ABSTRACT
The domestic slave trade has always bulked large in discussions of the character of American ante-bellum slavery. Assumptions and arguments about the nature of master-slave relations, about family separations, and about the slave family have necessarily had much to do with slave sales and with the extent and character of the domestic traffic in slaves. Bancroft’s study argued that the inter-regional traffic in slaves assumed massive proportions. In order to estimate the overall volume of inter-regional slave movements, Bancroft made comparisons between the decennial growth rates of slave populations in the several Southern states. The coastal slave movement also provides evidence of the ages of slave migrants. The assessment of Colonization, a second factor which might have disturbed US slave survival rates, seems to be relatively uncomplicated. The numbers of slaves manumitted appear to have been far larger than the numbers of smuggled slaves, slave colonists, or slave fugitives.
