The Ledger and the Chain
By Joshua D. Rothman
Basic Books, 2021
In just 365 pages Joshua Rothman’s “The Ledger and the Chain” took the reader deep into America’s original sin -- slavery -- in ways that educated, dismayed and ultimately left one uncertain about its impact in the modern political era. Rothman followed the lives and careers of three traders of enslaved people, Isaac Franklin, John Armfield and Rice Ballard, from 1808 (the mandated end of the international slave trade) to the Reconstruction Period. These men purchased enslaved people in the Middle Atlantic region and shipped them for sale to Louisiana and Mississippi, where the cotton plantation economy was exploding.
“The Ledger and the Chain” took an esoteric subset of a major narrative in US history, and meticulously provided factual detail on how that particular business operated. The reader also learned much about the protagonists’ personal lives -- backgrounds, motivations, marriages, even post mortem legal disputes -- so much in fact that their lives became intertwined and they almost blended into one amorphous being, “FAB.” Humanizing FAB was not an attempt to minimize their actions (....but they were such nice people!) but to show once again how seemingly normal humans are capable of such rank inhumanity.
Another purpose of “The Ledger and the Chain” was to show how FAB’s work “helped fuel the growth and prosperity of the United States itself” (Book Jacket). This assessment was sadly ironic, not triumphant; Rothman spent a good deal of time exploring the business acumen that they possessed, their business practices and the overall economic impact of the trade, to understand, not glorify. In many ways, this aspect of “The Ledger and the Chain” foreshadowed the rise of the Robber Barons; there were tales of business expansion by undercutting and buying out competitors, avoiding state regulators and creating vertical monopolies of sorts by buying their own ships. One would not be shocked if John D. Rockefeller had hired FAB as consultants.
All this was presented with a large dose of “what if,” i.e. what if FAB had used their generic skills in the pursuit of something more noble, or even just anything else. Later in life Franklin diversified by investing in a turnpike, bank and insurance company (302) and there was also the example of James Franklin Purvis, who turned away from the trade and toward brickmaking, stockbroking, banking and coal (337).
But FAB didn’t, and this highlights one of “The Ledger and the Chain’s” most profound aspects…that, outside of FAB’s own consciousnesses there was little in the US to force them to -- not the federal government, not the state governments, not the abolitionists and not their fellow citizens -- simply because it was wrong. The book was devoid of any insight on how morality factored into any of FAB’s decision making, leading the reader to assume it didn’t and to question whether the essential problem of race in the US existed, and still exists, separately from the ability to solve it.
From the federal standpoint, none of the major events relating to slavery from 1820-1860 made an appearance. No Missouri Compromise, Compromise of 1850, Abraham Lincoln, or for that matter John C. Calhoun or Jefferson Davis. A “giant” of the Senate prominent in the antebellum debates over slavery, Daniel Webster, briefly arose, representing a Louisiana slave trader in a federalism dispute over “what government authority existed to regulate the domestic slave trade and which governments possessed it” (290). Nicholas Biddle, the scourge of Andrew Jackson during the “war” over the Second Bank of the United States, became an unintentional hero by tightening credit and making it difficult (but only for a time) for FAB to sell their enslaved people.
State governments played almost no part in “The Ledger and the Chain.” The Northern and Western states were absent, quieted no doubt by a combination of racism and hesitancy to interfere in the affairs of other states. Louisiana and Mississippi made some noise in regulating the slave trade, but were motivated by sovereignty and financial issues and not about slavery itself. Virginia and Maryland were largely passive bystanders to FAB’s affairs.
The reader was also surprised by the role, or lack thereof, of 19th century abolitionists. Textbook mainstays William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass were mentioned, but only in passing. Two things stand out about FAB’s interactions with abolitionists: both how little FAB feared them and how little FAB feared from them. In a memorable scene, Rothman described an 1835 visit to the Franklin & Armfield operation in Alexandria, VA by Ethan Allen Andrews, a lawyer and moderate abolitionist from Connecticut. Employee Robert Windsor freely showed Allen around the slave house, including the segregated pens where the male and female enslaved people were kept. While Allen reflected on how what he saw evidenced “man’s inhumanity to man” he also commented positively on Armfield himself (208).
The lack of fear probably came from FAB’s recognition that abolitionists represented a minority view, even in the Northern states. There was very limited sense of any public approbation of FAB. On numerous occasions, Rothman laid waste to the old canard that respectable members of Southern White society looked down on the slave traders. The book was replete with examples of “FAB” moving easily through high society. Even noted abolitionist Timothy Dwight Weld noted that the only traders ever looked down upon were those from the lower classes; “by contrast (upper class) slave traders did not lose caste…(they were) held in repute as honorable merchants” (267). An Alexandria newspaper’s response to an enslaved person uprising was that “the whole affair was of so contemptible and unimportant a nature (that he decided not to) trouble the public with the history of it” (109). When Armfield died, his obituary never mentioned his business but celebrated his “(accumulation of a large fortune) by his enterprise, energy, pluck, industry and foresight” (355).
The only powers that had any really negative impact on the slave trade in “The Ledger and the Chain” were those of the “hidden (non-human) hand:” The business cycle, most notably the Panic of 1837, and the weather -- the slave ship Comet was blown off course and ran aground in the Bahamas, where the enslaved people were set free under British law (159). Of course, toward the end a different form of federal government action, the Anaconda Plan, slowly dismantled the slave traders’ infrastructure, but the reader gained little consolation from realizing that’s what it took.
When assessing any broader societal impact of “The Ledger and the Chain,” the reviewer, a high school history teacher with a broad but not overwhelmingly deep knowledge of US history who pays attention to current events, feels conflicted about whether it helps or hurts (through no fault of its own) the cause of civil rights. High school US history courses cover civil rights like a greatest hits album, a collection of big issues, names and events. For most Americans, this is all the civil rights history they’ll get, and we hope it raises a sufficient level of consciousness to make them receptive to the idea of civil rights as a crucial ongoing issue. But for some Americans, what they hear in high school is all they want to hear, and others may not even want to hear that much.
Enter Rothman, a serious academic historian, Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, department chairman at the University of Alabama and author of two previous major publications. His book is a triumph of research; it pummels the reader with details, some already known, many more less covered, e.g. the mechanics of the domestic trade of enslaved people, selling to free people of color and the sexual trafficking of young women. (The story of one such woman, Martha Sweart [Chapter 4] was sad enough on its own.) The reader quickly learns, as it did with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” that arguably the worst aspects of slavery and its aftermath is the stuff too granular to be covered in high school or even in a basic college survey: for Coates, neighborhood redlining and other forms of housing discrimination, and for Rothman, FAB.
No doubt Rothman’s peers in the academy, serious historical scholars and like minded amateurs will appreciate “The Ledger and the Chain,” every detail proof that slavery’s impact was even wider and worse than it seemed, justification for renewed civil rights activism. Many people who need to read it, however, either won’t or, if they did (or, more likely, if they heard about on a cable TV news show), it’s easy to imagine them looking at the same detail as Critical Race Theory-based overskill, the product of a cloistered, “woke” elitist who hates the US. It would indeed be a tragedy if such an important, illuminating work becomes just another casualty of the modern culture wars.