Auction Houses

In Shockoe Bottom, several dozen auction houses sold enslaved people alongside commodities such as corn and coffee, with most of this commerce concentrated in a roughly thirty-block area bounded by Broad, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Streets and the river. Some sales were part of larger businesses, while other auctioneers dealt exclusively in slaves. Davenport and Co., at Fifteenth and Cary streets, stood near the center of this district, and portions of that building survived Civil War destruction and remain part of the present building. The area also contained holding pens, slave jails, and lodging for slave traders, while white Richmonders generally ignored slave sales or accepted them as normal. An account reprinted from the New York Daily Tribune of March 8, 1859, described the inspection and sale of an enslaved woman named Molly for $695 and reflected on how injury or illness could lower a person's market value enough to make freedom seem more attainable through self-purchase. It also described a two-day sale in which 429 men, women, and children were sold out of 436 announced, for a total of $308,850. Richmond later became the largest source of enslaved blacks on America’s east coast from 1830 to 1860 through the massive downriver slave trade, with many people shipped to New Orleans and other Deep South ports, while others were marched across the James River into the city’s slave markets and auction houses.

Richmond, Virginia · United States