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This is a project dedicated to American slave traders, people whose occupation or business was to some degree (or entirely) the slave trade within (or outside) the United States, i.e. the buying and selling of human beings as a commodities, primarily African-American people in the Southern United States, from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until the Civil War defeat of the Confederacy in 1865.
People who dealt in enslaved indigenous persons, such as was the case of slavery in California, would also be included. This list represents a fraction of the "many hundreds of participants in a cruel and omnipresent" American market.
Note: Research has found resources provide only a basic skeleton of a much more substantial trade in enslaved human beings throughout the American South, with significant deficits in records of rural community slave trading, where already wealthy people speculated to ways to grow their wealth further, as well as in all private sales that occurred outside auction houses and trade marts.