The Great Slave Auction, Known as “The Weeping Time”
The 2nd Largest Slave Auction in American History
Until as recently as 2022, the Great Slave Auction in 1859 was considered the largest slave auction in American history. That was before a graduate student at the University of Charleston discovered an 1835 sale in Charleston of 600 enslaved people. In February of 1859, 436 enslaved people were sent to Savannah, GA, for the auction to be held on March 2–3, 1859. Four days were allotted before the sale for inspection of the slaves who were held in barn stalls and sheds while awaiting their purchase.
Joseph Bryan was coastal Georgia’s largest dealer in the trading of slaves and was selected to handle the sales. He advertised the auction for a month straight in The Savannah Republican and The Savannah Daily Morning News. Other ads were placed in major cities across the South and New York, attracting speculators from several states. The ads also attracted a reporter for the New York Tribune, Mortimer Thomson, who later wrote of the atmosphere leading up to the event. Fearing for his safety, Thomson wrote under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks.
“For several days before the sale, every hotel in Savannah was crowded with negro speculators from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, who had been attracted hither by the prospects of making good bargains. Nothing was heard for days, in the bar-rooms and public rooms, but talk of the great sale . . .” — Mortimer Thomson
The Ten Broeck Race Course in Savannah was the only venue large enough to accommodate the enslaved and buyers. The slaves were brought from two plantations owned by Pierce Mease Butler, the grandson of Founding Father and U.S. Senator Pierce Butler. Trustees of his estates forced Butler to sell approximately half of the enslaved people he owned to cover extensive gambling debts and financial losses during the Panic of 1857.
Great preparation was required to make the Ten Broeck Race Course ready. The existing stalls weren’t sufficient to hold over 400 slaves, and accommodations had to be met to keep families together, a stipulation made by Butler. Sheds and stalls were constructed, and spaces were reserved for the carriages, bringing buyers and gawkers alike. The kitchens had to be expanded to feed the slaves for several days and supply food for the buyers.
The four days prior to the event had dry weather, but it rained violently throughout the auction, stopping only after the last family was sold. This is one of the reasons the Great Slave Auction was called The Weeping Time as if God was weeping in sorrow at the spectacle. The other reason, of course, was the weeping of enslaved people being sold and separated from loved ones. Mortimer Thompod added this in his article:
The blades of grass on all the Butler estates are outnumbered by the tears that are poured out in agony at the wreck that has been wrought in happy homes and the crushing grief that has been laid on loving hearts. — Mortimer Thomson
Thomson also documented the pleadings of a twenty-three-year-old enslaved person, Jeffrey, who begged his buyer to purchase his beloved, Dorcas:
I loves Dorcas, young mas’r; I loves her well an’ true; she says she loves me, and I know she does; de good Lord knows I loves her better than I loves any on in de wide world — never can love another woman half so well. Please buy Dorcas, mas’r. We’re be good sarvants to you long as we live. We’re be married right soon, young mas’r, and de chillum will be healthy and strong, mas’r and dey’ll be good sarvants, too. Please buy Dorcas, young mas’r. We loves each other a heap — do, really, true, mas’r.”
Young mas’r, Dorcas prime woman — A1 woman, sa. Tall gal, sir; long arms, strong, healthy, and can do a heap of work in a day. She is one of de best rice hands on de whole plantation; worth $1,200 easy, mas’r and fus rate bargain at that.” — Jeffrey
Jeffrey’s pleading was to no avail. When the buyer realized he’d have to buy Dorcas’s family of four, he lost interest, buying Jeffrey alone. Thomson provides one of the few first-hand narrations of what enslaved people experienced during an auction.
The expression on the faces of all who stepped on the block was always the same, and told of more anguish than it is in the power of words to express. Blighted homes, crushed hopes and broken hearts was the sad story to be read in all the anxious faces. Some of them regarded the sale with perfect indifference, never making a motion save to turn from one side to the other at the word of the dapper Mr. Bryan, that all the crowd might have a fair view of their proportions, and then, when the sale was accomplished, stepped down from the block without caring to cast even a look at the buyer, who now held all their happiness in his hands. — Mortimer Thomson
When the auction ended, and the rains stopped after the final transaction. It took another two days to return the racetrack to normal. The official catalog advertised 436 slaves for sale, of which 429 were sold for $303,850, which would be almost $10,000,000 in today’s dollars. Seven enslaved people were unsold due to illness or disability. There is no record of their disposition.
The sold slaves were dispersed throughout the South, some returning to the area years later after the Civil War in search of family and loved ones. Some became sharecroppers on the very estates they were sold from. In 2008, Georgia erected two plaques to record the event. Anne C. Bailey recorded the event and its aftermath in her book, The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History. Please read it and weep.
Thank you for referencing the book, The Weeping Time. I just downloaded it on Audible.
I thank you so much for this history lesson. Something of which of course, I have never read an actual account.