The New York Times has an important article this weekend by SUNY Binghamton history professor Anne C. Bailey documenting the places where slaves were sold in the United States. The article is accompanied by photos by Dannielle Bowman. The article is part of the 1619 Project. From the article:
After the Civil War, most former auction sites quietly blended into the main streets of today. Except for the occasional marker or museum, there was no record of the horror of separation suffered by many black families. The emphasis on national unity and reconstruction created a desire to paper over the atrocities of the past, and many of these sites were forgotten. They were not forgotten, though, by the formerly enslaved people who had been sold there, or by their families. Immediately upon Emancipation in 1863 and the end of the war in 1865, many of these newly freed men and women set out on foot searching earnestly for their loved ones, and often the place they sought out first was the auction site. They took with them a lock of hair, a swath of clothing — small mementos that they had saved. They posted advertisements in newspapers and black churches searching for lost relatives. Their cry was “Help me to find my people,” as the historian Heather Andrea Williams documented in the book of the same name.
But often the auction site was no longer there to find. The war had laid waste to much of the South; the auction blocks had largely been removed, and the auction houses that still stood had been repurposed. No one was eager to preserve these sites, or even remember them. And so they disappeared, year by year, generation by generation, until there was no living memory of what happened in these places.
Today, only a small minority of these sites have been properly documented, recorded and preserved. There is no online database to find them. Countless remain completely unknown. When The New York Times Magazine asked the photographer Dannielle Bowman to document some of these sites, it quickly became clear that most of their locations could be pinpointed only through original research.
And so for the last five months, my research assistants and I at the Binghamton University/Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity have combed through archives — including volumes of narratives of the formerly enslaved, as well as post-Civil War ads placed in newspapers by the enslaved themselves — in an attempt to expand the historical record about America’s slave-auction sites. During that time, we have been able to identify fewer than 50 that have been marked and approximately 30 unmarked ones. Yet these are almost certainly just a fraction of the total, when you consider how many sales took place, over how many decades, during this chapter in American history.
Why is it important to excavate these sites? This is a question I have spent a long time considering. My second book, “The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History,” was about a horrifying event that took place over two days in Savannah in 1859. Four hundred thirty-six men, women and children, including 30 babies, were sold at the Savannah Ten Broeck Race Course, normally a playground for local elites. These enslaved men and women, Gullah Geechee African-Americans, had lived together for years on the plantation estates of Pierce Mease Butler, where they forged a community with its own norms, values and customs — many informed by their African heritage. But this auction, which they came to call “the weeping time,” separated them from their families and displaced them from the only “home” they had; it was a decisive moment, maybe the decisive moment, in many of their lives. Their family bonds may have mattered little to their owners, but they mattered to the enslaved. The extent to which several of them plotted and planned about how to stay together, or went looking for one another after Emancipation, spoke to the strength and resolve of black families.
This is a long and interesting article and I encourage you to read it in its entirety.
Were did they sell the irish slaves
Thanks for commenting. I have looked into this fairly closely and there are not documented cases of Irish being sold as slaves in the United States. -Pat Young
The Irish slaves were bonded, signed an agreement quite often to work for passage money to America.
Met a lady recently that had a relative that was bonded in this manner and when her time was worked out the master did not release her, had to escape by fleeing.
Note bonded slave agreement in Exodus and forbidding of forced slavey by kidnap in Exodus 21:16 was forbidden by God.