Sale of Newly Arrived Slaves

 

Slave Sales – Newly Arrivedⁱ

i Sale of slaves newly arrived from Africa aboard ship

Beginning in the autumn of 1732, our local newspapers also began including advertisements or notices of upcoming sales of the recently-arrived cargoes of enslaved people. Advertisements for most, but not quite all, of the incoming cargos appear in the surviving newspapers, but these notices do not provide the level of detailed information that we might hope to see. Many, but certainly not all, mention the number of people being offered for sale. The majority of these notices do not specify the geographic location of the sale. Besides identifying the name of the vessel and providing the date of the commencement of the sale, most of these advertisements simply note that the sale will take place “on board” the vessel in question. A minority of the surviving sale notices specify the name of the wharf at which the vessel was docked (or would be docked on the date of the sale).

For the entire era of importing African captives into the port of Charleston, from the late seventeenth century to the legal end of the trade at the beginning of the year 1808: Cargos of newly-imported people were routinely sold on the deck of the vessel that transported them into Charleston harbor, while that vessel was docked alongside one of the wooden wharves that extended eastward from East Bay Street into the Cooper River.

During the first decade of life here at “new” Charles Town, established at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers in 1680, the waterfront we call East Bay Street was known simply as “the wharf of Charles Town” (see Episode No. 180). Large and even medium-sized sailing vessels anchored a few hundred feet off shore and carried cargo and passengers to-and-fro by means of small row boats and barges or “lighters.” By the year 1690, Landgrave Thomas Smith had a built “wharf” of some sort near the east end of what became known as Longitude Lane, but it’s unclear how far it projected outward from land into the Cooper River.[2] In 1698, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina began granting marsh lots on the east side of East Bay to the owners of lots on the west side of that street, on condition that each owner would build part of a long brick seawall to stabilize the muddy waterfront. That granting process facilitated the development of an evolving series of wooden wharves projecting eastward into the Cooper River.

The 1711 illustration of Charleston known as the “Crisp map” shows two “bridges” or wharves on the east side of East Bay Street: One owned by Landgrave Thomas Smith, just a bit south of the east end of Tradd Street, and one built sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century by William Rhett, located slightly north of Broad Street. .

The map of Charleston published in 1739 with the title “Ichnography of Charles-Town at High Water” shows eight “bridges” or wharves on the east side of East Bay Street, in the following order from south to north: Brewton’s wharf, located just north of Granville Bastion, approximately where the Carolina Yacht Club stands today, then Lloyd’s, Pinckney’s, Motte’s, Elliott’s, Middle, Rhett’s, and Crokatt’s wharf, located just north of Unity Alley.

Getting back to our main topic, the number of East Bay Street wharves, constructed of palmetto-log cribs sunk into the mud and topped with broad wooden planks, continued to grow as the years passed. A newspaper report of a severe storm in the summer of 1770 names fifteen wharves along the east side of East Bay Street, stretching from the present site of the Carolina Yacht Club on the south to the vicinity of Cumberland Street on the north, just a bit south of Craven Bastion (now the site of the U.S. Custom House).[3] The Phoenix fire insurance map of Charleston, surveyed in 1788 and published in 1790, depicts seventeen wharves along the east side of East Bay Street, all south of modern Market Street, as well as a few new wharves north of Market Street that were built after the American Revolution.

I’ve found colonial-era advertisements for the sales of what they called “new Negroes,” or newly arrived enslaved people, at the following wharves (in no particular order): Elliott’s, Motte’s, Mayne’s, Graeme’s, Eveleigh’s, Dandridge’s, Burn’s, and Roper’s.

Cargos of newly-imported people were routinely sold on the deck of the vessel that transported them into Charleston harbor, while that vessel was docked alongside one of the wooden wharves that extended eastward from East Bay Street into the Cooper River. Most of the surviving printed notices of the sales that took place prior to the commencement of the American Revolution in 1775 do not specify the name of the wharves in question, but the volume and regularity of the traffic, especially in the last decade before that war, suggest that these sales could have taken place at any one of the fifteen to seventeen wharves located between Granville Bastion on the south and Craven Bastion on the north.

There is no known case of a sale of slaves at Gadsden's Wharf prior to 1806