In the years immediately following the American Revolution, slavery changes dramatically and, in doing so, changes America itself. The forced migration of enslaved people south and west across the continent is central to this as, between the 1780s and 1860s, “almost 1 million people [are] herded down the road into the new slavery” (2). After the Revolution ended in 1783, the nation’s leaders are “not sure that they [can] hold their precarious coalition of states together” (2). The territories they claim are vast and subject to claims from other nations and the continent’s indigenous inhabitants. They face infighting and internal divisions, a lack of stable currency, and an impending economic crisis.

Some of their conflicts concern slavery directly. A significant number of Americans feel that “enslavement contradict[s] all of the new nation’s rhetoric about right and liberty” (6). Even some slave owners take this position, including Thomas Jefferson. In 1784, Jefferson heads a committee that proposes to end slavery in “the territories across the Appalachians” (7) by 1800, despite owning “scores of enslaved African Americans” himself, including “the enslaved woman who bore his children” (6). Others vehemently oppose ending slavery. Jefferson’s antislavery clause is rejected in Congress and many argue that slavery is entirely just on moral grounds. Some ignore morality altogether and argue, as future chief justice John Rutledge does, that “[i]nterest alone is the governing principles with nations” (10).

This is perhaps the most prescient argument, as there are multiple interests encouraging Congress to allow slavery’s expansion. The South will continue to profit from the trade in, and labor of, enslaved people while “the Northeast [will] earn profits by transporting the commodities generated by slavery’s growth” (11). Most white people will also benefit from avoiding the national disunity that would come from an inability to make a deal on slavery. Ultimately, despite political clashes on numerous issues, “[s]lavery’s expansion [is] one topic in which political leaders from all sides [can] find common interest” (29). As such, in “the interest of both profit and unity” (11), Congress allows slavery to expand and spread across the continent.  

This expansion occurs through forced marches, over hundreds of miles, across rough terrain in extreme weather. In 1805, Charles Ball finds himself part of one such march. 25 years old, Ball lives in Maryland and has had five masters. His current master is “a hard man” but Ball does not try to escape and even works “extra hours” to provide food and clothing for his wife and children who are “owned by another white man” (16). Thanks to the struggling tobacco economy, some Maryland slave owners are allowing slaves to buy their freedom; Ball hopes to earn enough to buy himself and his family out of slavery. However, he is sold to a group of white men who jump him and tie his hands behind his back. They take this precaution because a slave who learns that they are “being taken south might be desperate enough to do anything” (23).

From the 1780s forward, both state and private parties develop schemes to sell millions of acres of undeveloped land, much of it in what will later become Alabama and Mississippi, to investors, effectively creating “a national financial market for land speculation” (18). Slavery is central to this because enslaved labor will be the force that will make these lands profitable, with many “anticipat[ing] that slave-made commodities [will] find a profitable market” to such a degree that “large supplies of ‘surplus’ slaves […] [is] the best form of currency for buying land” (21). This profitability is reliant on slavery’s frontier moving further south and west. Even supposedly anti-slavery figures like Jefferson support this move, arguing that “diffusion” of the slave population over a greater area will lead to “a greater probability of ameliorating their condition” (29) and “protect white lives” (35) by ensuring that there are not great concentrations of angry African-Americans seeking revenge, if or when general emancipation occurs.

Much of the movement of slaves is driven by “Georgia-men” who come up from the South to pay a higher “foreign price” (18) for slaves that they can then sell on for greater profit back in the southern territories. This practice was soon well known and Georgia-men quickly became “a specific type of danger in the oral book of knowledge of enslaved African Americans (21). One slave who ran away after he was bought by a Georgia-man describes it as “the worst form of punishment” (18), not least because it involves separation from family and familiar surroundings, a grueling forced march, and particularly tough working conditions. Like most Georgia-men, those that take Ball make him part of a “coffle” (22), a line of slaves chained arm-to-arm and neck-to-neck to their neighbors.

In a coffle, the slaves have to walk in perfect unison. More than that, they have to keeping walking constantly: they cannot stop without falling and being dragged by the neck. They cannot run or hide or jump from a boat and swim to safety. They cannot fight their captors, even when they rape the enslaved women, “as [was] common practice” (25). The coffle allows the Georgia-men to “make enslaved people work directly against their own love of self, children, spouses; of the world, of freedom and hope” (23), able only to “carry the chain forward like a pair of obedient, disembodied feet” (26). This allows slave owners and overseers freedom from some of the restrictions they had previously faced. In the northeast, enslavers had to consider “family ties between enslaved people that were important to other whites, fear of angry slaves, fear of one’s evangelized conscience, fear of foreign criticism of the land of the free” (32). By moving the slave frontier south and west, slave owners are free to use, and profit from, their slaves in a manner that will change America and the world. 

Four empires, the British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, “dominate the first three centuries of American history” (42). Initially, they take gold and silver but soon find “even greater wealth by laying a belt of plantation colonies from Brazil north to Virginia” (42). Much of their wealth comes through growing sugar farmed by enslaved Africans. Positioned at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans is, as French traveler Pierre-Louis Duvallon observes in 1800, “destined by nature to become […] perhaps the most important place of commerce in the new world” (43). At the turn of the 19th century, Spain holds the city and refuses US officials’ attempts either to buy it or to negotiate the right to export US products through it. This threatens to destabilize and financially cripple the new nation.

This changes dramatically with the 1791 slave revolt on Saint-Dominique, a French colony on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. An ideal site for sugar production, Saint-Dominique is probably “the most profitable stretch of real estate on the planet” and “the imperial engine of French economic growth” (44). However, when an ex-slave named Toussaint Louverture leads a group of his fellows to overthrow their masters and claim the colony as, effectively, an independent nation, the French Empire loses this source of wealth and power. Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul of the French Republic, is determined to reclaim this prize, and in 1801 sends a force of 50,000 men to take the colony. At the same time, having “concluded a secret treaty that ‘retroceded’ Louisiana to French control after thirty-seven years in Spanish hands” (45-46), he sends a second army of 20,000 to Louisiana and New Orleans. Having heard of the secret treaty, Jefferson offers Napoleon “$10 million for the city and its immediate surrounds” (46) but is turned down.

The revolutionary army on Saint-Dominique proves far more effective than Napoleon expected and, by “the middle of 1802, the first wave of French forces has withered away” (46). Napoleon reluctantly sends the Louisiana force to the island but they too are destroyed. Defeated and desperate, Napoleon sells Jefferson “all of French Louisiana—the whole west bank of the Mississippi […]—for a mere $15 million” (47). This sale, the Louisiana Purchase, doubles the size of the United States’ territory and opens up a vital site of commerce for the nation. Although “most US history textbooks [still] tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Dominique made it possible” (49), this sudden, highly-profitable expansion is a direct result of the ex-slaves’ fight for freedom. 

The revolt also has another significant influence on US politics. When Saint-Dominique declares itself an independent nation in 1804, changing its name to Haiti, “the name they believ[e] the original Taino inhabitants had used before the Spaniards killed them all” (47), it radically changes the way slavery operates. Slavery on the sugar colonies had “depended on the continual resupply of captive workers ripped from the womb of Africa” (47). However, after the revolt, many feel that slavery “had brought destruction upon Saint-Dominique” (48) and voices opposing the trade grow stronger. In 1807, Britain passes “a law ending the international slave trade to its empire” (48) and intends to pressure other European empires to follow suit. US Congress is already planning to do likewise, with a ban due to be enacted in 1808. Importantly, this reflects the fact that the use and forced movement of slaves born on the continent means that “the Middle Passage [is] no longer seen as an economic necessity” (48), rather than any sense that slavery is wrong. In fact, one representative boasts that “[a] large majority of people in the Southern states do not consider slavery as a crime” (48).

In New Orleans, which now contains a “little Saint-Dominique” (51) on its outskirts, comprised of refugees from the colony, this belief is particularly strong with the “Saint-Dominique refugees and their French- and Spanish-speaking compatriots demand[ing] more slaves” (51). Many officials concur and believe that allowing slavery to expand will unite an otherwise fractured, multicultural city. Enslavers work to bring in as many slaves as possible before 1808, while law-makers find loopholes in the ban allowing increased trafficking. Over the course of one year, “1804 to 1805, the number of people sold in New Orleans increased almost five times over” (53). When France invades Spain in 1809, 9,000 French refugees are ejected from Spanish Cuba and seek asylum in New Orleans. Around a third of them are “free people of color, forbidden to immigrate to the United States” (54) and they bring a vast number of slaves with them, all of which is legally problematic. However, the residents and officials insist that the refugees are allowed to settle in the city and the city prospers with these “new enslaved laborers and new buyers for land in lower Louisiana” (55).

In 1811, a group of slaves in Louisiana undertake “the biggest slave rebellion in the United States before the Civil War” (57), planning to take New Orleans and “hold it as the heart of a slave coast in revolt” (59). They pass through plantations and properties, gathering new recruits from among the enslaved people. The rebellion never makes it to the city, however. They are attacked by federal infantry, cavalry, and volunteer militia at a plantation where they had made camp. They run and are pursued for fifteen miles; by the time they make a final stand, there are only around 100 of them left. Those who are not killed in the attack surrender to the gathered forces. Some are “killed on the spot” (61) and the rest are bound and sent downriver, where they are tried by a “court” of white landowners. The rebellion’s alleged leader is tortured and burned to death. Some save their lives by “sell[ing] out other rebels” (62) and the rest are either hanged or shot. The rebellion is crushed by “a federal government dominated by enslavers that was committed to putting down slaves’ collective resistance” (64).

In 1812, responding to British naval blockades that were crippling American trade, the US declares war on Britain. However, in the first two years of the war, they suffer “many disappointments,” including the “Red Stick” war in 2013, in which members of the Creek Nation “[rise] up against white settlers” (68). In 1814, Andrew Jackson, commander of US army forces in the southwestern region, takes revenge, “killing 900 Creek warriors at a cost of only 70 of the attackers” (68) in a battle at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River. He then gathers all the Creek leaders and “bullie[s] them into signing a treaty that concede[s] 23 million acres” (68). Jackson leads his forces to victory again at the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815, this time against the British, who deny the validity of the Louisiana Purchase and aim to take the city. Although “American militia had historically performed poorly in pitched battle against trained European regulars” (70), under Jackson’s leadership they triumph. Jackson’s victories secure “American possession of the southwestern frontier” and make “a continental empire […] possible” (73).