The Auction

Written and visual descriptions of the slave trade often focused on the auction itself. Much like a theatrical show, the auction usually took place on a raised platform with the auctioneer, audience, and the enslaved expected to enact their particular roles. Observers described the drama of the bidding and the attempts of the auctioneer to coax the price ever upward.

In counties and towns, auctions often occurred on the courthouse steps or a designated street corner, usually near a popular tavern. In Richmond, the business of slave trading was irregular in the 1820s and 1830s. Auctions often occurred with the liquidation of an estate and usually took place at the Eagle's Tavern on Main Street near 12th Street. By the 1840s and 1850s, auctioneers began to specialize in selling people. Richmond’s auction rooms were concentrated on and around Wall Street (now 15th Street) and were generally small, low-ceilinged, dismal rooms with little furniture or decoration. The auction rooms were clustered near one another, and sales were held one after the other, with the crowd moving from one auction room to the next. As many as 100 people crowded into these spaces to watch the auctioneer, who stood on a block with the people he was selling. Basements of several public buildings, including the Odd Fellows Lodge, the Exchange Hotel, and the St. Charles Hotel, also served as auction rooms. Auctions occurred six days a week, all year long.

Crowe’s image shows an auction room, possibly that of Hector Davis and David Pulliam, on Wall Street. The young man holding onto the dress of the woman being sold was probably owned by the slave trader and forced to help sell other people. In 1860, Davis purchased a man named Wallace Turnage for $950. Turnage described his job for Davis as "auction and office boy … taking people from the jail to the dressing room and from the dressing room to the auction room." Quite unexpectedly, he was himself sold to a planter from Alabama. The sale of a slave named "Wallace" for $1,169.30 recorded in Davis's account book on August 2, 1860, might well refer to the sale of Wallace Turnage.

Auctioneers and commission agents used red flags to indicate a sale of any kind—livestock, household goods, land, or people. Attaching pieces of paper to the flag alerted potential buyers to what was being sold. In April 1865, abolitionist journalist Charles Carleton Coffin took this flag from an auction room in Charleston, South Carolina.

Later in March, 1853, Crowe visited Charleston, South Carolina, another major center for the internal slave trade. Unlike Richmond, where the slave trade was “hidden as much as possible,” the trade in Charleston took place in an open square next to the Exchange Building. On the day of the sale Crowe attended, ninety-six people from the same plantation were being sold, “in families, with the exception of a few who are single,” according to advertisement in the Charleston Mercury. In his painting, exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1854, Crowe presented a chaotic density of bodies. The red flags used by auctioneers to advertise an auction hang from the building, and the masts of “cotton-laden” ships in the background attest to textile industry that tied together the United States and England. Previously known only through a print in the Illustrated London News published in 1856, the painting was long believed to have been lost and has only recently been relocated.