Native Markets

During more than ninety years of active trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans to Virginia colonists, plantation owners, and traders purchased roughly 114,000 Africans from Atlantic slaving brigs. Most early sales took place along the York, Potomac, and Rappahannock rivers or in nearby towns, while a few ships traveled up the James River; after 1746, forty percent of enslaved Africans brought to Virginia arrived at Bermuda Hundred, where the James and Appomattox rivers converge, and at Osborne's Landing farther up the James, from which smaller vessels could reach Petersburg and Richmond. Until the American Revolution, Richmond was a small collection of villages at the Falls of the James, and the earliest sales and auctions there, including in Petersburg, were most likely secondary sales of captives purchased elsewhere. Rocky Ridge, now known as Manchester, and Richmond were advertised as points of sale in the 1760s and 1770s and usually sold enslaved Africans who had been born in Virginia or had lived in Virginia for some time. In 1775, in defiance of British rule, Virginia's leaders temporarily banned the importation of African captives; the ban became law in 1778, and in 1782 a second law allowed private manumission. Some owners freed enslaved people out of justice and compassion, while others acted from self-interest and exploited the growing demand for labor in the Deep South. As tobacco production exhausted Virginia's fields and the cotton gin made cotton highly profitable but still labor intensive, enslaved Africans were sold down the river to Deep South plantation owners willing to pay premium prices, allowing traders to amass huge fortunes. Richmond became the largest source of enslaved blacks on the east coast of America from 1830 to 1860, and receipts from slave sales in 1857 approached $3.5 million, about $100 million in 2010.

Richmond, Virginia · United States