Natchez slave market

Slaves were originally sold throughout the area, including along the Natchez Trace that connected the settlement with Nashville, along the Mississippi River at Natchez-Under-the-Hill, and throughout town.

The market differed from many other slave sellers of the day by offering individuals on a first-come first-serve basis rather than selling them at auction, either singly or in lots.

[2] The Forks of the Road slave market dates to the 18th century; slave sales in vicinity of Natchez, Mississippi were primarily at the riverboat landings in the 1780s but the widespread use of the Natchez Trace from Nashville beginning in the 1790s shifted the market inland to the Forks of the Road "located on the Trace at the northeast edge of the upper town.

[6] In 1833, in response to fears of contagion stoked by the 1833 cholera epidemic, several traders signed a public letter agreeing to permanently move the slaves for sale in Natchez outside of the city limits.

According to an Alabama newspaper, the move was the consequence of Isaac Franklin dumping the bodies of several enslaved cholera victims (including a teenage girl and an eight-month-old baby,[8] who had been shipped south from Alexandria, Virginia) into a ravine or bayou near town.

")[10] The signers of the letter were just a fraction of the 32 "non-resident slave merchants" selling in Natchez that year, who collectively reported US$238,879 (equivalent to $7,541,987 in 2023) in taxable revenue.

"[11] According to Frederic Bancroft in Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931), "The chief market, about 1834, was described as 'a cluster of rough wooden buildings, in the angle of two roads,' a mile from Natchez.

"[12] William T. Martin, who had been a county lawyer nearby, and who became an in-house attorney for Franklin & Ballard, and still later a politician and Confederate general, told Bancroft around the turn of the century: "In some years there were three or four thousand slaves here.

"[12] Forks of the Road appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe's non-fiction polemical A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), in a chapter on the ubiquity of family separation in the domestic slave trade, in which she disputes a Virginian's claim that it was rare to separate families, in the rare cases that slaves were sold to traders at all:[13] We take up the Natchez (Mississippi) Courier of Nov. 20th, 1852, and there read: NEGROES.