in the fifty years before the Civil War, roughly a million slaves would be marched or shipped out of the Upper South by sea, roughly twice the number of Blacks who had been landed in British North America from Africa. We are talking here about a migration—or, more accurately, a mass deportation—that ensnared more Black people than the number of whites who undertook the wagon train settlement of the American West, the fodder of so much Hollywood legend in the twentieth century. It was bigger, too, than the emigration of Jews from Russia and eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. And yet who
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