“The sons seeing their fathers on the other side, rose up with great energy and went towards them; the mothers hold their other children in their arms and threw themselves with them on the ground, wounding their own flesh mercilessly, to prevent them from being taken away.”1
This is how the Portuguese explorer Zurara described the dramatic moment of the sale of newly arrived enslaved Africans in the Portuguese seaport of Lagos in the 1440s. Already in these first sales in the early days of the Atlantic slave trade, family separation haunted captive Africans transported from West Africa to the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas.
At the site of this sale, there stands today the seventeenth-century two-story building called Slave Market (figure 6.1), now transformed into a museum. The name of the building evokes this early sale and Lagos’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. Although enslaved people were not sold inside this later building, its name shows how this tragic past has remained alive in the city’s collective memory. Auctions of African captives added a further layer to the commodification of human life that began on African shores and continued through the Middle Passage.
Figure 6.1. Slave Market, Lagos, Portugal, 2020. Courtesy of Roundtheworld, via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LagosSlaveMarket1.jpg.
As the trade in enslaved Africans expanded to the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave sales took multiple forms. In this painful context, the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the slave market changed as well. Enslaved Africans who survived the Atlantic crossing and the first days ashore were inevitably sold and became the property of slave owners in cities, mines, and plantations across the Americas. Although all were enslaved, their experiences of being sold in private and public spaces varied depending on the period of their arrival on American shores, the region where they landed, the activities they performed, and their age and sex.
The human cargo of a slave ship had often already been consigned to specific buyers, including ship captains and other officers, as discussed in chapter 4. Still, many men, women, and children were kept in slave markets and slave pens. In these specific sites located at seaport cities such as Salvador, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena, Havana, New York City, New Orleans, and Charleston, enslaved people waited to be sold and sometimes transported to other regions in the interior where they would work on plantations, in mines, and in various other settings in urban and rural areas. Other enslaved persons ended up in the slave market for a variety of reasons. The death of a slave owner, financial hardship, and even revenge against insubordinate behavior of bondspeople could provoke the sale of enslaved property.Slave sales were held in many kinds of sites. Newspaper ads show how, especially in urban areas, slave owners sold bondspeople directly to individual buyers. But on several occasions, enslaved people were sold in shops and spaces designated as slave markets. Some of these markets were closed when the slave trade from Africa was banned in various regions of the Americas starting in the early nineteenth century, but as slave owners continued to sell and purchase people in the national domestic trades, other sale spaces emerged. Some of these sites remained active until the legal abolition of slavery in each country. Descriptions of slave markets of the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, particularly in travel accounts, are more abundant as these three countries were the largest slave societies in the Americas. But other records, including slave narratives, visual images, and newspaper ads, provide descriptions of similar markets in other parts of the Western Hemisphere such as the French colony of Saint-Domingue. This chapter explores the experiences of enslaved African men, women, and children who, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, were sold in the Americas. I also examine cases of individuals and groups put on sale by their owners in the domestic market, by looking at the activities of sellers and buyers and the roles they played in these inhumane commercial transactions. Considering these various contexts across the Americas, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter argues that these sales were a pivotal stage of the commodification of enslaved Africans and their descendants. But even then, enslaved people resisted to be treated as things, by continuously affirming their humanity.