Publishers Weekly
★ 02/22/2021
University of Alabama history professor Rothman (Flush Times and Fever Dreams) delivers a harrowing portrait of how the domestic slave trade “helped define the financial, political, legal, cultural, and demographic contours” of 19th-century America. Focusing on three business partners—Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard—who ran the largest slave-trading operation in the country, Rothman explains how Congress’s 1808 ban on the importation of enslaved people “effectively creat a federally protected internal market for human beings.” When Natchez, Miss., banned slave-trading in 1833 in large part because Franklin had been caught dumping diseased corpses into a ravine, he simply moved his operation a mile outside of the city and continued receiving and reselling thousands of slaves bought by Armfield and Ballard from declining tobacco plantations in Maryland and Virginia. Rothman delineates the links between the domestic slave trade, the forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeast, the growth of the American banking system, and the establishment of national transportation networks. Through meticulous archival research, he 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. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
"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
"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
“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
“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
“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
"Amazing, disturbing…a stunning, unsettling account of a guilt shared more widely and more enthusiastically than many Americans like to think.”—Christian Science Monitor
“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 riveting narrative, formidably documented and written with quiet fury… brilliant."—Times Literary Supplement
“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
“A feat as impressive as it is necessary.”—H-Net
"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
"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
"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
"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
“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
“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
Library Journal
03/01/2021
Between 1800 and 1860, slavers transported roughly one million Black people within the American South and between states. Award-winning author Rothman (history, Univ. of Alabama; Flush Times and Fever Dreams) brings to life the enormity of the lucrative interstate and intrastate merchandising of brutalized Black bodies as instruments of capital and exchange in an American commerce bottomed on instruments of torture like the shackle and whip. He reconstructs the lives of Isaac Franklin (1789–1846), John Armfield (1797–1871), and Rice Ballard (1800–60), principals of the largest U.S. slave trading business: Alexandria, VA-based Franklin & Armfield. This wide-ranging and meticulously documented study interweaves biography, family dynamics, business contours and networks, and local and national developments to show how slavery and capitalism were always intertwined. Rothman carefully details how the success of Franklin & Armfield was aided by innovations in technology, infrastructure, information, and finance. To conclude, he underscores how these actions facilitated slave trafficking, leading to the permanent separation of families. VERDICT Explaining how trafficking in slaves advanced private and public priorities as it produced great wealth and promoted national growth, Rothman displays the ever-present and impoverishing cost to the enslaved. A must-read account that sheds light on the interdependence of slavery and capitalism in the United States.—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-02-10
A chilling account of the metastatic growth of America’s internal slave trade in the early 1800s.
Rothman, the chair of the history department at the University of Alabama and author of two previous books on slavery in the U.S., 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. Digging deeply into the horrific details of the hugely profitable slave-trafficking business of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard in Natchez, Mississippi, and Alexandria, Virginia, where they based their operations from the mid-1820s, the author clearly shows the mechanics behind the exponential growth of slavery in the South as it rose to meet the demands of a growing nation, financially, politically, geographically, and demographically. “Their America incentivized entrepreneurialism, financial risk, and racial slavery, and no one made more of the junction among those things than they did,” writes Rothman in this meticulously documented history. “They became some of the richest men in the country as a result.” Expanding from the successful model of slave trader Austin Woolfolk, who worked out of Baltimore, Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard took out ads, bargained in taverns, and bought enslaved people and took them to New Orleans, Charleston, and other cities in order to sell them for a profit. During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the clearing of Native peoples from their lands allowed for a massive increase in the production of cotton and sugar as well as the proliferation of banks and technological advances like the cotton gin—all of which required a seemingly “bottomless” supply of free labor. As they grew their businesses, these men “helped foster something resembling a national market in commoditized human beings that paralleled the development of national markets in an array of other goods.”
An excellent work of vast research that hauntingly delineates the “intimate daily savageries of the slave trade.
