Joshua D. Rothman's "The Ledger and the Chain"

Joshua D. Rothman is professor of history and chair of the department of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Flush Times and Fever Dreams and Notorious in the Neighborhood. He lives in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Rothman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Ledger and the Chain, readers will find themselves amidst a description of the townhouse and the attached compound/jail in Alexandria, Virginia, where domestic slave trader John Armfield did business and imprisoned enslaved captives. It draws particular attention to the contrast between the “well-furnished” parlor in which Armfield received customers and the padlocked iron doors behind which visitors would find enslaved people Armfield was accumulating for shipment to his partners in the Deep South.

The page does in fact give readers a sense of some of the significant themes of the book. It alludes to the efforts of John Armfield and his partners in the slave trade to present themselves as respectable businessmen. It draws attention to the brutal realities of the trade that underpinned that respectability. And it demonstrates how neither slave traders nor their clients made any particular effort to disguise the exchange of cash for bodies in which they were engaged, in a facility that stood in what was then part of the District of Columbia.

One of the important ideas of the book, in fact, is that there was no need to. The domestic slave trade, for all its horrors and cruelties, was perfectly legal in the United States before the Civil War: sanctioned by the federal government, seen by bankers and merchants as working to their advantage, demanded by slaveholders seeking to expand their labor forces and find reliable assets in which to store their money, and carried out by traders anxious to reap a profit. The house and compound in Alexandria operated by the slave trading company known as Franklin and Armfield, was a particularly visible and important site of the trade. But it was hardly the only one, and every place the trade was conducted advanced the growth of slavery, circulated capital throughout the country, and ravaged the lives of the enslaved who were trafficked by men antislavery activists knew as “soul-drivers.”

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--Marshal Zeringue