Ziba B. Oakes

Oakes is significant in the history of American slavery in part due to his construction of what he called a "shed" at 6 Chalmers Street.

"[2] Come the end of the American Civil War, writer and abolitionist James Redpath took it upon himself to visit Charleston's negro mart and liberate the slavery-related business documents that remained therein.

Oakes looted by Redpath were eventually turned over to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and in 1891 became a part of the anti-slavery special collections at the Boston Public Library.

"[6] According to a newspaper article published at the time of his death, Ziba Oakes arrived in Charleston when he was 10 years old and was "educated at the school of the late Bishop England.

His first connection with business was as a clerk with his father, who kept a store at the corner of Church and Market streets, to which, in due course of time, Mr. Oakes, the subject of the sketch, succeeded as proprietor.

[11] In 1833 Samuel Oakes & Son advertised five cases of "satin beaver hats" newly arrived on the barque Chief, as "fashionable, waterproof, and warranted to retain their color...for sale, low.

[13] Also in 1834, Oakes was the manager of the election of officers for the Marion Riflemen, Second Battalion, 16th Regiment Infantry, South Carolina Militia, which was assigned to a beat along the Cooper River.

In exchange for being able to rapidly assemble a shipping lot of enslaved people, Oakes' trading partners were apparently willing to pay a slight premium.

White, he opposed a new South Carolina law requiring that slave sales take place indoors rather than on the streets.

[33] Oakes was listing slaves for sale as late as November 1864: "A GANG OF 75 NEGROES accustomed to the culture of Rice, Cotton and Provisions.

"[34] Oakes' last known advertisement for an enslaved person appeared in the Charleston Mercury of November 9, 1864: "A likely young man, a superior cook in all branches of the trade, apply as above.

"[35] Oakes served in the Confederate States Army as a private in Company C of the 1st Regiment, South Carolina Militia (Charleston Reserves).

[36] In February 1865, journalist Charles Carleton Coffin visited the mart:[37] I entered the Theological Library building through a window from which General Gillmore had removed the sash by a solid shot.

A pile of old rubbish lay upon the floor, — sermons, tracts, magazines, books, papers, musty and mouldy, turning into pulp beneath the rain-drops which came down through the shattered roof.

There were the steps, up which thousands of men, women, and children had walked to their places on the table, to be knocked off to the highest bidder...While there a colored woman came into the hall to see the two Yankees.

"Tadman describes the letters to Ziba Oakes collected by activist and journalist James Redpath at the end of the war as being of "great importance" in the study of the final decade of the South Carolina slave trade.

[7] As part of what was the apparently common practice of scrubbing "clean the records of...leading South Carolina slave dealers," the newspaper that printer Oakes obituary reported that he "had made his money 'in the Commission and Auction business,' but it failed to mention that much of that business had involved buying and selling people, or that Oakes had once owned Ryan's Mart.

"[43] This kind of intentional forgetting was typical and persisted into the 20th century: "Despite Wilson's insistence that [6 Chalmers] had been associated with the internal American slave trade, many locals disparaged her claim.

Of course, rendering the domestic slave trade invisible was a central aspect of the postbellum white South's reconstruction of its history and its promotion of an apologist's view of slavery.

Tourist literature from early-twentieth-century Charleston was complicit in this process as it repeatedly denied the existence of slave markets in the city.

Walker frankly attributed claims that the property on Chalmers Street was the 'Old Slave Market, so-called,' to that 'same partisan history which stigmatizes the institution of slavery.'

A headline in 1930 in the Charleston News and Courier articulated further the local position: 'Building at 6 Chalmers Street Has Become Subject of Legend in City.