Schermerhorn, Calvin
The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860
Yale (New Haven)
2015
OUR SYNOPSIS: Calvin Schermerhorn examines the U.S. domestic slave trade by focusing on slave trading firms, arguing that their “ventures that financed, traded, and transported enslaved people chart the progress of nineteenth-century American capitalism more strikingly than any other enterprise." (1) In each chapter, he explores challenges encountered by slave trading capitalists to shed light on their adaptive business operations. He also emphasizes experiences of the enslaved captives themselves, showing how they resisted racial capitalism. He shows traders violently moved enslaved people across the U.S. starting in the 1810s, over land and later over water, taking advantage of developing infrastructure to streamline transport. They managed multiple currencies as the financial system took shape, with both traders and buyers purchasing on credit. As states introduced regulatory restrictions on the slave trade, traders crafted elaborate smuggling systems.
BIG QUESTIONS:
What role did financial institutions play in the domestic slave trade?
To what extent were federal and state governments directly involved in the slave trade?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“The development of American capitalism hinged on an economy of knowledge. Success as an interstate slave trader meant leveraging knowledge of local and distant markets and mastering the complexities of negotiating prices of human beings with other human beings.” (12)
“As they developed strategies, enslavers became increasingly adept at dislocating, disorienting, and disappearing captives, immiserating them by disinheriting children and young people, cutting them off from community, family, and ancestors’ social capital. As enslavers delivered a portable human commodity, they made African descent a marker of noncandidacy for the opportunities and entitlements of those who held property in other people.” (245)
PRIMARY SOURCE:
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Austin Woolfolk’s role in Baltimore’s domestic slave trade (see Chapter Two).
