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

"Readers watch them preen and hustle and manage their finances, and although Rothman regularly reminds us that these men were very comfortable with 'the intimate daily savageries of the slave trade,' he does an eye-opening job of making these three vile men three-dimensionally human ..."

"Rothman does an exemplary job of describing how the three established slave-trading outfits at the Chesapeake end of the domestic trade in Maryland, Alexandria, and Richmond, as well as deep south outposts in Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans; and how they achieved greater efficiencies in transport (both in terms of travel time and lost potential profit due to disease and death) by often delivering their human cargo via their own brigs, rather than hired ships or via arduous overland travel by chained coffle ..."

"This trenchant study deserves a wide and impassioned readership."

"xplaining how trafficking in slaves advanced private and public priorities as it produced great wealth and promoted national growth, Rothman displays the ever-present and impoverishing cost to the enslaved."

"An excellent work of vast research that hauntingly delineates the 'intimate daily savageries of the slave trade.'"

"distills these crucial questions to their core."

"Rothman writes about slave traders, and puts an indelible face on their inhumanity ..."