- Gravestone of one of DeSaussure's children, who lived from 1854 to 1855
- Southeast corner view of historic Louis DeSaussure House at 1 East Battery in Charleston
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A count of DeSaussure's advertisements in the Courier alone, carefully excluding repetitions and transfers from private to public sales, shows that he obtained commissions on not less than 193 slaves in January, 1860, and on more than 259 in February...His gains from sales of slaves and various other kinds of property were almost princely, for that time. The income of no other "broker," of no professional man, and of few, if any, merchants, equaled his...DeSaussure's commissions alone for 1860 were US$10,983(equivalent to $357,720 in 2022). Not all, but most of it, came from slave-trading. The next prosperous "broker" earned a little more than three-fourths as much, and none of the others exceeded $5,000, which was a large business income for that time and place; half of it sufficed for a generously comfortable living. [1]
Broker was the euphemism commonly used in Charleston to describe slave traders. [1] DeSaussure was one of the brokers who made use of the building now known as the Old Slave Mart. [7] At the time of the 1860 census, DeSaussure was a resident of Charleston, occupation broker, real estate valued at $20,000, personal estate valued at $25,000. [8] During the American Civil War he was a captain in the 3rd Regiment, South Carolina Cavalry. [9] In 1866 he paid $27 in taxes on $867 in cotton. [10]
In 1870, DeSaussure lived in the first ward of the city, occupation real estate broker, with his wife, five children aged six to 12, three female domestic servants born in Ireland, and two male domestic servants born in South Carolina. [11] At that time, DeSaussure owned real estate valued at $25,000 and personal property worth $10,000. [11] In 1872, DeSaussure was president of the Atlantic Phosphate Company, dealers in "first-class fertilizer." [12] He also continued to work as a broker, now specializing in "the Sale and Purchase of Stocks, Bonds, Real Estate and Loaning of Money." [12] In 1876 he called to order a "great meeting" at the Hibernian Hall in Charleston that passed a resolution refusing to pay taxes to any state government but one led by ex-Confederate general Wade Hampton III. [13] In 1877 he was vice president of the gentlemen's' auxiliary association of the Charleston City Hospital. [14] In 1880, DeSaussure's declared occupation was "broker, money," and one of his nearest neighbors was the physician and chemist St. Julien Ravenel. [15]
DeSaussure died in 1888 at age 64 and was memorialized in the first issue of the Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, which described his business career as follows: [16]
Mr. DeSaussure began his mercantile life with the house of Messrs. Tobias & Co., and shortly after entered into business on his own account, as Broker and Real Estate Agent, and soon took a high position as a capable and prudent man of business. He was a director of the South Carolina Railroad for many years, and occupied similar positions of trust and responsibility on boards of various public companies. In his home he was most hospitable, and delighted in those exhibitions of courtesy, which are grateful to sojourners in a strange city.
After the Confederacy's defeat in the American Civil War, many "white Charlestonians displayed historical amnesia" about the institution of slavery. [6] A Liverpool-based scholar concurs that "for South Carolina and the South generally much of the slave trade is missing from the historical record [but] slave trading and the forcible separation of slave families were pervasive in South Carolina [and] traders tended to be men of considerable wealth and status." [3] The Huguenot Society, which DeSaussure joined the April 13, 1885, was apparently one of the local entities that produced post-war obituaries and biographies that scrubbed "clean the records of...leading South Carolina slave dealers." [6]
DeSaussure married his first cousin Sarah E. DeSaussure. Their children were Sarah M. DeSaussure, L. D. DeSaussure, F. R. DeSaussure, William B. DeSaussure, Mrs. J. B. Chisolm, and Mrs. Charles E. Fuller. [16]
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
The Negro Law of South Carolina (1848) was one of John Belton O'Neall's longer works.
Slavery in South Carolina was widespread even relative to other slave states, and the region had a black majority throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. On the verge of the American Civil War, "45.8 percent of white families in the state owned slaves." Under South Carolina law, slaves were "deemed, sold, taken, reputed and adjudged in law, to be chattels, personal in the hands of their owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, and assigns, TO ALL INTENTS, CONSTRUCTIONS AND PURPOSES WHATSOEVER...A slave is not generally regarded as legally capable of being within the peace of the State. He is not a citizen, and is not in that character entitled to her protection."
The history of slavery in Tennessee began when it was the old Southwest Territory and thus the law regulating slavery in Tennessee was broadly derived from North Carolina law, and was initially comparatively "liberal." However, after statehood, as the fear of slave rebellion and the threat to slavery posed by abolitionism increased, the laws became increasingly punitive: after 1831, "punishments were increased and privileges and immunities were lessened and circumvented." Tennessee was one of five states that allowed slaves the right of a jury trial, and one of three states that never passed anti-literacy laws, although the punishment for forging a slave pass was up to 39 lashes.
Bolton, Dickens & Co. was a slave-trading business of the antebellum United States, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. Several of principals of the firm eventually shot and killed one another as part of a long-running dispute over money. A Bolton & Dickens account ledger survived the American Civil War and is a valuable primary source on the interstate slave trade.
Byrd Hill was a slave trader of Tennessee and Mississippi prior to the American Civil War. Byrd Hill has been described as one of the "big four" slave traders in the centrally located city of Memphis on the Mississippi River. Hill was partners for a time with Nathan Bedford Forrest and is believed to have resold six of the Africans illegally trafficked to the United States on the Wanderer in 1859. Hill also made a fleeting appearance in Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Slave-Trading in the Old South by Frederic Bancroft, an independently wealthy freelance historian, is a classic history of domestic slave trade in the antebellum United States. Among other things, Bancroft discredited the assertions, then common in Ulrich B. Phillips-influenced histories of antebellum America, that slave traders were reviled outcasts and that slave trading was a rare exigency. Bancroft's book "provides still unrivalled profiles of great numbers of traders, many of whom he found to have the highest social standing."
Ziba Burrill Oakes was a broker of slaves and real estate in Charleston, South Carolina. Oakes is significant in the history of American slavery in part due to his construction of what he called a "shed" at 6 Chalmers Street. The shed still stands and is now Charleston's Old Slave Mart Museum. The building as a whole, once a much larger assemblage of buildings and pens, was generally known as Ryan's mart or Ryan's nigger-jail, and shut down in late 1864 or early 1865, supposedly "when owners Thomas Ryan and Z.B. Oakes went off to fight in the war." Come the end of the American Civil War, writer and abolitionist James Redpath took it upon himself to visit Charleston's negro mart and liberate the slavery-related business documents that remained therein. The 652 letters to Z.B. Oakes looted by Redpath were eventually turned over to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and in 1891 became a part of the anti-slavery special collections at the Boston Public Library. The letters remain a significant primary source in the study of the 19th-century American slave trade.
This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States.
The magnitude of the trade, in terms of the lives it affected and families it destroyed, is without a doubt greater than any Civil War battlefield.
The Kingstree jail fire killed 22 prisoners on the evening of Monday, January 7, 1867, in the Williamsburg County seat of Kingstree, South Carolina, in the United States. One white prisoner escaped the building and survived, but all of the African-American prisoners incarcerated on the third floor were killed. Attempts to rescue the 19 men and 3 women left in the building were ineffective. By the time action was taken, the billowing smoke and heat were overwhelming.
William L. Boyd Jr. was a slave trader, real estate broker, and steamboat captain of Nashville, Tennessee in the United States. In 1883 he was charged with murder in the shooting death of his girlfriend Birdie Patterson.
Capt. Montgomery Little, CSA was an American slave trader and a Confederate Army cavalry officer who served in Nathan Bedford Forrest's Escort Company. Little was killed in action during the American Civil War at the Battle of Thompson's Station.
Alonzo James White was a 19th-century businessman of Charleston, South Carolina who was known as a "notorious" slave trader and prolific auctioneer and thus oversaw the sales of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of enslaved Americans of African descent in his 30-year career in the American slave trade.
Mason Harwell was an auctioneer, insurance broker, and a leading, if not the leading, slave trader in antebellum Montgomery, Alabama. According to Slavery in Alabama (1950), "After 1840 Montgomery was the principal market in the state." Sales in 1850s Montgomery often took place outdoors at a central landmark called the Artesian Basin. Around the turn of the century, an older resident of Montgomery told historian Frederic Bancroft, author of Slave-Trading in the Old South, that Harwell was "a man of respectable standing." Mason Harwell worked out of 21 Market Street. He had a second location at Coosa St. and Monroe.
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part.
Jordan Arterburn (1808–1875) and Tarlton Arterburn (1810–1883) were brothers and interstate slave traders of the 19th-century United States. They typically bought enslaved people in their home state of Kentucky in the upper south, and then moved them to Mississippi in the lower south, where there was a constant demand for enslaved laborers on the plantations of King Cotton. Their "negroes wanted" advertisements ran in Louisville newspapers almost continuously from 1843 to 1859. In 1876, Tarlton Arterburn claimed they had taken profits of "30 to 40 percent a head" during their slave-trading days, and that Northern abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe had visited the Arterburn slave pen in Louisville while researching Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. There is now a historical marker in Louisville at former site of the Arterburn slave jail, acknowledging the myriad abuses and human-rights violations that took place there.
Lewis C. Robards was a 19th-century American slave trader of Lexington, Kentucky. He had an unscrupulous reputation as a dealer, and he was widely known for his "special" offerings: fancy girls, meaning young, light-skinned enslaved women and girls offered for sexual exploitation. Robards was also considered a likely culprit in several cases of kidnapping into slavery. His slave pen was funded in part by a loan from John Hunt Morgan; when he could not repay the loan his premises were sold to Bolton, Dickens & Co., a multi-state slave-trading firm based in West Tennessee.
Theophilus Freeman was a 19th-century American slave trader of Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He was known in his own time as wealthy and problematic. Freeman's business practices were described in two antebellum American slave narratives—that of John Brown and that of Solomon Northrup—and he appears as a character in the 2013 film adaptation of Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave.
John Jenkins Poindexter was an American slave trader, commission merchant, school commissioner, and steamboat master of Louisiana and Mississippi. He served in the Mexican-American War as a junior officer in the Mississippi Rifles in 1846. The historic John J. Poindexter House in Jackson, Mississippi, was commissioned for the young Poindexter family and designed in the 1840s by architect William Nichols.