Dedicated marts, depots, and lockups were by no means ubiquitous, but the slave trade itself was: "The slave trade took place in nearly every town and city in the South. In most, however, the trade did not have a permanent physical location. Commonly, slaves were sold on court days, usually outdoors at a location near the courthouse, yet those cities with a large slave market had a significant infrastructure dedicated to the buying and selling of humans."
New Orleans was the great slave market of the lower Mississippi watershedwith hundreds of traders and a score of slave pensbut there were also markets and sales "at
Donaldsonville,
Clinton, and
East Baton Rouge in Louisiana; at
Natchez,
Vicksburg, and
Jackson in Mississippi; at every roadside tavern, county courthouse, and crossroads across the Lower South." from
The Slave States of America (1842) by
James Silk Buckingham depicts a slave sale at the
St. Louis Hotel, sometimes called the French Exchange Slave traders traveled to farms and small towns to buy enslaved people to bring to market. Enslaved people were placed in pens to await being sold, and they could become quite crowded. People were held until their means of transportation was arranged. They were transported in groups by boat, walked to their new owners, or a combination of the two. They were moved in groups in a
coffle. This meant that people were chained together with iron rings around their necks which were fastened with wooden or iron bars. Men on horseback herded the groups, or coffles, to their destination. They used dogs, guns, and whips. According to ''Nile's Weekly Register'' of Baltimore in the 1840s, "The procurement of from fifty to three hundred slaves is a work of days, sometimes of weeks or months. Many plantations must be visited by the trader and his agents. Then a variety of circumstances occasions necessary delays, before the gang can be put in motion for the south. During this period the slaves are secured by handcuffs, fetters, and chains, and put into some place of confinement. The national prison at Washington city, and the state prisons, are prostituted to this use when occasion requires. The more extensive slave-dealers have private prisons constructed expressly for this purpose."
Lumpkin's Jail, the largest in the state of Virginia, was a particularly inhumane place that resulted in people dying of starvation, illness, or beating. They were so cramped that they were sometimes on top of one another. There were no toilet facilities. Per
Frederic Bancroft, "As a rule, in all such places, the floor was the only bed, a dirty blanket was the only covering, a miscellaneous bundle the only pillow. Some jails may have been tidy and officious operations, but many or most were not.
Henry Bibb described one jail where he was held as repugnant "on account of the filth and dirt of the most disagreeable kind...there were bedbugs, fleas, lice and mosquitoes in abundance to contend with. At night we had to lie down on the floor in this filth. Our food was very scanty, and of the most inferior quality. No gentleman's dog would eat what we were compelled to eat or starve." St. Louis slave trader
Bernard M. Lynch offered jailing services to owners for 37½ cents per slave per day. The owners or operators of private slave jails were not necessarily the legal owners of everyone incarcerated within, and the business of jailing was distinct from the business of trading. For instance
Matthew Garrison, who was both a slave trader and jail owner in Louisville, Kentucky, submitted a bill for "boarding slaves" to the county chancery court adjudicating a dispute over
estate slaves, while W. H. DeJarnatt advertised that four slaves he was listing for sale could "be seen at the house of M. Garrison". 's slave market for most of the 1850s but in 1859 he sold it for to his former partner
Byrd Hill (
National Museum of African American History and Culture) (1853) s to be held at the negro mart attached to the
Charleston Workhouse yard (
Charleston Daily Courier, January 29, 1841) A negro mart was usually a type of urban retail market, usually consisting of a dedicated showroom and/or a workyard, a jail, and storerooms or kitchens for food. Negro marts were urban "clearinghouses" that both acquired enslaved people from more rural districts and sold people for use as farm, skilled, or domestic labor. The term
negro mart was most commonly used in
Charleston, South Carolina, but can also be found in
Memphis, Tennessee, multiple locations in
Georgia, et al. In the 1850s, future Confederate military leader
Nathan Bedford Forrest operated a heavily advertised
negro mart on Adams Street in Memphis. In January 1860, the
New York Times reported that the Forrest & Jones negro mart in Memphis had collapsed and caught fire; two people died but the bills of sale for people, "amounting in the aggregate to " were salvaged. A description of "the negro mart of
Poindexter & Little" in New Orleans, Louisiana states: "In this mart the Negroes were classified and seated on benches, as goods are arranged on shelves in a well-regulated store. The cooks, mechanics, farm-hands, house-girls, seamstresses, washwomen, barbers, and boys each had their own place." During the Civil War,
Gideon J. Pillow wrote a complaint letter to the effect that U.S. Army troops had robbed him of his slaves, and killed or jailed his overseers; he wanted someone to check if the women and children, particularly, were "confined in the Ware house or Negro Mart." It was not uncommon to hold sales or auctions outdoors in the pre-
air-conditioning South; the plaza north of the
Charleston Exchange may be the most enduring and notable of these locations. Similarly, rather than depending on candles, kerosene, whale oil, or gaslights, the noon-to-three trading hours of the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans probably took advantage of the brightest hours of natural light through the rotunda windows. Outdoor slave markets were sometimes controversial. Charleston banned outdoor sales in 1856 and the traders protested that the ban might subtly send a message that there was something wrong with buying and selling people. And in 1837 a correspondent named D wrote to the
New Orleans Times-Picayune complaining of being inconvenienced by the "practice which has been recently adopted by negro traders, I know not who, of parading their slaves for sale, on the narrow
trottoir in front of the
City Hotel, Common street...I have very frequently found much difficulty in making my way through the rank and file of men, women and children, there daily exhibited." Many, if not most, hotels in southern cities were also de facto slave markets and slave jails. In 1884, a former slave trader named Jack Campbell told a reporter "Go into any Southern hotel that was built before the war and ask them to let you go down into the cellars. See if you don't find these old cells where the servants of travelers were shut up at night." When Reverend
Thomas James, a missionary and freedman from New York, was granted permission by the U.S. Army to liberate Louisville's slave jails in February 1865 he found hundreds of people still in the pens, "many confined in leg irons," and nine more in the
National Hotel. == Home and plantation jails ==