Suchergebnisse

"During the American Civil War, Confederates bought and sold thousands of men, women, and children. A robust and surviving slave trade, the extension of a traffic that had emerged to support the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, enabled them to do so. Even though the war destroyed the economy that had long underpinned American slavery, Confederates nevertheless traded people from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. Some took advantage of the enduring slave trade to shape their experiences of the war, using their ability to force people into motion to mobilize for the conflict or to weather the numerous crises it created on the homefront. Others speculated wildly, investing in the enslaved during the war to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding future for which they fought. Still others traded people to ward off the progress of emancipation. For those held in slavery, meanwhile, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped the ways in which they encountered freedom, preventing many from achieving it by yanking them back into bondage even as it inspired others to take the risk of escaping. The Civil War slave trade thus profoundly shaped the experience of the conflict for all residents of the American South. Regardless of the choices they made--to buy or to sell people, to risk sale or to flee from it--the effects of the slave trade reverberated throughout the conflict and produced legacies that endured long after the guns fell silent."