Calvin Schermerhorn. The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860

An excellent and eminently readable book, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, joins a growing literature showing precisely how slaveholders and traders fulfilled personal and business ambitions by commodifying African American bodies. Even nonspecialists have probably heard of major conferences on slavery and capitalism and works by Michael Tadman, Steven Deyle, Joshua D. Rothman, Edward E. Baptist, and Walter Johnson, the last of whom blurbs this book as “the best book ever written on [the] role of the interstate slave trade in the economic history of the United States.” This is high and deserved praise from a fellow traveler. What sets Calvin Schermerhorn’s book apart is the scholar’s ability to use account books and business papers to re-create hidden linkages and to narrate and humanize “discrete sets of subjects whose participation in the slavery business illuminates the process of capitalist development and the promise of American modernity” (5). Organizing his book around six different slave-trade businesses that span from the post–War of 1812 period to the eve of the Civil War, Schermerhorn demonstrates agency where previous scholars have relied almost exclusively on systems. We see, for example, how after 1815 Austin Woolfolk used kinship networks, advertising, and information to build Baltimore’s largest slave-trading firm and create an economy of scale that stretched to the banks of the Mississippi. In so doing, we experience how Woolfolk’s assault on abolitionist Benjamin Lundy helped inspire William Lloyd Garrison’s evolution into an immediate abolitionist. We see, in henceforth unknown detail, how John Marsh exploited corrupt judges, ambiguous “broken voyages” laws, and a general lack of enforcement to domesticate the slave trade and smuggle thousands of slaves into Louisiana despite a legal prohibition. One chapter examines how in good and bad times creative New Orleans bankers financed debt and attracted external investment by leveraging slave property. As a result, slavery, far from undermining commercial expansion or development, facilitated it, making Louisiana “briefly ... the most credit-laden, most monetized state in the nation” (242).

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