Slave markets and slave jails in the United States

Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part.

Price, Birch & Co., "dealers in slaves" Alexandria, Virginia, photographed c. 1862
In addition to private jails, enslaved people were often held in public jails, such as a 40-year-old fugitive man named Monday who fought "like the Devil when arrested" and who was held in the jail of Walker County, Alabama (The Democrat, Huntsville, July 7, 1847)

Slave trading was often done in business clusters where many trading firms operated in close proximity. Such clusters existed on specific streets (such as Pratt Street in Baltimore, Adams Street in Memphis, or Cherry Street in Nashville), in specific neighborhoods (for example, near, but not within, the French Quarter in New Orleans, and at Shockoe Bottom in Richmond), or in settlements seemingly dedicated to serving planters seeking new agricultural laborers (such as Forks of the Road market in Natchez, Mississippi, and at Hamburg, S.C., across the river from Augusta, Georgia).[1] Many thousands of other sales took place on the steps of county courthouses (to satisfy judgments, estates and claims), on large plantations, or anywhere else there was a slave owner who needed cash in order to settle a debt or pay off a bad bet. It was not uncommon to hold sales or auctions outdoors in the pre-air-conditioning South; the plaza north of the Charleston Exchange may be the most enduring and notable of these locations.

A slave market could operate without a dedicated jail, and a jail could operate without an associated market. For example, the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans, and the Artesian Basin in Montgomery, Alabama, were important slave markets not known for their prison facilities. A number of slave jails in the Upper South were used for holding people until slave traders had enough for a shipment south, but were only rarely the site of slave sales, in part because the profit for the trader was sure to be higher in the Deep South, closer to the labor-hungry plantations of the cotton and sugar districts.

History

Dedicated marts, depots, and lockups were by no means ubiquitous, but the slave trade itself was: "The slave trade took place in nearly every town and city in the South. In most, however, the trade did not have a permanent physical location. Commonly, slaves were sold on court days, usually outdoors at a location near the courthouse, yet those cities with a large slave market had a significant infrastructure dedicated to the buying and selling of humans."[2] New Orleans was the great slave market of the lower Mississippi watershed—with hundreds of traders and a score of slave pens—but there were also markets and sales "at Donaldsonville, Clinton, and East Baton Rouge in Louisiana; at Natchez, Vicksburg, and Jackson in Mississippi; at every roadside tavern, county courthouse, and crossroads across the Lower South."[1][3]

"Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda at New Orleans" by William Henry Brooke from The Slave States of America (1842) by James Silk Buckingham depicts a slave sale at the St. Louis Hotel, sometimes called the French Exchange

Slave traders traveled to farms and small towns to buy enslaved people to bring to market.[1] Slave owners also delivered people they wanted to dispense with.[4] Enslaved people were placed in pens to await being sold, and they could become quite crowded.[4] In New Orleans, most sales were made between September and May. Buyers visited the slave pen and inspected enslaved people prior to the sale.[5] People were held until their means of transportation was arranged. They were transported in groups by boat, walked to their new owners, or a combination of the two. They were moved in groups in a coffle. This meant that people were chained together with iron rings around their necks which were fastened with wooden or iron bars. Men on horseback herded the groups, or coffles, to their destination. They used dogs, guns, and whips.[4] Railroads brought a new, simpler means of travel that did not rely on the use of coffles.[4]

In some cases, slave traders, like Franklin and Armfield Office, had a network of slave depots that were located along their routes.[4] Circa 1833, an Appalachian newspaper complained about the slave traders traveling through the region with coffles, and reported that private jails had been built by slave traders at Baltimore, Washington, Norfolk, and near Fredericksburg.[6] According to Nile's Weekly Register of Baltimore in the 1840s, "The procurement of from fifty to three hundred slaves is a work of days, sometimes of weeks or months. Many plantations must be visited by the trader and his agents. Then a variety of circumstances occasions necessary delays, before the gang can be put in motion for the south. During this period the slaves are secured by handcuffs, fetters, and chains, and put into some place of confinement. The national prison at Washington city, and the state prisons, are prostituted to this use when occasion requires. The more extensive slave-dealers have private prisons constructed expressly for this purpose."[7]

Lumpkin's Jail, the largest in the state of Virginia, was a particularly inhumane place that resulted in people dying of starvation, illness, or beating. They were so cramped that they were sometimes on top of one another. There were no toilet facilities.[4]

Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer described slave pens she saw on her travels in America as "great garrets without beds, chairs or tables."[8] Per Frederic Bancroft, "As a rule, in all such places, the floor was the only bed, a dirty blanket was the only covering, a miscellaneous bundle the only pillow.[8]

Coffle gang
"Great Negro Mart" sign: This card dates to about 1860, this building had been occupied by Nathan Bedford Forrest's slave market for most the 1850s but in 1859 he sold it for US$30,000 (equivalent to $977,111 in 2022) to his former partner Byrd Hill[9] (National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Slaves Waiting for Sale by Eyre Crowe (1853)
Three newspaper listings for estate sales to be held at the negro mart "work yard," Charleston Daily Courier, January 29, 1841

A negro mart was usually a type of urban retail market, usually consisting of a dedicated showroom and/or a workyard, a jail, and storerooms or kitchens for food. Negro marts were urban "clearinghouses" that both acquired enslaved people from more rural districts and sold people for use as farm, skilled, or domestic labor. The term negro mart was most commonly used in Charleston, South Carolina, but can also be found in Memphis, Tennessee, multiple locations in Georgia, et al. In the 1850s, future Confederate military leader Nathan Bedford Forrest operated a heavily advertised negro mart on Adams Street in Memphis.[10] In January 1860, the New York Times reported that the Forrest & Jones negro mart in Memphis had collapsed and caught fire; two people died but the bills of sale for people, "amounting in the aggregate to US$400,000 (equivalent to about $13,028,150 in 2022)" were salvaged.[11]

A description of "the negro mart of Poindexter & Little" in New Orleans, Louisiana states: "In this mart the Negroes were classified and seated on benches, as goods are arranged on shelves in a well-regulated store. The cooks, mechanics, farm-hands, house-girls, seamstresses, washwomen, barbers, and boys each had their own place."[12]

During the Civil War, Gideon J. Pillow wrote a complaint letter to the effect that federal troops had robbed him of his slaves and killed or jailed his overseers; he wanted someone to check if the women and children, particularly, were "confined in the Ware house or Negro Mart."[13]

A lawsuit resolved in 1870 addressed the issue of debt for an enslaved person purchased on credit, after an insurance company refused to pay out on a property insurance claim, since the slave had committed suicide after being put in a slave mart in New Orleans. The court determined that the debt was still owed, but removed the interest payment obligation.[14]

After slavery

The Smithsonian magazine states that "[t]hese were sites of brutal treatment and unbearable sorrow, as callous and avaricious slave traders tore apart families, separating husbands from wives, and children from their parents."[15] During the Civil War, slave pens were used by the Union Army to imprison Confederate soldiers. For instance, slave pens were used for this purpose in St. Louis, Missouri and Alexandria, Virginia.[15] In Natchez, Mississippi, the Forks of the Road slave market was used by the Union soldiers to offer the formerly enslaved protection and freedom.[15] In 2021 the site was made part of the Natchez National Historical Park.[16]

Old slave pens were also repurposed for worship and education. In Lexington, Kentucky, Lewis Robards' slave jail was used as a Congregational church by African Americans. A freedmen's seminary, now Virginia Union University, was established in Lumpkin's Jail. Known as the "devil's half acre", a founder of the seminary James B. Simmons said that it would now be "God's half acre".[15][4] A site formerly called A. Bryan's Negro Mart in Georgia, was commandeered by the U.S. military at the conclusion of the Civil War. It was later described as having four stars on the sign out front; the windows of the upper stories had iron grates, and among the abandoned detritus were "bills of sale for slaves by the hundreds," business correspondence, "handcuffs, whips, and staples for tying, etc." The building turned into a school for formerly enslaved children.[17]

Notable markets and jails
"Old Slave Market, Charleston, S.C." postcard of Charleston Exchange by Detroit Publishing Co., image dated 1913-1918
"A List of Runaways Confined in the Jails of this State," Mississippi Free Trader, December 11, 1835

This is a list of notable buildings, structures, and landmarks (etc.), that were used in the slave trade in the United States.

See also

References
  1. Bancroft, Frederic (2023) [1931, 1996]. Slave Trading in the Old South (Original publisher: J. H. Fürst Co., Baltimore). Southern Classics Series. Introduction by Michael Tadman (Reprint ed.). Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-64336-427-8. LCCN 95020493. OCLC 1153619151.
  2. McInnis, Maurie D. (Fall 2013). "Mapping the slave trade in Richmond and New Orleans". Building & Landscapes. 20 (2): 102–125. doi:10.5749/buildland.20.2.0102. JSTOR 10.5749/buildland.20.2.0102. S2CID 160472953.
  3. Johnson, Walter (2013). River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 86. ISBN 9780674074880. LCCN 2012030065. OCLC 827947225. OL 26179618M.
  4. Tucker, Abigail. "Digging up the Past at a Richmond Jail". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2021-05-06.
  5. El-Shafei, Dahlia; Mason, Kate; O'Dwyer, Kathryn. "Henry Bibb and The Slave Pens of New Orleans - Stop 2 of 7 on the Urban Slavery and Everyday Resistance tour". New Orleans Historical. Retrieved 2021-05-06.
  6. "A Most Disgraceful Business". Middlebury Register and Addison county Journal. 1833-01-22. p. 3. Retrieved 2023-09-18.
  7. "Slavery and the internal slave trade in the United States of North America; being replies to questions transmitted by the Committee of the British and Foreign ..." HathiTrust. Retrieved 2023-09-11.
  8. Bancroft, Frederic (2023) [1931]. Slave Trading in the Old South. Southern Classics Series. Introduction by Michael Tadman. University of South Carolina Press. pp. 322–323. ISBN 978-1-64336-427-8.
  9. Hurst, Jack (2011-06-08). Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 56–58. ISBN 978-0-307-78914-3.
  10. The Confederacy's Greatest Cavalryman: Nathan Bedford Forrest By Brian Steel Wills · 1998, University Press of Kansas, page 30
  11. "A Double Catastrophe in Memphis. A NEGRO MARKET AND A NEWSPAPER OFFICE IN RUINS". The New York Times. 1860-01-19. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-05-04.
  12. Alexander, Charles (1914). Battles and Victories of Allen Allensworth Lieutenant-Colonel, Retired, U.S. Army. Sherman, French. ISBN 978-0-598-48524-3.
  13. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861-1867 Selected from the Holdings of the National Archivesof the United States. Cambridge University Press. 1985. p. 285. ISBN 978-0-521-13213-8.
  14. Catterall, Helen Tunnicliff; Hayden, James J.; Matteson, David Maydole (1926–1937). Judicial cases concerning American slavery and the negro. Carnegie institution of Washington publication, no. 374. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie institution of Washington. p. 558.
  15. White, Jonathan W. "When Emancipation Finally Came, Slave Markets Took on a Redemptive Purpose". Smithsonian Magazine.
  16. Mendoza, Brishette (July 3, 2021). "How a Slave Market Became a National Park Service Site". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 3, 2021. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
  17. Greatheed, Samuel; Parken, Daniel; Williams, Theophilus; Price, Thomas; Conder, Josiah; Ryland, Jonathan Edwards; Hood, Edwin Paxton (1865). The Eclectic Review.
  18. Calonius, Erik (2006). The Wanderer: the last American slave ship and the conspiracy that set its sails. New York, N.Y: Saint Martin's Press. p. 127. ISBN 978-0-312-34347-7.
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