The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

An award-winning historian’s “searing" (Wall Street Journal) account 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 r...