To Be Sold | eHistory ToBeSold

The Significance of the Trade

In 1972, historian Richard Ralston coined the term ‘Second Middle Passage’ as a way of conveying the devastations to the Black community caused by the domestic slave trade in the United States. In this second wave of the larger African diaspora more than a million men, women, and children were sold ‘down the river’ from the upper south to the newer states of the Cotton Kingdom.

In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously charged his king with human trafficking: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people [meaning Africans] who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere [meaning America] to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” This passage was so inflammatory it was removed.

What Jefferson never acknowledged, but participated in, was the subsequently massive trade in human beings.

Historian Tiya Miles has told the harrowing history of Ashley’s sack, a simple cotton bag given from an enslaved mother, Rose, to her nine-year-old daughter on the occasion of her daughter’s unexpected sale. Heartbroken at having to say a sudden goodbye, Rose repurposed the bag as a psychic med kit, filling it with a dress, some pecans, a braid of her hair, and “my love always.” She never saw her daughter again.

To understand the devastation of the Second Middle Passage, multiply this story by a million.

And then understand that such sales were but a fraction of the transfers that occurred not between states but within states as a result of sheriff’s sales, probate sales, and private agreement.

Purposes of the Project

First: We seek to recover the names and stories of the African Americans who endured the trade. Nothing can compensate Black families for the intergenerational trauma caused by the Second Middle Passage. As the story of Ashley’s Sack attests, however, there is a kind of power in telling the truth. Maybe a full reckoning is impossible, but in assembling these stories and records, and in making them available to Black genealogists, we can hope to facilitate a form of psychic reunion and healing.

Second: We seek to name names of another kind. For too long, slavetraders were assumed to be an odious class operating at the periphery of the American economy. As recent books have made clear, their wealth and influence was central to the rise of universities, the social sciences, accounting practices, and the global industrial takeoff. In exposing the breadth and depth of these slavetraders’ influence, we seek to hold them accountable for the depth and breadth of their involvement in the trade.

Third: We seek to decimate the very idea of the Second Middle Passage as a purely ‘domestic’ phenomenon. America’s internal slave trade was the product at once of supply-side forces in the United States and demand-size forces in England, all focused on the industrial take-off in textiles. One example makes this especially clear: After abolition in England, reparations were paid to the slavers, especially in Liverpool, who invested that money in railroads that tied their port to the interior Cottonopolis of Manchester and Lancashire. The slave trade, in other words, had not ended but merely changed forms, and even as Britain began to suppress the transatlantic trade, it stimulated the massive expansion of America’s internal trade through its voracious demand for cotton.

Fourth: Newspapers played a critical role in facilitating the trade in human beings and reaped significant profit. Much as classified ads would later become a cash cow for twentieth-century newspapers, the vast column inches dedicated to slave ads were a significant source of revenue for nineteenth-century newspapers (some of which are still extant.) While some media companies have begun to grapple with their facilitation of the slave trade, much of this story remains to be told.