The Atlantic
The Men Who Turned Slavery Into Big Business
The domestic slave trade was no sideshow in our history, and slave traders were not bit players on the stage.
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Adam Maida / The Atlantic
Isaac Franklin spent part of Christmas Day 1833 assessing his company’s operations and making plans for the future. Writing from New Orleans to one of his business partners in Virginia, Franklin took a few moments out of his holiday to report that he had rented a new showroom in the city from which he would soon start making sales, and that sales up the Mississippi River at the company’s branch in Natchez, Mississippi, were going swimmingly.
th-century businessmen Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard. “The observation that Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard lived in a nation that sanctioned and rewarded the market exchange of people as property is true,” Rothman begins. “But it is inadequate.” From there, the history intertwines a careful biography of a very successful business with unflinching attention to the monstrosity that business was built upon.
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The Ledger and the Chain tells the story of how these three men profited from the United States’ decision to outlaw the foreign slave trade, in 1808. The change, of course, did not put an end to slavery