A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade

by Robert Harold Gudmestad

Robert H. Gudmestad provides an in-depth examination of the growth and development of the interstate slave trade during the early nineteenth century, using the business as a means to explore economic change, the culture of honor, master-slave relationships, and the justification of slavery in the antebellum South. Gudmestad demonstrates how southerners, faced with the incongruity of maintaining their paternalistic beliefs about slavery even while capitalistically exploiting their slaves, coped by disassociating themselves from the brutality and greed of the slave trade and shifting responsibility for slavery’s realities to the speculators. In tracing the trans- formation of a troublesome commerce into a southern scapegoat, this pro- vocative work proves the interstate slave trade to be vital to the making―and understanding―of the paradoxical antebellum South.

Genres: Writing

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Robert Gudmestad is professor of history at Colorado State University.

Reviews

[Ni · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review is of the longer Thesis version of this book (A Troublesome Commerce: The Interstate Slave Trade, 1808-1840), published in 1999. My reading progress updates seem to have been lost.

This was a difficult to read work, as it touches on information that I need in order to know the world in which my protagonist (for #WhoByFireIWill ) will have to maneuver successfully, but seeing how, in just a few decades, the south goes from SlaveHolders in the Upper South acknowledging the problems with the slave trade, to even those only peripherally connected with slavery in the Upper South suddenly marching in lock step with the Lower South, identifying all parts of the system that held that horribly "Peculiar Institution" in place as one and inseparable and not even open for discussion, means that the changes and hardening attitudes up in MD affect my protag and everyone around him, probably making it easier for his 'owner' the antagonist to make life harder for him in a multitude of ways. Since the antag is much older than my Protag, he may have even seen some of the changing attitudes in both parts of the south, and as this book shows, closed his eyes to/imbibed the evolving justifications for both the trade, the Fancy maids market

(here is an excellent article tying that part of the trade with the modern sex trafficking market & the other infamous Baltimore speculator Franklin, competitor of Woolfolk: https://historynewsnetwork.org/articl...),

and all the rest of their "Peculiar Institution."

I have to understand each of these varying points of view, true, but I still feel as if I could take ten showers now, and never be clean.
Shira Dest.

ps: this work is freely available here, and I hope that more will read and review it:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/519d...

Also see this short thesis on the Fancy trade as sex trafficking and how it applies today: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a difficult to read work, as it touches on information that I need in order to know the world in which my protagonist (for #WhoByFireIWill ) will have to maneuver successfully, but seeing how, in just a few decades, the south goes from SlaveHolders in the Upper South acknowledging the problems with the slave trade, to even those only peripherally connected with slavery in the Upper South suddenly marching in lock step with the Lower South, identifying all parts of the system that held that horribly "Peculiar Institution" in place as one and inseparable and not even open for discussion, means that the changes and hardening attitudes up in MD affect my protag and everyone around him, probably making it easier for his 'owner' the antagonist to make life harder for him in a multitude of ways. Since the antag is much older than my Protag, he may have even seen some of the changing attitudes in both parts of the south, and as this book shows, closed his eyes to/imbibed the evolving justifications for both the trade, the Fancy maids market

(here is an excellent article tying that part of the trade with the modern sex trafficking market & the other infamous Baltimore speculator Franklin, competitor of Woolfolk: https://historynewsnetwork.org/articl...),

and all the rest of their "Peculiar Institution."

I have to understand each of these varying points of view, true, but I still feel as if I could take ten showers now, and never be clean.
Shira Dest.

ps: this work is freely available here, and I hope that more will read and review it: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/519d...