The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within t
When interviewed in 1913 by Myra Williams Jarrell for the Topeka Star, Emily Ford and Mary Shawn of Burlingame, Kansas, recalled an instance of family separation in American slavery due to the slave trade
"AUCTION & NEGRO SALES": Black man in Union uniform reading in front of the Crawford, Frazer & Co. slave market at 8 Whitehall Street, photographed by George N. Barnard during the Atlanta campaign, 1864 (Library of Congress Digital)
Partial manifest of a coastwise slave shipment made from Baltimore to New Orleans, by Hope H. Slatter, on the ship Scotia, September 1843
Commerce and transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, 1859
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also kn
Price, Birch & Co., "dealers in slaves" Alexandria, Virginia, photographed c. 1862
In addition to private jails, enslaved people were often held in public jails, such as a 40-year-old fugitive man named Monday who fought "like the Devil when arrested" and who was held in the jail of Walker County, Alabama (The Democrat, Huntsville, July 7, 1847)
Claimed to be Nathan Bedford Forrest's slave pen ("The Old Negro Mart" Memphis Commercial Appeal, January 27, 1907)
"Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda at New Orleans" by William Henry Brooke from The Slave States of America (1842) by James Silk Buckingham depicts a slave sale at the St. Louis Hotel, sometimes called the French Exchange