| Summary |
This thesis is a study of slave traders and their trading practices in antebellum North Carolina. It focuses on the lives of traders, markets, trading routes, and the precarious relationship that existed between traders and slaveholders. In broad outline, the work is essentially a case study of traders with special emphasis on their image, status, and treatment as businessmen. North Carolina traders were crucial in opening up and settling the Southern states in need of slave labor. Enduring both hardships and a negative identity, they purchased slaves in the state and moved them along the arduous overland journey to markets in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Some reaped huge profits and a few actually came to wield considerable influence and power in their home communities. Across the state of North Carolina, however, traders were not popular individuals. In large part, white North Carolinians, foreign visitors, as well as slaveholders and slaves regarded them as a wretched and disreputable group of businessmen Most rarely achieved any definite social. standing or respect, but vacillated somewhere between the gentry and poor whites in both North Carolina and the larger class-conscious South. Traders were obviously used as scapegoats by many Southerners who were not willing to accept responsibility for their role in the slave system. Slaveholders were especially guilty of this practice. While many seemed to loath traders, for example, most dealt with them at one time or another. In fact, traders' very livelihood depended primarily on the support they received from slaveholders. As businessmen, traders in North Carolina were a strange breed in many respects. But the group was rather diverse. Most traders had ties in the state with their families and business partners; and a significant number made their mark in farming, industry, and politics. Overall, consequently, the business of trading slaves in North Carolina flourished and had a critical impact on the economy as well as on the South's "peculiar institution" of slavery. |
