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 kn
Price, Birch & Co., "dealers in slaves" Alexandria, Virginia, photographed c. 1862
In addition to private jails, enslaved people were often held in public jails, such as a 40-year-old fugitive man named Monday who fought "like the Devil when arrested" and who was held in the jail of Walker County, Alabama (The Democrat, Huntsville, July 7, 1847)
Claimed to be Nathan Bedford Forrest's slave pen ("The Old Negro Mart" Memphis Commercial Appeal, January 27, 1907)
"Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda at New Orleans" by William Henry Brooke from The Slave States of America (1842) by James Silk Buckingham depicts a slave sale at the St. Louis Hotel, sometimes called the French Exchange
Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. As one historian put it, "Stinted allowance, imprisonment, and whipping were th
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States
…Nineteenth-century American county courthouse architecture § County jails and sheriff's residences Torture of slaves in the United States Birch, Kelly (2017). Slavery and the origins of Louisiana's prison industry, 1803–1861 (Ph.D. thesis). Australia: University of Adelaide…
"Said the wife of an ex-negro trader in Virginia to a freedmen who was skinning a live catfish, 'How can you be so cruel!'—'Why,' said the intelligent contraband, 'Dis is de way dey used to do me, and I'se gwine to get even wid somebody.'" (Waynesboro Record, Waynesboro, Penn., March 9, 1866)
This Thomas Nast illustration depicts the cat-o-nine-tails lash in use.
"Whipping with the paddle as witnessed by the author" (Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave, 1848)
Detail of the "hot paddle" from the Wilson Chinn photos taken during the American Civil War