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Civil War slave trade topic of Tuesday meeting
By Roscoe Barnes III
As the Civil War drew to a close, the trafficking of enslaved people continued.
Despite the many twists and turns of the American economy and changing landscape of cotton and the political upheaval across the country during the Civil War, human trafficking through the domestic slave trade continued right up to the end of the war.
To better understand the impact of chattel slavery, and the people caught up in the system, including the enslaved and the enslavers, Dr. Robert K.D. Colby has written a book that sheds new light on the subject.
Titled, “An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South” (Oxford University Press, 2024), the book explores the survival of the domestic slave trade during the Civil War. Colby uses wartime slave commerce to examine the endurance of Confederate nationalism, economic and social life during the war, and the contested onset of African American freedom.
Colby will discuss these issues – and others -- at the Tuesday, September 22, meeting of the Natchez Historical Society. The meeting will begin with a social at 5:30 p.m. and Colby’s presentation at 6 p.m. at the Historic Natchez Foundation at 108 S. Commerce St.
The event, part of the Grace MacNeil Lecture Program, is free and open to the public.
“An Unholy Traffic” is Colby’s first book, and it is especially relevant to Natchez because of the city’s history with the Forks of the Road, which was the second largest slave market in the Deep South during the antebellum period, as well as the role that the Mississippi River played in the domestic slave trade.
Natchez’s antebellum wealth was closely tied to the system of chattel slavery, making the city an important place from which to consider the larger story Colby tells.
The remarkable story of Prince Abdul Rahman Ibrahima may also come to mind when discussing the slave trade in Natchez. Ibrahima, a Muslim prince from West Africa, spent 40 years enslaved by Thomas Foster Sr. in the Natchez area before gaining his freedom in 1828.
Colby is associate director of the Center for Civil War Research and assistant professor of history in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi. Before taking this position at Ole Miss, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University.
Colby is a native of Virginia. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Colby’s book has been recognized as a significant contribution to the study of American history during the Civil War. It won the John L. Nau Book Prize from the Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA and also received the Nonfiction Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
“An Unholy Traffic” makes a powerful argument that suggests the slave trade provided a way for Confederates to keep their armies in the field.
Caroline E. Janney, author of “Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox,” notes that Colby’s book presents a story that is centered on the persistence of the slave trade during the Civil War.
“Never believing that their cornerstone institution might be imperiled, both individual enslavers and the Confederate state continued to buy and sell the flesh of men and women up to and sometimes after the moment of defeat,” Janney writes. “This is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand both the grip slaveholding held on Confederacy and vice versa.”
For Natchez residents, Colby's work offers more than a study of the Civil War era. It provides a deeper understanding of how slavery continued to shape lives, economies and communities even as the Confederacy neared collapse, making his upcoming presentation particularly relevant to a city whose history is deeply intertwined with that story.
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ROSCOE BARNES III, Ph.D., is the cultural heritage tourism manager at Visit Natchez.
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