Amidst the proliferation of recent scholarship on the slave trade, the lives of slave traders themselves remain largely a mystery. In this presentation, Joshua Rothman takes a biographical approach to Isaac Franklin (a Tennessee native), John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who collectively built the most successful slave-trading firm of the nineteenth century and forged the economic link among New Orleans, Richmond, and other cities that both fueled the cotton revolution and devastated thousands of families and communities.
Joshua Rothman directs the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama, where he is also a professor of history specializing in nineteenth-century America and the history of race and slavery. He is the author of Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (2003); Reforming America, 1815–1860 (2009); and Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (2012), which won the Gulf South Historical Association's Michael Thomason Book Award and the Southern Historical Association's Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize. He is currently researching a book tentatively entitled The Ledger and the Chain: The Men Who Made America's Domestic Slave Trade into Big Business. His recently published an article "Fugitive Slave Ads Paint a New Picture of Slavery and Resistance" about how newspaper ads (placed by slavers) record the heroic efforts of hundreds of thousands of Americans to break free from bondage.
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