This is a list of slave traders of the United States , people whose occupation or business was the slave trade in the United States , i. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was passed in under the so-called Star-Spangled Banner flag, when there were 15 states in the Union, closing the transatlantic slave trade and setting the stage for the interstate slave trade in the U. Over 50 years later, in , the last American slave sale was made somewhere in the rebel Confederacy.
Slavery was widespread, so slave trading was widespread, and "When a planter died, failed in business, divided his estate, needed ready money to satisfy a mortgage or pay a gambling debt, or desired to get rid of an unruly Negro, traders struck a profitable bargain. No fortunes were to be made as local agents. They did not escort coffles or run auctions themselves, but they did parlay their enslaving expertise into profits.
Also, especially in the first quarter of the 19th century, cotton factors , banks, and shipping companies did a great deal of slave trading business as part of what might be called the "vertical integration" of cotton and sugar industries.
Countless slaves were also sold at courthouse auctions by county sheriffs and U. People who dealt in enslaved indigenous persons , such as was the case with slavery in California , would be included. Slave smuggling took advantage of international and tribal boundaries to traffic slaves into the United States from Spanish North American and Caribbean colonies, and across the lands of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, Seminole, et al.
Note: Research by Michael Tadman has found that "'core' sources provide only a basic skeleton of a much more substantial trade" in enslaved people throughout the South, with particular deficits in records of rural slave trading, already wealthy people who speculated to grow their wealth further, and in all private sales that occurred outside auction houses and negro marts.
