The domestic slave trade has always bulked large in discussions of the character of American ante-bellum slavery. Assumptions and arguments about the nature of master-slave relations, about family separations, and about the slave family have necessarily had much to do with slave sales and with the extent and character of the domestic traffic in slaves. All this has, however, been despite the fact that no satisfactory quantitative estimate of the trade has been available. Indeed, the standard work on the American domestic slave trade, Frederic Bancroft's Slave Trading in the Old South (1931), has recently been challenged in the studies of Calderhead (1972) and of Fogel and Engerman (1974), and those studies have in turn been questioned by, for example, Gutman and Sutch in Reckoning with Slavery (1976).
The present study will seek to offer a more satisfactory estimate of the trade than has so far been available, and will argue that the trade accounted for the substantial majority (somewhere between 56 and 69 per cent) of the more than one million net inter-regional slave movements which took place in the South over the period 1820 to 1860.