History of the United States I / Unit 12 USH1 1689 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Second Middle Passage
The idea
After eighteen oh eight the largest source of enslaved people was the legal internal market, in which upper South states sold men, women and children to the Lower South. Between eighteen twenty and eighteen sixty, White American traders sold over a million captives in that domestic market, and the anchor calls it the second middle passage. Groups travelled by ship from Virginia, which specialised in raising enslaved people for sale, to New Orleans for sale to Mississippi Valley planters. Others made overland treks from North Carolina to Alabama and the Deep South. New Orleans held the largest slave market in America and Natchez the second largest, and slave auctions took place daily across Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. A healthy young enslaved man in the eighteen fifties sold for a thousand dollars, and prices had doubled since the eighteen twenties, when the same person would have brought four hundred.
In practice
Demand so high by the eighteen fifties that southerners pressed to reopen the international slave trade, and upper South sellers opposing them, because cheaper imports would have cut the price of the people they were selling.
Where people slip
That last fact is the one to hold. The reopening question split the South against itself along exactly the line of the internal trade, with Virginia and Maryland defending their market against South Carolina and the Gulf states who wanted cheaper labour. The domestic trade was not a regrettable necessity of the cotton economy. It was a business with its own lobby, its own price index and its own sectional politics, and the people in it were its inventory. Note also the phrase second middle passage, which is the anchor's, and which places this trade beside the Atlantic crossing rather than treating it as a lesser thing.
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