The Baton Foundation

An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South
2025-04-13 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York)
About the Book
Between Fort Sumter and Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands of Black men, women, and children through a persisting trade in enslaved people. They did so for numerous reasons, including to adapt to the conflict, to invest in their desired slaveholding future, and to fend off the onset of emancipation. These transactions had profound impacts on the enslaved–their lives and families, and the ways in which they pursued freedom during the war. The surviving traffic in humanity thus shaped the experience of the Civil War and its aftermath for all inhabitants of the wartime South.
About the Speaker
Robert Colby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His first book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. His research has won awards from the Society of American Historians and the Society of Civil War Historians and has been published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition.
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