by Ira Berlin
The trade slackened as the Panic of 1837 reduced cotton and sugar production and deflated the price of slaves, giving beleaguered black people on the seaboard a measure of relief. But the respite was momentary. Rather than mark the beginning of the end of the internal slave trade, the Panic only allowed the forces that drove the slave trade to gather strength, as leading members of the planter class added to their holdings and consolidated their place atop Southern society.
The assault on enslaved black families and communities resumed in the 1840s as cotton and sugar prices revived and, with them, the demand for slaves. Black people were again on the move. For the next two decades, the traffic in slaves grew steadily. Nearly a quarter of a million slaves left the seaboard for the interior between 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War, with more than half being shipped west of the Mississippi River. Again slaves were drawn from areas that once had imported slaves, as the exporting region gradually drifted southward and westward. At midcentury, Georgia, Tennessee, and even portions of Alabama were sending their slaves west. The process by which importer states became exporters continued almost until the moment of slavery’s demise.
The outbreak of the Civil War hardly ended the deportation of black men and women. Slaveholders on the periphery of the South, fearing that their slaves would escape to the advancing Union army, shipped them inland. Thousands of enslaved black men and women were sent to upland farms and plantations, and many more were sold to Texas and other parts of the trans-Mississippi west as the pace of the trade accelerated.5
By the time the Confederate defeat ended the second great migration, the geography of black America had been radically restructured; the center of slave life had shifted from the seaboard South to the interior. In 1790, nearly half of all enslaved African Americans resided in Virginia; on the eve of the Civil War that figure had shriveled to 12 percent. While Virginia’s slave population increased just barely during the nineteenth century, Maryland’s declined. Meanwhile, the slave populations of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas swelled beyond recognition. The territory of Mississippi—which encompassed lands that would eventually be part of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—contained some 3,000 slaves at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1860, well over 400,000 slaves lived in Mississippi alone. On the eve of the Civil War, more than half of the slave population resided in the Southern interior.6
Along with the massive movement to the interior was a still larger local trade, where enslaved black people were sold within their neighborhoods, counties, or states. This intrastate trade—which may have exceeded the interstate trade—was often just the beginning of the second great migration, as slaves sold locally were later carried west. Even the trade within a locality—a state certainly and perhaps even a county—could have the same disruptive effect as the long-distance transfer; hence, local trades should be considered part of the second Middle Passage.7
This great migration, like the first, reflected the needs of sellers in the slave-exporting region and buyers in the slave-importing region, each of whom carefully considered the age, sex, and productive and reproductive capacity of their human property. Although slavery in the settled South remained profitable, many slaveholders found themselves burdened by a surplus of slaves, as the switch from tobacco to cereal cultivation and mixed farming reduced the need for a year-round labor force. Planters and farmers, who increasingly thought of themselves as employers and not masters, found that hired hands—enslaved as well as free—who might be engaged during planting and harvest were more attractive than workers who required yearlong support. In some places, the preference was for hired slaves; in others, for wage labor, both black and white. “Employment and reward for industry and discharge if otherwise,” boomed one border-state defender of the wage-labor system. Similar developments in the region’s towns, which grew in number and size during the nineteenth century, increased demand for skilled workers—blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers as well as wagoners and sometimes boatmen—for urban shops and manufactories. As the demand for brute labor declined, so too did the need for young men and women who had muscle and energy but little knowledge of the work at hand. One in three slaves between the ages of ten and twenty residing in the seaboard South at the beginning of the nineteenth century would be gone by 1860.
Economic changes drove the transformation of the region’s demography. The switch to cereal and mixed farming and the growth of manufacturing reflected the declining profitability of plantation agriculture in portions of the settled South. Marginal agriculturalists found themselves sliding toward financial ruin and the region edged toward economic stagnation. In such circumstances, slaves were their owners’ most valuable and generally most marketable asset. The sale of slaves not only might stave off bankruptcy, but also would enable slaveowners to purchase the seeds, animals, tools, and machines that could revive their own prospects and, in time, the region’s economy.8
Slaveowners in the settled South also learned the slave trade was a profitable way to rid themselves of unruly and intransigent slave men and women. During the nineteenth century, the threat of sale became the most potent mechanism of slave discipline, as black people, according to one observer of the transfer of slaves from Maryland to Georgia, “dread nothing on earth so much as this.” “They regard the south with perfect horror, and to be sent there is considered as the worst punishment that could be inflicted on them.” Slave masters found that selling a few slaves “down the river” had a visible effect on order in the quarter. The fear of sale allowed slaveholders to extort promises of faithful service and pledges of future loyalty from their slaves. Not a few used the threat “to put a slave in their pocket”— meaning to put cash in their pocket in exchange for the slave—as a means of extracting additional drafts of labor. For slaveowners, sale became not only a source of wealth and a way of discipline, but also a means to destabilize the slave community, stripping it of its most effective leaders and intimidating those who remained. Strangely, putting aside the lash for the threat of sale also allowed planters to claim a new standard of humanity.9
Although there was a symbiotic relationship between the needs of the slaveowners in the slave-exporting region and those of would-be slaveowners in the importing region, their interests did not always coincide. Fearful that their plantations would become a dumping ground for slave rebels, black-belt planters tried to bar men and women they considered troublemakers. Some of the first laws enacted by the territorial legislatures of Mississippi and Alabama prohibited the entry of slaves with histories of rebelliousness or criminality. Louisiana required imported slaves to be accompanied by certificates attesting to their “good moral character,” although the character test was never defined. At other times, various states prohibited the import or the export of slaves for reasons of state policy, humanitarian and commercial. For example, in 1817, Maryland prohibited the export of slaves who had been promised freedom. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, at one time or another, barred the importation of slaves when the expanding black population appeared to threaten the state’s security or the rising price of slaves threatened the economy. But such moments did not last. Often they were the product of some momentary crisis, as in the panic that followed the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831. Generally, when the panic subsided, the laws were quickly repealed, and when they were not, they fell into disuse. Even then demand for slaves always trumped such legislation.10
The handful of slave rebels shipped southwest could not disguise the planters’ satisfaction, as they received young men and women whose strength hastened the transformation of a wilderness and whose fecundity assured the continued viability of the plantation workforce. From the slaveholders’ perspective, the very old and the very young who could not withstand the rigors of the transcontinental journey were just extra baggage. Young adults composed the mass of those shipped west and, over time, their share of the forced migration increased. In 1810, slaves between age fifteen and thirty made up one-quarter of t
he deportees. By 1830, they equaled nearly 45 percent.11
The forced migration distorted the age and sex balance of the black population in both exporting and importing regions. The Southern interior—like Virginia and South Carolina in the eighteenth century—was an extraordinarily youthful place. Men below the age of twenty-five represented nearly 39 percent of Alabama’s slaves in 1820, a higher portion than in Virginia, where young men (similarly defined) made up about 35 percent of all slaves. The proportion was doubtless even higher on the largest plantations, for wealthier planters had the resources to purchase the slaves they believed most useful for the difficult work of creating a new plantation. On the estate of the largest planter in the wealthy panhandle area of Florida, a unit of some 213 slaves in 1830—123 males and 86 females—included no women and only one man over age fifty-five. The old heads, experienced men and women whose knowledge might guide the nascent slave community and subvert the planters’ project, were missing.12
The youth that characterized the population of the Southern interior was balanced out by the elderly men and women who were left behind, much like the effect on the west coast of Africa during the height of the international slave trade. In 1820, slaves over age forty-five comprised some 11 percent of the population of Virginia, while they made up less than 6 percent of the population of Alabama. A comparison between the Alabama county of Greene, where only four slaves in one hundred had reached the age of forty-five, and the tidewater Virginia county of Surry, where slaves of that age were proportionately four times as numerous, exposes the stark differences in the age structure of the slave-importing states of the interior and the slave-exporting states of the seaboard.13
The internal slave trade—like its international predecessor—also warped the sexual balance of the black population, at least for a time. As enslaved men trekked west to build the new plantation economy, the settled seaboard South became a disproportionately female society. The female majority within the slave population fit well with the seaboard South’s function as the nursery of the workforce for the Southern interior. Although abolitionists (and, subsequently, historians) found charges of the forced breeding of slaves difficult to substantiate, there was no questioning the slaveholders’ appreciation for the value of the slaves’ producing children.14 For some seaboard slaveowners, slave children were their most profitable “crop,” and they knew it. They encouraged slave women to have children, offered incentives of free time or even cash and threatened barren women with sale. However, the male majority in the Southern interior did not last long, perhaps because of—as with the first Middle Passage—the higher rates of male mortality. Within a generation of the arrival of the first slaves, a sexually balanced population emerged in the cotton South, both assuring the viability of the planters’ labor force and reestablishing a self-sustaining black population.15
The complementary needs of buyers and sellers-hard-pressed seaboard farmers and ambitious black-belt planters—reshaped black society in other ways as well. Summing up the conventional wisdom, a veteran of the plantation business advised that “it is better to buy none in families, but to select only choice, first rate, young hands from 14 to 25 years of age, (buying no children or aged negroes).” Indeed, in defining the slave family as women and very young children, slave traders showed little interest in the family groups that they demeaned as “mixed lots.” Enslaved black men and women came to appreciate the fragility of the marriage bond, and parents came to understand that their teenage children would disappear, never to be seen again. Sales to the interior shattered approximately one slave marriage in five and separated one-third of children under fourteen from one or both of their parents. The preferences of slaveholders both as sellers and buyers destabilized slave families, ensuring that husbands and wives would be separated and children would be taken from parents. Nothing revealed the full extent of the second Middle Passage so much as this.16
Beyond sex and age and the peculiar matter of judging a slave’s character, black-belt planters had other preferences that shaped black life during the second great migration. Westward-moving planters frequently took their favorites with them. Those who purchased slaves from traders also made choices. Just as some eighteenth-century slave masters prized Igbos over Angolans, Gambians over Calabars, some of their nineteenth-century counterparts desired Virginians over Carolinians or vice versa. Slave traders made much of the places of origin when they advertised their slaves, playing to the prejudices of their customers.17
Viewed as a whole, the internal slave trade, like the international one, mixed people from different regions. A close look at the origins of enslaved black men and women carried to middle Florida in the 1830s reveals that a large share of men and women were drawn from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and over 25 percent from South Carolina and Georgia, but also that others were taken from places as disparate as Kentucky and Louisiana. Even those from Virginia, the most important source of Florida’s slaves, came from different parts of the state, with about one-third coming from the tidewater region, another third from the piedmont, and with small numbers from Southside and northern Virginia and a handful drawn from the Shenandoah Valley and the surrounding mountains. Mixing slaves at the point of purchase and sale, as well as during their long trek, made it difficult for planters to exercise their preferences.18
The resultant jumbling also made it more difficult for black people to find kin and friends among those sold south. The heterogeneity of the internal slave trade left black migrants isolated and alone, so that the black men and women taken from the seaboard South experienced all the horrors of their ancestors’ transatlantic journey. Like their forebears, they too had been forcibly separated from everyone and everything they knew and loved. Their westward journey was also traumatic and often deadly. Even before departing, many experienced the harrowing pain and humiliation of having their persons inspected in the most minute and intimate ways. Once the trade was under way, the grim reality of being separated from everyone they knew and loved became manifest. As with the transatlantic slave trade, slaves ensnared in the internal trade would realize—in one chilling moment—the full implications of their captivity.
Having arrived at what would be their new home, only rarely did they see a familiar face. In the new plantations of the southwest, slaves from the Chesapeake and the low country mingled in the new plantations with slaves smuggled from Africa and the West Indies and free blacks kidnapped from the Northern states. While some slaves bragged of their origins—claiming that “Virginia de best” and South Carolinians “eats cottonseed”—such regional chauvinism soon disappeared. Unlike in the eighteenth century, observers failed to dwell upon the peculiar twang in the voice of Virginia slaves or the lilt in the language of those from the low country. But if older distinctions between Virginians and South Carolinians and Africans and African Americans disappeared, new ones emerged, as the new arrivals were not always welcome by the first-comers.19
Still, the shared experience of being bought and sold unified black people as perhaps no other. The destination of most seaboard slaves moved steadily westward with the expansion of the cotton kingdom so that the trek from the interior was arduous and, for many, increasingly long. Coffles trudging at the rate of some fifteen to twenty miles a day could make the trip between tidewater Virginia and the Mississippi Valley in about two months under ideal conditions. But conditions were rarely ideal, and muddy roads and swollen rivers forced slaves to detour and could substantially increase the time slaves spent on the road. In fact, few slaves moved without such delays, for travel was rarely direct. Meandering from town to town, much as African captives moved from village to village, and as their seaborne counterparts in the African trade had earlier sailed from port to port, traders here and there sold a few slaves and purchased others. A trader carried Charles Ball, a Maryland slave, southward to Georgia in a coffle that numbered some fifty slaves. Along the way, he periodically stopped, pitched camp, and peddled slaves in the ne
ighborhood, literally moving from door to door. In the evening he would return, Ball reported, with those “whom he had not disposed of.” The others remained tethered to camp, anxiously waiting for their turn.20 Many—perhaps most—transplanted slaves shared Ball’s experience of being sold door-to-door. While most slaves faced the auction block and public sales at one time or another, many moved invisibly in the quiet bargaining between trader and would-be owner, out of public view.
Although the logic of commerce urged that these valued commodities be well fed and housed, logic no more prevailed in the second Middle Passage than it did in the first. Eager to pad their profits, traders—in particular the marginal operators—skimped on the care and feeding of their human property. They bedded their slaves with little protection, forcing them to sleep on the dank ground in open fields or some equally uninviting board floor in drafty buildings. They fed the captives on whatever was available and replaced only the most threadbare garments. If men and women fell ill, they could expect only the most rudimentary medical care, if any, for traders were quick to cut their losses. Fearing that a contagion that had taken the lives of several of his slaves would damage his ongoing business, Isaac Franklin, Natchez’s leading slave trader, refused to call a physician to treat his ailing slaves. Instead, he let the slaves suffer and die, and then dumped their bodies in a nearby ravine. The infamous captain of the Zong, who threw sickly slaves overboard, had nothing on Isaac Franklin. While the mortality rate for the internal slave trade never approached that of the transatlantic transfer, it surpassed that of those who remained in the seaboard states.21