A Troublesome Statistic: Traders and Coastal Shipments in the Westward Movement of Slaves

Richard Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth

The Journal of Economic History, 2013, vol. 73, issue 3, 792-809

Abstract: We analyze all slave manifests housed at the National Archives—some 24,400 documents involving approximately 135,000 slaves who were transported in the coastwise trade from 1810 to 1861. The manifests list the name of the owner or shipper, which allows us to match names with traders found in other sources. We also utilize demographic characteristics of the manifests to estimate the probability that a trader organized the shipment. Commercial transactions increased over the antebellum period, and on average were responsible for approximately 55 percent of slaves who migrated from Atlantic to Gulf coast ports. “No one has ever suggested a method for finding what proportion of the slaves transported from one state to another were taken by their original masters or their heirs for their own use.”Bancroft 1931, p. 397

Date: 2013
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