The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped AmericaAn award winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave tradeand its role in the making of America. Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these menwho trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep Southwere essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States.