Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-4575]

George Harper Houghton

In the course of the nineteenth century, the domestic slave trade displaced more than one million men, women, and children from the Atlantic states to the Deep South. Children were separated from parents, as were husbands from wives, and brothers from sisters. The migration of African Americans to the North, although it was often voluntary, exacerbated the problem, separating free from enslaved family members.