Street Auctions and Slave Marts in Antebellum Charleston

Boisterous and pathetic auctions of enslaved people were once a familiar sight in early Charleston that often clogged busy streets and sidewalks. As urban congestion increased and public scrutiny from anti-slavery advocates grew in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, local government sought to compartmentalize and quiet this traditional spectacle. The advent of enclosed “marts” for the auction sales of enslaved people marked a significant commercial change that endured into the era of Civil War. Historic documents illustrating this revised form of human trafficking are not always what they purport to be, however.

In an earlier podcast (Episode No. 126), we traced the geography of the auction sales of enslaved residents of South Carolina during the colonial era. Today’s program continues that story beyond the American Revolution and focuses specifically on the geography and protocol of slave auctions held in urban Charleston. Bear in mind, however, that this material represents a brief overview of a complex phenomenon that operated in Charleston over a long period of time. For the purpose of brevity and clarity, I’m omitting many specifics, including names and physical addresses, that another historian could explore in a much longer treatment of this same topic. My goal is simply to provide a framework to facilitate a broader understanding of a very important part of the civic history of Charleston that has been largely neglected because of its complexity.

In colonial-era Charleston, under the government of the provincial legislature, the power to sell goods by auction within the capital town was concentrated in one official, appointed by the governor and styled the “Vendue Master.” This title was created by law in 1710 and continued for nearly seventy years, into the era of the American Revolution.[1] The sole Vendue Master was empowered to appoint deputies (which you’ll find abbreviated “D.V.M.” in the colonial-era newspapers), and this small coterie of men were responsible for handling all sales by vendue, or auction, or “public outcry” in urban Charleston. Rather than receiving a salary from the government, the sole Vendue Master and his deputies charged a fixed percentage or commission of every item they sold.

The legal authority to conduct auctions in Charleston was decentralized in September 1779, when the nascent state government of South Carolina abolished the appointed office of Vendue Master and began offering licenses to auctioneers practicing both in urban Charleston and in the countryside.[2] From that time onward, a new class of businessmen arose in this city and in other municipalities across the state. They were not simply auctioneers, but agents who specialized in marketing, selling, housing, and transporting enslaved people on behalf of private owners wishing to dispose of their legal chattel. Private owners of enslaved people could contract with such agents, variously called brokers, auctioneers, or traders, who would make all the arrangements for a sale by vendue or “public outcry.” For advertising the sale, moving the enslaved people in question from the country to the city, housing and feeding them in advance of the sale, conducting the sale, and securing payment from bidders, the agents received a percentage of all transactions, as well marked-up fees for incidental charges related to housing, feeding, and clothing the people sold by him.

From the mid-1780s into the early 1860s, the City of Charleston hosted a number of private brokers and auctioneers who specialized in the public sale of enslaved humans. Anyone perusing the city’s daily newspapers of that era (which you can find at the library’s South Carolina History Room) will soon discern the names of the most active agents in this trade in successive generations. The firm of William Payne & Sons, for example, was the busiest slave auction house in the Lowcountry during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, but there were many other individuals and partnerships who profited from selling humans. 

Similarly, anyone reading through the extant newspapers of that era will recognize a geographic trend in the auction advertisements. Immediately before and after the American Revolution, most auctions in Charleston occurred at a piece of open ground on the north side of the Exchange Building. As I mentioned in Episode No. 126, that building was completed in 1771 and in early 1772 became the new “usual place” for auction sales of enslaved people in the city. After the Revolution, most of the licensed auctioneers operating in Charleston secured office space near the Exchange and began conducting auctions on their doorsteps. At the turn of the nineteenth century, many newspaper advertisements for auctions describe the sale site as being “near the Exchange” or “opposite the Exchange,” at the east end of Broad Street. The busy vendue office of William Payne and Sons, for example, is now called No. 32 Broad Street.

After the South Carolina legislature permanently ended the importation of enslaved Africans into the port of Charleston in January 1808 (see Episode No. 50), the local slave trade shifted to focus exclusively on the internal population; that is to say, the selling and buying of enslaved people who were already residing in South Carolina. At the same time, the westward expansion of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase increased demand for the finite supply of enslaved labor as white planters moved to the southwest to create new cotton plantations. Coincidentally, in December 1809, the South Carolina legislature transferred to the local City Council much of the power to regulate and profit from auctions held within urban Charleston.[3] This change also coincided with a reorganization of the city’s food markets, which led in early 1810 to the advent of a new phenomenon called Vendue Range at the east end of Queen Street (see Episode No. 19).

As a public space specifically designated for curbside auctions, Vendue Range quickly became a popular site for the sale of small used goods, furniture, estates, and non-human merchandise. Meanwhile, most public auctions of enslaved people in the early nineteenth century continued to be held in the shade of the north side of the Exchange building, or within sight of that familiar landmark. By the late 1830s, this traditional form of local commerce faced two important challenges. First, the rise of anti-slavery sentiment in the Northern states generated negative publicity for the open-air sales of men, women, and children on the streets of Charleston. Local authorities steadfastly defended the institution of slavery, while at the same time growing increasingly conscious of their fading national and international reputation. Second, the expanding population of the city created more traffic as pedestrians, horse, mules, and vehicles of all description competed for space in Charleston’s historically-narrow streets. The daily occurrence of crowded slave auctions around the Exchange or Custom House, as it was then known, often generated congestion that strained both patience and tempers.

In the autumn of 1837, Charleston’s City Council contemplated the construction of a new public facility to be used exclusively for the auction sales of enslaved humans. The city aldermen agreed that the building, to be called a “Mart,” was necessary to alleviate the congestion and embarrassment caused by the traditional street auctions near the Exchange, but the city’s finances in the wake of the disastrous “Panic of 1837” forced them to postpone the project.[4] Two years later, however, in November 1839, City Council ratified an ordinance to establish a “Mart” on the premises of the city Work House, then located on the south side of Magazine Street. (In the interest of time, we’ll save the details of Charleston’s first “Mart” for a future episode.)

Once the municipal “Mart” was completed and ready for business, the city’s 1839 ordinance decreed that all slave auctions formerly conducted by brokers, auctioneers, and traders (but not sheriffs) were to be held henceforth at the city Mart and conducted by city agents. The 1839 ordinance also established a hefty fine for anyone who “shall expose or offer for sale, or sell any slave or slaves in any of the streets, lanes, alleys or open courts in the city, or on any lot, enclosure, open space, house or building, or in any place within the limits of the city.”[5] Before the new Mart opened, however, the city ratified another ordinance to clarify that private citizens who were not “brokers, auctioneers, or traders in vending Negroes,” could sell their own slaves by private sale, not public outcry, “at any lot, inclosure [sic], house, or building within the city, being his own premises.”[6]

Immediately after the opening of the city’s premiere slave Mart on August 10th, 1840, the brokers, auctioneers, and traders who dealt primarily in human chattel complained about the city’s new policy. By contracting with private parties to handle the advertising and logistics of human auctions in urban Charleston, these merchants earned large commissions that amounted to a comfortable income. The city’s new policy not only removed slave auctions from the streets of Charleston, it also created a municipal monopoly on human auctions that destroyed the income of the traditional brokers. Under pressure from private enterprise, City Council soon revised the Mart ordinance in May 1841. From that moment, brokers, auctioneers, and other commission traders were once again allowed to exhibit and sell enslaved people, but only under two conditions. The transactions had to be conducted as private sales, not auctions “at public outcry,” and the location of each exhibition and sale was restricted to “any lot, inclosure [sic], house or building within the limits of the city” that was owned by the broker or auctioneer conducting the sale.[7]

Under continued pressure from private enterprise, the city revised the Mart law again in late January 1842. The city surrendered its monopoly on slave auctions and allowed brokers and auctioneers to resume selling enslaved people by public outcry, but continued to prohibit brokers and auctioneers from displaying, exhibiting, or exposing any slaves for sale “in any street, lane, alley or open court, or unenclosed lot in the City of Charleston.”[8] Beginning in February 1842, therefore, the streets of Charleston were once again filled with a variety of voices calling out the auction of enslaved people, but those voices were somewhat fainter than in the past because the sales now took place within private buildings and enclosures rather than in the city streets.

As the months passed in the mid-1840s, however, the brokers and auctioneers grew bolder and their sales tactics began to revert to the old ways. The display and sale of enslaved people began to spill out of private buildings and yards and into the public streets. Although the city’s auction ordinance of 1842 imposed a $500 fine for each infraction of this street prohibition, there was little enforcement and seemingly little municipal concern. As a testament to changing public opinion and the force of private enterprise, the city revised the law again in January 1849, formally repealing the prohibition against slave auctions in the streets of Charleston.[9]

In the decade between 1839 and 1849, Charleston’s municipal government endeavored to confine and dampen the noisy spectacle of selling of men, women, and children on the city streets. The city’s attempt to secure a monopoly on this profitable commerce failed, as did its efforts to restrict the business to enclosed spaces removed from public view. Meanwhile, the city’s urban population continued to increase and Northern hostility to the institution of slavery continued to grow. In the face of mounting congestion and criticism, Charleston’s City Council adopted a new auction ordinance in April 1856. Beginning on July 1st of that year, it became unlawful “for any person or persons, to make or conduct public sales, or sales at auction, of Negroes, horses, carriages, or any other commodity, or merchandize, at or on any lot or lots, piece or pieces of land, street or streets, adjoining or surrounding the Custom House in the City of Charleston.”[10]

Unlike its predecessors, the 1856 law against slave auctions in the streets of Charleston endured until the local demise of slavery in February 1865. The advent of the prohibition in 1856 inspired the creation of a new generation of privately-owned, indoor, off-street facilities for the auction sales of enslaved people, called “marts” after the fashion of the city’s ill-fated model of 1840. Most of these privately-owned slave marts were concentrated in the area bounded by Broad, Queen, Church, and East Bay Street. The most famous of these new facilities was Thomas Ryan’s Mart on the north side of Chalmers Street, which opened in in July 1856 and closed its doors in the autumn of 1863. The closure of the Ryan’s Mart and the other slave auction houses was not due to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, as some might believe, but rather the beginning of the Union Army’s daily bombardment of urban Charleston in late August 1863. Most businesses south of Calhoun Street shuttered their stores that autumn and moved out of town, but private slave sales (not auctions) continued in Charleston’s northern wards until the arrival of Federal troops in mid-February 1865.

Today, anyone seeking information about the auction sales of enslaved people in urban Charleston can visit the Old Slave Mart Museum, which is owned and operated by the City of Charleston. Located in the physical remnants of Thomas Ryan’s Mart at No. 6 Chalmers Street, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, the exhibits within the Slave Mart Museum focus on a specific aspect of the city’s commercial history. Rather than attempting to tell the entirety of the long and complex story of selling humans in urban Charleston, the museum concentrates on the period between 1839 and 1863 and the legal, commercial, and social forces that led to the creation of Ryan’s Mart.

The history of the “slave mart” phenomenon in mid-nineteenth-century Charleston has been summarized in a several scholarly books and articles (with varying success, as it’s a convoluted topic).[11] The City of Charleston’s decision to remove slave auctions from the city streets to enclosed venues away from public view is a significant part of the last gasp of Southern slavery and has rightly been mentioned in a number of books about the history of slavery in general. To provide a graphic illustration of this phenomenon, some publications and websites include an image of a historic broadside, or sale advertisement, related to a specific slave auction held in Charleston in 1833. The broadside in question is a rectangular sheet of paper, measuring 21 by 30 centimeters, containing a description of thirty enslaved people to be auctioned by one Richard Clagett on March 5th, 1833, at a place called Potter’s Mart.

Copies of this 1833 broadside can be found in the archives of a number of institutions both in Charleston and across the United States, and images of it have been reproduced in several reputable books about the history of American slavery. Physical copies of this specific broadside have sold for thousands of dollars at reputable auction houses, and I’ve even heard of people claiming to be descended from the enslaved people mentioned in this 1833 broadside. All of these fact strike me as very unfortunate, however, because the document in question is not what it purports to be.

The broadside announcing Richard Clagett’s 1833 sale of enslaved people at Potter’s Mart  is, in my professional opinion, not authentic. I believe it is a mid-twentieth-century, mass-produced approximation of an antebellum broadside. I have not personally examined a physical copy of the broadside to form an opinion of the paper or the typography, but the content of its text, in light of the aforementioned history of “marts” in nineteenth-century Charleston, provides sufficient evidence to render judgment. To demonstrate my point, I’ll describe the most salient features on which I’m basing my conclusion. For the purposes of discussion, I’m going to refer to the purported-1833 broadside as the “fake” broadside, although I certainly don’t mean to impugn the character of any individual or institution that holds a copy of this article.

The “fake” broadside in question refers to an auction to be conducted in 1833 by a merchant named Richard Clagett. According to the information contained in the published city directories of antebellum Charleston, municipal death records of that era, and the U.S. Census records, there was no one bearing the surname Clagett in Charleston during the 1830s. Beginning in the spring of 1840, however, there was a commission broker named Thomas Clagett in the city, who was followed a decade later by one William Clagett. Searching through the newspapers of nineteenth-century Charleston, however, I have discovered no trace of any merchant or broker named Richard Clagett.

The slave auction referenced in the “fake” broadside was supposed to take place at a venue called Potter’s Mart. Having combed through the newspapers of 1833 and the surrounding years, and having examined the published city directories of that era, I can positively report that there was no establishment in the City of Charleston called “Potter’s Mart” in 1833. As we now know from the earlier discussion, there were no venues called “marts” in the city until sometime after the opening of the original municipal “Mart” in 1840. There was, however, an Irish merchant named John Potter (1765–1849) who lived and worked in Charleston during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Mr. Potter owned a building on the south side of Broad Street, within sight of the Exchange, which he rented to a series of other merchants as a store and residence, while Potter himself resided principally in Princeton, New Jersey after 1824.[12]

The descriptions of the enslaved individuals in the “fake” broadside do not match those of other humans known to have been offered for sale on Tuesday, March 5th, 1833. Every issue of the three daily papers active in Charleston at that time (the Courier, Mercury, and Southern Patriot) regularly included a cluster of advertisements for “Sales at Auction.” According to the published notices contained in those papers, a total of twenty auctions were advertised to take place in Charleston on Tuesday, March 5th, 1833. Seven of those twenty auctions included enslaved people. Of those seven slave auctions, all but one included multiple people and were advertised to take place at the north side of the Exchange or Custom House. The sole exception was the sale of “a young Negro woman . . . with her child, 6 months old,” whom James Dick advertised to sell at his store in Vendue Range. None of these advertisements include the name Richard Clagett, or course, and none mention a place called Potters Mart.[13]

Despite the aforementioned facts, the text of the “fake” broadside includes two kernels of truth. There was a venue in Broad Street, near the traditional epicenter of slave auctions, owned by a man named Potter, which was rented by a succession of merchants. As such, one might call it “Potter’s Store.” There was also an auction broker named Clagett in Charleston who occasionally sold enslaved humans, but his name wasn’t Richard and he wasn’t active in 1833. Considering these coincidences, I suspect that someone in the middle of the twentieth century selected the names Clagett and Potter from some historical documents—perhaps old newspaper clippings or even now-lost broadsides—and created a new document containing a synthesis of factual and invented information. Perhaps the creator visited the Charleston Library Society at No. 164 King Street and perused their extensive collection of antebellum newspapers. Furthermore, the descriptions of the enslaved individuals in the “fake” broadside resemble those found in authentic documents of that era, with a few minor exceptions. The advertisement for Richard Clagett’s sale notes that the “auctioneer will pay for the papers,” while most, if not all, antebellum auction notices specify that the purchaser will pay for the legal bills of sale. The “fake” broadside also describes two young girls, aged 13 and 16, as “wenches,” a term usually reserved for child-bearing women beyond girlhood in antebellum South Carolina.

All things considered, the text of the “fake” broadside appears to be a pastiche of data gleaned from historic sources combined with invented verbiage to resemble the genuine article. To any reader or customer unfamiliar with the obscure details of slave-auction protocol in antebellum Charleston, however, the document would seem to be plausibly authentic. It remains unclear and unknown whether the creator of this synthetic broadside sought to deceive future readers or customers, or merely sought to create a modern document that mimicked the fabric of the past. While this facet of the story might forever remain a mystery, it is possible to trace the appearance of the “fake” broadside to a specific time and place in Charleston’s past.

For nearly six decades of the twentieth century, from 1935 to 1991, Herman A. Schindler (1901–1992) ran a popular antique shop at No. 200 King Street.[14] During that long tenure, Mr. Schindler regularly placed advertisements in the local newspapers for sale items in his store. In a 1986 article about Charleston’s thriving antique market, a New York Times reporter described Schindler’s establishment as “a dusty store out of Dickens” that “has long been a nationally recognized source of old prints and books.”[15] The “fake” broadside for Richard Clagett’s fictional auction appeared in one of Mr. Schindler’s advertisements in December 1958. Among a list of special items on sale, he inserted the following text: “Framed slave broadside at Potter’s Mart, Charleston, dated 1833, $20.”[16] Schindler’s 1958 notice did not mention whether he held a single, framed copy of the broadside, or multiple copies for sale. From information contained in later sources, however, it seems that Herman Schindler or similar parties had obtained a number of identical copies of the “fake” broadside. In the spring of 1961, for example, the Milwaukee Public Library included a copy of the 1833 Potter’s Mart broadside in an exhibition of materials related to the Civil War.[17] In November 1963, a newspaper reporter from Cleveland, Ohio, described a framed copy of the 1833 broadside hanging in the gift shop of the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston.[18] A scholarly guide to nineteenth-century broadsides, published in 1971, noted that multiple American institutions held copies of the 1833 broadside for Potter’s Mart. That guide merely acknowledged its existence, however; its editors did not attempt to authenticate the item nor offered comment on its provenance.[19]

Herman Schindler’s Antique Shop at 200 King Street may or may not have been responsible for creating the “fake” broadside, but his venue appears to have been the vector for its distribution across the United States after 1958. Nothing I’ve heard about Mr. Schindler’s character or business would lead me suspect that he sought to pull the wool over the eyes of his customers. He made a respectable living trading in antiques as well as historic artifacts and documents related to local history. In short, he was a collector and a salesman, not a historian. Similarly, one cannot believe that the people and institutions that have bought and sold copies of the purported 1833 broadside over the past sixty-odd years sought to deceive or defraud their customers or the public in general. In light of the details of the slave-mart phenomenon in mid-nineteenth century Charleston, the story of Richard Clagett’s sale at a place called Potter’s Mart does not ring true, but heretofore only a handful of academics have been privy to the obscure local facts that prove this case.

The sale of enslaved men, women, and children by public auction was a very real part of Charleston’s daily life in centuries past, conducted on the city’s busy streets and sidewalks for many generations before withdrawing into private enclosures or “marts” in the final years of the institution of slavery. The story of this abominable practice is told through a trove of historical documents, including municipal proceedings, ordinances, sale advertisements, broadsides, and bills of sale. Such resources offer indisputable facts that help us grasp the legacy of injustice that formed the bedrock of our community. As with modern media, however, we must cultivate a habit of critical thinking and exercise a measure of informed skepticism to discern fact from fiction.

Citizens of the twenty-first century, like those of the past, depend on access to reliable information and the assistance of impartial curators of resources. My purpose in highlighting the flaws of a specific un-authentic document was not to denigrate well-meaning historians and institutions, but rather to use that document to illustrate the importance of digging deeper into the details of our community’s past. Here at the Charleston County Public Library, we encourage readers of all ages to nurture a sense of eternal curiosity. As always, the Charleston Time Machine invites you to explore the facts that form the layers of our shared past, that shaped our present, and help us envision the future.