Selecting and Pricing Enslaved People

Over time, men and women who procured enslaved people in slave markets in the Americas developed their own preferences. Portuguese and Brazilian slave traders and slave owners identified Africans by “nation” (nação) such as “Nagô,” “Jeje,” “Congo,” “Angola,” “Benguela,” “Mina,” “Cabinda,” and many others.

In markets selling recently arrived enslaved Africans, enslaved men were available in higher numbers than women, usually in a ratio of two to one. As explained in chapter 3, this disparity was because slave merchants believed men were better suited for agricultural work, whereas African agents were more inclined to keep women to perform agricultural labor or to sell them to trans-Saharan traders to serve as concubines in Muslim societies. Buyers, in turn, also developed preferences allegedly based on ethnic origins, which in actuality relied on preconceptions associated with specific groups of enslaved individuals.

These stereotypes appeared early. In a treatise originally published in the eighteenth century, Italian Jesuit missionary and administrator Giovanni Antonio Andreoni (alias André João Antonil), who sojourned in Brazil in the seventeenth century, explained the alleged differences among these various nations. According to him, the “Ardas” (a denomination referencing the Kingdom of Allada on the Bight of Benin) and the “Minas” (also a generic reference to Africans of the Bight of Benin) were robust, whereas captives from Cape Verde and São Tomé were weaker. As stated by the Jesuit missionary, captives from Angola, especially those raised in Luanda, were more apt than the previous ones to learn mechanical trades. Moreover, the “Congos” (a broad label to refer to captives captured in regions of West Central Africa under the authority of the King of Kongo and who spoke languages of the Kikongo cluster) were also quite industrious. They were effective at working not only in the sugarcane fields but also in workshops and domestic service.⁴² These racist views persisted in the nineteenth century. The French physician Jean-Baptiste Alban Imbert, who came to Brazil in 1831, published an extensive treatise about the diseases affecting enslaved people. In this book, he reproduced pseudoscientific racial stereotypes by stating that Africans from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin were the best ones and advising planters to not purchase enslaved Africans from certain recognizably “bad” regions of provenance such as Benguela.⁴³

Similar preferences based on long-lasting stereotypes also existed in colonial North America. Like Antonil, eighteenth-century British observers also praised the enslaved Africans transported from the Upper Guinea region, the Gold Coast, and the Bight of Benin as superior, robust, and hardy, and sometimes even as docile and obedient. In South Carolina, there was an apparent preference for African captives from Senegambia and the Gold Coast, whereas Africans from the Bight of Biafra were held in disdain.⁴⁴ Despite this, in his famous dictionary, Malachy Postlethwayt, who worked for the Royal African Company, also praised enslaved people coming from the region of Angola in West Central Africa as “more capable to undergo the labour and fatigue of cultivating and manufacturing sugar, tobacco, indigo, and the other hard work to which these poor wretches are commonly put.”⁴⁵ During the eighteenth century, slave merchants and slave owners were suspicious of the insurgent and belligerent behavior of enslaved Africans who previously worked in British colonies of the West Indies.

As with the process of acquiring captives on the coast of Africa, purchasers sought individuals in good physical shape who would survive in horrible working conditions. Before transporting their slaves for sale in the New Orleans market, slave dealers shaved the beards and combed the hair of enslaved men. As age was a central factor in the selection process, they also dyed any existing gray hairs.⁴⁷ In various parts of the Americas, younger males were preferred to perform work on plantations, in mines, on cattle ranches, and in jerk meat factories, but buyers also procured enslaved women to work either on plantations or in urban settings as laundresses, cooks, and wet nurses who breastfed the offspring of slave owners. Enslaved women considered to be physically attractive were highly valued by male buyers.⁴⁸ Not only they could provide sexual services, but they were also possible good candidates to bear children who would become the property of their owners. In the United States, height was a prized element for locally born enslaved men who were sold in public auctions, and buyers paid more for tall males. They also paid the highest prices for young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and young women between fifteen and twenty—in other words, in the early years of reproductive age.⁴⁹

Historians of slavery have conceived the value of an enslaved person as the “discounted sum of expected lifetime earnings net of consumption” that highly depended on “skills, life expectancy, and interest rates.”⁵⁰ Prices of slaves varied over time and were determined by local and Atlantic markets. During the colonial period, the Spanish crown regulated the prices of enslaved Africans disembarked and sold in Cartagena.

In general, Africans who had recently disembarked in the Americas were priced lower than enslaved people who were either born in the Americas or who had lived there for many years. However, it seems that shorter life expectancy was a greater factor than language knowledge and skills in lowering the value of newly arrived enslaved Africans.⁵¹ In Cartagena and Saint-Domingue, the prices of recently arrived enslaved Africans were cheaper than locally born individuals. Buyers seemed to prefer enslaved men and women who spoke Creole as well as Spanish or French, and who were converted to Roman Catholicism, to perform work in the urban areas as artisans and domestic servants and to occupy higher positions in residences, on plantations, and in mines, as some of them also knew Portuguese and were adapted to local customs. In nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, the preferences were different, probably because of the great availability of African-born bondspeople. Newspapers featured numerous announcements selling African-born women who worked as domestic servants and African-born young men who were barbers and pages. Although purchasers sought African captives in good physical condition, in ports such as Cartagena, some buyers purchased enslaved persons who were considered physically and mentally ill because they could be acquired for very low prices. After a period of investment in their recovery, they could resell them for larger amounts and make great profits.⁵²

It is not surprising that as the Atlantic slave trade grew and the demand for an African enslaved workforce to work especially on sugarcane plantations intensified, the prices of newly arrived slaves in the Americas gradually increased as well.

In seventeenth-century Cartagena, when the Portuguese held the asiento, the asiento representatives could not sell in credit newly arrived Africans directly to individual owners. Instead, they depended on intermediaries to purchase recently disembarked African-born captives in cash to resell them to individual customers. Most buyers were merchants who also traded other goods, but they might also be governors, public officials, clerks, artisans, and farmers.⁵⁴ During the slavery era as a whole, the Roman Catholic Church was the largest slave owner institution in the Americas. Thus, religious orders such as the Jesuits of the Society of Jesus were also important buyers of enslaved people who had recently arrived in Cartagena’s market.

Slave owners could also sell their enslaved property individually or in small groups directly to interested customers. These sales were often intended to pay debts. In Brazil, owners of sugar plantations and mills obtained enslaved people from large slave merchants as advance payment for future sugarcane harvest. When they went into debt, their human property was seized and sold in public auctions.⁵⁵ Likewise, when slave owners were able to recover enslaved men and women who escaped, they also did not hesitate to sell them. In Latin America, local judges could also order a slave owner to sell a mistreated slave. In these various cases, enslaved people could be sold in public auctions where buyers made bids as well as private sales in which buyers and sellers engaged in direct negotiation.

In British North America, colonial eighteenth-century newspapers featured a considerable number of advertisements announcing slave auctions and sales, including sales of newly arrived enslaved Africans, many of whom came ashore in Charleston. The sales were announced on flyers distributed throughout the city and also advertised in the South Carolina Gazette.⁵⁶ On July 24, 1769, a poster (figure 6.2) announced the sale of ninety-four “prime, healthy negroes, consisting of thirty-nine men, fifteen boys, twenty-four women, and sixteen girls” “just arrived” in the Brigantine Dembia from Sierra Leone.⁵⁷ The poster is framed by two images representing an African man and an African woman. The man is holding a spear; both figures are bare-chested and only wearing a loincloth to cover the lower part of their bodies, and each one is accompanied by a child. Despite being depicted in an idealized fashion, similarly to the ways other Africans and even Indigenous populations were portrayed at the time, the presence of children in the image suggests that being healthy also meant having the ability to conceive healthy enslaved children.⁵⁸

Private sales and public auctions also occurred after the death of the head of the family that required division of assets. An ad on December 26, 1770, published just after Christmas in the Maryland Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal, announced that several enslaved men, women, and children were to be sold. The slaves were already the property of a local man, and although the ad did not reveal where they were born, it indicated that “amongst whom is a very good Blacksmith, and several good Forgemen, [and] Wood-cutters” who were part of the estate of the late Joseph Smith and would be auctioned in Baltimore, Maryland.⁵⁹

Figure 6.2. Advertisement for Sale of Newly Arrived Africans, Charleston, July 24, 1769. Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed July 13, 2023, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1971.

The pages of nineteenth-century Brazilian newspapers showcased advertisements of slave owners offering enslaved people for sale in the middle of other announcements selling the most disparate things. One single page of the newspaper Diário do Rio de Janeiro from December 16, 1826, features a variety of ads selling a farm, a shop, a horse, a pestle, birds, all kinds of alcohol, and military uniforms, as well as several individual announcements marketing enslaved men, women, and children, including African-born slaves identified as Cabinda, Angola, and Mina. Directing buyers to private homes and to the shops of the Valongo slave market, the ads described in detail the skills of the human property on sale. While men were shoemakers, pages, gardeners, and barbers, enslaved women included street vendors and domestic workers who performed tasks such as cooking, running errands, and cleaning the house. Most ads conclude by emphasizing that the slaves on sale had no vices or ruses.⁶⁰

Sales and auctions could also take place in private residences and on plantations. French naturalist Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny, who traveled for eight years in several countries of the Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century, witnessed one of these sales in the French colony of Martinique, which took place after a planter went into bankruptcy. He seemed shocked to hear the merchant shouting, “Three hundred piastres the negro!” and then see buyers examining the bodies of enslaved persons as they were livestock: “The latter opened his mouth to count his teeth; this one bent down to inspect his feet, legs, thighs and chest, trying to make sure nothing was being concealed from him, neither varicose veins nor hernias.”⁶¹ The horrendous scene of a slave auction, so common throughout the Americas during the era of chattel slavery, is also depicted in one of the engravings illustrating Orbigny’s account. The image also features women and children participating in the inspection of slaves on sale, showing readers how already at an early age all French free men and women were trained to treat the bodies of enslaved people as mere commodities. In Martinique, as in Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena, and even in New Orleans, white women attended slave auctions and went to the marketplaces where they sold and purchased enslaved people. Although historians such as Walter Johnson have stated that “it was only men who went to the slave market,” recent magisterial works by Black women historians have proved that this statement is rather inaccurate.⁶² In 1816, the creation of “Ladies Auctions” in several cities of the United States, such as Charleston, New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, and Richmond, taught white female buyers how to bid on and purchase enslaved people like any other commodity.⁶³

Starting in 1807 with the prohibition of the British Atlantic slave trade, Britain put growing pressure on other nations to stop the international trade. In addition, the rise of legislation gradually abolishing slavery in the US North and the successful revolution in Saint-Domingue that ended slavery in the French colony in 1804 made the enslaved African workforce even more limited. This scarcity impacted the prices not only of the newly arrived men, women, and children in the regions that still allowed imports of enslaved Africans, such as Brazil and Cuba, but also those of slaves born in the Americas.⁶⁴

In the years of the cotton boom starting in the second decade of the nineteenth century, prices of enslaved people were practically determined by the price of cotton in the United States.⁶⁵ Although there were increases, there were also several oscillations. The growing cotton industry propelled the growth of the enslaved population as well as the intensification of the domestic legal and illegal slave trade. This new demand for enslaved workers also led to the rise in prices for them, especially in the two decades before the abolition of slavery. Take the example of New Orleans. Between 1824 and 1858, the average price of an enslaved man between twenty-one and thirty-eight years old varied from as low as $498 to as high as nearly $900.⁶⁶ New Orleans’s French Quarter was crowded with slave pens, showrooms, and offices of various slave-trading companies, in addition to other prominent sites such as the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel. Buyers visiting these sites scrutinized the bodies of enslaved men, women, and children the way they did in other parts of the Americas, looking for any defects that could affect the productivity of their future human property. They rubbed bondspeople’s muscles, assessed the color of their skin and gums, counted fingers and teeth, touched bondswomen’s breasts, palpated their abdomens, and searched for whipping scars, signs that revealed rebellious behavior.⁶⁷ They also forced men, women, and children to walk, jump, and talk to test their fitness. It was not uncommon for purchasers to request that the traders show them enslaved men and women naked.

Prices of bondspeople also increased in the Caribbean by the middle of the nineteenth century. On a Cuban plantation the average price of a locally born enslaved male was 668 pesos in 1856, whereas in 1863, it was 914 pesos.⁶⁸ In Brazil, prices of enslaved people tended to increase over time, even though there were variations according to region, period, and other features such as age, sex, and region of provenance. In this country where the slave trade from Africa was legally banned for the first time in 1831 and where slavery was only abolished in 1888, the prices of enslaved persons greatly increased in the last two decades before the final abolition.⁶⁹ A sample of nearly 800 enslaved persons sold between 1872 and 1874 in four districts of the Paraíba Valley, a coffee-producing region in Brazil, shows that enslaved men aged between fifteen and thirty-nine years old were sold for an average price of 1,758,118 réis, the Brazilian currency at the time, which in today’s value very roughly corresponds to 44,000 reais.⁷⁰ However, these prices must be taken with caution. They are approximative and obviously not comprehensive, even though they can provide a general idea of the rising prices of bondspeople in regions where the demand for a slave workforce increased following the growth of cotton, sugar, and coffee production during the nineteenth century. Because these numbers varied according to each region and local currencies, they only make sense in comparison to the costs of other goods at the time. Therefore, the conversion of these prices to present-day currency can only provide an approximate idea of the high value of an enslaved person. Yet, based on the various figures discussed in this chapter, it is possible to suggest that the average starting price of an adult enslaved man in the United States and Brazil during the nineteenth century could be the equivalent of today’s value of a midsize new car in either country.