English painter Eyre Crowe’s images of the American slave trade include a series of sketches later published as wood engravings and, in two instances, turned into oil paintings that depict the domestic trade in enslaved African Americans just before the American Civil War (1861–1865). These images provide some of the only eyewitness visual renderings of the slave trade in Richmond, the largest slave-trading center in the Upper South. An act of Congress had abolished the international slave trade in the United States effective 1808, but a domestic trade accounted for the sale of millions of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, where the cotton boom led to a near-bottomless market for enslaved labor. The process of trafficking slaves, which Crowe’s images helped to illuminate and publicize, included auction houses, auction blocks, so-called slave jails, and transportation either on foot or by train. Crowe was visiting Richmond in 1853 as the secretary of British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who was on a lecture tour, when he witnessed and sketched a slave auction on Wall Street, down the hill from downtown Richmond. His sketching nearly caused him to be removed from the auction house. Later, he also witnessed and depicted slaves being taken to a railroad depot. Two paintings made from his sketches, After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond and Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, were exhibited in Great Britain in 1854 and 1861 respectively. Together with Crowe’s other images, these paintings played an important role in spreading antislavery awareness in both Britain and in America.
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