Silas Omohundro

Like other traders, Omohundro carefully recorded the revenues and expenses for his slave-trading business. The routine line-by-line recording of expenses incurred or money earned belies the human toll his business exacted. Weekly entries on groceries, clothing, and shoes record the money spent to improve the appearance of the people being sold and thus to increase their price at sale. On January 14, 1856, Omohundro recorded giving $1.75 to “Negroes when Sold.” 

Silas Omohundro (1807–1864) ran a middling slave trade from a boardinghouse and private jail off Richmond’s Birch’s Alley (also known as Wall Street, now 15th Street). The central Virginia native was an agent for Franklin & Armfield in the 1830s before settling in Richmond in the 1840s. He boarded and lodged visiting buyers who housed their human purchases in his jail. Omohundro bought and sold enslaved people in partnership with his brother and perhaps met Corinna Hinton, an enslaved woman, in the Richmond market. Omohundro had an ongoing domestic relationship with Hinton, who remained enslaved after the couple married. Omohundro freed his wife and children in his 1864 will, testifying that she “has always been a kind, faithful, and dutiful woman to me, and an affectionate mother and will continue to be so.”