gudmestad2003

@Book{ gudmestad2003,
    author = {Robert H. Gudmestad},
    title = {A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade},
    address = {Baton Rouge},
    publisher = {Louisiana State University Press},
    year = 2003,
}

Book’s subtitle might more accurately end with “in white Southern minds”; this is a good monograph that is primarily focused less on the trade itself and more on what made it “troublesome” to white paternalist slaveholders who believed a distinction could be drawn between immoral/wrongful sales and rightful ones. Shows that these distinctions, and fears about the slave trade, were different in the Upper South and Lower South (where the real fear, according to pp. 112-117, was about importation of contagions of various kinds, disease, rebellion, etc.), but that slaveholders in both sections made peace with the trade in a variety of ways, especially by stigmatizing and attempting to limit the activities of certain kinds of speculators and professional slave traders. Crux of the book’s argument becomes clear on pp. 70-82.

Useful for me in terms of understanding how someone like George B. Kinkead and other Upper South slaveholders get involved in Henrietta Wood case—why they see certain kinds of enslavement and trade as illegitimate but without challenging the proprietary logic behind slavery itself.

p. 2 - identifies prime shipping season for slave traders as October to March

p. 8 - useful statistics on the interstate trade, followed by estimates of profit margins on p. 11

p. 17 - examples of Natchez planters going all the way to Virginia to buy slaves; also see section on Natchez and Forks of the Road on pp. 24-25

p. 28 - rise of partnerships between professional traders

p. 100 - the kidnapping trade, Lewis Robards

pp. 100-1 - sickness in slave jails