The Domestic Slave Trade

The parts they don’t say out loud

Photo by Patrice Strong

“Beginning in the seventeenth century, millions of African people were kidnapped, sold into slavery, and shipped to the Americas as part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In 1808, the United States Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa. At the same time, the high price of cotton and the development of the cotton gin caused the demand for slave labor to skyrocket in the Lower South. The Domestic Slave Trade was created to meet this demand.

Over the next fifty years, slave traders forcibly transferred hundreds of thousands of slaves from the Upper South to Alabama and the Lower South. Between 1808 and 1860, the enslaved population of Alabama grew from less than 40,000 to more than 435,000. Alabama had one of the largest slave populations in America at the start of the Civil War.”

Those two paragraphs summarize the what without telling you anything about the who and very little about the why. If you only read that Alabama’s enslaved population grew from 40,000 to 435,000 in just over fifty years. You might conclude that most of them just moved from one place to another, like the great migration. That’s partially true because most of those slaves came from other states like Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. The truth is that the increased population in those states was due to the…