Synopses & Reviews
Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block.
Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms -- to save their families despite that new economy.
Moving focus away from the traditional master-slave relationship in a staple-crop setting, Schermerhorn demonstrates through extensive primary research that the slaves in the upper South were integral to the development of the region's modern political economy, whose architects embraced invention and ingenuity even while deploying slaves to shoulder the burdens of its construction, production, and maintenance.
Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom proposes a new way of understanding the role of American slaves in the antebellum marketplace. Rather than work against it, as one might suppose, enslaved people engaged with the market somewhat as did free Americans. Slaves focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as slaveholders increasingly did, but on keeping their kin out of the human coffles of the slave trade.
Review
andldquo;The best book ever written on role of the interstate slave trade in the economic history of the United Statesandmdash;both north and south. Absolutely essential.andrdquo;andmdash;Walter Johnson, author of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
Review
andldquo;Shattering the myth of a neo-feudal, backward South, Calvin Schermerhorn deftly reveals the entrepreneurial slave traders who helped to develop American capitalism. Clear and cogent, The Business of Slavery illuminates the flow of humans, treated as commodities, passing through innovative conduits of transportation and finance to constitute a nationandrsquo;s perverse wealth.andrdquo;andmdash;Alan Taylor, author of The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772andndash;1832
Review
andldquo;In this powerful book, Calvin Schermerhorn revolutionizes how we view the domestic slave trade. The commodification of enslaved Americans not only drove the southern economy, but fueled capitalist development in the North and Europe. Splendidly written and tautly argued, this book is a singular achievement.andrdquo;andmdash;Robert Gudmestad, author of Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom
Review
andldquo;Historians have devoted considerable attention to the domestic slave trade, but the strategy of looking at the evolution of representative slave trading firms offers a fresh approach.andrdquo;andmdash;John Majewski, University of California, Santa Barbara
Synopsis
Calvin Schermerhornandrsquo;s provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demonstrate how slavery was a national business supported by far-flung monetary and credit systems reaching across the Atlantic Ocean. The author details the anatomy of slave supply chains and the chains of credit and commodities that intersected with them in virtually every corner of the preandndash;Civil War United States, and explores how an institution that destroyed lives and families contributed greatly to the growth of the expanding republicandrsquo;s capitalist economy.
About the Author
Calvin Schermerhorn teaches history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South.