Books-The Ledger and the Chain

In his book The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade in America by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. These men—who trafficked and sold more than half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery’s expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Rothman shows that the domestic slave trade 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. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.

(Basic Books)