FROM THE STACKS Commemorating the 33rd Annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, scheduled for February 24-26, 2022, Bluffs & Bayous offers this first in a series of reviews for books integral to the conference’s presentations and discussions that explore its 2022 theme — Mississippi: A Tapestry of American Life.
BY
Jim Wiggins
The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua Rothman
I
n the opening pages of his new book, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, Joshua Rothman takes us to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1833. Spring rains had revealed three corpses that had been buried the previous year in shallow graves in a ravine. They were victims of the dread disease cholera; but more to the point, they were also enslaved victims of the dread slave trader Isaac Franklin, who had ordered the hasty and secretive disposal. As word spread of the find, there was outrage among the townspeople. In a fit of self-righteous pique, the city fathers sent them all slinking into unceremonious exile. The banishment was of little consequence, however. The traders simply moved to a site that was just beyond the city limits, to
a place called the Forks of the Road. There, Franklin and his partners John Armfield and Rice Ballard would in fact expand their Natchez operation. The cholera-induced “capital depreciation” which the company had suffered in 1832 would pale in comparison to the profits of 1833 and later. All was well with Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard—and with their company, already the largest slave-trading business in the nation and still expanding. To be clear, as Rothman tells us, the decision to ban the merchandising of humans within Natchez proper had nothing to do with an aversion among its white residents to the merchandizing of humans as an activity. The issue in 1833 had been the danger posed to public health by newly arrived and possibly diseased “stock.” And, beyond that, there had been the upset to decorum to consider. After all, a roving street corner bazaar of enslaved people might perturb the refined sensibilities of those whose refinement had been bought with the stolen labor of enslaved people. Similarly, today, mention of such things from our past unsettles our present complacency, complacency bought with the coin of willful ignorance, leading us to exile such thoughts to a place outside the bounds of notice. There to be forgotten, though never forgotten. There to flourish like a Forks of the Road of the Mind, festering, metastasizing, sickening the body politic. Fortunately, though, it is a mental illness with a known
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cure—historical honesty. Natchez, prepare for some therapeutic perturbation. As a teaser event for February’s Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, Joshua Rothman is coming to town this fall, as a guest speaker for the Natchez National Historical Park. Chair of the History Department at the University of Alabama, Rothman is one of the historians who over the past 25 years have pulled back the curtain on the intricate links between the business of racial slavery in all its aspects and the development of not only the southern economy but also the national economy. In this field, other books tell the story of the internal slave trade in its entirety; and the numbers involved are astounding. Over the years from 1800 to 1860, one million enslaved people were trafficked from the Upper South to the Lower South. Millions more were bought and sold in intrastate trades. But in this book, Rothman focuses on the activities of the three men mentioned above, a story in which Natchez figures prominently. It, New Orleans, and Alexandria, Virginia, were the primary hubs of a business distinctive in its scale but also in its vertical integration of the purchasing, incarcerating, shipping, marketing, and selling of enslaved people. It is history on a granular level. In the text but also in the nearly ninety pages of endnotes—Professor Rothman plainly paid his archival dues—you get to know the “commodities” of the trade as individual humans with names, unique personal characteristics, families, friends, and homes. But you also get to feel Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard’s predatory breaths on your neck. Because let’s be blunt about their “business.” As Rothman puts it, these were “the kind of men who sold other peoples’ children for profit,” men who consciously employed “the intimate daily savageries of the slave trade” as tools of their trade to enhance their profits. “The exhilarating thrill of acting with impunity animated
