Commodification in America: Old and New

“And yet, today, we continue to engage in various forms of commodifying the human person, even if they are less visibly brutal and bloody.”

The night they drove old Dixie down, there were more than just bells ringing and people singing. There were people frantically buying and selling a once lucrative, extremely volatile good: people. On April 2, 1865, exactly one week before the remnants of Robert E. Lee’s once mighty Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Union forces at Appomattox Court House, Robert Lumpkin, a prosperous slave trader in Richmond, Virginia, tried (and failed) to ship his fifty slaves from his creek bottom jail out of the burning Confederate capital. En route to Appomattox, a Confederate cavalryman encountered a troop of enterprising soldiers from Georgia purchasing slaves whom they hoped to move farther south under cover of Lee’s retreating army.

Why, one asks, would defeated Confederates desperately try to retain possession over that which by the end of the Civil War so obviously could no longer be possessed? The reason, as University of Mississippi historian Robert K.D. Colby explains in his new book An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South, is that the slave trade remained an incredibly profitable (though increasingly unstable) market up to the very last days of the war. By 1860, enslavers valued the four million people they held in bondage at about $3 billion, an amount that surpassed the total value of America’s railroads and the capital the nation held in banks. Recirculated as slave-backed loans, mortgages, and securities, the slave economy directly benefited as much as thirty percent of the South’s white population.

Although a catastrophic war waged primarily on southern lands—and a largely successful Union naval blockade—wrecked the Confederate economy, it did not destroy the slave trading industry, with thousands of sales occurring during the four-year conflict. If anything, the South’s declining fortunes only heightened the value slaveholders placed on their human property, given that slaves remained an important source of labor. They could also be sold to ambitious individuals hoping for an impressive return on investment if the “peculiar institution” were to survive. Indeed, of those enslaved at the beginning of the war, approximately eighty to eighty-five percent of them were still enslaved at the end, many having been moved to areas of the Confederacy insulated from Union armies.