Troublesome Commerce

Robert H. Gudmestad provides an in-depth examination of the growth and development of the interstate slave trade during the early nineteenth century, using the business as a means to explore economic change, the culture of honor, master-slave relationships, and the justification of slavery in the antebellum South. Gudmestad demonstrates how southerners, faced with the incongruity of maintaining their paternalistic beliefs about slavery even while capitalistically exploiting their slaves, coped by disassociating themselves from the brutality and greed of the slave trade and shifting responsibility for slavery's realities to the speculators. In tracing the trans- formation of a troublesome commerce into a southern scapegoat, this pro- vocative work proves the interstate slave trade to be vital to the making- and understanding- of the paradoxical antebellum South.

By tracing the history of slaveholders' ambivalent, angst-ridden critiques of the slave trade across the regions of the South and throughout the entire antebellum period, and placing them in dialogue with an increasingly full- throated defense of speculation in human property, Gudmestad has made a substantial contribution to the political and cultural history of the slave- holding South.--Walter Johnson, author of Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market, This compelling study demonstrates in eloquent terms how the slave trade evolved from family migrations before the 1830s into a heartless big- business commerce in which slave households were unmindfully torn apart. In every respect, this work contributes to our understanding of how capital- ism and slavery could walk hand in hand--in shackles.--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Hearts of Darkness

Robert H. Gudmestad is an assistant professor of history at Colorado author of Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom.