Accounting for the Business of Suffering: A Study of the Antebellum Richmond, Virginia, Slave Trade

When the Congress barred the importation of slaves into the United States in 1808, it left the internal slave trade intact. The trade took on a new importance as the slave states of the Old South saw their agricultural economies shift to a point that holding large numbers of slaves became too expensive. During this time, the large agricultural concerns shifted to the New South, where cotton and sugar plantations needed the cheap labour provided by the institution of slavery. As this transition intensified, Richmond, Virginia, became a central slave market that facilitated the interstate slave trade as Old South planters chose the course of selling slaves as a valuable commodity rather than the course of manumission. The records of two businesses—Dickinson & Hill and Hector Davis & Company—which plied the slave trade in the Richmond market, have survived into the twenty-first century. These records revealed a primitive, yet sophisticated, process to account for the consignment, purchase, and sales of human merchandise in this haunting story of the 'business of suffering'.