Every historical project worth its salt includes at least a handful of genuine archival surprises. One that shaped my book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South, took place in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library in the winter of 2019 (a visit made possible by the support of a Nau Center Library Fellowship). I was working through the papers of the McCue Family, specifically the correspondence of the judge and eventual Confederate soldier John Howard McCue, when a set of letters McCue received in the late winter of 1861 stopped me cold. First in January, then in March, McCue received missives from a slaveholding Tennessee doctor named James Forbes. While he had recently relocated to Fayette County, Tennessee, Forbes had long resided near McCue in Virginia’s Nelson County. With the secession movement well underway, Forbes’s new home sat astride the border between Tennessee and the newly-founded “Republic of Mississippi”; indeed as he went about his business, he could be “either in or out of the US as I may choose.” Though the times were tumultuous, Forbes and his neighbors possessed what he called “a quiet settled determination to resist the powers that expect to be after the 4th of March next”: Abraham Lincoln and his recently-elected Republican allies. [1]

In the meantime, however, Forbes had more pressing business with McCue. Among the at least five people Forbes enslaved was a woman named Judy. [2] When he removed to Tennessee in 1861, he separated Judy from her husband, George, whom a Lynchburg enslaver named William Staples retained in his possession. Forbes now wished to obtain George in order to reunite him with Judy. To be sure, Forbes sought a bargain in purchasing George. In making his request to McCue, he emphasized George’s age (forty-three), that he had recently suffered from pneumonia, and that he had “been worked hard” in his life. He also cited the reality that the economic and political chaos of the secession crisis meant that the prices offered for enslaved people were in steep decline. “Negroes are down with us,” he proclaimed, and probably would not “go up till matters are settled.” In a subsequent letter, Forbes urged McCue to accelerate the transaction given that Virginia’s laggardly pace in seceding risked placing George across what might become an international boundary. The combined weight of political uncertainty and George’s purported shortcomings led Forbes to offer a bid for George’s services. He initially valued George at less than $600 but professed himself willing to go as high as $850—“the present Memphis price asked for No 1 negroes.” [3]

Thus far, Forbes’s efforts were unexceptional, for slaveholders regularly sought to wheedle down the prices of people they pursued (slave narratives are replete with haggling between slave traders and their clients). As much as he tried to play down George’s value writ large, however, Forbes had a specific reason for desiring to acquire him—one he stated to McCue with a shocking clarity. His eagerness to reunite George with Judy had nothing to do with the sort of paternalist impulses enslavers regularly touted and reflected little care for the wellbeing of the enslaved people in question. Instead, he saw their reunion in purely financial terms. It was an investment in his future slaveholding, for the happy couple would be likely to produce children whom Forbes would then own—and, as Forbes put it, “it is not easy for hens to lay eggs & have chicks without a ‘Cock.’” This idea was clearly one that enthralled him, for a few weeks later he returned to the theme with similar candor: bringing the couple together, he argued in pushing McCue to send George to him, “would be profitable in the way of negro increase.” [4]

James Forbes’s naked invocation of the language of animal husbandry caught me off guard, and I spent a few minutes reading and re-reading the letter to make sure I had deciphered it correctly. Upon further reflection, however, I realized that while the straightforwardness of Forbes’s metaphor was unique, the sentiment was anything but. For one, the comparison between enslaved people and livestock represented a stark part of the legal realities of American slavery. Advertisements for auction sales following the demise (fiscal or literal) of an enslaver regularly listed people and animals alongside one another. And enslaved people drew out this comparison explicitly in attacking the institution of slavery. Solomon Northup, recalling his time in Theophilus Freeman’s New Orleans slave jail, remembered enslavers forcing captives to show their teeth for examination “precisely as a jockey examines a horse which he is about to barter for or purchase.” [5] In other letters I had read, only the barest context clues could help me discern whether, when enslavers referred to something by a single first name, they were describing a horse, a boat, or one of the people they held as property.

Beyond the connections between enslaved people and other forms of chattel property, moreover, Forbes’s sentiment was one that, if not often expressed so succinctly, permeated the peculiar institution. As Daina Ramey Berry and other scholars have shown, slaveholders universally valued enslaved women for the children they would bear, progeny who, by the laws of slavery, would immediately become the property of their enslavers. No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson considered the reproduction of enslaved people a critical part of their value, and enslavers shared this sentiment throughout the tenure of the institution. [6] The simple reality was that American slaveholders relied on the people they enslaved to produce children and banked on their doing so in mapping out their future plans.

In some ways, Forbes’s insistence on planning on the future amid the secession crisis proved more shocking than his crudely-expressed desire for George and Judy to procreate for his benefit. As noted above, Forbes pursued George, Judy, and the children he hoped they would bear as American slavery came under intense threat. Secession and war loomed over the transaction, with the threat of emancipation—to forestall even the possibility of which white Southerners had seceded following Lincoln’s election—lurking behind both. And yet, Forbes was far from alone in betting on a slaveholding future during the Civil War. In the course of my research into the domestic slave trade during the Civil War, I found example after example of similar transactions. Confederates, confident in their nascent nation’s eventual victory and the independent slaveholding republic this would secure, channeled their enthusiasm and assurance into enslaved property. As one Confederate put it while acquiring people in the winter of 1863, “If this war is ever ended fairly, women and children are the property to put money in. I think that first class men and women will bring $5000 then.” [7]

If and for how long Forbes shared this confidence remains unclear, for the two letters (in January and March 1861) are the only correspondence he had with McCue—a fact that additionally leaves George’s and Judy’s fates ambiguous. But surviving evidence about his actions—as well as his experiences in the war—indicate that Forbes’s sanguinity in pursuing George likely continued. His two letters certainly expressed remarkable confidence during the secession crisis. Though the Volunteer State had not yet offered its services to the Confederacy (indeed, that entity did not yet exist at the time of his first letter), Forbes spat defiance at the United States. “It is one of the results of negro slavery to make the whites independent & sovereign,” he crowed, underlining a key plank in the Confederate endeavor. He was sure that project would succeed, for ten million white Southerners “never can be conquered or subjugated.” “War may be waged,” he concluded, “but it will have an end & we will be free.” In his subsequent letter, he lauded Tennesseans who had flocked to the Confederacy’s banner in Charleston, and he pledged his allegiance to slavery, promising, “I will follow [n-----s]” not only out of the Union but “astride of the South Pole,” if necessary. [8] He would eventually bleed in the Confederate service. Having joined the Rebel army as a surgeon in the spring of 1861, Forbes served in that capacity until he suffered a wound near his bladder in the autumn of 1862. This added injury to insult, for in the intervening period Union forces had taken Memphis and begun crossing Fayette County for their initial approach to Vicksburg. As a result, Forbes’s “family ha[d] been driven from their home” and become refugees. [9]

Judy’s (and perhaps George’s) fate during and after the war is unknown. She may have made it to one of the contraband camps in southwestern Tennessee, or possibly to a refuge a Memphis. Or she may have been one of the many people Confederates drove south into the Confederate interior ahead of the region’s fall. If the latter were the case, another slave market may have threatened her, for Confederate refugees regularly sold people to sustain themselves in their flight. Her and her husbands’ travails—and James A. Forbes’s pursuit of human property—both stemmed from a conflict fought to forge a slaveholding future. Forbes believed that such a struggle would result in an independent slaveholding republic, one that would secure to him the benefits emerging from the enslavement of generations of human beings. For Judy and George, the war promised liberty, though one that would arrive neither certainly not linearly. Considering their entwined experiences deepens our understanding of the Civil War, the reasons for which Rebels fought, and the meaning of the new birth of freedom that emerged from it.

Robert K. D. Colby (CLAS 2009) is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His research on the domestic slave trade has won multiple awards, including the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians.