Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life [Hardcover]

"Carry Me Back is a book we have long needed--a synthetic, region-wide treatment of the domestic slave trade. Deyle's deep research and lucid writing convincingly show that the sale and transport of human property from the upper to lower South was a national tragedy of epic proportions, a grand economic enterprise that both forged the Cotton Kingdom and was the root of its undoing. Behold! The story of how the largest source of wealth in antebellum America belongs at the center of our national narrative, and how it haunts us still."--David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and Director, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University
"Prodigiously researched and convincingly argued, Steven Deyle's Carry Me Back places the slave market at the center of the nineteenth-century United States. Carry Me Back tells the story of the disastrous effects of that market on black lives, of its crucial place i

Carry Me Back is a study of the slave trade in national perspective. It explores the origins of the slave trade; the rise and fall of the cotton kingdom; the growth of a market economy in the South and the role slave labor played in it; the abolitionist attack on slavery; the slave trade's effect upon the black and white South; and the kinds of local, regional, and national politics debates the slave trade sparked. Steven Deyle peppers the manuscript with descriptions of how the slave trade worked, the people involved in it, and outsiders' observations of the practice. By looking at the impact of the slave trade on the North in an empirical manner, this manuscript distinguishes itself even from the recent award-winning books on the slave trade. By demonstrating the centrality of the slave trade to antebellum American life more broadly this will be a significant book for a wider American history audience. This book promises to be a strong addition to the landmark histories of slavery on the Oxford list, including the works of David Brion Davis, Sterling Stuckey, and John Blassingame. Like Walter Johnson's SOUL BY SOUL, it should be reach a wide audience of American historians.

Steven Deyle is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.