A half century before the United States legally abolished the importation of enslaved people directly from Africa in 1807, the northeastern colonies of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia were engaged in domestic trading of enslaved persons, routinely transporting them to the southeastern colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia. Internal trading in enslaved people existed roughly from the 1760s to the 1860s in the United States. By the 1790s, with westward expansion, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia became the main exporters to the lower South, and within a few decades North and South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee were major exporters to the southwest. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812, hordes of migrants, many with enslaved people in tow, occupied the lower Mississippi Valley, which was destined to soon become the land of cotton and sugar bowls, kingdom, and empire. People of African descent were forcefully brought from the upper old South to these regions by professional slave traders and speculators and sold in chattel human investment markets to meet an insatiable demand for enslaved labor. Early on, Natchez, Mississippi, became one of the two major southwest centers of America's long-distance domestic slave trade, the lifeblood of the southern slavery system, and from the 1830s to the Civil War, Forks of the Road was reportedly America's second largest southwest enslavement marketplace.
