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An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South

An Author Talk with Robert K.D. Colby

Join us for a virtual talk by historian Robert K.D. Colby on his first book, “An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South.”

Between Fort Sumter and Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands of men, women and children through a persisting trade in enslaved people. They did so for a multitude of reasons, including to adapt to the conflict, to invest in their desired slaveholding future, and to fend off the onset of emancipation. These transactions had profound impacts on the enslaved, their lives and families, and the ways in which they pursued freedom during the war. The surviving traffic in humanity thus shaped the experience of the Civil War and its aftermath for all inhabitants of the wartime South.

Robert K.D. Colby is an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. His research has won awards from the Society of American Historians and the Society of Civil War Historians and has been published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition.

This is a free event, but registration is required. For more information, contact Anne McCrery at anne.mccrery@lva.virginia.gov or 804.692.3568.

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