Black Market: The Slave’s Value in National Culture after 1865

By 1860, the value of the slave population in the United States exceeded $3 billion–triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South’s lucrative farmland. The slave was not only a commodity to be traded but also a kind of currency and the basis for a range of credit relations. But the value associated with slavery was not destroyed in the Civil War. In Black Market, Aaron Carico reveals how the slave commodity survived emancipation, arguing that the enslaved person–understood here in legal, economic, social, and embodied contexts–still operated as an indispensable form of value in national culture. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the Fourteenth Amendment to the first western, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery’s political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Carico explains how a radically incomplete–and fundamentally failed–abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined–and now goes on to determine–economic, political, and cultural life.