Disposing of Human Property: American Slave Families and Forced Separation in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Virtually no slave family in the nineteenth-century American South was completely safeguarded from forced separation, yet the extent of family breakups throughout the slave states remains far from clear. Much of the historical debate has focused on the domestic slave trade and its effect on slave family stability, thereby downplaying other methods of forced separation, which were surely just as disruptive, such as local sales and estate divisions. Moreover, few historians have approached the issue of forced separation from a comparative perspective. This article examines the threat of forced separation for slave families living in two distinct communities of the antebellum South, namely, northern Virginia and southern Louisiana. Concluding that the threat of forced separation was inextricably linked to the nature of regional slave-based agriculture, this study shows that time and place mattered and that the threat of forced separation varied for slave families living in different communities.