List of American slave traders
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This is a list of American slave traders, people whose occupation or business was the slave trade in the United States, i.e. the buying and selling of human chattel as commodities, primarily African-American people in the Southern United States, from the declaration of independence in 1776 until the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. People who dealt in enslaved indigenous persons, such as was the case with slavery in California, would also be included. This list represents a fraction of the "many hundreds of participants in a cruel and omnipresent" American market.[3]
The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was passed in 1808 under the so-called Star-Spangled Banner flag, when there were 15 states in the Union. The last slave auction in the rebel states was held in 1865.[4] In the intervening years, the politics surrounding the addition of 20 new states to the Union had been almost overwhelmingly dominated by whether or not those states would have legal slavery.[5] Slavery was widespread, so slave trading was widespread, and "When a planter died, failed in business, divided his estate, needed ready money to satisfy a mortgage or pay a gambling debt, or desired to get rid of an unruly Negro, traders struck a profitable bargain."[6] A slave trader might have described himself as a broker, auctioneer, general agent, or commission merchant,[7] and often sold real estate, personal property, and livestock in addition to enslaved people.[8] Many large trading firms also had field agents, whose job it was to go to more remote towns and rural areas, buying up enslaved people for resale elsewhere.[4] Countless enslaved people were also sold at courthouse auctions by county sheriffs and U.S. marshals to satisfy court judgments and settle estates; individuals involved in those sales are not the primary focus of this list.
Note: Research by Michael Tadman has found that "'core' sources provide only a basic skeleton of a much more substantial trade" in enslaved people throughout the South, with particular deficits in records of rural slave trading, already wealthy people who speculated to grow their wealth further, and in all private sales that occurred outside auction houses and negro marts.[9]
List is organized by surname of trader, or name of firm, where principals have not been further identified.
Note: Charleston and Charles Town, Virginia are distinct places that later became Charleston, West Virginia, and Charles Town, West Virginia, respectively, and neither is to be confused with Charleston, South Carolina.
We must have a market for human flesh, or we are ruined.
— Frederick Douglass, on the predominant message from the Southern states to the U.S. government before the American Civil War, The Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. II, p. 405