Negro mart

A negro mart was a type of retail slave market in the United States, usually consisting of an auction room and slave pen. Negro marts dealt in enslaved African-Americans in the southern United States before the American Civil War, usually as urban "clearinghouses" that both acquired enslaved people from more rural districts and sold people for use as farm labor. The term negro mart was most commonly used in Charleston, South Carolina, but can also be found in Memphis, Tennessee, multiple locations in Georgia, et al. In the 1850s, future Confederate military leader Nathan Bedford Forrest operated a heavily advertised negro mart on Adams Street in Memphis.[2] In January 1860, the New York Times reported that the Forest & Jones negro mart in Memphis had collapsed and caught fire, two people died but luckily the bills of sale for people, "amounting in the aggregate to US$400,000 (equivalent to about $12,063,700 in 2021)" were salvaged.[3]

Slaves Waiting for Sale by Eyre Crowe (1853)
Three newspaper listings for estate sales to be held at the negro mart "work yard," Charleston Daily Courier, January 29, 1841
Bolton, Dickens & Co. advertisement in the Memphis Daily Eagle, September 26, 1849, page 3; Bolton & Dickens was the biggest slave-trading firm in Memphis and had branch offices in Vicksburg, Mobile, New Orleans and Lexington, Kentucky[1]

A description of "the negro mart of Poindexter & Little" in New Orleans, Louisiana states: "In this mart the Negroes were classified and seated on benches, as goods are arranged on shelves in a well-regulated store. The cooks, mechanics, farm-hands, house-girls, seamstresses, washwomen, barbers, and boys each had their own place."[4]

A site formerly called A. Bryan's Negro Mart in Georgia, was commandeered by the U.S. military at the conclusion of the Civil War. It was later described in print as having four stars on the sign out front, and being a large three-story building where "slaves had been bought and sold for many years." The windows of the upper stories had iron grates, and among the abandoned detritus were "bills of sale for slaves by the hundreds," business correspondence, "handcuffs, whips, and staples for tying, etc." The building was to be turned into a school.[5]

During the Civil War, Gideon J. Pillow wrote a complaint letter to the effect that federal troops had robbed him of his slaves and killed or jailed his overseers; he wanted someone to check if the women and children, particularly, were "confined in the Ware house or Negro Mart."[6]

A lawsuit resolved in 1870 addressed the issue of debt for an enslaved person purchased on credit, after an insurance company refused to pay out on a property insurance claim, since the slave had committed suicide after being put in a slave mart in New Orleans. The court determined that the debt was still owed, but removed the interest payment obligation.[7]

See also

References
  1. Mooney, Chase C. (1957). Slavery in Tennessee (Reprint ed.). Indiana University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-8371-5522-7.
  2. The Confederacy's Greatest Cavalryman: Nathan Bedford Forrest By Brian Steel Wills · 1998, University Press of Kansas, page 30
  3. "A Double Catastrophe in Memphis. A NEGRO MARKET AND A NEWSPAPER OFFICE IN RUINS". The New York Times. 1860-01-19. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-05-04.
  4. Alexander, Charles (1914). Battles and Victories of Allen Allensworth Lieutenant-Colonel, Retired, U.S. Army. Sherman, French. ISBN 978-0-598-48524-3.
  5. Greatheed, Samuel; Parken, Daniel; Williams, Theophilus; Price, Thomas; Conder, Josiah; Ryland, Jonathan Edwards; Hood, Edwin Paxton (1865). The Eclectic Review.
  6. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861-1867 Selected from the Holdings of the National Archivesof the United States. Cambridge University Press. 1985. p. 285. ISBN 978-0-521-13213-8.
  7. Catterall, Helen Tunnicliff; Hayden, James J.; Matteson, David Maydole (1926–1937). Judicial cases concerning American slavery and the negro. Carnegie institution of Washington publication, no. 374. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie institution of Washington. p. 558.
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