American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader

As a young man, John B. Prentis (1788-1848) expressed outrage over slavery, but by the end of his life he had transported thousands of enslaved persons from the upper to the lower South. Kari J. Winter's life-and-times portrayal of a slave trader illuminates the clash between two American dreams: one of wealth, the other of equality. Prentis was born into a prominent Virginia family. His grandfather, William Prentis, emigrated from London to Williamsburg in 1715 as an indentured servant and rose to become the major shareholder in colonial Virginia's most successful store. William's son Joseph became a Revolutionary judge and legislator who served alongside Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison. Joseph Jr. followed his father's legal career, whereas John was drawn to commerce. To finance his early business ventures, he began trading in slaves. In time he grew besotted with the high-stakes trade, appeasing his conscience with the populist platitudes of Jacksonian democracy, which aggressively promoted white male democracy in conjunction with white male supremacy. Prentis's life illuminates the intertwined politics of labor, race, class, and gender in the young American nation. Participating in a revolution in the ethics of labor that upheld Benjamin Franklin as its icon, he rejected the gentility of his upbringing to embrace solidarity with "mechanicks," white working-class men. His capacity for admirable thoughts and actions complicates images drawn by elite slaveholders, who projected the worst aspects of slavery onto traders while imagining themselves as benign patriarchs. This is an absorbing story of a man who betrayed his innate sense of justice to pursue wealth through the most vicious forms of human exploitation.

I know of no rival book that reveals so much of the biography and, more important, the antecedents and social milieu of a slave trader. This is a striking study of the banality of the slave-trading evil in the early American Republic.--William L. Andrews "E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill", Offers an indelible portrait of a Virginia slave trader and the everwidening filial, cultural, and political circles that framed his life. The book does a very good job of outlining the dimensions of the world that produced Prentis; it also offers important meditations on the way that Prentis's often conflicting dreams and desires impacted the social world around him.--Richard Newman "author of Freedom's Prophet: Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers", Scholars of slavery and of those caught in its grip, whether white or black, will find it a welcome addition to the literature. The story of middling, urban slave owners has not received enough attention, a condition that Winter's work starts to correct.--Washington Independent Review of Books, Winter uses the life of John B. Prentis as a framework within which to display the larger society of the antebellum South with regard to the issue of slavery. She does not whitewash the violent racism and sexism at the root of that society, but by telling one man's story, she establishes the context of American slavery in a fresh and enlightening way.--Suite 101

KARI J. WINTER is a professor of American studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (Georgia) and editor of The Blind African Slave: Or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace.