Hidden in Plain Sight:
Centering the Domestic Slave Trade
in American Public History
By Stephanie E. Yuhl
There
is a secret history lurking in Elizabeth O’Neill
Verner’s etching Mellowed by Time (1935–1936), one of the more
enduring artistic depictions of Charleston, South Carolina. At first
glance, this image presents a lovely glimpse of one of the city’s
famous landmarks, St. Philip’s (Episcopal) Church, whose cemetery
boasts the graves of elite South Carolinians, including Senator John C.
Calhoun and Declaration of Independence signer Edward Rutledge.
A slight shift in the angle of approach to the church, however, brings
into focus a very different perspective on the history of the city.
Situated in the foreground to the right of the church steeple is a fourstory, windowed, and decidedly run-down brick building that might
seem to be just another example of the dilapidated charm that characterizes much of Historic Charleston visual culture.1 In fact, the
building is the remains of the Ryan’s Mart barracoon, or “‘Ryan’s
nigger-jail,’” the brutal ground where enslaved African Americans were
imprisoned and prepared for sale and dispersal in what was one of
the city’s robust slave-trading businesses of the antebellum period.2
Although the internal slave trade in the United States was one of
the largest forced dislocations in world history, and the antebellum
southern slave market its central commercial agent, the reality of
the domestic trade remains abstract for most Americans today. Like
the Ryan’s Mart barracoon in Verner’s image, remnants of this vital
1
Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, Prints and Impressions of Charleston (Columbia, S.C., 1939),
plate 21. Verner also produced a pastel study of this subject titled St. Philip’s over Rooftops. I am
grateful to my friend Senior Manuscript and Reference Archivist Harlan Greene at the College of
Charleston for pointing out the presence of the barracoon in Verner’s etching. I would also like
to thank Douglas Egerton and Karen Cox for commenting on early drafts of this work; Stephen
and Susan Hoffius, Sandra Fowler, and Nichole Green for their assistance during my research in
Charleston; and the reviewers for the Journal of Southern History for their precision and insights.
2
Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore, 1931), 170–73 (quotation
on 171). See also the photograph following page 172.
Ms. Yuhl is a professor of history at College of the Holy Cross.
The Journal of Southern History
Volume LXXIX, No. 3, August 2013
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history are largely hidden in plain sight on the American commemorative landscape. Few southern communities that explicitly bank on
their plantation past through historical tourism highlight properties or
venues associated with the domestic slave trade. The racialized commerce in human beings is a painful subject that is exceedingly difficult
to present in public historical form, as evidenced by the heated debate
surrounding the controversial 1994 reenactment of a slave sale in
Colonial Williamsburg.3 It is the rare community that even acknowledges the physical reminders of the local trade in its midst, and most
of these exceptional instances of public recognition have only come
about in recent years. In Virginia, for example, a slave auction block
on a street corner in Fredericksburg and a landmark plaque and small,
private museum noting the site of Alexandria’s notorious slave-trading
firm Franklin and Armfield gesture toward this past.4 Outside
Natchez, Mississippi, a marker recognizes “The Forks of the Road,”
the location of the region’s vigorous slave market that fed the expansion of King Cotton into the Old Southwest. The result of grassroots
organizing, the display consists of a series of interpretative panels
alongside the highway and is, unfortunately, easily sped past by visitors heading to view the capital of old Mississippi’s cotton-planter
elite. Likewise, in Savannah, one of the single largest auctions of slaves
in American history, known as “the Weeping Time”—a tragic tale of
436 men, women, and children who were sold at the city’s racetrack
in 1859 to pay off the debts of planter Pierce M. Butler—is similarly
reduced to a signpost. Finally, in New Orleans, the booming commercial hub of the antebellum domestic trade, where one would expect
to find multiple examples of its formal commemoration, none exist.5
3
Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at
Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, N.C., 1997); James Oliver Horton, “Slavery in American
History: An Uncomfortable Dialogue,” in James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds.,
Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York, 2006), 35–55,
esp. 49–53.
4
The slave auction block and marker stand at the corner of Charles and William Streets
in Fredericksburg. The Freedom House Museum, located in the basement of the headquarters of
the Northern Virginia Urban League in Alexandria, presents a small but quality display on the
internal slave trade and Franklin and Armfield. Unfortunately, the museum is located outside the
Old Town Alexandria historic district and is not well publicized. Therefore, as the numbers
in its guest registry bear out, the museum receives very few visitors. Its potential to serve as
a corrective to the lack of commemorative narratives of the slave trade is thus seriously
diminished. See the museum’s website, http://www.freedomhousemuseum.org.
5
On the Natchez market see http://www.forksoftheroad.net; and Jim Barnett and H. Clark
Burkett, “The Forks of the Road Slave Market at Natchez,” Mississippi History Now, http://
mshistory.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/47. On “the Weeping Time” and its commemoration,
see Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson, “Unearthing the Weeping Time: Savannah’s Ten Broeck Race
Course and 1859 Slave Sale,” Southern Spaces, February 18, 2010, http://southernspaces.org
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
595
Charleston’s Old Slave Mart Museum (OSMM), located on a portion
of the former Ryan’s Mart property, serves as a vivid physical corrective to this glaring absence. Situated in the center of a thriving tourist
town otherwise known for its impressive stock of elaborate planters’
mansions and seen as a rather romantic destination landscape, the
OSMM is a rare and preserved original structure where enslaved human
beings were regularly sold in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Through the building’s material reality and its exhibits detailing the
internal slave trade, the OSMM makes the history of American trafficking in human beings inescapable for Charleston residents and visitors.
The museum’s very existence insists on a serious remapping of mainstream historical narratives of slavery and capitalism with the auctioneer’s slave pen as the appropriate starting point. When the story of
slavery begins in the usual historic sites—the plantation, small farm, or
city mansion setting—it is too easily domesticated into a discourse
about paternalism, relationships, community, homes, households, and
intact families “white and black.” In such settings, bondage is too readily assimilated; the enslaved too easily become “servants” separated
from active enslavers; and the institution of slavery becomes construed
as an inheritance that was essentially paternalistic and organic in nature.
The necessary prehistory of the trade is generally erased or, at best,
marginalized. Historian Peter H. Wood has made clear the historical
disservice of such a discursive approach. He argues that phrases such
as “gulag” and “privately owned slave labor camps” describe more
accurately than “plantations” the degrading working and living conditions in which the enslaved found themselves in the American South.6
Allowing the plantation to be the commonplace starting point for understanding slavery similarly obscures the transactional mechanism by
which the enslaver’s power was expressed—the slave trade. Such an
approach also mystifies both the essential capitalist nature of the socalled peculiar institution and the fact that the trade in human beings
required constant and deliberate maintenance by white southerners.7
The OSMM today makes human trafficking the new point of origin
for touristic and historical narratives of race slavery and American
/2010/unearthing-weeping-time-savannahs-ten-broeck-race-course-and-1859-slave-sale. On the
New Orleans slave market, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave
Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
6
Peter H. Wood, “Slave Labor Camps in Early America: Overcoming Denial and
Discovering the Gulag,” in Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, eds., Inequality
in Early America (Hanover, N.H., 1999), 222–38 (quotations on 234).
7
See James Oakes’s pathbreaking study, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York, 1982), for the first sustained challenge to the slaveholders-as-paternalists thesis.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
596
capitalism. By highlighting that a slave was fundamentally and inescapably “a person with a price” and by underscoring how the domestic
slave trade was thoroughly embedded in elaborate economic processes, the museum challenges visitors to reconsider assumptions
about slavery’s paternalism and capitalism’s progressive, ameliorative
nature.8 Actively remembering the slave trade through museum commemoration becomes a means of promoting social justice and racial
understanding. Of course, this conception of the trade has not always
been on view at the OSMM. The story of how the contemporary
OSMM came into being and how slavery and the domestic slave trade
have been variously acknowledged and interpreted there over time—
from its founding in 1938 to its remaking during the modern civil
rights era and its recent reopening under city auspices—presents a rich
opportunity to examine the vexing and evolving relationship among
race, capitalism, and memory in American public history.
The United States’ official outlawing of the international slave
trade in 1808 and the expansion of cotton and the plantation economy
into the lower Mississippi River Valley and Texas created by the midnineteenth century a thriving domestic slave trade. The lure of profits
and demand for labor catalyzed a massive forcible shift of people from
the Atlantic seaboard inland, what historian David Brion Davis has
called an “enormous tidal wave that moved a total of a million or more
slaves from their original places of residence to the Old Southwest.”9
Between 1820 and 1860 the internal slave trade, including interstate
and local sales, constituted a significant portion of southern economic
activity, totaling “something close to half a billion dollars in property.”10 The trade also served as the vital mechanism for expanding race
slavery and ensuring its consolidation and survival as a national institution. Slavery opponents also understood that “the trade was . . . the
market of slavery’s future” and turned their energized critiques toward
the internal trade, publicizing through tracts, broadsides, and public
lectures its inherent physical, moral, and familial violence.11 It is no
understatement to claim that antebellum America’s economic, political, cultural, and spiritual concerns came into sharp focus in the slave
trader’s enterprise. In Charleston, “a major entrepôt of the trade” that
8
Johnson, Soul by Soul, 217.
David Brion Davis, “Foreword,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal
Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, 2004), ix–x (quotation on x).
10
Johnson, Soul by Soul, 6.
11
Walter Johnson, “Introduction: The Future Store,” in Johnson, ed., Chattel Principle, 1–31
(quotation on 2).
9
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
597
boasted thirty-two known active slave brokerages in the 1850s, Ryan’s
Mart was a central part of that larger historical process.12
That same tension between the visibility and invisibility of
slavery’s brutal commercial core played a role in the genesis of
Ryan’s Mart in the 1850s. For decades, the vast majority of slave sales
in Charleston had taken place in public in the open city streets, especially outside the Customs House (today called the Old Exchange
Building) at the foot of Broad Street, but also in the nearby area
bounded by Chalmers, Queen, and State Streets.13 As early as 1839,
however, Charleston attempted to bring the commercial slave trade
under stricter city control. An ordinance that year made it illegal to
“sell any slave or slaves in any of the streets, lanes, alleys, or open
courts in the city” and established a “Mart” at the city Work House as
the sole legal site for public slave auctions. The Work House Mart,
located away from the city’s commercial district and its auction
houses, opened its doors in 1840 and quickly became a business
success. Almost immediately, disgruntled local brokers seeking to tap
into the profitable trade began to fight against the notion of a single
legal site for slave sales. By early 1842, the city council had repealed
the 1839 ordinance, opening up entrepreneurial opportunities for area
businessmen to establish their own auction houses.14
Street sales, however, remained illegal in Charleston until 1849,
when the law was overturned in part to counteract the restriction’s
seeming “‘concession to those who are opposed to our peculiar institution’”—that is, the law was repealed so as to undermine the arguments of antislavery agitators that closed auctions, out of the public
view, were proof that white southerners knew the slave trade was
vicious and immoral.15 A famous image by the British artist Eyre
Crowe that appeared in the Illustrated London News in November
1856 depicted one such open-air slave auction near the Charleston
Customs House in 1853. The scene shows a bustling, well-attended
event where slaves, including a mother and child, are physically
inspected and bid upon by white speculators and enslavers, one of
whom carries a whip. The viewer is to presume that this young,
12
Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South
(Madison, Wis., 1989), 38.
13
Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South, 165–70.
14
Ordinances of the City of Charleston, from the 24th May, 1837, to the 18th March
1840 . . . (Charleston, S.C., 1840), 205 (quotations); Edmund Drago and Ralph Melnick, “The
Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina: Rediscovering the Past,” Civil War
History, 27 (June 1981), 138–54, esp. 141– 42.
15
Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 142.
598
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vulnerable family will be torn asunder by the auctioneer’s call. The
action all takes place under the branches of a palmetto, the state tree of
South Carolina, cementing for an international audience the image
and reality of slave sales as part of Charleston’s heritage.16
In the face of such effective antislavery publicity, by April 1856 the
city of Charleston had once again passed an ordinance to bring the
trade indoors, “‘to prevent [slave] sales at auctions, in the streets and
places surrounding the Custom House’” as of July 1.17 On that same
date, Thomas Ryan, a former commissioner at the city Work House,
opened his “Slave Mart” on a L-shaped piece of property stretching
from Chalmers Street north to Queen Street. Lucinda, a twenty-yearold woman, was the first enslaved person sold on the premises.18
Situated in the heart of the bustling slave-trading district, Thomas
Ryan’s auction complex was one of several firms that sold property
of all sorts, but his main venture was the sale of slaves. His place of
business featured a passageway or gallery from 6 Chalmers Street (the
site of the current Old Slave Mart Museum) that opened into a large
outdoor courtyard bordered by several buildings, including a two-story
kitchen, a morgue, and the four-story barracoon fronting Queen Street.
Historians Edmund L. Drago and Ralph Melnick have effectively
argued that under Ryan’s purview, the Chalmers section of the property most likely did not host slave auctions but functioned as an
entrance to the larger auction complex in the rear.19 However, in
February 1859 a prominent local slave broker named Ziba B. Oakes
purchased Ryan’s Mart and set up a “shed” at the Chalmers Street end
of the property specifically for auctions. The “shed” was a “substantial
structure” designed “to blend architecturally” with its neighbor to the
west, the German Fire Engine House. The new construction featured
an iron gate and a stuccoed-brick arched facade with two octagonal
pillars that still characterize the building today.20
16
“Slave Sale, Charleston, South Carolina, from a Sketch by Eyre Crowe,” Illustrated
London News, November 29, 1856, p. 555; reproduced as “A Slave-Auction at the North of the
Old Exchange, March 10, 1853,” in Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South, following p. 168.
This image has been incorporated into the principal street signage and exhibit material at the
current Old Slave Mart Museum. For an excellent treatment of the visual culture of the American
slave trade and Eyre Crowe’s works in particular, see Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for
Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago, 2011).
17
Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 142.
18
Ibid., 143; City of Charleston, “Old Slave Mart Museum: A Timeline,” http://web.archive.org
/web/20111120070453/http://www.charlestoncity.info/shared/docs/0/osmm%20timeline.pdf;
hereinafter cited as OSMM Timeline.
19
Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 147– 48.
20
Ibid., 150 –52 (quotations on 151).
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
599
Oakes left behind remarkable documents that detail the workings of
the slave trade at 6 Chalmers Street, which he publicized to buyers not
only from the Lowcountry and South Carolina interior but also from
places as far-flung as Galveston, Mobile, and Chattanooga.21 Correspondence between Oakes and his purchasing agent, A. J. McElveen,
illustrates well the essential commercial ethos of their enterprise:
“I offred Richardson $1350 for his two negros,” McElveen wrote in
1856. “[H]e Refused to take it. the fellow is Rather light. he weighs
121 lbs, but Good teeth & not whiped[.] the little Girl he was offrd
$475[.] I thought the boy worth a bout $850 and at that price they
would not Sell for cost.”22 Working primarily in the Sumter area,
about one hundred miles northwest of Charleston, McElveen bought
stock for the Chalmers Street business—what historian Michael
Tadman has estimated “accounted for at least several dozen slaves
per year.”23 Once acquired and forcibly transported to Oakes’s mart,
slaves were imprisoned in the barracoon and waited in terror as they
contemplated their fate—being transported far from their home communities and separated from their families. Slaves were fed from the
kitchen, prepared for sale, stripped, inspected, and eventually sold at
auction to the highest bidder. The event was not simply registered by
an abstract mark in a ledger book. Rather, its violent toll was inflicted
on the very real bodies and psyches of human beings. From beginning
to end, the process linked fiercely racist dehumanization to the quest
for profit in a violent and complementary relationship.
Edmund L. Drago, the editor of Oakes’s correspondence, has characterized the traders behind this enterprise as “hard-headed businessmen”
who were interested in capitalist pursuits and infrastructural improvements and who served as early proponents of “New South” modernization before a “New South” existed.24 In other words, the slave brokers
understood that their work was essential in stoking the southern and
national economy; their motives were not paternalistic but market- and
profit-driven. Southern planters, keen on emphasizing the paternalism
of their institution, occupied an awkward position as buyers and sellers
in relation to these traders and the trade. As Adam Rothman has demonstrated, planters marshaled formidable legal, religious, and political
21
Author’s interview with Nichole Green, May 5, 2009, Charleston, South Carolina; digital
audio recording in author’s possession.
22
A. J. McElveen to Z. B. Oakes, July 10, 1856, in Edmund L. Drago, ed., Broke by the War:
Letters of a Slave Trader (Columbia, S.C., 1991), 123.
23
Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 37–38 (quotation on 38).
24
Drago, ed., Broke by the War, 8–9.
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forces in the antebellum period to “exorcise the commercial spirit from
the master-slave relation” and thus make distinctions between their
slave ownership and the slave trade.25 Nonetheless, men like Oakes
enjoyed a vital partnership with the planter class; some brokers joined
its ranks, and others enjoyed respect and substantial status in their
communities.26 As one of the “wealthier men” in Charleston in 1860,
for example, Oakes was hardly a shunned outsider. He was a member of
numerous fraternal organizations as well as a vestryman in the Unitarian
Church. Immediately following the Civil War, he was elected city
alderman (1865–1868), and his death in 1871 made front-page news.27
Until his final slave auction in November 1863, Z. B. Oakes and his
mart were a powerful part of the commercial lifeblood of Charleston.28
In February 1865, after Confederate forces had evacuated Charleston
following 587 days of relentless bombardment, a northern journalist
named Charles Carleton Coffin arrived in the beleaguered city.29
Writing for the Boston Daily Journal, Coffin regaled his audience
with a personal dispatch dated February 24 that detailed the defeat of
the notorious slave trade. After locating the slave-trading district “in a
reputable quarter” on Chalmers Street, Coffin opened the “large iron
gate” of a building marked “MART”—Z. B. Oakes’s auction site—and
entered through the arched passageway and hall built by Oakes in 1859
for slave sales. Together with a freedman, Coffin broke down the door
to the larger auction complex, revealing the walled-in yard with “a fourstory brick building, with grated windows and iron doors,—a prison.”
In vivid detail Coffin described for his readers the despair conveyed by
the site: “A small room adjoining the hall was the place where women
were subjected to the lascivious gaze of brutal men. There were the
steps, up which thousands of men, women, and children had walked to
their places on the table, to be knocked off to the highest bidder.”30
25
Adam Rothman, “The Domestication of the Slave Trade in the United States,” in Johnson,
ed., Chattel Principle, 32–54 (quotation on 46).
26
For example, slave trader Isaac Franklin, of the firm Franklin and Armfield, was able to use
the sizable assets gained from the trade to catapult up Tennessee society, accumulating slaves for
his plantations and marrying into a prominent family. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 93–94.
27
Drago, ed., Broke by the War, 5–11 (quotation on 8).
28
OSMM Timeline.
29
Walter J. Fraser Jr., Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia,
S.C., 1989), 264–69.
30
Charles Carleton Coffin, Four Years of Fighting: A Volume of Personal Observation with
the Army and Navy, from the First Battle of Bull Run to the Fall of Richmond (Boston, 1866),
473–74 (first, second, and third quotations on 473; fourth and fifth quotations on 474). See
also “Charles Carleton Coffin, Boston Daily Journal, c 1865,” http://web.archive.org/web
/20101214055615/http://charleston-sc.gov/shared/docs/7/old_slave_mart_charles_coffin_article.pdf;
and Drago, ed., Broke by the War, 2.
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
601
Five days after President Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural
address, called for Americans “to bind up the nation’s wounds,” Coffin
was back in Boston, presenting to the Ward Eleven Freedmen’s Aid
Society the mart’s steps and other artifacts of the Charleston slave trade
that he had salvaged from the site. Famed abolitionist William Lloyd
Garrison gave a speech from atop the mart steps, and a letter from poet
John Greenleaf Whittier was read to the rejoicing crowd: “Let these
infernal hieroglyphics and symbols of the worship of Anti-Christ be
preserved. Lay them side by side with the racks of the Inquisition and
the keys of the Bastille. Let them tell the generations to come of that
most hideous form of human depravity.”31 By March 1865, as the
bloody Civil War dragged toward its conclusion, some Americans
were already underscoring the imperative not to forget but to enshrine
the domestic slave trade as a vital corrective to the annals of American
history. It took nearly a century and a half for Charleston to heed
Whittier’s call to remember and for Oakes’s former auction shed to
be known once more for its particular slave-trading past.
From the 1870s through 1916, the building at 6 Chalmers Street
served as a rather run-down residential tenement. After several years’
sitting vacant, the property housed the Earl Fischer Auto Repair Company in 1927.32 Yet as early as 1924, the same year Mayor Thomas P.
Stoney hitched the struggling city’s economic future to heritage tourism by declaring Charleston “America’s Most Historic City,” at least
one local recognized the slave mart’s potential as a tourist draw.33
Charleston realtor Sidney S. Riggs was the son of John S. Riggs Jr., a
prominent antebellum broker and slave trader and a colleague of Ziba
Oakes’s. In a letter to historian Frederic Bancroft, who had been in
Charleston researching what was to become his 1931 classic, SlaveTrading in the Old South, the entrepreneur Riggs asked for advice:
“‘I am thinking of putting the Old Slave Mart in such shape that visitors
would be able to get some kind of idea of how it looked in former
days.’ . . . ‘I would welcome any suggestions from you as to this.’”34
Fourteen years later an Ohio-born travel writer named Miriam B.
Wilson purchased the small lot and structure at 6 Chalmers Street
31
Boston Daily Journal, March 10, 1865, quoted in Drago, ed., Broke by the War, 3.
Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 152–54;
OSMM Timeline.
33
Thomas P. Stoney, “Mayor Stoney’s Annual Address,” Year Book, City of Charleston,
South Carolina (Charleston, S.C., 1924), liv.
34
S. S. Riggs to Frederic Bancroft, July 24, 1924, quoted in Drago, ed., Broke by the War,
12 (quotations), 29n23.
32
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and opened to the public the first incarnation of the Old Slave
Mart Museum.35
Despite Wilson’s insistence that the site had been associated with
the internal American slave trade, many locals disparaged her claim.
Of course, rendering the domestic slave trade invisible was a central
aspect of the postbellum white South’s reconstruction of its history
and its promotion of an apologist’s view of slavery. Tourist literature
from early-twentieth-century Charleston was complicit in this process
as it repeatedly denied the existence of slave markets in the city.
C. Irvine Walker’s 1919 Guide to Charleston, S.C. downplayed the
practice of slave sales, describing them as uncommon though “necessary from time to time.” Tourists were told that, for the most part,
slaves were “passed by inheritance from father to son.” Walker
frankly attributed claims that the property on Chalmers Street was the
“Old Slave Market, so-called,” to that “same partisan history which
stigmatizes the institution of slavery.”36 A headline in 1930 in the
Charleston News and Courier articulated further the local position:
“Building at 6 Chalmers Street Has Become Subject of Legend
in City.” Despite local archives filled with antebellum documents,
such as laws regulating the slave trade within the city and local
newspaper slave auction notices, the News and Courier reporter erroneously argued that the site could not have been a slave mart because
there was never “sufficient buying and selling of slaves in the city to
have warranted the establishment of any institution for the purpose.”37
Indeed, a 1931 tourist and shopping guide to Charleston that was
distributed free to visitors by the city, the chamber of commerce, and
the board of trade boasted of its “complete and reliable information”
yet deftly avoided any mention of the slave mart. Instead, Chalmers
Street was noted to be of interest simply for “its old world atmosphere
that bring[s] European towns to mind. Paved with ancient cobblestones, and faced with many historic buildings.”38 An interesting
35
OSMM Timeline; Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South
Carolina,” 138–39, 154. Occasionally, the Old Slave Mart Museum’s beginnings are cited as
1937, the year Miriam Wilson began restoring the property, but the official opening occurred on
February 21, 1938. See Judith Wragg Chase Scrapbook, pp. 5, 6, and 11, Old Slave Mart Museum
and Library Collection (Acacia Collection, Savannah, Ga.); hereinafter cited as Chase Scrapbook.
36
C. Irvine Walker, Guide to Charleston, S.C., with a Brief History of the City and a Map
Thereof (Charleston, S.C., 1919), 70–71 (first, second, and third quotations on 70; fourth quotation on
71). See also Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 138–39.
37
“Do You Know Your Charleston? Old Slave Market: Building at 6 Chalmers Has Become
Subject of Legend in City,” Charleston (S.C.) News and Courier, December 29, 1930, p. 10.
38
Charleston, South Carolina, “America’s Most Historic City,” February 1931, Tourism
Pamphlets (Charleston Museum Archives, Charleston, S.C.).
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
603
exception to this general pattern was a map of Historic Charleston
published in National Geographic Magazine—notably, one year after
Wilson opened her museum—that marked (without commentary) the
site of the “Old Slave Market,” among a few dozen other places of
interest.39 For the most part, however, the local controversy over the
slave mart’s status persisted. Thomas Petigru Lesesne reiterated local
resistance in his 1939 guidebook, Landmarks of Charleston, stating
that the “old Slave Market” on Chalmers Street was a “myth [that] has
been exploded repeatedly.”40 To perpetuate the idealized notion that
enslaved African Americans in Charleston were, as Walker put it, “the
best cared for peasantry the world has ever seen,” it was necessary to
erase the institution’s machinery—the long-distance slave trade—
from the public story and civic landscape.41
This self-willed historical amnesia characterized much of Charleston’s
white cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s. In these years elite
Charlestonians, many of whom were artists, writers, and architects, took
part in a national impulse to celebrate the local and regional in America.
They formed a vibrant network of organizations dedicated to articulating
a selective view of their city’s history through literature, paintings, etchings, and the preservation of historic buildings and African American
Gullah spirituals. For the traveling public, Charleston became known as
the site of an endangered aristocratic American past, characterized by
harmonious racial relations and genteel agrarian sensibilities. From these
collective efforts emerged the nation’s first historic zoning ordinance,
passed in October 1931, and the consumable and lucrative tourist entity
known as Historic Charleston.42
Miriam Wilson undertook the renovation and opening of the Old
Slave Mart Museum at 6 Chalmers Street as part of this larger cultural
movement that both commercialized and romanticized Charleston’s
heritage. The forty-one-year-old, unmarried white midwesterner arrived
in Charleston in 1920, seeking a few weeks’ convalescence with
friends. She encountered a sleepy and dilapidated town enamored
with its own past that appealed to Wilson’s deep interest in history,
39
DuBose Heyward, “Charleston: Where Mellow Past and Present Meet,” National
Geographic Magazine, 75 (March 1939), 273–304 (map on 279).
40
Thomas Petigru Lesesne, Landmarks of Charleston, Including Description of an Incomparable Stroll (Richmond, 1939), 64 (quotations). See also Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart
Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 139.
41
Walker, Guide to Charleston, S.C., 70 (quotation); Lesesne, Landmarks of Charleston, 64.
See also Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 138–39.
42
See Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston
(Chapel Hill, 2005).
604
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
especially the history of slavery (her Virginian grandfather had allegedly left that state and moved to Ohio in opposition to slavery). And
yet, in Charleston Wilson claimed to have “found so few answers to
her many questions about this aspect of history, [that she] decided to
extend her visit in order to answer them for herself.” Wilson resigned
her position in Toledo, Ohio, as head of the Women’s Division of the
United States Employment Service and settled in Charleston, where
she lived until her death in 1959.43 To support herself, Wilson started
to research local history and write. In 1930 she self-published Street
Strolls Around Charleston, South Carolina, a walking guide to the city
that mentioned specifically the sale of slaves on Chalmers Street
and that became so popular with the city’s increasing numbers of
tourists that it enjoyed eight editions in Wilson’s lifetime. In the
mid-1920s the business-minded Wilson opened Colonial Belle
Goodies, a shop in the heart of what would become the Historic
District that specialized in Lowcountry candies and snacks. Using
historical recipes gleaned from her research in newspapers and
archives, Wilson concocted “traditional” treats such as peach leather,
benne wafers, and so-called monkey meat cakes to cater to the city’s
growing tourist trade. As a rather modern “traditional” venture,
Colonial Belle Goodies even offered gifts by mail order.44 Wilson’s
interest in opening the slave mart site as a historic property was rooted
in this same entrepreneurial spirit. According to Judith Wragg Chase,
the OSMM’s second curator and co-owner, Wilson “noticed that
tourists would often come to stand and stare at the ‘Old Slave Market’
on Chalmers Street.” Finally in early 1938 Wilson purchased the property and opened her private museum to display historical handicrafts,
allegedly made by slaves, for paying visitors.45
The two decades in which Miriam Wilson founded and developed
the Old Slave Mart Museum were characterized by struggle: first, to
create the museum collection; second, to alert locals and visitors of the
site’s former history; and finally, to promote her particular perspectives
43
Judith Wragg Chase, “Miriam Bellangee Wilson—Yankee Doodle Dandy: Pioneer
Preservationist of Charleston History,” Preservation Progress, 8 (1963), 7–10 (quotation on 7).
A later version of this article, labeled “Miriam Bellangee Wilson—Founder Old Slave Mart
Museum,” 1967, can be found in Old Slave Mart Museum Papers (Old Slave Mart Museum,
Charleston, S.C.); hereinafter cited as OSMM Papers.
44
Chase, “Miriam Bellangee Wilson,” 8; Miriam Bellangee Wilson, Street Strolls Around
Charleston, South Carolina, “America’s Most Historic City”: Giving the History, Legends,
Traditions (Charleston, S.C., 1930), 42; “Miss Miriam B. Wilson, Founder of Museum, Dies,”
Charleston News and Courier, July 8, 1959, p. 9A; “News of Food: Old Slave Market in Charleston,
S.C., Turned into Shop for Making Delicacies,” New York Times, September 6, 1950, p. 33.
45
Chase, “Miriam Bellangee Wilson,” 8.
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
605
Figure 1. A 1942 photograph of the exterior of Miriam Wilson’s Old Slave Mart
Museum, featuring two young African American children, provides a sense of the site’s
“Dickensian” and dilapidated air. Courtesy of the Charleston Museum, Charleston,
South Carolina.
on the nature of slavery and African American progress. On the first
count, Wilson spent the hot summer months when tourist traffic was
slow in Charleston traveling throughout the South conducting research
about slavery in area archives. During her visits to cities such as
Knoxville, Lynchburg, Chapel Hill, and New Orleans, Wilson energetically promoted the OSMM through local newspaper stories. She also
solicited the loan of slave-made artifacts for the museum, such as mortar
and pestles, rice fanning baskets, furniture, bricks, tools, quilts, and
leather and copper work. As one article put it, “In her old jalopy she
visited several states a year, publicizing her search. Ex-slaves and former slave holders were still alive then and articles could be verified as
being slave-made.” 46 Wilson exhibited these objects on the second floor
of the 6 Chalmers Street property, alongside several alleged slave “interview stalls” she had restored.47 Wilson relocated her confection shop to
the first floor, rebranding the delicacies as made from “slave recipes.” 48
46
Chase Scrapbook, p. 6. See also Chase, “Miriam Bellangee Wilson,” 9–10.
Martha Carson, “Through Dedicated Friendship: A Life’s Work Still Lives,” Charleston
(S.C.) Evening Post, March 1, 1963, clipping in Chase Scrapbook, p. 26.
48
Chase Scrapbook, p. 7. Wilson sold her candy business in 1949 to Archibald Furtwangler,
who continued to operate it out of the first floor of the property. “News of Food,” New York
Times, September 6, 1950, p. 33.
47
606
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
From the beginning, Wilson’s one-woman venture, which she claimed
attracted 10,000 to 20,000 visitors a year, had at least a partial profit
motive in mind.49
Another of Wilson’s major preoccupations was dispelling the
shadow of doubt that lingered over the site’s historical identity. Wilson
constantly reiterated the legitimacy of her assertion that 6 Chalmers was
associated with the domestic slave trade. She authored a museum pamphlet that not only underscored the research behind her claim, but also
was careful to situate the sale of slaves alongside that of other antebellum property: “Old newspaper files, a hand bill of 1852, and other
sources established the fact that this building was used not only as a
Slave Mart but also where Real Estate, Household Goods, and other
auctions were held.”50
Wilson had reason to be defensive as local residents and civic
leaders regularly opposed or undercut her position, privately and publicly. According to Judith Wragg Chase, “Some of these [detractors]
spread tales about [Wilson] which were as untrue as they were unfair.”
One rumor that enjoyed particular traction was that this “‘Yankee’
lady . . . . used to go out and buy raw meat from a butcher shop so
that she could smear the blood on the floor and show it to the tourists
as the ‘bloo[d] of the slaves’!”51 City government also pushed back
against Wilson. In reviewing a 1940 Gray Line bus tour itinerary, for
example, one representative of the Historical Commission of Charleston,
the same body that sponsored the placement of a historical marker on
the Queen Street barracoon sometime around the late 1930s, took issue
with how Wilson’s “slave mart” claim was being repeated by tour
guides: “Incidentally, is it not wrong to assert that that Chalmers Street
building was a slave market? I know it’s always done, but I have been
told it was never so used.”52 Tension on this matter persisted for years.
In a 1952 training manual for tour guides, the commission admitted that
slave sales took place in the city, and at Ryan’s Mart, but objected to the
singularity implied by the definitive article in the name “The Old Slave
49
Lib Wiley, “Operator of Charleston’s Slave [Mart] Here Seeking Hand-Made Items,”
undated, unidentified Lynchburg, Virginia, newspaper clipping, in Chase Scrapbook, p. 6; Theodore
Carlisle Landsmark, “‘Haunting Echoes’: Histories and Exhibition Strategies for Collecting
Nineteenth-Century African American Crafts” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1999), 209.
50
Miriam Bellangee Wilson, “Foreword,” Old Slave Mart Museum brochure, in Chase
Scrapbook, p. 11.
51
Chase, “Miriam Bellangee Wilson,” 7 (first quotation), 9 (second quotation).
52
Minutes, January 25, 1940, Box 2, Records of the Historical Commission of Charleston,
1933–1956, Charleston Archive (South Carolina Room, Charleston County Public Library,
Charleston, S.C.). I am grateful to Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle for bringing this document
to my attention.
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
607
Mart” and to its “spectacular signs”: “To call it the ‘Slave Mart’ is
inaccurate and misleading because that status is a half-truth. Our greatest
historians and recognized authorities on recorded history are unanimously agreed that Charleston NEVER had a slave market.” The commission’s manual was quick to point out that “New Orleans had one, but
Charleston never did,” lest tourists somehow get the wrong idea about
the allegedly less capitalistic and exploitative nature of slavery in
Charleston. Clearly, the commissioners seemed unaware of how their
assertion that “Ryan’s Mart was merely another slave broker’s office,
not the only one, in Charleston”—where human beings were sold alongside plows and other property—actually highlighted the pervasive
normalization of the chattel principle in Charleston.53
Even Wilson’s death in July 1959 did not put an end to the controversy surrounding the Old Slave Mart Museum. Just one month later,
in an article discussing Wilson’s will, the Charleston News and
Courier declared, “Actually there is no record of the building being a
general slave market. History has never verified such a story.”54
Even though Wilson called her enterprise the “Old Slave Mart
Museum,” words that she had painted in capital letters over the arched
entrance sometime in the 1950s and that at last did not include the
tricky definite article from its previous title, the site did very little to
expose slavery’s brutal and oppressive history.55 Wilson was no racial
radical; rather, she was sympathetic to the apologists’ view of slavery
as a tragic burden on the South: “When I went to Charleston,” Wilson
once lamented to a Lynchburg reporter, “I was just as ignorant as any
other Northerner.”56 Her years in Charleston converted her to a new
way of seeing the past. In a lecture that she presented regularly to
OSMM visitors, Wilson well summed up her perspective: the South
was not to blame for slavery because “slavery has existed in all
countries among all races since the beginning of time”; slavery
“involved a hard trying life for master and mistress”; and “at best
slavery was not a very sound economical set-up.”57 Following the
53
“Material Used for Class for Guides,” April 18, 1952, Historical Commission of
Charleston (Charleston Museum Archives).
54
Bartley I. Limehouse, “Charleston’s Old Slave Mart Bequeathed to Museum Here,”
Charleston News and Courier, August 5, 1959.
55
Postcards of the Old Slave Mart Museum, in Chase Scrapbook, p. 13.
56
Wiley, “Operator of Charleston’s Slave [Mart] Here Seeking Hand-Made Items,” in Chase
Scrapbook, p. 6.
57 Miriam Bellangee Wilson, Slave Days: Condensed from Factual Information (Charleston, S.C.,
1946), 3 (first quotation), 6 (second and third quotations), available in Folder 2, Box 1, Series 1, Old
Slave Mart Museum Collection (Avery Research Center, College of Charleston, Charleston, S.C.).
A revised and expanded edition of this pamphlet was published in 1948.
608
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
dominant historical interpretation of her day, popularized by Yale
University historian Ulrich B. Phillips, whom she quoted to tourists,
Wilson characterized master-slave relationships as benevolent: “The
Southerner has never let the Negro suffer.”58 She contended that “the
very fact that the masters of plantations left their wives and children in
the care of loyal and trusted servants, while they went to the War
Between the States, proves that the Negroes as a whole were not as
badly treated as many writers imply.”59 Ironically, for her paying
customers Wilson even downplayed the internal slave trade. She conceded that blacks were treated poorly during the transatlantic Middle
Passage and “by the itinerant slave traders who bought from the ship’s
master,” but she absolved planters of complicity in this dehumanizing
transactional process. Instead, Wilson perpetuated the paternalistic
myths that “in some sections of the South there was very little speculating in slaves” and that when sales did take place, they were most
often “to settle estates.” “Research shows that in many sections it
was a matter of pride with the planters never to buy or sell a slave,”
she concluded.60
Thus, Wilson’s OSMM did not challenge prevailing racist interpretations of slavery, which in turn shaped the Jim Crow South in which
she operated, but was simply dedicated to “Saving Negro Crafts
of Ante-Bellum Days.”61 Nonetheless, this choice was politically
charged. Instead of highlighting slavery as exploitative and violent,
Wilson’s displays of utilitarian objects suggested how slavery had
benefited Africans, as contact with Europeans had provided blacks
with useful craftsmanship and labor skills. For Wilson, these handicrafts seemed a kind of proof that “the Negro Race” had merit and
would continue to progress as Americans, but only in time. In fact, to
promote such progress and to revive pride in the slave past, Wilson
sought in 1950 to purchase the old Ryan’s Mart barracoon on Queen
Street, then being occupied as a black tenement, to create “‘a craft
center for Negroes,’” but her efforts were unsuccessful.62 Undaunted,
Wilson continued to promote her racial position through her work
at the OSMM, in particular by praising in her tours the leadership
58
Wilson, Slave Days, 13 (quotation). See Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery:
A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Re´gime (New York, 1918), esp. 328–29.
59
Wilson, Slave Days, 10.
60
Ibid., 9.
61
Postcard, in Chase Scrapbook, p. 10.
62
Chase, “Miriam Bellangee Wilson,” 10 (first quotation); Wilson, Slave Days, “Foreword”
and p. 13; Landsmark, “‘Haunting Echoes,’” 209–11 (second quotation on 210).
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
609
of Booker T. Washington and his “sane, sound, solid” teachings that
promoted the slow evolution of black self-sufficiency and his call for
“the two races to walk side by side but not to mingle.” In the end, like
the demolition of the old Ryan’s Mart barracoon on Queen Street in
1951, Wilson’s paternalistic packaging of the Old Slave Mart Museum
served to remove from sight at 6 Chalmers Street the ugly historical
meaning of race slavery and inhumane capitalism.63
When Miriam Wilson died in 1959, the future of the Old Slave
Mart Museum was uncertain. Stipulating that 6 Chalmers Street continue to operate as the OSMM, Wilson’s will bequeathed the property
to the Charleston Museum, which refused the gift. It then moved to
Wilson’s residual heir, the Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Luke
and St. Paul, which accepted the property but had no interest in
running the museum, whose doors closed temporarily. Dismayed at
this state of affairs, Wilson’s friend and estate executor, Louise Alston
Wragg Graves, convinced her sister, Judith Wragg Chase, to join her
in saving the museum. While these two white women were descendants of the prominent old-line Charleston family after which the
city’s Mazyck-Wraggborough district was named, neither woman
could call herself a Charlestonian. Graves was born in Toms River,
New Jersey, in 1902, and Chase in Augusta, Georgia, in 1907. Both
had been educated at the Women’s Art School at Cooper Union, and
Chase later completed her degree at Syracuse University. Graves and
Chase both married career military men and lived in various parts of
the country, until they reconnected with their family history by
relocating to Charleston in 1945 and 1960, respectively.64
By opting to take over the OSMM in 1960, Graves and Chase
joined a long line of women, including artists Elizabeth O’Neill
Verner and Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and historic preservation
pioneer Susan Pringle Frost, who had for decades dedicated themselves to safeguarding and interpreting Charleston’s history. For the
most part, these cultural producers were able to build sustaining
professional careers based on celebrating a traditional elite white
perspective of the place and its people, black and white. At the
OSMM, the sisters’ mission to demonstrate “the contributions made by
millions of anonymous slaves to our American culture” was decidedly
63
Wilson, Slave Days, 13 (quotations); OSMM Timeline.
Limehouse, “Charleston’s Old Slave Mart Bequeathed to Museum Here”; “Artist, Author
Judith Chase Dies,” Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier, March 30, 1995, p. 18A; “Old Slave
Mart Museum Owner Louise Graves Dies,” Charleston Post and Courier, November 13, 1994,
p. 2B; Landsmark, “‘Haunting Echoes,’” 218–19, 225–26.
64
610
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
idiosyncratic.65 It constituted a significant departure from the artistic and
historic preservation work thriving elsewhere in the city, as did Chase’s
occasional outreach to members of the local black community.66
Given the precariousness of the museum’s position in the city, the
stability and financial solvency of the institution were never assured.
In 1963, to oversee and protect the perpetually struggling OSMM, the
sisters chartered the Miriam B. Wilson Foundation as a 501(c)(3) taxexempt, nonprofit educational organization.67 Even though the foundation eventually had a racially integrated board of directors and
Chase had been a founding officer of Charleston’s first integrated
branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, she recalled that
“from 1960 to 1970, during the height of the civil rights movement,
support was scarce,” describing the “outright opposition from both
blacks and whites who resented being reminded of slavery.”68 “The
early 1960s was a bad time to raise money for black heritage projects,” Chase told a local reporter in 1978. “What money was available
was all going for civil rights. In addition, both blacks and whites alike
wanted to sweep the past under the rug and forget slavery had ever
existed in America.” 69 That the museum survived during these years
is remarkable and due entirely to Graves and Chase’s curious dedication. In 1964, while civil rights activists throughout the South were
confronting racism through direct action, such as voter registration
drives, the sisters pooled their money to purchase the OSMM property
and thereafter poured their energy into celebrating historical black
artisanship at their tiny and, it is clear from the records, marginalized
museum. Admission receipts that year totaled a modest $1,200, which,
at twenty-five cents a ticket, meant that only 4,800 persons visited the
struggling Old Slave Mart Museum.70
For nearly thirty years, Graves served as museum director, but
the real force behind this phase of the OSMM’s history was Chase.
65
Yuhl, Golden Haze of Memory; Judith Wragg Chase, “Comprehensive Information relating
to History, Purpose, and Operation of the Old Slave Mart Museum & Library, 1937 through
1985,” p. 33 (quotation), Miriam B. Wilson Foundation Correspondence, Sandra N. Fowler
Papers (Avery Research Center). See also Christine Randall, “Curator Catalogs Collection,”
Charleston News and Courier, November 1, 1978, p. 3B.
66
Chase, “Comprehensive Information,” 39, 49–50.
67
“Museum Foundation Is Formed,” Charleston News and Courier, May 17, 1963, p. 7D.
See also Chase, “Comprehensive Information,” 34.
68
Chase, “Comprehensive Information,” 34. See also Randall, “Curator Catalogs Collection,” 3B.
69
Randall, “Curator Catalogs Collection,” 3B.
70
Judith Wragg Chase, “History and Preservation Efforts, Old Slave Mart Museum and
Library,” January 1, 1987, OSMM Papers.
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
611
Calling herself both “registrar and curator of collections” and “education director,” Chase expressed her academic and artistic ambitions
through the museum and aspired to professionalize its operations. A
lecturer and author who considered herself a serious historian and art
historian of American slavery and Africa, Chase elevated the
museum’s profile and energetically publicized the OSMM’s value for
and use by scholars, cultural organizations, and national and international media.71 Under her leadership the OSMM joined the American
Association of Museums, loaned textiles to the Smithsonian Institution, and won several local museum awards and development grants.
In the early 1970s, for example, the OSMM was awarded $45,000
from the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
to support the cataloging of the OSMM collection and growing
library, the bulk of which Chase housed in the attic of her Sullivan’s
Island home.72 Chase spearheaded efforts to have the 6 Chalmers
Street property designated a national landmark, and in 1975 it was
placed on the National Register of Historic Places, putting to rest once
and for all any question of the site’s association with the slave trade.
Miriam Wilson would have been delighted.73 Chase also expanded the
museum’s holdings and mission to include her particular passion—art
and objects from Africa—and to underscore the connections between
American blacks and their ancestors. She even traveled to Senegal in
1966, a trip she claimed was funded in part by members of the local
black community, to attend the first “World Festival of Negro Arts”
and procure items for the museum.74
Extant documentation and recollections paint a complicated picture
of Judith Wragg Chase. On the one hand, she preserved African
American cultural objects to counteract what she called “‘The Myth
of the Negro Past’—the concept that blacks have no past worth
71
For examples, see Chase Scrapbook, p. 4; and Correspondence File, Old Slave Mart
Museum and Library Collection (Acacia Collection).
72
H. Jane Shealy, “Smithsonian Interested in Slave Mart Bedcovers,” Charleston News and
Courier, June 3, 1985, p. 2; V. Olivia Smashum, “Foundation Wins Grant for Black Culture
Project,” Charleston News and Courier, August 8, 1975, p. 3; Randall, “Curator Catalogs
Collection,” 3B; [Judith Wragg Chase], Catalog of the Old Slave Mart Museum and Library
(2 vols.; Boston, 1978).
73
Bobby Isaac, “Wilson Foundation Honored,” Charleston News and Courier, May 22, 1975,
p. 11B; Drago and Melnick, “Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina,” 143–44, 154.
See also National Register of Historic Places #75001694, National Park Service; and “National
Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form: Old Slave Mart,” April 1, 1975, available online at http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/charleston/S10817710090/index.htm.
74
Mary Wideman, “Searching Africa for Art,” Charleston News and Courier, February 24,
1967, p. 2B.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
612
knowing.”75 She encouraged school groups, especially from black
schools, to visit the museum to learn their history, and she sponsored
an art contest for black children. Their art was exhibited at the
museum and was judged by volunteers from an area black sorority,
Zeta Phi Beta.76 On the other hand, throughout her nearly three
decades with the OSMM, which coincided with major national and
local struggles for racial justice, Chase kept out of the political fray.
Even in 1969, when striking African American hospital workers
protesting racist employment practices picketed through Charleston
and “paused symbolically” before the OSMM (to underscore the
connection between oppressions past and present), Chase remained
silent.77 Sandra Fowler, Wilson Foundation board president for over
ten years, shed some light on this seeming contradiction, describing
Chase as “a very formidable lady” who was also an “elitist.” While she
genuinely admired and worked to promote black art and culture,
Chase, according to Fowler, was “not interested in civil rights. . . . She
did not have personal relationships with blacks but she had a professional viewpoint about them”—which Fowler went on to describe as
“proprietary.”78 Chase’s position seemed at once progressive, as seen
in her interest in Africa, and paternalistic, as seen in her belief that
she had a particular obligation to educate blacks about their own
history. “I was surprised,” she told a local reporter in 1978, “to find
that many of them [blacks] knew very little about their African
heritage.” Her work at the OSMM and her writings were a means
to both “remedy” this situation and promote her own professional
status.79 In her 1971 book Afro-American Art and Craft, for example, Chase praised young African American artists’ “[w]illingness to
accept racial identification,” while encouraging her readers to remember, “We may not have kept pace with one another in the past, but
in spite of our regular failures, our regular missteps, we must keep
moving forward together.”80 Characterizing Chase’s racial sensibility
as “rather schizophrenic,” Fowler explained, “There was a lot of that
in Charleston and all over the country. This was the norm really.”81
75
Chase, “Comprehensive Information,” 32.
Ibid., 39.
77
Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital
Workers’ Union, Local 1199 (Urbana, 1989), 129–58 (quotation on 141).
78
Author’s interview with Sandra Fowler, May 8, 2009, Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina;
digital audio recording in author’s possession.
79
Randall, “Curator Catalogs Collection,” 3B.
80
Judith Wragg Chase, Afro-American Art and Craft (New York, 1971), 136.
81
Fowler interview.
76
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
613
Given Chase’s scholarly pretensions and more expansive interests,
a visitor to the OSMM in the 1970s might have expected to find a
museum quite unlike the one Wilson developed. In reality, other than a
new emphasis on Africanisms through the inclusion of African art and
artifacts, the barely two-thousand-square-foot exhibition space was
strikingly similar to Wilson’s. An elaborate gift shop still occupied the
entire first floor, but now global handicrafts were displayed for sale
among the books, benne wafers, sea grass baskets, and other souvenir
trinkets.82 The “rickety . . . and dangerous” stairs led to the second-floor
gallery, where Chase, like Wilson before her, would hold forth on a
broad sweep of African American history among the many real and
alleged “slave-made” artifacts that had been gathered by Wilson.83
Although Graves and Chase had redecorated and “rearranged Miss
Wilson’s somewhat haphazard exhibits,” the objects were still displayed
in the homemade cases built by Wilson in the 1930s.84 Chase defended
this “unorthodox” and even nostalgic method of display in a federal
grant application: “We have found that our hand made cases and
handlettered labels are effective teaching tools. The visitors say they
give an ‘old-fashioned’ look to the museum and help make them feel
they have been transported to the slavery period, more surely than
would be the case in a modernized museum.”85 Contemporary newspaper photographs of the OSMM from the 1960s through the 1980s
reveal a cramped and dark interior space, crowded with objects, documents, and memorabilia displayed in a rather random fashion.86 Sandra
Fowler described the old museum as being “like a curiosity shop. It was
Dickensian. The displays were kind of hacked together in a quaint way,
but things weren’t on display in any meaningful way.”87
In the mid-1970s the aging sisters, who were concerned about their
ability to maintain the constantly struggling museum, publicized their
desire to sell the collection. They approached the Smithsonian at several
points over the following decade, but the parties could not come to a
sale agreement.88 Chase also discussed possible collaborations with area
82
Gift shop photographs and notes, in Chase Scrapbook, pp. 18, 20.
Fowler interview.
Chase Scrapbook, p. 14 (quotation); Fowler interview.
85
Chase, “Comprehensive Information,” unnumbered page.
86
Newspaper clippings, “6 Chalmers” File (South Carolina Room, Charleston County
Public Library).
87
Fowler interview.
88
Tom E. Terrill, University of South Carolina, to William Sheele, South Carolina Museum
Commission, February 3, 1976, Old Slave Mart Museum and Library Collection (Acacia
Collection); Gary B. Kulik, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
to Judith Wragg Chase, December 16, 1985, OSMM Papers.
83
84
614
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
institutions, including South Carolina State College and the University
of South Carolina in Columbia, to no avail. In 1979 the College of
Charleston expressed potential interest and hired cultural anthropologist
John Michael Vlach to evaluate the museum’s slave-related American
items. His assessment offers a glimpse into the OSMM under Chase’s
command. After dismissing the African art as “adequate” but not
“major” (a point Judith Chase would have argued vehemently against),
Vlach confirmed that the museum collection contained some very valuable objects that illustrated Lowcountry slave life, especially in the
areas of basketry, textiles, and metalwork, but he determined “that the
full potential of the museum has never been realized. This is obvious to
all concerned.” Vlach argued that the historical information (on topics
spanning from Africa before European contact through the Civil War)
displayed in the tiny exhibit space was too “encompassing” in scope and
supported by “not . . . good enough” artifacts. “The present arrangement
which allows only one floor for exhibits,” Vlach continued, “is frankly a
terrible use of the building. Specimens are improperly lighted, badly
displayed in rickety cases, and given labels that are painfully amateurish
and sometimes out of step with current scholarship.” By way of illustration, he pointed to the use of text from a Ripley’s Believe It or Not
column as explanatory matter for one object. Still, Vlach concluded that
the College of Charleston should purchase and reinterpret the materials
related to Lowcountry slavery because of their value in shining a light on
an aspect of African American heritage that was otherwise ignored in
Charleston: “In view of the fact that the Museum can set the record
straight in a city whose public image has previously only given credit to
its white citizens, I will only say that the Museum has inestimable value
and that it should be preserved and developed. It is a crucial resource,
and the opportunity for its development should not be squandered.”89
The College of Charleston opted not to purchase the OSMM and its
collection, however, and for nearly a decade the aging sisters lobbied
for the City of Charleston to take over. By the mid-1980s, Chase and
the Wilson Foundation board expressed the urgency of their case in
correspondence and meetings with Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., through
features in the local newspapers, and via the circulation of a petition
89
Judith Wragg Chase, “Long Range Plans for Preservation and Development of the Old
Slave Mart Museum[,] Oldest Museum of Black Heritage in the U.S.,” ca. 1978–1979, OSMM
Papers; John Michael Vlach, “Evaluation of the Old Slave Mart Museum,” April 9, 1979,
Eugene C. Hunt Papers (Avery Research Center) (quotations). Vlach concluded that objects of
interest to the College of Charleston were worth $29,000. Ted Rosengarten evaluated relevant
materials in the library to be worth nearly $12,000. “Summary of Appraisals,” Hunt Papers.
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
615
of support among the city’s black community.90 Highlighting the
OSMM’s relevance to Charleston as both a tourist and a heritage entity
and claiming 25,000 visitors in 1985, Chase declared the situation to be
a crisis.91 It was “no longer feasible to continue to rely entirely on the
altruism of volunteer directors and an underpaid, geriatric staff,” Chase
declared. “If considerable financial aid is not soon forthcoming, this
oldest museum of black history, this national landmark, will soon close
its doors forever.”92 By all accounts, Riley was enthusiastic about the
prospect of the city’s purchasing and preserving the OSMM, but he
expressed concerns about the “value of the collection and the appraisal
of the property.”93 For several years, Chase and the mayor’s office
conducted sporadic and rather heated negotiations, with Chase insisting
that the collection and library could not be separated from the sale of
the building and with the city arguing Chase had highly overestimated
their value. Chastening Riley for “your failure to take action,” Chase
threatened in 1986, “you have postponed it too long and we have all run
out of time. . . . Unless some acceptable proposal is presented to us
shortly, we will have no recourse but to put the building up for sale on
the public market.”94 Meanwhile, tensions mounted between Chase and
the now racially diverse Wilson Foundation board, who believed that a
deal with the city was the best resolution of the museum’s troubled
future. Board members complained publicly, as the New York Times
reported, of “a reluctance by Mrs. Chase to relinquish control that contributes to the museum’s current plight.”95 This rancor came to a head
in 1986 when the foundation board requested from Chase “an accounting of public and private funds for which tax exemptions were awarded
in the name of the Miriam B. Wilson Foundation.”96 As a result of this
audit and an ongoing strained relationship, the board voted months later
to dissolve the foundation. Unable to come to terms with the city, Chase
closed the Old Slave Mart Museum “indefinitely” on January 1, 1987.97
90
“Petition to Save the Old Slave Mart Museum and Library [1986],” Old Slave Mart
Museum and Library Collection (Acacia Collection).
91
Press release, September 9, 1986, OSMM Papers.
92
Chase, “Comprehensive Information,” unnumbered page.
93
“Time to Resolve Fate of Slave Mart Museum,” Charleston Evening Post, April 24, 1986.
See also Judith Wragg Chase to Mayor Joseph Riley, January 2, 1986, and August 8, 1986,
OSMM Papers; and H. Jane Shealy, “Financial Uncertainty Threatens Fate of Old Slave Mart
Museum,” Charleston (S.C.) Saturday Post/Courier, April 12, 1986, pp. 1B, 2B.
94
Judith Wragg Chase to Joseph P. Riley Jr., January 2, 1986, OSMM Papers.
95
“Fate of Museum on Slavery in Doubt,” New York Times, July 6, 1987, p. 8.
96
Sandra N. Fowler to Judith Wragg Chase, July 5, 1986; and Clifford Tall to Sandra Fowler,
July 25, 1986, both in OSMM Papers.
97
Fowler interview; “Concluding Old Slave Mart Operations,” January 8, 1987, Old Slave
Mart Museum and Library Collection (Acacia Collection).
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
616
After what he described as “wrestling” for years with the OSMM
owners, Mayor Riley convened a group of black and white civic
leaders in February 1987 to “carefully study this issue to determine
the degree to which we, as a community, should become involved in
attempting to save the Museum and the collection” and then “to make
a recommendation to me and the City Council.”98 In the end, the city
determined to buy the 6 Chalmers Street property but not the collection. After several more months of offers and counteroffers between
the parties, a final purchase price of $200,000 secured the deal.99
However, almost twenty years passed before the Old Slave Mart
Museum again opened its doors to the public. Only the faded words
“Old Slave Mart Museum” painted on the weathered stucco facade
reminded those tourists and locals who bothered to notice that this
structure held an important meaning and place in Charleston’s and the
nation’s past. Perhaps, like disturbing the asbestos that might be
hidden in the walls around us, it seemed too dangerous, even toxic,
for a community like Charleston to go poking around too explicitly
in the history of the domestic slave trade. Certainly, the OSMM
project was not a city priority in these years, though several concrete
factors help explain, though not excuse, the glacial pace of development. First, Hurricane Hugo devastated the South Carolina coast
in September 1989, turning Charleston’s attention and financial
resources to stabilizing and rebuilding the city. Second, problems
establishing coherent and focused leadership of the project resulted in
several prolonged false starts and delays. As a local newspaper surmised in 2007, “The museum has been closed for two decades because
no one was exactly sure what to do with it.”100 After a plan fell
through for the Avery Research Center for African-American History
and Culture to operate the OSMM, a new managerial structure was
needed.101 In 1993 Vanessa Turner Maybank, then Charleston’s director of tourism, stepped in to continue renovations and seemed to be
making progress, hiring Warren Parker in 1995 to design an exhibit
for the space.102 In that time, however, Maybank was also promoted
98
Joseph P. Riley Jr. to Sandra Fowler, February 3, 1987, OSMM Papers.
See Frances Cantwell to Clifford H. Tall, October 2, 1987; Julian Brandt to Frances Cantwell,
January 11, 1988; and Deed of Sale, 6 Chalmers Street, January 29, 1988, all in OSMM Papers.
100
Brian Hicks, “Old Slave Mart Museum Will Reopen Wednesday,” Charleston Post and
Courier, October 30, 2007, p. B1.
101
Dorothy Givens, “Old Slave Mart Eyed for Center,” Charleston Post and Courier, June
11, 1992, “This Week in Peninsular Charleston” section, p. 4; Lucille S. Whipper to Mayor
Joseph P. Riley Jr., March 28, 1989; and Rhet Wilson to Mary Ann Sullivan, executive assistant
to Mayor Riley, August 31, 1993, both in OSMM Papers.
102
Warren Parker correspondence, 1995–1999, OSMM Papers.
99
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
617
to the position of clerk of council, and the scope of her professional
obligations to the city increased, potentially drawing away energy and
focus from the museum project.103 Nonetheless, throughout the early
1990s the city slowly carried out some expensive, long-needed structural repairs and major improvements to the 6 Chalmers Street property, some of which were funded by grants.104
In the meantime, a new conceptualization emerged of the OSMM’s
role in Charleston’s tourist landscape. It would serve as the “hub” for
an envisioned “African-American National Heritage Museum,” a
“multi-site museum” to include the Aiken-Rhett House, the McLeod
Plantation, and the Avery Research Center and to be “cooperativelymanaged” by Avery, the Historic Charleston Foundation, and the City
of Charleston.105 As the Heritage Museum’s “interpretive center,” the
OSMM would house a sweeping exhibit, designed by Parker, to “tell
the full story of the African-American experience in the United States
from the African heritage to the present.”106 Other than the inclusion
of the modern civil rights movement, the themes and broad scope
of this exhibit were remarkably similar to those highlighted by Chase
and Wilson. So, too, the domestic slave trade would have constituted
only a very small part of this larger historical panorama.
Instead of shining a bright light on the commerce in black bodies
at 6 Chalmers Street and throughout the South, this proposal diluted the
trade in a sea of generalities. This impulse echoed the truism that
historian of the slave trade Steven Deyle has noted: “If most people
today are uncomfortable discussing the institution [of slavery] as a
whole, it is doubly true that they do not want to be reminded that earlier
generations of Americans bought and sold their ancestors like cattle, or
that some of their family fortunes were built upon this trade.”107
Certainly, not everyone in Charleston was excited about the
OSMM’s resuscitation. An organization made up of local property
owners and calling itself the French Quarter Neighborhood Association
(FQNA) cited concerns ranging from noise and sanitation to vandalism
and parking. Given the historic district’s narrow streets and proximity
103
Green interview.
See Correspondence File, 1989–1993, OSMM Papers.
105
“South Carolina Tourism Marketing Partnership Program Application”; and “Visit the
African-American National Heritage Museum” brochure, both in OSMM Papers.
106
“National Trust for Historic Preservation Grant Application,” 1995 (first quotation); and
“South Carolina Tourism Marketing Partnership Program Application” (second quotation), both
in OSMM Papers.
107
Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York,
2005), 11.
104
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
618
to the Charleston City Market, a hotspot of bars, restaurants, and nightlife, residents expressed reasonable anxiety about increased pedestrian
and automotive traffic in the area. “If you imagine the numbers
[of visitors] needed to sustain it [the Old Slave Mart Museum], you
could compare it to opening a McDonald’s on Chalmers Street, and we
all know that could never happen,” the president of the FQNA urged
Mayor Riley.108 However, in what could be construed as coded racialized language, the group also fretted that “crime” could also increase
because of the crowds attracted to the OSMM, and residents thus
demanded more “visible Police patrols.”109 While the city seems to have
taken these complaints seriously, the very existence of the FQNA and its
initial opposition to the OSMM’s reopening raises interesting questions
about what version of history could be told in Charleston.110 This group,
which was so concerned with preserving “the quality of life” in its
“fragile” historic neighborhood, actually embraced a “bogus” historical
title, wrongly attributing “French Quarter” status to the area because
of the nearby presence of the French Huguenot Church. Although
there never was a historical French Quarter in Charleston, the property
at 6 Chalmers Street was of vital historical import, having been a
booming auction house where human beings were sold in the 1850s.111
Although thousands of glossy brochures publicizing the Heritage
Museum were printed, that project never reached fruition, and it was
not until 2002 that the site-specific heritage of the OSMM came into
sharper focus. That year, the city hired Nichole Green, a young
African American anthropology graduate student with a background
in historical interpretation, to be the new OSMM curator and director.
Born and raised in nearby McClellanville, South Carolina, a small
coastal fishing village, this self-described “Gullah girl” helped change
the museum’s direction and mission. Instead of moving forward
with Warren Parker’s design, which she described as exhibiting “any
and everything we can think about African and African American
history thrown into this small space,” Green proposed to concentrate
108
Jacqui Brokaw to Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., March 31, 1999, OSMM Papers.
Jacqui Brokaw to Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., April 28, 1999, OSMM Papers. See also
“Agreement Concerning French Quarter Neighborhood Association and City of Charleston,”
March 31, 1999, OSMM Papers; and Robert Behre, “City Museum Plan Sours in Neighborhood,”
Charleston Post and Courier, January 23, 1999, p. B3.
110
Robert Behre, “Slave Mart Museum Is Free to Reopen,” Charleston Post and Courier,
September 8, 1999, p. B1.
111
Jacqui Brokaw to Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., March 31, 1999, OSMM Papers (first and
second quotations); author’s interview with Harlan Greene, May 5, 2009, Charleston, South
Carolina; digital audio recording in author’s possession (third quotation).
109
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
619
interpretation on the building’s own history as a robust internal slavetrading center.112
This shift in focus was again not obvious to all involved, including
the museum’s supporters. As Kenneth E. Foote has argued, issues of
shame and pride often lead a community to expunge the violent past
from its historical landscape.113 In Charleston, for example, the
OSMM project team discussed changing the name of the museum,
perhaps to “Ryan’s Mart,” out of concern for how the word slave
might resonate uncomfortably with the community. Instead, Green
pushed for keeping the name and making the content explicit: “People
were sold here. We are not going to sugarcoat this. We are not going
to pull any punches here. That is what it was called,” Green recalled
arguing; and she reminded her colleagues that, historically, 6 Chalmers
“was also called ‘Ryan’s Nigger Mart.’” After two years of research
and politicking, the Charleston City Council finally approved in 2004
a new and tailored focus for the museum: the domestic slave trade.114
With the city’s backing secured, Green turned her attention to
the time-consuming process of creating a new exhibit, with the firm
Rowland Design of Indianapolis and consultant Deborah Mack, following professional museum standards. Budgetary limitations prohibited the implementation of the first design, which would have
utilized both floors of the museum. These restraints were attributed to
the city’s competing capital claims for developing the International
African American Museum, a project that has yet to be realized.115
The end result for the OSMM was a compromise: on the first floor
a permanent exhibit, supported by artifacts, on the domestic slave
trade and the role of the 6 Chalmers Street property in that enterprise,
with the second floor dedicated to traveling exhibits related to the
museum’s educational goals. Appropriately, the retail element of the
museum was significantly decreased, with a narrow bookshelf and a
small case taking the place of the elaborate gift shop of past versions
of the OSMM. As if seeking not to recommercialize a site so profoundly associated with the horror of the trade, today’s museum purveys on a very modest scale books and DVDs related to Lowcountry
112
Green interview. See also Wevonneda Minis, “‘Gullah Girl’ Makes Culture Her
Career,” Charleston Post and Courier, February 21, 2009, http://www.postandcourier.com
/article/20090221/ARCHIVES/302219948.
113
See Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and
Tragedy (Austin, 1997).
114
Green interview.
115
Ibid. On the International African American Museum, see http://www.iaamuseum.org.
620
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Figure 2. The Old Slave Mart Museum exterior today, showing the new signage
incorporating “Slave Sale, Charleston, South Carolina, from a Sketch by Eyre Crowe,”
published in Illustrated London News, November 29, 1856, p. 555. Photograph by
the author.
and African American history. And yet, in a striking and disappointing
misstep, this museum dedicated to educating the public in a serious
way about the internal American slave trade fails to offer for sale
notable works on the trade by scholars such as Michael Tadman,
Steven Deyle, Robert H. Gudmestad, and Walter Johnson.116
Still, the 35,000 visitors who ventured into the Old Slave Mart
Museum from its opening on October 31, 2007, through May 2009
116
Tadman, Speculators and Slaves; Deyle, Carry Me Back; Robert H. Gudmestad, A
Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge,
2003); Johnson, Soul by Soul; Johnson, ed., Chattel Principle. Before these works, the standard
in the field was Bancroft’s 1931 study, Slave-Trading in the Old South.
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
621
would have been hard-pressed not to realize that they had entered a
space that was very different from other tourist destinations in
Charleston.117 In the orientation area a large sign embossed with the
City of Charleston’s seal proclaims, “Our mission, to broaden people’s
understanding of Charleston’s role as a slave-trading center during the
domestic slave trade, enables us to reach out to our community and to
those whose ancestors’ lives were shaped or changed here.” Visitors
are then informed of the historical importance of the precise ground on
which they stand: “Few buildings like the old Slave Mart still stand in
the South. In the mid-1850s, slave traders came to this place to buy
and sell African Americans—an interstate trade that brought wealth to
Charleston, the state and the region. The lives of the enslaved blacks,
traders and owners who passed through here were as different as they
were entwined. This museum was created to share their stories.” Such
a greeting, with its emphasis on the brutal activities that took place on
the site in the 1850s, strikes at the foundation of any romantic myths
about Historic Charleston and the Old South that tourists might bring
with them.118 Through the use of narrative, firsthand accounts of slave
sales from multiple perspectives, audiovisual effects, such as the
sounds of an auctioneer’s sales call and a nervously beating heart,
and historical objects, including a whip, photographs, and shackles,
the OSMM underscores several main points of the building’s formerly
hidden history. The first is that “there were two types of slave trade in
America,” differentiating the better-known transatlantic trade from the
internal trade, which “kept slavery very much alive . . . until the Civil
War ended in 1865.” Second, visitors learn that the majority of the
slaves auctioned at 6 Chalmers Street were not African-born, but
American-born, and were sold for an American market. Third, the
exhibit highlights the perspectives of the three parties involved in any
transaction—the enslaved person, the trader, and the buyer—as it
details the chattel principle at work before, during, and after a sale.
Finally, despite the fact that auctions attempted to obliterate the
enslaved person’s humanity, the exhibit documents moments of resistance and agency among enslaved persons for sale. At various points
throughout the exhibit, viewers are reminded of the particularity of the
space they occupy: it was an auction “showroom built specifically for
slave-selling.”119 Beyond this content, the site of the museum itself is
117
Visitor Information and Surveys, OSMM Papers.
Exhibit, Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, visited by the author
May 4–7, 2009.
119
Ibid.
118
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
622
the object of historical encounter. As Kenneth Foote says, the ground
itself, “stained by the blood of violence and covered by the ashes of
tragedy, force[s] people to face squarely the meaning of an event”—in
this case, the trafficking of human beings in America by Americans.120
This emphasis on the very Americanness of the trade is imperative.
Before the relatively recent interest in the domestic slave trade,
scholars tended to focus on the terrors of the Atlantic slave trade,
and local commemorative efforts, in the North and the South, followed suit.121 The 2008 exhibition of a replica of the slave schooner
Amistad at the United Nations in New York and Traces of the Trade:
A Story from the Deep North, a 2008 PBS documentary film tracing
a Rhode Island family’s intimate involvement in the transatlantic
trade, are just two examples of many that illustrate how regions
beyond the American South are increasingly confronting their complicity in this global historical process.122 Likewise, in the Charleston
area, the international slave trade has lately received commemorative
attention, especially on nearby Sullivan’s Island, the major port of
entry for enslaved Africans who survived the brutal Middle Passage
to North America. Each year since the late 1990s, for example, a
group of locals calling themselves “the descendants community” have
held a ceremony on the island “collectively honoring our African
ancestors who perished during the Middle Passage.”123 In 1999, amid
heated public debate about the flying of the Confederate flag over the
statehouse, the South Carolina General Assembly approved a distinctive historical marker to be placed at Fort Moultrie. On this National
Park Service ground, more commonly associated with the military
feats of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, a large sign now proclaims
unabashedly: “This is Sullivan’s Island. A place where . . . Africans
were brought to this country under extreme conditions of human
bondage and degradation.” Tourists seeking to know more can view
the “African Passages” exhibit at the Fort Moultrie Visitor Center
120
Foote, Shadowed Ground, 5.
Some notable works in this large body of scholarship include Philip D. Curtin, The
Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis., 1969); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The
Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York, 1997); Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic
Slave Trade (New York, 1999); and Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle
Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).
122
On the United Nations exhibit, see “Exhibit on Slave Trade Opens at United Nations
Headquarters, 26 March,” press release, note no. 6133, March 24, 2008, http://www.un.org
/News/Press/docs/2008/note6133.doc.htm. On filmmaker Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade:
A Story from the Deep North, see http://www.pbs.org/pov/tracesofthetrade.
123
Remembrance flyers, 1999 and 2002, Fowler Papers.
121
THE SLAVE TRADE AND PUBLIC HISTORY
623
across the street.124 And finally, on July 26, 2008, the Toni Morrison
Society commenced its A Bench by the Road project, dedicating the
first of what it hopes will be many benches across the country at
important sites of African American history. “There is no place you
or I can go,” Morrison wrote in 1989, “to think about or not think
about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of
slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey
and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or
plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no
300-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road.” On Sullivan’s
Island, the bench sits near the location of the former pest house,
where Middle Passage survivors were quarantined and prepared
for sale.125
While these efforts are undoubtedly worthwhile and necessary,
emphasizing the transatlantic over the domestic slave trade has
allowed Americans to understand trafficking in human beings as an
inherited institution—a residual imposition of British colonialism
instead of a vital, internal mechanism that Americans created and
sustained. Furthermore, the dearth of historic sites asserting the
domestic trade’s importance risks reinforcing the slave owners’ interpretation of the peculiar institution. According to David Brion Davis,
excising slavery’s commercial core was precisely “the way southern
slaveholders, who tended to despise slave traders, wished to think of
their labor system. The ideal of planter ‘paternalism’ could be
maintained only if the monetary negotiations with traders were kept
in the dark.”126 Historian Steven Deyle sums up well the dangers of
this enduring perspective: “And, unfortunately, more than anything
else, it has been the dominance and persistence of this apologist view
of the domestic trade that has left most people today completely
124
“This Is Sullivan’s Island” historical marker, dedicated 1999, Cannon Row, Fort Moultrie,
Fort Sumter National Monument, Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina (quotation; ellipses in
original); “African Passages: Sullivan’s Island and the Slave Trade,” Fort Moultrie Visitor
Center, Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, visited by the author, May 2, 2009. See also National
Park Service, “Fort Moultrie: African Passages,” http://www.nps.gov/fosu/planyourvisit/upload
/African_Passages.pdf. For more on the Atlantic slave trade and memory, see Simon Lewis,
“Slavery, Memory, and the History of the ‘Atlantic Now’: Charleston, South Carolina and the
Global Racial/Economic Hierarchy,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 45 (June 2009), 125–35.
125
Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road: Beloved,” World: Journal of the Unitarian
Universalist Association, 3 (January–February 1989), 4–5, 37–41 (quotation on 4), inscribed on
plaque, A Bench by the Road, dedicated July 26, 2008, Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. See
also Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, “Looking the Thing in the Face: Slavery, Race, and the
Commemorative Landscape in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865–2010,” Journal of Southern
History, 78 (August 2012), 639–84, esp. 683–84.
126
Davis, “Foreword,” in Johnson, ed., Chattel Principle, ix.
624
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
unaware of the prominent role that this essential feature of the southern slave system played in antebellum American life.”127
In its current form, then, the Old Slave Mart Museum follows
the path of new historiography on the internal slave trade and constitutes a critical intervention in the American commemorative landscape. Its presentation of race and history has morphed from the
Washingtonianism of Miriam Wilson, to the hybrid progressive/
paternalistic stance of Judith Wragg Chase, to a full confrontation
with the brutal reality of the domestic slave trade and its exploitative,
capitalist roots. To evoke the famous imagery of W. E. B. Du Bois,
the museum seeks to lift the veil that covers southern and national
history so that tourists will have the tools to begin to see the past differently. Visitors are asked to recognize that the exploitation of African
American slave labor and skill, in Charleston’s magnificent planters’
homes and sprawling former rice fields, was made possible through
the internal market for slaves, the fundamental mechanism of slavery’s
perpetuation in antebellum America. “Maybe not lifting a veil,” Green
clarifies, “but maybe putting on something so you see it from a different perspective now.”128 After decades of practiced amnesia, the
outlines of the barracoon, which have long been hidden in plain sight,
are at last becoming visible.
127
Steven Deyle, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America: The Lifeblood of the Southern
Slave System,” in Johnson, ed., Chattel Principle, 91–116 (quotation on 93).
128
Green interview.