Sales of Bondspeople Born in the Americas

Bondspeople born in the Americas also made their way to slave pens, markets, squares, and auction blocks, where public sales were held. Many enslaved men, women, and children were also sold in larger or smaller sites such as squares, shops, and even private homes.

In the West Indies and Latin America, especially in Cuba and Brazil, the slave trade from Africa continued through the middle of the nineteenth century. Cuba banned the international slave trade for the first time in 1820, but the illegal introduction of enslaved Africans continued until 1867, when legislation establishing a second prohibition was more effectively enforced. Brazil outlawed the import of enslaved Africans in 1831. Nonetheless, nearly 800,000 captives were introduced into the country until 1850, when new legislation barring the importation of enslaved people in the country passed and was eventually fully enforced. Therefore, between 1831 and 1850, the period of the international illegal slave trade to Brazil, auctions of recently disembarked enslaved Africans could no longer be announced in newspapers and held in public spaces.

One of the major destructive consequences of slave auctions and sales was family separation. Enslaved men and women born in the Americas reported the horrible moment when they were sold and torn apart from their families. Their parents and relatives also told them how either they or their ancestors had been separated in these tragic sales, which often occurred after slave owners passed away. Take the example of Mary Prince, born in slavery in the British colony of Bermuda in 1788. Like many enslaved children, her early years were marked by family separation and grief. When she was a girl, her owner put her and her two sisters up for sale to raise money for his marriage, separating her from her mother. The day of the sale came, and her mother brought her and her sisters to the marketplace. In her narrative, published in Britain after she escaped slavery, Prince recounted the traumatic episode of her sale, when the market’s organizer brought her to be auctioned: “He took me by the hand, and led me out into the middle of the street, and, turning me slowly round, exposed me to the view of those who attended the vendue. I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts.”²⁰

Harriet Jacobs, who was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813, reported these appalling moments in her narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, telling how her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and parents were sold and separated several times. Jacobs lost her parents when she was a child. Along with her brother, she was raised by her grandmother, who was also enslaved.

Sales left deep scars on enslaved people who, decades after these traumatic events, still remembered being stripped from their loved ones. Enslaved families could be sold separately in the United States until the legal end of slavery in 1865. Only in 1871 did Brazil enact legislation prohibiting the separation of enslaved couples and children younger than twelve years of age from their parents. Enslaved men and women also passed down to their descendants memories of the horrible circumstances that led to their being sold, the time they spent confined in slave pens, and the traumatic experience of being shown, like livestock, in auction blocks. Although each individual experienced uniquely the process of being sold and separated from their dear ones, they also lived this trauma collectively.

On March 2 and 3, 1859, the second largest and most infamous of these sales held in the United States took place in Georgia.²³ Pierce Mease Butler, a planter from Georgia Sea Islands, sold his 436 enslaved men, women, and children, who had never been sold before, to pay his debts, mainly contracted in gambling. It was the largest slave sale in the history of the state of Georgia, and one of the largest in the United States.²⁴ The Weeping Time, as the massive sale became popularly known, did not take place at an ordinary auction block or slave market but rather at a racecourse in order to accommodate the massive number of enslaved persons on sale. Historian Anne C. Bailey examined the devastating sale, showing how this event imprinted long-lasting marks on dozens of separated enslaved families. After the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865 in the United States, as other freedpeople did, the descendants of the men, women, and children sold during the Weeping Time sought to find their relatives and recover their names.²⁵ The tragic sale remained alive in the collective memory of Georgia’s Black population, and in 2008, the Georgia Historical Society and the City of Savannah dedicated a marker to pay homage to the men, women, and children sold during the dreadful event. Yet, many other enslaved people were sold in other sales across the United States. Although these stories rarely reached the public sphere, enslaved people passed down their memories of these painful episodes to their descendants.²⁶