Mechanics of Slavery

Reverend Robert Walsh's account from 1828 and 1829 exposed the cramped, airless, and overheated conditions aboard a slave ship, where women and girls were forced into one low compartment and men and boys into another, with hundreds of people packed into spaces so small that each person had only inches of room. The stench and heat were so severe that the spaces were nearly impossible to enter, and when naval officers insisted that the captives be brought on deck for air and water, 517 naked people of all ages emerged at once and crowded the deck. In Virginia, the trade in enslaved Africans extended from their forced arrival to their sale and transport elsewhere in the Americas until 1865, and Richmond became the largest source of enslaved blacks on the east coast of America from 1830 to 1860 through the massive downriver slave trade centered at the Manchester Docks and Rocketts Landing. Many were shipped to New Orleans and other Deep South ports, while others crossed the James River in coffles and were taken through Richmond's slave markets and auction houses, past Lumpkin's Slave Jail, to the African Burial Ground and the First African Baptist Church, an important center of African American life in pre-Civil War Richmond.

Richmond, Virginia · United States