Human Conflict Project

All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The Domestic Slave Trade of the United States

1790–1865 · Americas

Displacement Sexual Violence Abduction (Children)
Displaced
1 million
About one million enslaved people were moved from the Upper South to the Lower South between roughly 1790 and 1860, of whom the majority were sold through the trade and the remainder carried with migrating owners. The figure is a demographic reconstruction rather than a count: it is derived from the decennial federal censuses by comparing the enslaved populations that each state should have had from natural increase with the populations recorded, and is set out in these terms by the Equal Justice Initiative and Encyclopedia Virginia. Family effects are estimated separately: on these reconstructions more than half of enslaved people in the Upper South were separated from a parent or a child, and about a third of their marriages were broken by forced migration.
Share of the population affected
25%
of the enslaved population of the United States at the 1860 census, at the end of the interstate trade, 1860

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What happened

When Congress closed the Atlantic trade to the United States in 1808, the enslaved population of the Chesapeake and the Carolinas was already growing by natural increase while the cotton frontier of the Gulf states was opening. The result was an internal traffic that moved roughly a million people south and west over seven decades, by coastwise vessel, by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi after 1811, on foot in chained coffles, and from the 1830s by rail. Slave-trading firms maintained pens and auction houses in Richmond, Alexandria, Baltimore, Charleston and above all New Orleans. The trade is documented in bills of sale, trader ledgers, newspaper advertisements, court records and the federal censuses, and its scale is inferred from interstate population differentials. Its most-cited social consequence is the routine breaking of families: on standard reconstructions more than half of enslaved people in the exporting states lost a parent or child to sale.

Parties

Slaveholders and professional traders in the Upper South sold and marched roughly a million enslaved people to the cotton and sugar districts of the Deep South and Southwest

Disputed

The share of the million who were sold by traders rather than carried by migrating owners is estimated differently by different historians, and the profitability and demographic logic of the trade remain subjects of economic-history debate.

The denominator

The 1860 federal census counted 3,953,760 enslaved people. The same population was 697,681 at the 1790 census and grew roughly fivefold by natural increase over the trade's span, so the census at the close of the period is the only denominator that yields a share resembling the historiographical finding that about one enslaved person in four in the Upper South was sold or moved south.

The denominator is an end-of-period snapshot: measured against the 697,681 enslaved people counted in 1790, when the trade began, the million people sold south would exceed 100 per cent.

Where the baseline comes from

On the death toll

There is no separate death toll for the internal trade, and it was not a killing operation: deaths occurred on coffle marches, in slave pens and in the shift to the harsher labour regimes of the sugar and cotton districts, but they are not separable in the records from the general mortality of enslavement. The trade's documented harm is measured in sales and family separations rather than in deaths.

Documented forms of violence

Forced LabourSexual ViolenceAbduction of ChildrenTorture

The Equal Justice Initiative and Encyclopedia Virginia document the sale of children away from parents, the sale of women into sexual exploitation, and the use of whipping and confinement in trading pens, drawing on sale records, advertisements, court cases and the narratives of formerly enslaved people.

Movements mapped

Countries touched, on present-day borders

United States of America

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.
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