A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade

Robert H. Gudmestad provides an in-depth examination of the growth and development of the interstate slave trade during the early nineteenth century, using the business as a means to explore economic change, the culture of honor, master-slave relationships, and the justification of slavery in the antebellum South. Gudmestad demonstrates how southerners, faced with the incongruity of maintaining their paternalistic beliefs about slavery even while capitalistically exploiting their slaves, coped by disassociating themselves from the brutality and greed of the slave trade and shifting responsibility for slavery’s realities to the speculators. In tracing the trans- formation of a troublesome commerce into a southern scapegoat, this pro- vocative work proves the interstate slave trade to be vital to the making―and understanding―of the paradoxical antebellum South.

Robert Gudmestad is professor of history at Colorado State University. He is the author of A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade and Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom.