In recent years there has been a surge of historical interest in the domestic slave trade in the American South. A look at the total numbers of enslaved people forcibly transported by road, river, or sea across the expanding empire of American slavery in the 19^th century reveals that the domestic slave trade ensnared over twice the estimated figure of African captives imported directly into North America via the Transatlantic slave trade (around 2 million in the domestic slave trade compared with approximately 450,000 from the Transatlantic trade).  There is now a consensus amongst American slavery’s scholars that recognises both the scale and the impact of the interstate slave trade on enslaved people in the United States as a Second Black Diaspora.

Monograph studies on the domestic slave trade in the US include: Michael Tadman’s Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (1989); Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999); Robert Gudmestad’s A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (2004); and these are now joined by Steven Deyle’s significant contribution. Tadman’s study is largely responsible for reawakening current academic interest in the subject, pioneering new ways of working with a wide range of sources to arrive at an accurate estimate of the size of the antebellum slave trade. Johnson’s Soul by Soul uses slave narratives and court records to examine the everyday experience of America’s slave-pens and auction-blocks from the perspective of trader, buyer, and slave; while Gudmestad’s work concludes by asking us to consider the legacies of the ‘troublesome commerce’ – seen most dismally in the transformation of slave trader Isaac Franklin’s ‘favorite plantation, Angola’ into the Louisiana State Penitentiary of today.

Deyle’s study offers us several fresh perspectives. First, he reframes the domestic slave trade as a central feature of American, rather than just Southern, life. This requires us to pay closer attention to the trade’s origins, to examine the North-South flows of enslaved people in the late 18^th century, and also to reconsider the political motivations behind the purchase of the Florida and Louisiana territories – regions which not only contributed to the growth of slavery, but which also became magnets for the institution’s commerce in human beings. Another innovative feature of Carry Me Back is Deyle’s focus on the importance of local sales in slaves. Contrary to the dominant image of the domestic slave trade as being interregional, Deyle highlights that ‘the overwhelming majority of enslaved people who were sold … were sold locally, by one owner to another or by nearby county courts as a way to settle debts.’ As the title of chapter five emphasises, in the antebellum South, slave trading was ‘a regular part of everyday life’ and was ‘performed in full public view.’ (144, 145)

Anyone seeking to understand what American slavery was cannot afford to ignore the buying and selling of human beings. As Walter Johnson wrote, the real history of the antebellum South is the history of two million slave sales. Deyle’s study is an important addition to the re-evaluation of the domestic slave trade and the nature of slavery in the United States - Carry Me Back will be of use and interest to all readers.

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