Hope H. Slatter

Slatter was from the small settlement of Clinton, Georgia, located in the dead center of the state. He was named for Rev. Hope Hull, a Methodist minister.[6] He served in McIntosh's Division of the Georgia Militia during the War of 1812, working as assistant forage-master.[7]

Slatter may have been in the slave trade as early as 1817.[8] In 1833, H.H. and S.F. Slatter and two other traders offered 200 people for sale in Hamburg, South Carolina.[9] In 1835 he was said to be "the main one" of a dozen slave traders doing business in Baltimore, a hub of the coastwise slave trade.[10] Slatter and his family resided in the ninth ward of the city of Baltimore in 1840.[11] His slave prison was on Pratt Street, near Howard.[12] He always shipped out his human cargo on Saturday nights.[3] Slaves to be shipped were often transported from Slatter's to the port by way of horse-drawn omnibuses.[8] An abolitionist who observed one such shipment launch at the port stated, "Slatter was standing upon deck smiling most Pecksniffianly upon every one as he passed and saying to the anguished girls, 'Never mind, Molly, find another husband better than the one you have left,' and encouraging an old negro in the holds to scrape away upon a cracked fiddle that they might dance."[3]

Abolitionist Oliver Johnson visited the prison around 1840 and wrote about it in The Liberator newspaper.[5] A religious delegation visited his slave jail in 1840, and one visitor reported in 1843:

He addressed them somewhat as follows: 'Gentlemen, I suppose this looks strange to you, coming fram the North as you do. I live in a slave State, where the laws fix these matters. These people are with me a short time, I feed and clothe them well, and consider I do not make their condition any worse than it was before.' He showed the gentlemen his establishment, snd seemed to take pleasure in doing so. And to tell the whole truth, the place it genteel and comfortable enough for a seminary of learning. But the down-cast look of those poor blacks I shall never forget it...He also had the largest and most ferocious dog I ever saw in a small enclosure. The head colored man told me that this dog would allow no one, white or black, to come near him, but himself. His slave-prison is now regarded as a public nuisance, even in this slave-cursed city.[6]

In 1935 an insurance man going through old Atlantic City government documents found a bill of lading for an 1844 shipment of slaves from Hope H. Slatter in Baltimore to Shadrack F. Slatter in New Orleans.[13] Capt. Hugh Martin of the brig Kirkwood and Slatter had negotiated fixed rates by age: $12 each to transport those over 10 years old, $6 for those under 10 years old, and "children at the breast no charge."[13] The brothers Slatter had a stand in New Orleans at Esplanade and Moreau.[14] It was typical for interstate slave-trading businesses like the one owned by the Slatters to have a buying location in the Upper South and a selling location in the Lower South.[4] In 1848 The Liberator reported that H. H. Slatter had used four men armed with pistols, clubs and Bowie knives to help him quell a crowd surrounding one of his shipments, likely the people who attempted to escape to freedom in the Pearl incident.[15][16] Around 1848 Slatter sold his premises to Bernard M. Campbell and Walter L. Campbell.[17]

After having made his fortune, he built a mansion, and later moved to Florida where he owned a sugar plantation.[3] Slatter lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina for few months and was remembered there as a "well known and wealthy negro trader."[18] He likely owned a plantation in Mobile, Alabama, as well, because at the time the 1850 U.S. census he was the legal owner of 82 enslaved people in that district, 75 male slaves aged 25 to 38, and seven female slaves, aged 25 to 40.[19] Slatter died of disease, a victim of the 1853 yellow fever epidemic.[3][20] At the time of his death he owned a theater and "the old bank" in Mobile, and was the director of several insurance companies.[21] He died intestate, his heirs were his widow and four children, three of whom were minors at the time of his death.[22]

In the 1870s, Hope Slatter's son, Hope H. Slatter II, used his "considerable" inherited slave-trade wealth to bribe a federal district attorney to get him out of a murder conviction, he then testified against the attorney on charges of accepting a bribe.[23] Slatter apparently did not enjoy the hospitality of the Albany Penitentiary and "told a piteous tale of the severity of the discipline, by which the convicts are compelled to keep their eyes on the ground and not allowed to utter a syllable under pain of punishment by the shower bath, dark dungeon, flogging, etc."[24]

• List of American slave traders
• Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States
• History of Baltimore

•  Bancroft covers H. H. Slatter substantially in Slave-Trading in the Old South.

• Robert Trunnell v. Hope H. Slatter. Petition for Freedom
• Hope H Slatter - Slavetrader on YouTube