In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation.Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who ran Franklin and Armfield, and none were more influential. Drawing on source material from more than thirty archives in a dozen states, Rothman follows the three traders through their first meetings, the rise of their firm, and its eventual dissolution. Responsible for selling between 8,000 and 12,000 slaves from the Upper South to Deep South plantations over a period of eight years in the 1830s, they ran an extensive and innovative operation, with offices in New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana and Natchez in Mississippi. They advertised widely, borrowed heavily from bankers and other creditors, extended long term credit to their buyers, and had ships built to take slaves from Virginia down to New Orleans. Slavers are often misremembered as pariahs of more cultivated society, but as Rothman argues, the men who perpetrated the slave trade were respected members of prominent social and business communities and understood themselves as patriotic Americans.By tracing the lives and careers of the nation's most notorious slave traders, The Ledger and the Chain shows how their business skills and remorseless violence together made the malevolent entrepreneurialism of the slave trade. And it reveals how this horrific, ubiquitous trade in human beings shaped a growing nation and corrupted it in ways still powerfully felt today.
Show moreIn The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation.Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who ran Franklin and Armfield, and none were more influential. Drawing on source material from more than thirty archives in a dozen states, Rothman follows the three traders through their first meetings, the rise of their firm, and its eventual dissolution. Responsible for selling between 8,000 and 12,000 slaves from the Upper South to Deep South plantations over a period of eight years in the 1830s, they ran an extensive and innovative operation, with offices in New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana and Natchez in Mississippi. They advertised widely, borrowed heavily from bankers and other creditors, extended long term credit to their buyers, and had ships built to take slaves from Virginia down to New Orleans. Slavers are often misremembered as pariahs of more cultivated society, but as Rothman argues, the men who perpetrated the slave trade were respected members of prominent social and business communities and understood themselves as patriotic Americans.By tracing the lives and careers of the nation's most notorious slave traders, The Ledger and the Chain shows how their business skills and remorseless violence together made the malevolent entrepreneurialism of the slave trade. And it reveals how this horrific, ubiquitous trade in human beings shaped a growing nation and corrupted it in ways still powerfully felt today.
Show moreJoshua D. Rothman is professor of history and chair of the department of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Flush Times and Fever Dreams and Notorious in the Neighborhood. He lives in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
"A feat as impressive as it is necessary."--H-Net
"Tremendous...[The Ledger and the Chain] intertwines a careful
biography of a very successful business with unflinching attention
to the monstrosity that business was built upon."--Slate
"An argument that is sure to push the literature on the slave trade
in new directions... an incisive analysis that should be essential
reading."--Journal of Southern History
"Harrowing... Rothman's searing reportage makes it glaringly clear
just how pervasive and profound the legacy of slavery has been and
is to the American way of life."--Seattle Times
"In popular culture, we've cast slave traders at social pariahs but
Joshua Rothman's book refutes that whitewashed narrative. In many
ways, slave traders were celebrated businessmen and he traces the
stories of three of the biggest slave traders to show how much the
economies of the South and the North relied on America's original
sin."--Reckon
"A searing account of the reprehensible life's work of Franklin and
his remorseless business associates. Other scholars have produced
accounts of the domestic slave trade. Mr. Rothman writes about
slave traders, and puts an indelible face on their
inhumanity."--Wall Street Journal
"A riveting narrative, formidably documented and written with quiet
fury... brilliant."--Times Literary Supplement
"Antebellum America was simultaneously a robust marketplace of
strivers and a landscape of horror for the millions who were
enslaved. In this groundbreaking work, Joshua Rothman reveals the
intimate connection between the two. His study of the
under-examined slave trade shows how it was integral to the rise of
interstate commerce, the flow of credit, and the establishment of
new transportation routes. He also underscores its systematic
cruelty, in which men gloried in rape and casually sold children
from parents yet stood as respected members of the community. The
Ledger and the Chain is detailed, incisive, and devastating."--T.
J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon and
Custer's Trials
"Joshua Rothman carefully and empirically builds from a forensic
accounting of the lives and practices of those Frederick Douglass
termed the 'man-drovers' and others called the 'soul drivers' to a
social autopsy of the whole of American slavery in the nineteenth
century. Essential."--Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of
America
"Powerful ... Rothman confounds the stereotype of the slave trader
as scrappy outsider... [and] brilliantly captures the grotesque
collision of dehumanization and sentimentality that shaped the
worlds of Franklin and his associates."--New York Review of
Books
"Wide ranging and meticulously documented...A must read account
that sheds light on the interdependence of slavery and capitalism
in the United States."--Library Journal
"A tour de force of deep research and vivid detail that illuminates
big and critical issues. Beautifully written too. Moving,
horrifying, unforgettable."--Drew Faust, Harvard University
"Amazing, disturbing...a stunning, unsettling account of a guilt
shared more widely and more enthusiastically than many Americans
like to think."--Christian Science Monitor
"Accounts of American slavery often overlook the central role of
the traders who profited. Rothman's history focuses on three of the
biggest."--New York Times Book Review
"Slave traders aren't often called out by name, and therefore are
subjected to little accountability. But Rothman shines a light on
how these human traffickers were responsible for crimes against
humanity, the sale of over half a million enslaved people among
them."--Fortune
"Rothman employs his wide breadth of knowledge about the era to
vividly depict the human and economic impacts of the domestic slave
trade as it burgeoned in the early 19th century...An excellent work
of vast research that hauntingly delineates the 'intimate daily
savageries of the slave trade.'"--Kirkus
"Through meticulous archival research, Rothman debunks the myth
that slave traders were social outcasts and tracks how their brazen
advertisements and abusive treatment of captive men, women, and
children were used by abolitionists to stoke public outrage. This
trenchant study deserves a wide and impassioned
readership."--Publisher's Weekly
"The story of the international slave trade is well known to many.
Much less known are the workings of the domestic slave trade in the
United States that sent tens of thousands of enslaved African
Americans from the Upper South to the cotton and sugar fields in
the Deep South. With exhaustive research and piercing insight,
Joshua Rothman's The Ledger and the Chain brings that history alive
through the stories of three men who sat at the nexus between
Southern cotton producers and Northern financial institutions. As
the tragic legacies of these men are still with us, this book
should be read by all who are interested in our current racial
predicament."--Annette Gordon-Reed, coauthor of Most Blessed of the
Patriarchs
"We are sometimes told that the quintessential American story is
the tale of the small business that makes it big. If that's the
case, there's no more American story than The Ledger and the Chain,
Joshua Rothman's brilliant new history of the slave-trading
entrepreneurs Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice
Ballard."--Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been
Told
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
