Researching Slavery's Capitalism
The Domestic Slave Trade
One of the principal resources is slave ship manifests listing names, ages, and physical descriptions of captives consigned to saltwater passages. Manifests were required by federal law beginning in the 1810s and are U.S. Customs records. The largest online collection is indexed and digitized by Ancestry.com and is available for free with an Ancestry login: New Orleans, Louisiana, Slave Manifests, 1807-1860. Examples of manifests from this collection include this 1832 manifest of the merchant brigantine Ajax, to which Rice C. Ballard consigned captives for the passage to New Orleans.
