Richmond's Burgeoning Trade

After reaching Virginia, enslaved Africans were forced along the riverbanks into nearby cities, including Richmond, for further sale, a routine practice after Virginia prohibited the importation of Africans to its shores in 1778. The federal ban on all African importation in 1808 reduced the supply of coerced labor that southern agriculture depended on, while Virginia's tobacco cultivation had exhausted much of the state's soil and lowered farm productivity. Combined with the natural increase in the enslaved population, these conditions left many Virginian communities with more enslaved laborers than they could support. Richmond, then a small but busy riverfront town at the fall line of the James River, already served as an important transportation hub for imported and regional goods throughout the South. As legal restrictions on African importation took hold, Virginia's surplus of enslaved labor coincided with growing demand in the South, and Richmond became a major center for exporting enslaved people as human cargo. The intrastate and interstate slave trade expanded along with the city's general commerce and urban growth. By the 1830s, Virginia slave traders had become a professional group, and by 1840 Richmond had surpassed Alexandria as the most active exporter of enslaved Africans to other American territories, chiefly in the Deep South. From the late 1840s until 1865, several dozen auction houses operated in Shockoe Bottom, supplying sugar and cotton plantations, deepening the South's dependence on coerced labor, and helping fuel the Civil War. Richmond's trade in enslaved people stretched from ports such as the Manchester Docks and Rocketts Landing through the city's markets and auction houses to sites including Lumpkin's Slave Jail, the African Burial Ground, and the First African Baptist Church.

Richmond, Virginia · United States