The Horrors of the 'Great Slave Auction': Mar. 2 1859 at Butler Island and Hampton Plantations

The Horrors of the 'Great Slave Auction': Mar. 2 1859 at Butler Island and Hampton Plantations

On the eve of the Civil War, 158 years ago, the largest sale of enslaved people in the U.S. ever to occur took place.

A plaque erected by the Georgia Historical Society on the Savannah, Georgia, racetrack where the sale took place—and which is still used to this day—offers a brief synopsis of what happened, excerpted here:

"To satisfy his creditors, Pierce M. Butler sold 436 men, women and children from his Butler Island and Hampton plantations near Darien, Georgia. The breakup of families and the loss of home became part of African-American heritage remembered as 'the weeping time.'"

The story has a lot of layers, writes Kristopher Monroe for ‘The Atlantic’, and it’s telling that only a single, recent plaque remembers the Weeping Time while Savannah is home to a “towering monument to the Confederate dead” erected a century ago.

The man who owned the slaves that were sold at the “Great Slave Auction,” called such particularly by Northern reporters who covered the sale, inherited his money from his grandfather. Major Pierce Butler was one of the country’s largest slaveholders in his time, Monroe writes, and was instrumental to seeing that the institutions of slavery were preserved. “One of the signatories of the U.S. Constitution, Major Butler was the author of the Fugitive Slave Clause and was instrumental in getting it included under Article Four of the Constitution,” he writes.