Author:
Joshua D. Rothman

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Sign up todayThe Ledger and the Chain
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Learn moreAn award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave trade—and its role in the making of America.
Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men—who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South—were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States.
In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.
Joshua D. Rothman is professor of history and chair of the department of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Flush Times and Fever Dreams and Notorious in the Neighborhood. He lives in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Audiobook details
Narrator:
Leon Nixon
ISBN:
9781549135040
Length:
13 hours 40 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Hachette Audio
Publication date:
April 20, 2021
Edition:
Unabridged
PDF extra:
Available