If you want to tell the story of how the United States got its economic engine running, focus on the 19th century practice of buying and selling domestic slaves, says a UC Davis historian in a new book.

In "Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in America Life," Steven Deyle suggests that the American domestic slave trade was central to the growth of the nation. The business began in earnest after 1808 when the African slave trade was officially abolished by the United States.

"Slave property became a capital investment second only to land valuation in the American economy," he says.

The slave business brought incredible wealth to traders and Southern plantation owners. At the same time, it created great moral dilemmas, regional conflicts and eventually resulted in the Civil War.

"The white South needed the slave trade, but increasingly they couldn't justify it morally," Deyle says. "It created glaring problems and human consequences."

It also spurred the major social and ethical concerns that have become part of the fabric of the American republic. "It tore husbands from wives and children from parents," Deyle says. "The human cost of this tragedy was something the nation is still dealing with today."

Deyle's new book, one of the few to focus on the domestic slave trade as a national institution, covers the market revolution in the South, how the buying and selling of human property was a regular part of everyday life, the abolitionist attacks on slavery and the African American resistance to the slave trade.

"Wealth from the slave trade has woven its way into American society so thoroughly that few have any knowledge of its origins," Deyle concludes.