This dissertation examines the Telfair family of Savannah, Georgia who enslaved the most people in the state before the American Civil War. It uses the frameworks of microhistory and transnational history to examine the social, political, and economic connections the family had beyond the American South, and the implications of those connections for the people they enslaved. The dissertation argues that a southern, sectional framework, is inadequate for explaining the activities of the “Antebellum One Percent”, the less than one percent of the antebellum South’s population who owned more than one hundred slaves before the Civil War. In many ways, the Telfair family are an exceptional case, but their unique history demonstrates that historians should view racial chattel slavery in the early United States as a national rather than a sectional institution before the Civil War.