tadman1996

@Book{ tadman1996,
    author = {Michael Tadman},
    title = {Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South},
    address = {Madison},
    publisher = {University of Wisconsin Press},
    year = 1996,
}

p. 12: Table 2.1 provides estimates of when states became “net exporters” or “net importers” of slaves through the interregional trade

p. 23: critique of Fogel and Engerman’s focus on New Orleans trade to draw generalizations because of its tendencies towards specialization

p. 70: seasonal cycles of the trade

pp. 97-102: evidence of “preparing” slaves for sale

p. 105: effects of Panic of 1837

p. 117:

… the great majority of sales to the trader were not involuntary or reluctant. Essentially, the Upper South seems to have been releasing slaves who were ‘surplus,’ in the narrow sense that their work would yield even higher profits in the importing than in the exporting states. When slave prices were favorable (times when profits from the Upper South’s crop production would also have been building up), typical Upper South slaveholders seem to have found it more attractive to sell surplus slaves in return for dramatic profits than to accept a more gradual access of profits by using those slaves to expand crop production at home.

p. 118: “sales to the trader came essentially, not from distressful emergencies and necessities, but from the temptations of attractive speculative opportunities” (see also p. 125, 130)

p. 121: “… in the exporting states it would have been quite rare to have survived into middle age without being sold locally or interregionally”

pp. 121-129: discussion of “slave breeding” debate, ultimately concluding against the idea of numerous “stud farms” or “regional specialization in breeding” but affirming the “almost universal enthusiasm for natural increase from ‘slave property’”

Chapter 6 covers family separations, showing “for the substantial majority of slaveholders, an easy resort to self-interest, sale, and separation” of families, particularly first marriages in the Upper South; “just over half of all slaves who fell into the hands of the trader would either have been forcibl[y] separated from a spouse or have been children who were forcibly separated from one or both of their parents”

p. 169: “about one in five marriages of Upper South would have been broken by the [interregional] trade,” perhaps more like one in four if local sales and other transactions included; suggesting “that the risk of the forcible termination of a first marriage was very real indeed. But against this, the substantial majority of Upper South marriages would seem to have run their natural course, and would have been ended only by the death of a spouse” (p. 171)

p. 171: approximately 1 in 3 “Upper South children aged fourteen and under … were separated from one or both parents by the trade” … p. 172: “Against all this we shall, nevertheless, have to consider the probability that the vast majority of children lived with their parents for at least ten years, and a majority for some years longer. Such a circumstance, together with the threat of separation, would surely have built very deep-rooted ties between parents and children.”

pp. 174-75:

So, among Upper South slaves, the marriage institution as a normal expectation and right of life could flourish; but, at the same time, forced separations were sufficiently widespread for deep distrust of those who wrecked marriages—the masters—to be endemic. With increasing years, slaves reached a phase of life where marriages came less under threat because the spouses became less saleable, but the offspring of those unions would increasingly be of interest to the traders.

Chapter 7 discusses the Southern myth of ostracized traders, on which see also gudmestad2003.