Charleston is the most populous city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston metropolitan area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint of South Carolina's coastline on Charleston Harbor, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the confluence of the Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers. Charleston had a population of 150,227 at the 2020 census. The population of the Charleston metropolitan area, comprising Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties, was estimated to be 849,417 in 2023. It ranks as the third-most populous metropolitan statistical area in the state, and the 71st-most populous in the United States.
A slave market is a place where slaves are bought and sold. These markets are a key phenomenon in the history of slavery.
Boone Hall Plantation is a historic district located in Mount Pleasant, Charleston County, South Carolina, United States and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The plantation is one of America's oldest plantations still in operation, as it has continually produced agricultural crops for over 320 years. The majority of this labor, as well as the construction of the buildings and its characteristic bricks, was performed by enslaved African Americans. For this reason, the site was named one of the African American Historic Places in South Carolina in 2009. The historic district includes a 1936 Colonial Revival-style dwelling, and multiple significant landscape features, including an allée of southern live oak trees, believed to have been planted in 1743. The site is open for public tours.
Goodwood Plantation was a mid-sized slave plantation that grew cotton on about 1,675 acres (7 km2) in central Leon County, Florida. It is located at 1600 Miccosukee Road. The plantation was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on June 30, 1972.
Middleton Place is a plantation in Dorchester County, along the banks of the Ashley River west of the Ashley and about 15 miles (24 km) northwest of downtown Charleston, in the U.S. state of South Carolina. Built in several phases during the 18th and 19th centuries, the plantation was the primary residence of several generations of the Middleton family, many of whom played prominent roles in the colonial and antebellum history of South Carolina. The plantation, now a National Historic Landmark District, is used as a museum, and is home to the oldest landscaped gardens in the United States.
David Drake, also known as "Dave Pottery" and "Dave the Potter," was an American potter and enslaved African American who lived in Edgefield, South Carolina. Drake lived and worked in Edgefield for almost all his life.
Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.
McLeod Plantation is a former slave plantation located on James Island, South Carolina, near the intersection of Folly and Maybank roads at Wappoo Creek, which flows into the Ashley River. The plantation is considered an important Gullah heritage site, preserved in recognition of its cultural and historical significance to African-American and European-American cultures.
The Charles Street Jail, also known as the Suffolk County Jail, is an infamous former jail located at 215 Charles Street, Boston, Massachusetts. It is listed in the state and national Registers of Historic Places. The Liberty Hotel, as it is now known, has retained much of its historic structure, including the famed rotunda.
The City Market is a historic market complex in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Established in the 1790s, the market stretches for four city blocks from the architecturally-significant Market Hall, which faces Meeting Street, through a continuous series of one-story market sheds, the last of which terminates at East Bay Street. The market should not be confused with the Old Slave Mart where enslaved people were sold, as enslaved people were never sold in the City Market. The City Market Hall has been described as a building of the "highest architectural design quality." The entire complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Market Hall and Sheds and was further designated a National Historic Landmark.
The Franklin and Armfield Office, which houses the Freedom House Museum, is a historic commercial building in Alexandria, Virginia. Built c. 1810–1820, it was first used as a private residence before being converted to the offices of the largest slave trading firm in the United States, started in 1828 by Isaac Franklin and John Armfield. Another source, using ship manifests in the National Archives, gives the number as "at least 5,000".
The Market House is a Market house and town hall in the center of Fayetteville, Cumberland County, North Carolina. It was built in 1838 on the site of the old state house and Town Hall which burned down in 1831. Fayetteville was the capital of North Carolina from 1789 to 1794.
The Old Exchange & Provost Dungeon, also known as the Custom House, and The Exchange, is a historic building at East Bay and Broad Streets in Charleston, South Carolina. Built in 1767–1771, it has served a variety of civic institutional functions, including notably as a prisoner of war facility operated by British forces during the American Revolutionary War. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973. It is now a museum operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim is a Reform Jewish congregation and synagogue located in Charleston, South Carolina, in the United States.
The Gov. William Aiken House was built in 1820 at 48 Elizabeth Street, in the Wraggborough neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina. Despite being known for its association with Gov. William Aiken, the house was built by John Robinson after he bought several lots in Mazyck-Wraggborough in 1817. His house was originally configured as a Charleston double house with entrance to the house from the south side along Judith Street. The house is considered to be the best preserved complex of antebellum domestic structures in Charleston. It was the home of William Aiken, Jr., a governor of South Carolina, and before that the home of his father, the owner of South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, William Aiken.
Lumpkin's Jail, also known as "the Devil's half acre", was a slave breeding farm, as well as a holding facility, or slave jail, located in Richmond, Virginia, just three blocks from the state capitol building. More than five dozen firms traded in enslaved human beings within blocks of Richmond's Wall Street between 14th and 18th Streets between the 1830s and the end of the American Civil War. Its final and most notorious owner, Robert Lumpkin, bought and sold slaves throughout the South for well over twenty years, and Lumpkin's Jail became Richmond's largest slave-holding facility.
The history of Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the longest and most diverse of any community in the United States, spanning hundreds of years of physical settlement beginning in 1670. Charleston was one of leading cities in the South from the colonial era to the Civil War in the 1860s. The city grew wealthy through the export of rice and, later, sea island cotton and it was the base for many wealthy merchants and landowners. Charleston was the capital of American slavery.
Old Market Building, also known as the Rice Museum, is a historic public market building located at Georgetown, Georgetown County, South Carolina. It was built in 1832–1835, and is a one-story, Classical Revival temple-form building on a high arcaded base.
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 site 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.
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. The term slave depot was commonly used in New Orleans in the 1850s.
