Purposes of the Project

To Be Sold reconstructs America's domestic slave trade as a system — the traders who ran it, the transatlantic economy that drove it, and the newspapers that advertised and profited from it — in order to restore the people it trafficked to the machinery that trafficked them.

First, we name names of a particular kind. For too long the slave trader was cast as a pariah at the margins of American life — a low creature the plantation ideal preferred to disown. Recent scholarship has shown the opposite: that the traders' capital and methods sat close to the center of American development, underwriting universities, shaping the young social sciences, refining the practices of accounting and credit, and helping finance the industrial takeoff. By reconstructing the traders and their networks from the advertisements they placed — their firms and partnerships, their jails and holding pens, their routes and reach — we seek to hold them accountable for the full breadth and depth of what they built and what they broke.

Second, we seek to dismantle the idea that the Second Middle Passage was a purely "domestic" phenomenon. America's internal trade was driven at once by supply-side forces at home and demand-side forces abroad, both converging on the industrial takeoff in textiles. The connection is not abstract. When Britain abolished slavery, it paid reparations not to the enslaved but to the enslavers — capital that Liverpool's slaving families reinvested in the railways binding their port to the cotton mills of Manchester and Lancashire. Slavery had not ended; it had changed form. Even as Britain suppressed the transatlantic trade, its appetite for cotton fed the vast expansion of America's internal one. To tell the story of the domestic trade without England is to miss half of it.

Third, we seek to reckon with the newspapers themselves. The trade in human beings ran on column inches. Much as classified advertising would later enrich the twentieth-century press, the endless notices of sale, purchase, and pursuit were a reliable revenue stream for nineteenth-century papers — some of which still publish today. Our sources are those very advertisements, which means our method carries its own indictment: the record we build is made of the evidence of the newspapers' complicity, and it lets us measure that complicity — issue by issue, column by column, paper by paper — as few efforts have before.

Fourth, we seek to recover the people. Nothing can repay the intergenerational theft of the Second Middle Passage, and no database can reassemble what it broke. But there is a power in truth plainly told. Where the named-individual collections return to a genealogist an ancestor's name, we can return the ancestor's world — the trader who sold them, the route they were forced along, the pen that held them, the market that priced them. As Ashley's Sack reminds us, the smallest surviving record can carry an ocean of love and loss across generations. In restoring the enslaved to the machinery that moved them, we aim not at closure, which is impossible, but at recognition, which is owed.