Michael Strahan, NFL Hall-of-Famer and television personality, can track his descendants’ migration from the upper South to Texas as the result of the Second Middle Passage – a turning point in the history of the domestic slave trade in the United States. 

Although the slave trade from Africa had been outlawed in the United States by 1808, the demand for labor and the explosive growth of the cotton industry led to a continued demand for slaves, and resulted in a large domestic slave trade that followed. The Second Middle Passage, a turning point in the history of the domestic slave trade in the US, occurred from 1790 until the start of the Civil War in 1861. Enslaved peoples were relocated from the upper South to the lower South of the United States to accommodate the spread of the cotton industry. 

Before the introduction of the cotton gin, cotton was a highly labor-intensive, unprofitable crop. Invented by Eli Whitney in 1794, the cotton gin was a machine that quickly and easily separated the seeds from the cotton and dramatically increased production. The cotton gin, along with the Industrial Revolution, combined to create a huge textile industry and demand for raw cotton exploded, becoming a profitable crop. Much of the land suited for cotton was in the lower South, and the Louisiana Purchase made fertile land available for white landowners. As landowners expanded and planted more cotton, they needed a much larger workforce. The upper South was able to profit by selling slaves to harvest the cotton, and thus creating the Second Middle Passage. 

This second wave of the slave trade was particularly horrific because it separated families and communities that had existed together for generations. There was little incentive for the traders to keep families together as human beings were treated merely as commodities. The journey to the new destinations were often on foot and many perished along the way due to exhaustion, disease, violence and lack of food and clean water. Once they arrived, their lives were much harder picking cotton than they had been harvesting tobacco and other crops. With the demand for cotton high, slaves were expected to work harder and longer hours. The profitability of cotton enabled it to expand from the lower South to Mississippi and Texas, and helped to create major shipping ports in Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas.