Slave markets and slave jails in the United States

Many thousands of other sales took place on the steps of county courthouses (to satisfy judgments, estates and claims), on large plantations, or anywhere else there was a slave owner who needed cash in order to settle a debt or pay off a bad bet.

For example, the grand hotels of New Orleans, and the Artesian Basin in Montgomery, Alabama, were important slave markets not known for their prison facilities.

"[1] New Orleans was the great slave market of the lower Mississippi watershed—with hundreds of traders and a score of slave pens—but 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.

"[7] 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.

[4] Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer described slave pens she saw on her travels in America as "great garrets without beds, chairs or tables.

"[8] 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.

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.

[13] 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.

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.

"[17] 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.

"[18] 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.

[19] 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.

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.

"[21] 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.

"[24] The Smithsonian magazine states that "[t]hese were sites of brutal treatment and unbearable sorrow, as callous and avaricious slave traders tore apart families, separating husbands from wives, and children from their parents.

[25] In Natchez, Mississippi, the Forks of the Road slave market was used by the Union soldiers to offer the formerly enslaved protection and freedom.

It was later described as having four stars on the sign out front; the windows of the upper stories had iron grates, and among the abandoned detritus were "bills of sale for slaves by the hundreds," business correspondence, "handcuffs, whips, and staples for tying, etc."

At one side of the rotunda were rooms where slaves might be confined temporarily, when necessary, or where men and women might be taken to undergo inspection by prospective purchasers more detailed than was possible in public.

Hamilton, who was in the United States in 1843, and published a book about what he saw in New Orleans, adds a final touch: 'When a woman is sold, the auctioneer usually puts his audience in a good humor by a few indecent jokes...'"[29]: 150