William G. Eliot

The abuse of slaves did not end at the occasional whipping or mutilation for disobedience, running away, or a bad attitude. The casual buying, selling, trading, and abandonment of slaves proved an equally cruel treatment. All of these broke up married couples and separated slaves from their children, who were treated as casually as any other property and disposed of without any thought to the sentiment of their parents.

The sale of slaves often came about as a payment for debt or in the settlement of the estate of a deceased slaveowner. In addition, the slaveowners of the Chesapeake region and the northern tier of slave states found a profitable market for slaves in the cotton states of the Deep South, where in the early nineteenth century the market for raw cotton in the northern United States...