Scott Shane moved to Baltimore with his family in 1983 to start work as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. A decade or so later, he was shocked to see a reference to the slave trade that had thrived at the Inner Harbor for more than half a century before the Civil War. He found that most Baltimoreans and most Americans have little idea of what the domestic slave trade was: the forced transport of about 1 million enslaved African Americans from the upper south, particularly the Chesapeake region, to the deep south, where the cotton and sugar plantations had an insatiable demand for labor. For many captives, sale south — usually through a slave trader like those around Baltimore’s harbor — was a terrible fate, separating them forever from parents, siblings, spouse and children. So he wrote about this phenomenon for The Sun and have always wanted to return to the story.
Scott went on to work for The New York Times for 15 years, writing about the spy agencies, terrorism and national security. When he retired from the Times at the end of 2019, he returned to the history of slavery, looking for a true story to tell. The victims of the domestic slave trade were largely illiterate, and the slave traders were hardly writers. So he enlarged his hunt through books and archives and came across the abolitionist Charles Torrey, who had died in a Baltimore prison, and his partner, the Washington shoemaker Thomas Smallwood.
