Originally published 2017-12-11.
Before the Civil War, the sale of human beings in the United States was not hidden. It took place on courthouse steps, in town squares and in purpose-built offices with company names painted on the front. Enslaved men, women and children were auctioned, mortgaged, rented out and moved hundreds of miles to new owners, often separated from their families for good.
Photography arrived in America only in the late 1830s, so very few images show an actual sale. What survives instead are the places where the trade happened and the people who lived through it: courthouse yards in Kentucky and Maryland, a slave dealer’s building in Alexandria, Virginia, an auction house on an Atlanta street, and groups of people who escaped to Union army lines in 1862. Many of these pictures were made by photographers working with the Union army, who recorded the trade’s buildings after slaveholders had fled.
Below, each photograph is described with what is known about where and when it was taken. Where a date or place is uncertain, we say so. Taken together, they show how ordinary, organised and profitable the domestic slave trade was, and how quickly people seized freedom when the chance came.
Escaping to Union lines in 1862
A large group of formerly enslaved people photographed outside Foller’s house at Cumberland Landing, Virginia, by James F. Gibson in 1862. Union troops of the Peninsula Campaign camped there in May of that year, and thousands of enslaved people left nearby plantations to reach them. The army called such refugees “contrabands”, a legal label that let commanders refuse to return them to Confederate owners. The photograph is often dated to 1861, but the campaign that brought the army to Cumberland Landing took place in 1862.
Courthouse squares where people were sold
A crowd gathered in front of a courthouse, published as a slave auction in Easton, Maryland, in the 1850s. Easton is the seat of Talbot County, where Frederick Douglass was born into slavery around 1818. The identification of this particular scene as an auction has not been independently confirmed, so it is best treated as a courthouse gathering of the period. County courthouses were common places for sales, especially sales ordered to settle debts or estates.
A crowd on Cheapside in Lexington, Kentucky, beside the county courthouse, the site of one of the largest slave markets in the South. Cheapside was the town’s main public market from the early 1800s, and enslaved people were sold there alongside livestock and goods until the trade was outlawed during the Civil War. Kentucky traders bought people locally and shipped them down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to cotton states such as Mississippi, where prices were higher. In 2017 Lexington removed two Confederate statues from the square, and in 2020 the area was renamed Henry A. Tandy Centennial Park.
A hand-coloured view of a courthouse yard, circulated with the caption that it shows where the last enslaved people were sold at public auction. The original caption gives no town or date, and we could not confirm either. The image is included because it reflects how courthouse lawns, now often peaceful public spaces, were once places of sale.
Atlanta: “Auction & Negro Sales”
A storefront on Whitehall Street, Atlanta, in 1864, with the sign “Auction & Negro Sales” above the door. The photograph is usually credited to George N. Barnard, who documented the city for the Union army after General William T. Sherman captured it that autumn. Within months much of central Atlanta had burned, and the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified in December 1865. The sign is one of the plainest surviving records of slave selling as an everyday business.
Alexandria’s slave-trading office: Price, Birch & Co.
The building at 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia, with the sign of Price, Birch & Co., “Dealers in Slaves”. From 1828 it was the headquarters of Franklin & Armfield, one of the largest slave-trading firms in the country; ship manifests show that at least 5,000 people were sent south through this office. Price, Birch & Co. took over in 1858 and closed in 1861.
The yard behind the Duke Street office, with the barred holding pens where people were kept before being sold or shipped south. When Union troops reached Alexandria in May 1861 the traders had already fled. A Union soldier stands beside the cells in this view.
Another view of the pens at the Alexandria slave-trading complex, with heavy barred gates and a narrow courtyard. Men, women and children could be held here for weeks while dealers assembled groups for the overland march or the sea voyage to New Orleans. The complex was photographed during the Union occupation of the town.
The Price, Birch & Co. building photographed from closer in, during the Civil War. The Union army held the building until February 1866 and used it as a military prison, among other things, including housing for refugees from slavery. Today it is the Freedom House Museum, a National Historic Landmark since 1978, owned by the City of Alexandria and reopened to the public in 2022.
Life under occupation: Edisto Island and Yorktown
Enslaved people with a cart and horse at the Cassina Point plantation on Edisto Island, South Carolina, in 1862. The photograph is usually credited to Henry P. Moore, a New Hampshire photographer who accompanied Union troops after the island’s planters fled the Union capture of Port Royal in late 1861. The people pictured remained on the land, now under Union control, in the uncertain period before emancipation became official policy.
A group of African Americans who reached Union lines near Yorktown, Virginia. The image was published with the date 1861, but Yorktown was held by Confederate forces until May 1862, so it almost certainly dates from the Peninsula Campaign of that spring, when James F. Gibson photographed refugees around the army’s headquarters. Many of the men in such groups were employed by the army as labourers, cooks and teamsters.
Advertisements and slavery beyond the United States
A printed auction notice dated 18 May 1829 offering people for sale or hire, listed by name, age and skill, beside rice, books, muslins and a horse named Blucher. The poster does not name the town; the goods it lists suggest it came from a British colony rather than the American South, and it is often reproduced without its origin. Whatever its source, it shows plainly how enslaved people were advertised in the same breath as merchandise.
Three young people in chains, a photograph widely published as showing slaves in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) around 1910. Slavery persisted in Ethiopia long after it ended in the Americas; the country promised reforms to join the League of Nations in 1923, and Emperor Haile Selassie formally abolished slavery on 26 August 1942. The exact circumstances of this picture are not documented, so the date should be treated as approximate.
Why these photographs still matter
None of these images shows the moment of sale, yet together they map an industry: the courthouse squares where people were sold to settle debts, the offices and pens of professional traders, the advertisements, and the people who walked away from slavery as soon as an army made it possible. The domestic slave trade moved roughly a million people from the Upper South to the Deep South between 1790 and 1860, tearing apart families on a vast scale.
Several of these places can be visited today. The Freedom House Museum in Alexandria tells the story of the people who passed through Duke Street, and a historical marker in Lexington now acknowledges Cheapside’s past. Looking carefully at the buildings and faces in these photographs, and getting their dates and places right, is one small way of restoring the history of the people who were bought and sold there.
Sources: Wikipedia: Freedom House Museum; Wikipedia: Cheapside Park, Lexington; House Divided (Dickinson College): Photographs of wartime contrabands; Wikipedia: Slavery in Ethiopia. Photographs by James F. Gibson, George N. Barnard, Henry P. Moore and unidentified photographers; collection as published by the Daily Mail (2017).
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