List of slave traders of the United States

This is a list of slave traders of the United States, people whose occupation or business was the slave trade in the United States. Slave traders were human traffickers that bought and sold people as property, also called "chattel" or "commodities". The people who were enslaved and bought and sold were primarily Africans and African-American people in the Southern United States from the time of the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 until the defeat of the Confederate States of America in 1865, ending the American Civil War.

The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was passed into law in 1808 under the Star-Spangled Banner flag, when there were 15 states in the Union. This Act, combined with the Slave Trade Act of 1794 and the Slave Trade Act of 1800, prohibited U.S. citizens from engaging in the international slave trade between nations:

• Slave Trade Act of 1794: This law prohibited U.S. citizens from using American ships to transport slaves to foreign countries. It also made it illegal to outfit a vessel for this purpose from U.S. ports.
• Slave Trade Act of 1800: This act built on the 1794 law, making it illegal for U.S. citizens to engage in the international slave trade, even on foreign vessels. It also increased penalties for those involved.
• Act Prohibiting the Import of Slaves of 1807: Signed into law by president Thomas Jefferson and effective January 1, 1808, this landmark legislation banned the importation of enslaved people into the United States.

These laws did not apply to the domestic or interstate slave trade in the US, which continued through the end of the civil war. The laws did apply to the transatlantic slave trade and prohibited U.S. citizens from participating in it. Little to no enforcement of these laws resulted in a dramatic increase of the illegal slave trade. U.S. slave traders and slavery oligarchs established new trade routes with other countries, primarily Brazil and Cuba.

Over 50 years later, in 1865, the last American slave sale was made somewhere in the rebel Confederacy.^[3] In the intervening years, the politics surrounding the addition of 20 new states to the Union had been almost overwhelmingly dominated by whether or not those states would have legal slavery.^[4]

Slavery was widespread, so slave trading was widespread, and "When a planter died, failed in business, divided his estate, needed ready money to satisfy a mortgage or pay a gambling debt, or desired to get rid of an unruly Negro, traders struck a profitable bargain."^[5]

Slave traders were not limited to a single profession but were found across many levels of a society that profited from the practice. Terms used to describe occupations related to slave trading included the following:

Directly involved in the trade:

• Agents or General Agents
• Auctioneers
• Brokers
• Chancery Court Clerk & Master
• Commission Merchants^[6]
• Factors
• General Merchants
• Merchants
• Slave Dealers
• Slave Traders
• Traders

Involved in capture and transport:

• Agents or General Agents
• Captains of ships
• Clerks
• Collectors of Customs
• Crew members
• Customs Officials
• Drovers
• Jailors
• Justice, Justice of the Peace
• Masters of ships
• Notaries
• Police
• Sailors
• Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs
• Shipbuilders
• Shippers
• Slave Catchers
• Slave Hunters
• Slave Owners
• Slave Patrol

Profited indirectly from the trade:

• Financiers and investors: Wealthy individuals, firms, banks, and insurance companies provided the capital to fund slave trading voyages and the expansion of the plantation economy
• Colonial and city tax collectors: The taxes and duties collected on the purchase and sale of enslaved people were used to fund public works projects in port cities like Newport, Rhode Island.
• Business managers and overseers: These individuals managed the business affairs of plantations, where the agricultural labor of enslaved people was central to the economy.

Many slave traders often sold real estate, personal property, and livestock in addition to enslaved people.^[7] Large trading firms also had field agents, whose job it was to go to more remote towns and rural areas, buying up enslaved people for resale elsewhere.^[3]

Field agents stood lower in the hierarchy and are generally poorly studied, in part due to lack of records. For example, field agents for Austin Woolfolk "served only a year or two at best and usually on a part-time basis. No fortunes were to be made as local agents."^[8] On the other end of the financial spectrum from the agents were the investors—usually wealthy planters like David Burford,^[9] John Springs III,^[10] and Chief Justice John Marshall^[11]—who fronted cash to slave speculators. They did not escort coffles or run auctions themselves, but they did parlay their enslaving expertise into profits. Also, especially in the first quarter of the 19th century, cotton factors, banks, shipping and insurance companies did a great deal of slave trading business as part of what might be called the "vertical integration" of cotton and sugar industries.

Countless slaves were also sold at courthouse auctions by county sheriffs and US marshals to satisfy court judgments, settle estates, and to "cover jail fees". Individuals involved in these sales are not the primary focus of this list. People who dealt in enslaved indigenous persons, such as was the case with slavery in California, are included. Slave smuggling took advantage of international and tribal boundaries to traffic slaves into the US from Spanish North American and Caribbean colonies and across the lands of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, Seminole, et al., but American-born or naturalized smugglers, indigenous slave traders, and any American buyers of smuggled slaves are included.

Note: Research by Michael Tadman has found that "'core' sources provide only a basic skeleton of a much more substantial trade" in enslaved people throughout the South, with particular deficits in records of:

• Rural slave trading
• Already wealthy people who speculated to grow their wealth further
• All private sales that occurred outside auction houses and negro marts.

^[10] This list represents a fraction of the "many hundreds of participants in a cruel and omnipresent" American market.^[12]

The following list is organized by surname of the trader or name of the firm, where principals have not been further identified.

Note: Charleston and Charles Town, Virginia are distinct places that later became Charleston, West Virginia, and Charles Town, West Virginia, respectively, and neither is to be confused with Charleston, South Carolina.

"We must have a market for human flesh, or we are ruined."