The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860

The new history of the antebellum South finds more similarities with the North than differences, even when capitalism is the comparative yardstick. Employing a fast-paced style and clever turns of phrase, Calvin Schermerhorn paints larger-than-life portraits of the leading slave traders who made “slavery's capitalism” (p. 136). They included Austin Woolfolk, the ruthless Baltimorean who created “a brand name synonymous with the slave trade” (p. 35). Hugues Lavergne convinced London's Baring Brothers and Company to market bonds issued by the land bank that Louisiana planters had created to raise capital. Thus did European investors gain a stake in U.S. slavery. The Business of Slavery re-creates the experience of its victims as well as of its perpetrators, using ships' manifests, among other sources, as windows into their lives. For the barrel maker Sam Watts, for instance, who “became part of Franklin and Armfield's supply chain” in Virginia, the journey ended at Edmond Jean Forstall's Louisiana Sugar Refinery (p. 129). Eliza Thompson left New York in 1818 for what she expected would be a term of three years and nine months at a Louisiana sugar plantation. She “was still there when the U.S. Census taker arrived” in 1870 (p. 93

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