AP® African American Studies review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/african-american-studies/units/2/2-5)
Unit 2 · Topic 2.5
2.5 Slave Auctions and the Domestic Slave Trade
After the US banned importing enslaved Africans in 1808, the cotton boom drove a huge domestic slave trade that sold over a million African Americans from the upper South to the lower South. Slave auctions tore families apart, and Black writers like Solomon Northup described them to counter claims that slavery was gentle.
Key terms
- domestic slave trade
- Second Middle Passage
- slave auction
- cotton boom
- Solomon Northup
Cotton and the 'Second Middle Passage'
The United States banned the importation of enslaved Africans in 1808. After that, the enslaved population grew mainly through births, not new arrivals, even as demand for workers soared.
The demand came from cotton. The cotton gin, invented in 1793, made short-staple cotton profitable, and the forced removal of Native nations in the 1830s, including the Trail of Tears, opened their lands for plantations. The lower South (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas) became dominated by cotton and slavery, and enslaved people there sold for high prices.
So enslavers in the upper South, especially in older states like Virginia and Maryland and in Kentucky and Missouri, sold people south. Over a million African Americans were forced to move, many marched hundreds of miles in chained lines called coffles. That is more than two and a half times the number who arrived from Africa. Historians call it the Second Middle Passage, and it was the largest forced migration in American history.
The auction block
Enslavers used the law and the ideology of white supremacy to treat people as property and to break them in body, mind and spirit. At auctions, buyers inspected people like livestock. Children were sold away from parents and spouses from each other. People who resisted being sold could be whipped, sometimes in front of their families and friends.
The required broadside, an 1859 poster for an auction at the Charleston courthouse, shows how ordinary and public these sales were. They were advertised like any other business.
Solomon Northup's testimony
Solomon Northup was a free Black musician from New York. In 1841 he was lured to Washington, D.C., kidnapped and sold into slavery. He spent twelve years enslaved in Louisiana before friends won his freedom, and he published Twelve Years a Slave in 1853.
In the required excerpt, Northup describes a New Orleans slave pen where enslaved people were washed, dressed and made to dance so they would look healthy for buyers. He records a mother named Eliza begging not to be separated from her children as they were sold away from her.
Writing against slavery
Enslavers and their defenders claimed slavery was a kind, protective institution. African American writers used narratives, poetry and speeches to prove the opposite. By describing the physical and emotional pain of being sold into unknown places, they gave readers firsthand evidence that slavery destroyed families, which helped build support for abolition.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
A causation chain
Explain how the growth of the cotton industry affected enslaved African American families in the first half of the 1800s.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Start with the cause: cotton demand and new land in the lower South.
- Step 2: Add the condition: after 1808, new workers had to come from within the US.
- Step 3: Give the effect: the domestic slave trade sold people south, breaking up families.
Answer: Model answer: As cotton spread across the lower South, demand for enslaved workers soared. Because importing Africans was banned after 1808, enslavers in the upper South sold over a million people south in the domestic slave trade. Families were split at auctions, as Solomon Northup described when Eliza was separated from her children in a New Orleans slave pen.
Common mistakes
- Thinking slavery shrank after 1808. The enslaved population kept growing through births, to about 4 million by 1860.
- Mixing up the Middle Passage (across the Atlantic) and the Second Middle Passage (from the upper to the lower South).
- Calling Northup a fugitive. He was a free man who was kidnapped and illegally enslaved.
On the exam
- Know the upper South and lower South and the direction of the trade.
- For a narrative excerpt, explain both what it describes and why the author wanted readers to know it.
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself
4 questions on 2.5 Slave Auctions and the Domestic Slave Trade. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
"Next day many customers called to examine Freeman's 'new lot.' The latter gentleman was very loquacious, dwelling at much length upon our several good points and qualities. He would make us hold up our heads, walk briskly back and forth, while customers would feel of our hands and arms and bodies, turn us about, ask us what we could do, make us open our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse which he is about to barter for or purchase. Sometimes a man or woman was taken back to the small house in the yard, stripped, and inspected more minutely. Scars upon a slave's back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale."
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 1853, describing a slave pen in New Orleans in 1841
Northup compares the buyers to "a jockey" examining "a horse" mainly to stress that
The detail that scars "hurt his sale" shows that
Northup, a free Black New Yorker who was kidnapped and sold, published his narrative in 1853 mainly to
Northup was sold in New Orleans at a time when over a million enslaved people were being forced from the upper South to the lower South. This movement is best explained by
0 of 4 answered