The Ledger and the Chain

How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

Bibliographic Data

ID9316902
AuthorsCalvin Schermerhorn (0000-0003-3551-7758, Arizona State University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume19
Issue3
Pages122-124
Publication date2022-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLabor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1547-6715 • E-ISSN: 1558-1454
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/15476715-9795222
OpenAlexW4302009897
LanguageEN
Citations received7

The Ledger and the Chain is a gripping story of human traffickers as labor allocators in the American South at a pivotal time. It focuses on how a constellation of white businesspeople—principally John Armfield, Rice C. Ballard, and Isaac Franklin—bought, transported, jailed, and sold ten thousand of their African-descended fellow Americans and how their firm, Franklin & Armfield, exemplified American capitalism of the early nineteenth century. The title points to the marriage of the bland business technology of the ledger and the bloody violence of the chain. The juxtaposition unravels a seeming contradiction between capitalism and slavery. The book's subjects put the capitalist virtues of social trust, investment, optimism, and creative problem-solving into the service of incarcerating, raping, deracinating, and forcing the labor of thousands of Black Americans, killing many along the way.Franklin & Armfield was the United States’ most successful domestic slave-trading firm, and Joshua D. Rothman deftly weaves together stories of Armfield, Franklin, and Ballard with those of employees, associates, family members, and subjects whom they enslaved and trafficked. Initial chapters focus on Armfield, Ballard, and Franklin's early lives, situations, and choices that steered them into becoming career enslavers. The nimble narrative considers the geopolitics of a republic expanding into the trans-Appalachian West through military conquest and the geoeconomics of cotton and other commodities for which growers demanded enslaved laborers. Congress outlawed the landing of foreign captives in 1808, and in 1809 Isaac Franklin began participating in the domestic trade in enslaved people, most of whom lived hundreds of miles from sites of cotton production. Rothman's arguments nod to historians such as Sven Beckert, Seth Rockman, and Edward E. Baptist in arguing that the “cotton bonanza” of the early nineteenth century drove military conquest that produced rapid dispossession of Native American territory, which was swiftly converted to private ownership (157). As Rothman points out, the political framework that supported the cotton boom spurred the infrastructure, transportation, communication, and financial developments necessary to sustain it. Franklin and Armfield availed themselves of those resources using the racial and democratic entitlements the process furnished.On the critical point of why The Ledger and the Chain's subjects chose to make this their livelihood, Rothman argues that “Isaac Franklin chose to stay in the slave trade because he was good at it, because he liked it, and because it was a family business” (61). John Armfield and Rice Ballard relished it as well, casting themselves as confidence-inspired masters of their universe whose indifference to suffering and terror they inflicted was an asset and a necessary qualification. As their business grew in the mid-1820s, Franklin & Armfield “helped foster something resembling a national market in commoditized human beings that paralleled the development of national markets in an array of other goods” (87).By 1830, Franklin & Armfield included a wide-ranging network of local purchasers in the Chesapeake backcountry feeding the firm's jails in Richmond and Alexandria, notably Armfield's headquarters at 1315 Duke Street. That was a brick compound with living space, jails, and outbuildings including a tailor's shop, all within walls reminding one viewer of a “penitentiary” designed to hold one hundred or so captives at a time (99). Agents of the firm organized human caravans or coffles that Armfield or Franklin force-marched to Forks-of-the-Road, outside Natchez, Mississippi. Armfield leased and bought ships to establish a human conveyor between the Chesapeake and New Orleans, where Franklin and his associates headquartered a sales agency in the largest US slave market. The economy was turning in their favor, with rising demand for enslaved workers and unheard-of financial expansion, but the firm weathered shocks like Louisiana's prohibition on slave traders’ imports, the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia, and a cholera epidemic in 1832 – 33 that sent them out at night disposing of the bodies of their enslaved merchandise in Mississippi bayous.Rothman's superb narrative includes African-descended subjects like Martha Sweart, a sixteen-year-old captive whom Ballard and Franklin traded and raped as a side benefit of the firm. Sweart's ordeal in the firm's rape rooms, private jails, and slave ships shows, in the author's quietly outraged prose, that a legal business euphemized as a slave market was a place of machine-tooled sexual violence against women and girls as well as a process of forced-labor allocation. Rothman narrates the ordeal of Virginia Boyd, whom one of Ballard's partners “raped repeatedly . . . for over a decade,” and whom Ballard sent to Texas, while pregnant, to dispose of, recommending that the Houston trader sell her apart from her children (332). Boyd wrote Ballard a letter asking why he had done this to her, but Ballard was characteristically unmoved: he'd made a fortune from buying and selling thousands of other Black women and didn't feel he owed her an explanation, much less a reprieve. These and other inclusions of African-descended subjects sets in ghastly relief the personal violence and swaggering impunity with which Armfield, Ballard, Franklin, and their associates conducted business.The trio retired from their firm in 1836 at the height of a booming market. Franklin and Ballard married white women of property and standing and disposed of the Black women whom they had raped, along with unwanted children conceived through sexual violence. A reader wanting justice will not find it in the afterlife of Franklin & Armfield, even though Rothman's exquisitely crafted narrative does justice to his subjects and their historical contexts. Armfield, Ballard, and Franklin were successful after leaving the slave trade, reinventing themselves as planters, hospitality entrepreneurs, cotton merchants, and philanthropists. Armfield's fortune endowed Sewanee, the University of the South. Franklin's legacy helped cement structural racial violence. He owned the Angola estate, on which the Louisiana State Penitentiary was built, and the forced labor of mainly Black prisoners echoed the process Franklin and his partners pushed forward. The Ledger and the Chain is the best-written book on the interregional trade in enslaved people in the economic history of the United States, North or South

Capitalism · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

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