Description
After the Revolution, a new type of American slave trade rose to eclipse and replace the transatlantic slave trade. Taking place wholly within the United States, the Upper South slave owners sold their surplus workers to cotton planters in the Deep South. Historian Richard Bell tracks the rise and its impact of this ‘Second Middle Passage’ upon the expansion of slavery into new territories and states, focusing on the Black families whom those traders tried to divide and the unrelenting resistance they mounted trying to preserve their kin groups and subvert their enslavers’ aspirations of achieving absolute mastery.