The Cage was a jail, often used as a slave jail, that was located at the northwest corner of 17th and Main in Richmond, Virginia, United States prior to and during the American Civil War. [1] The Cage was a short-term lockup facility. [2] Corporal punishment was also inflicted there. [3]
An early form of the Cage was in use as early as 1785. [4] The original Cage was octagonal and was used "until Henrico County erected a new jail in 1820, when an arrangement was made by the City and the County to keep all prisoners in the County jail. This arrangement was continued until 1830, when the City built its own jail." [5] : 57
According to a major history of Richmond, the Cage was three stories tall and topped with a dome "with stocks and whipping post in the rear." [6] The Cage was "open on three sides, except for iron gratings, and those within were visible to passers-by. The need for such a facility was stressed by a grand jury which found an excessive number 'of vagrants, beggars, free Negroes and runaway slaves' which 'daily infest the streets and by night plunder the inhabitants.'" [6]
People of color who could not present free papers or a slave pass were sometimes placed in the Cage until their legal status could be ascertained. [7] In 1853, when slave traders were in a dispute over a woman named Sally who was thought to be insane, the Richmond Dispatch reported, "Captain Wilkinson stated, that on two several occasions the watch found Sally sitting on the side walk and took her to the cage." [8]
According one local historian, the Cage "was heavily used during the Civil War." [9]
Richmond is the capital city of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. Incorporated in 1742, Richmond has been an independent city since 1871. The city's population in the 2020 census was 226,610, up from 204,214 in 2010, making it Virginia's fourth-most populous city. The Richmond metropolitan area, with over 1.3 million residents, is the Commonwealth's third-most populous.
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.
Port Walthall was a town located on the north bank of the Appomattox River in Chesterfield County, Virginia, United States, a few miles upriver from its confluence with the James River at City Point.
Charles F. Hatcher, typically advertising as C. F. Hatcher, was a 19th-century American slaver dealing out of Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He also worked as a trader of financial instruments, specie, and stocks, and as a land agent, with a special interest in selling Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas real estate to speculators and settlers.
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".
Chimborazo Park is a park and historic land site in Richmond, Virginia, United States. Created in 1874, the park was the site of Chimborazo Hospital, one of the world's largest military hospitals.
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.
Twenty-One Magazine, formerly the Old Charleston Jail and once the site of the Charleston Workhouse and Negro Mart, is a structure of historical and architectural significance in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. Operational between 1802 and 1939, the jail held many notable figures, among them Denmark Vesey, Union officers and Colored Troops during the American Civil War, and high-seas pirates. The Old Charleston Jail went through a renovation starting in 2016. It is now a private event venue.
The Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground was established by the city of Richmond, Virginia, for the interment of free people of color, and the enslaved. The heart of this now invisible burying ground is located at 1305 N 5th St.
Francis Jackson, also known as Frank Jackson, was an African-American victim of kidnapping into slavery. He was born free, but enticed into helping to drive horses to Virginia, a slave state, and was sold into slavery in early 1851. Besides escaping a number of times over seven years, there were three legal cases fought in Virginia and North Carolina. It seemed to be settled with the Francis Jackson vs. John W. Deshazer case when he was ruled to be free in 1855, but he was held as a slave until 1858. Jackson lived a continual cycle of being sold to new slaveholders, running away, getting caught, and then being returned to his latest owner.
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.
Seth Woodroof was a slave trader based in Lynchburg in central Virginia, United States. He was an interstate trader who ran what the Lynchburg Museum called the "most active and infamous" slave pen in the city. He is believed to have been actively trading from approximately 1830 until the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. Woodroof sat on the Lynchburg city council from 1858 to 1865.
Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. As one history put it, "Stinted allowance, imprisonment, and whipping were the usual methods of punishment; incorrigibles were sometimes 'ironed' or sold."
Andrew J. Orr and Dickinson W. Orr, typically advertising as A. J. & D. W. Orr, were brothers, merchants, planters, railroad contractors, and slave traders based in Macon, Georgia, United States. The Orrs were originally from the Charlotte, North Carolina area, but moved to central Georgia early in their lives and remained there, first working as local merchants and then transitioning into the interstate slave trade, buying in the Carolinas and Richmond, Virginia, and selling to planters in the vicinity of Macon and Augusta, Georgia. They then became railroad contractors as well, using groups of enslaved men to build three separate Georgia railroad lines. A. J. Orr was beaten to death by a slave in 1855. D. W. Orr continued working as a railroad contractor until at least 1863. He died in 1867.
The Richmond, Virginia slave market was the largest slave market in the Upper South region of the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. An estimated 3,000 to 9,000 slaves were sold out of Virginia annually between 1820 and 1860, many of them through Richmond. Richmond's slave traders clustered their jails and auction rooms on Wall Street, a narrow alley in a section of the city called Shockhoe Bottom, the valley created by Shockhoe Creek, which bisected the city. Traders also used the offices and meeting rooms at the Exchange Hotel, St. Charles Hotel, City Hotel and Odd Fellows' Hall. A visitor of 1852 reported, "There are four [slave depots], and all in the same street, not more than two blocks from the Exchange Hotel, where we are staying. These slave depots are in one of the most frequented streets of the place, and the sales are conducted in the building, on the first floor; and within view of the passers-by. There are small screens, behind which the men of mature years are taken for inspection; but the men and the boys are publicly examined in the open store, before an audience of full one hundred." He reported that only three of 20 men so exhibited had "clean backs" unmarked by whip scarring.
Elmore H. Simmons, generally signing documents as E. H. Simmons, was an American slave trader. He is primarily known from receipts for purchases and sales of slaves that are held in various slavery document collections held in U.S. libraries. Simmons was active as a slave trader from 1847 until 1852 in the U.S. states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.