Customer Reviews

Speculators And Slaves: Masters, Traders, And Slaves In The Old South

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Calmly and with much use of statistics, Tadman utterly smashes any idea that the master-slave relationship might have been truly paternal or any good at all for the slaves. This book starts slowly but leads to a strong, harsh conclusion: slave owners had virtually no regard for their slaves' family lives or happiness. It includes many good tables and historic illustrations.

This book is not, unfortunately, an easy read. It's thorough, careful, and heavily reliant on close analysis of bills of sales. Tadman's conclusion is that slave "owners" were speculators, selling slaves when the price was high, and holding them when it was low. (An important defense of slavery was that slave "owners" only sold slaves when financially pressed--this book shows the opposite was true.) Tadman calculates that "at least" 69.3% of the 154,000 interregional exportations in the 1820s were sales (with the rest slaves taken along with immigrating planters; Tadman 246). Unless those 106,722 slaves were all unmarried orphans, slave "owners" broke up a lot of families. Tadman estimates that the interregional slave trade broke up families in 51% of cases (150); this trade would have led to the termination of one out of every five marriages in the Upper South; one out of three children under the age of fourteen would have been sold away from parents. Local sales, he says "would have raised this proportion to about one in two" (211-2).