The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 Main Menu Yale University Press

Soul Drivers, Market Makers

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African-descended Virginians tied together and marching reluctantly through the Virginia countryside in the early months of 1818 embodied a central if tragic act in the human drama of U.S. commercial development. At least twenty-seven souls in a coffle driven by horsemen traveled southwest from Petersburg, a port town of seven thousand residents, to Raleigh, North Carolina, where they would turn right and head west. Their passage was part of a process of modern development, the antecedents of which had uprooted over 20 million Africans, 12 million of whom were embarked on Atlantic passages, the survivors landing in the Americas. Descendants of those forced migrants were embarking on another passage, this one south by southwest to the newest, most robust frontier of global staple crop production. That was the lower South. For the captives, it was an abrupt departure from the lands in which their ancestors’ bones were buried and the worlds in which they dwelt with their concerns.

The subjects of this chapter joined hundreds of thousands more along the paths of the interstate slave trade.
Francis Everod Rives and his partners Peyton Mason Sr. and Peyton Mason Jr. transported two coffles of enslaved Virginians to the lower South in 1818, making a fortune and pushing forward the process of economic modernization.

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  1. Introduction Calvin Schermerhorn

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  1. Introduction

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