Slave Auction Block

Antebellum Wheeling, though in the less slaveholding western part of Virginia, was woven into the social and political fabric of slaveholding Virginia. A slave-auction block stood at the northwestern corner of the Second Ward market house, and Judge John Cochran recalled in 1855 a wooden movable platform about two and a half feet high and six feet square, reached by three or four steps, where an auctioneer sold an older enslaved woman before a small crowd. Such scenes increased local opposition to slavery. Yet Wheeling was part of a broader slave-trading network driven by the Deep South’s demand for labor on cotton plantations. Virginia, America’s largest slaveholding state, exported half a million slaves south and west, and Wheeling served as the destination of the overland route from Baltimore to the Ohio River and onward to slave markets in Charleston, present-day West Virginia, Kentucky, and along the Mississippi River. Coffles of shackled slaves passed through Wheeling on the National Road and later by railroad to be sold downriver, while some were held in nearby pens and occasionally escaped with help from Underground Railroad conductors based in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Opposition to the slave trade in Wheeling eventually rerouted much of this traffic east to Alexandria.

Wheeling, West Virginia · United States