extant coastal manifests, however, there seem to have been only one or two other such declarations. Similarly, when a firm of prominent Richmond slave auctioneers declared that they had "no connection with the Negro Trade," this is read as unease over trading (p. 167). The intention might simply have been to assure clients that the firm did not buy and sell in its own right and could be trusted to bid slaves off at fair prices. Gudmestad ends up stressing the hollowness of southern paternalism, but it might be that southerners found it easier than he suggests to reconcile slave trading with their consciences.

MICHAEL TADMAN

University of Liverpool