Auction Blocks in Charleston and New Orleans Turn People Into Listed Merchandise
A surviving 1859 Charleston broadside lists 99 enslaved people by name, age, and a buyer's shorthand for their bodies
Quick facts
- Major US markets
- Charleston, New Orleans
- Charleston broadside
- 99 enslaved people listed, January 10, 1859
- New Orleans peak period
- c. 1830 to the Civil War
What happened
By the early nineteenth century, cities across the American South, most prominently Charleston and New Orleans, hosted regular public slave auctions in hotels, courthouses, and dedicated auction houses. A surviving broadside advertised a court-ordered sale at the Charleston courthouse on January 10, 1859, listing 99 enslaved men, women, and children by first name and age, grouped in numbered lots, with handwritten annotations from prospective buyers or auctioneers reading healthy, very fine, sold privately, dead, shot in leg, breeding, leg broke, and lost a toe. In New Orleans, auctions regularly advertised individuals by name and skill, such as a broadside naming Isam, described as a superior engineer and blacksmith, and Pauline, described as speaking French and English, framing enslaved people's labor and their bodies as the two things being sold. New Orleans became one of the largest slave markets in the country from roughly 1830 until the Civil War, with auctions held in its major hotels and dedicated slave depots and showrooms lining its most frequented streets.
Why it matters
These surviving broadsides are direct documentary evidence of how the domestic slave trade reduced named individuals, people with skills, families, and injuries recorded in the same breath as their price, to line items in a for-profit ledger. The annotations on the Charleston broadside, written by buyers evaluating human beings the way they would livestock, are as close as the archive gets to showing the trade's daily mechanics in a market it had made almost casual.
How we know
The original broadsides are held in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which has digitized and published both the Charleston courthouse broadside and multiple New Orleans auction advertisements with full transcriptions.
Sources
- National Museum of African American History and Culture. Broadside for an auction of enslaved persons at the Charleston courthouse · Primary source (author-declared)nmaahc.si.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- National Museum of African American History and Culture, Searchable Museum. Business of the Trade · General sourcesearchablemuseum.com · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineThe Atlantic Slave Trade29 events · Four centuries in which European traders forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, and the enslaved people, revolts, and abolitionists who fought it from the first crossing to the lastView all →