ENTRY

Slave Trade, Eyre Crowe’s Images of the

SUMMARY

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.

Background

The author of "Vanity Fair"

Eyre Crowe (1824–1910) traveled in America for six months, from 1852 until 1853, working as secretary to family friend William Makepeace Thackeray, the wildly popular satirist and author of the novel Vanity Fair (1848). Thackeray was booked to deliver a series of six lectures in each of the eight cities he visited: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. Along the way, Crowe helped to write Thackeray’s letters and arrange his travel and lodging.

Crowe had spent much of his childhood in Paris, where his father, Eyre Evans Crowe, served as the correspondent for London newspaper the Morning Chronicle. At age fourteen, the younger Crowe enrolled in the studio of the French painter Paul Delaroche. In 1844 Crowe moved with his parents to London, where he attended the Royal Academy School of Art. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1846 and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1876.

Theater Poster for Uncle Tom's Cabin

Shortly after arriving in America with Thackeray, Crowe purchased a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Published in book form in March 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel sold 300,000 copies in its first year and would go on to become the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. As Crowe later wrote in With Thackeray in America (1893), Stowe’s dramatic depictions of auction blocks, families separated by slavery, runaway slaves, and vicious overseers “properly harrowed” him and inspired him to learn what he could of American slavery. On March 3, 1853, his first morning in Richmond, Crowe noticed in one of the local newspapers “the announcements of slave sales, some of which were to take place that morning in Wall Street, close at hand, at eleven o’clock.” He wandered down the hill from his hotel to the slave-auction rooms and there made a number of sketches that served as inspiration for a series of his later engravings and paintings.

Domestic Slave Trade

Slave Auction House
Slave Auction House
The Slave Trade in Alexandria
The Slave Trade in Alexandria
Woman in Front of Slave Pen
Woman in Front of Slave Pen

Crowe’s drawings and paintings are significant to the degree that they shed additional light on a dark corner of American slavery: the domestic, or internal, slave trade. The international slave trade, which included the often-deadly voyage from African to America known as the Middle Passage, legally ended in the United States in 1808, giving rise to a new domestic market. Historians estimate that from 1820 to 1860, two million enslaved African Americans were sold from one owner in the United States to another. Of those two million, about 666,000 were sold from states in the Upper South (especially Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) to states in the Lower South (especially Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), where the sharp increase in cotton production fueled a parallel demand for slave labor. Those sold through the interregional slave trade were typically purchased by traders in the Upper South, where they were held in “slave pens,” or “jails,” before being marched or transported south by railroads. Upon arrival, they were sold again, often on the auction block at places many called the “slave market.”

This forced migration of hundreds of thousands of enslaved peoples was usually attended by family asserted that family separations were rare and only occurred in unusual circumstances, but historians have determined that more than half the slaves sold by traders were forcibly separated either from a spouse or from one or both of their parents. Slaves were sold for a variety of reasons: as punishment, to pay debts or secure mortgages, or to settle an estate after the death of an owner. Families were usually not sold intact because family units did not command the highest prices. Instead, individual slaves, age fifteen to thirty, were the most profitable. Young mothers were sold away from their husbands and children, young fathers from their wives and children, and children from their parents.

Slave Market of America

Many cities in the Upper South developed a sizable infrastructure dedicated to the slave trade: Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Alexandria, and Richmond among them. These cities became primarily slave collecting and resale centers, with a large network of traders who provided slaves to satisfy the demand in urban markets. Once purchased by a trader, slaves were usually transported to the urban center by boat or railroad, or marched overland, and then placed in slave jail. One of the largest and most financially successful slave-trading firms was the partnership of Isaac Franklin and John Armfield (active from 1828 to 1836), who had an organized network of traders stationed in cities throughout the region, including Richmond and Warrenton in Virginia and Fredericktown and Baltimore in Maryland. Slaves purchased by the traders were sent to Franklin and Armfield’s headquarters in Alexandria. Richmond, the largest slave-trading center in the Upper South throughout most of the 1840s and 1850s, had multiple slave jails and auction rooms, most of which were within a few blocks of each other and only a few blocks from the Thomas Jefferson–designed State Capitol building. These facilities were concentrated on a small alleyway known locally as Wall Street, or roughly along what is now Fifteenth Street in Shockoe Valley.

After being held in jails, sometimes for weeks at a time, slaves were eventually sold, often to another trader. Sales either occurred at the jails or in salesrooms. These rooms were generally small and low-ceilinged, with little furniture or decoration. They consisted primarily of large, undivided interiors that sometimes held as many as a hundred people. Each room also had a piece of furniture specifically built for the trade conducted there: the auction block. Generally these were platforms that raised the auctioneer and the slaves for sale above the standing audience, to allow all a clear view of the “stock,” as dealers commonly referred to the people they auctioned. In addition to the dedicated salesrooms, slaves were also sold at auction in the basements of several of Richmond’s leading hotels, including the Exchange Hotel and the St. Charles Hotel.

Images

Slave Auction at Richmond
Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia.
Slaves Waiting for Sale
Slaves Waiting for Sale, Virginia.

On March 3, 1853, when Crowe visited Wall Street in Richmond, he reported four salesrooms there. The Wall Street traders at the time were Pulliam and Davis, Benjamin and Solomon Davis, R. H. Dickinson and Brothers, and C. B. and N. B. Hill. In the rooms he visited that day, Crowe gathered material that would later form the basis for a series of images that were published in the Illustrated London News on September 27, 1856, and two paintings that were exhibited in London in 1854 and 1861. Together, these images tell the story of the American slave trade by representing different moments in the process.

Crowe’s sketching that day in Richmond attracted considerable attention. Those around him began to take notice of the image he was creating and paid little attention to the auctioneer. Three times the auctioneer stopped and came over to question Crowe about what he was doing. The artist decided that because of the auctioneer’s “ill-disguised rage,” he ought to leave, quickly. He later reported that the entire audience determined him to be an abolitionist and he worried for his own safety. Concerned that it would cause trouble for Thackeray, who was well liked by Richmonders, Crowe was relieved to learn that friends helped to keep the incident quiet.

Auction Prices for Slaves

The image Slaves Waiting for Sale is known in three versions: the sketch made the day Crowe was in the salesroom, the wood engraving of the sketch that was published in 1856, and a painting of the same scene that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1861. The image was particularly striking because it depicted a subject not commonly shown in abolitionist art. Many artists had drawn or painted a slave auction; it was a popular subject in abolitionist materials and features in several scenes in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Crowe chose instead to show the moment before the auction; his focus on that quiet moment of uncertainty and dread invites viewers to pause and to think about the subject anew. In his image of nine slaves seated on benches awaiting the moment of sale on the auction block, he depicted families that had already been torn apart by the trade.

When the painting was exhibited in London in 1861, critics were struck by what they saw as the picture’s apparent accuracy. One reviewer, for London’s Art-Journal, declared it “one of the most important pictures of the exhibition.” All were particularly taken with the figure of the male slave on the right. At the time, viewers were accustomed to seeing images of slaves who accepted their position with a happy complacency, as famously depicted by Stowe in her characterization of Uncle Tom. Crowe chose instead to paint a very different figure, a man described, by the same Art-Journal reviewer, as expressing “suffused indignant scorn, mingled with defiance.” In the figure of this man, Crowe had depicted a slave who could resist, rebel, or run away at any moment. It was his most powerful statement about slavery and the slave trade.

The second image derived from Crowe’s day in the salesroom in Richmond was also published in the Illustrated London News, alongside Slaves Waiting for Sale. The engraving, Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia (1856), showed an event more commonly dramatized in abolitionist imagery: a slave auction. In Crowe’s image, the viewer’s attention is centered on the young woman on the block. To the left is a group of slave traders. Crowe described one of them as having “an unmistakable look of devilry,” and drew him with a cowhide whip trailing between his legs, almost in imitation of an animal’s tail.

After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond

The third image in Crowe’s cycle on the American slave trade was a painting exhibited at the Society of British Artists in 1854: After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond (exhibited in London as Going South: A Sketch from Life in America). In this image, Crowe depicted what happened to slaves after they were purchased in the city’s salesroom. Centered at a railroad terminal in Richmond with the city’s skyline visible in the background, Going South shows a scene of extraordinary confusion as slaves are marched to the railroad cars for their journey south. Some may have faced only short journeys to nearby locations, but most were beginning a migration that would conclude in another auction room hundreds of miles away in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana.

Legacy

Crowe’s paintings and images exhibited in the years before and at the beginning of the American Civil War did much to spread awareness of the American slave trade. After the war, they were quickly forgotten and were not exhibited again until they were sold to collectors in America in the mid-twentieth century.

Similarly, the story of the American slave trade was largely forgotten by white mainstream culture after the end of the Civil War. Only a few places in the American South still have with structural or other material connections to the trade. In Alexandria, the main house that stood at the center of the Franklin and Armfield establishment is now the home of the Freedom House Museum; in Charleston, South Carolina, the Mart on Chalmers Street is operated as the Old Slave Mart Museum. In Richmond, recent archaeological excavations have revealed the location of Lumpkin’s Jail, but most of the other traders’ jails and auction rooms are buried under Interstate 95. In most other cities, no evidence remains of the places where two million enslaved men, women, and children were sold in the American slave trade.

MAP
TIMELINE
October 1852
The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray and his secretary, Eyre Crowe, board the ship Canada in Liverpool bound for Boston, Massachusetts, where Thackeray will begin a lecture tour of the United States.
October—November 1852
Eyre Crowe purchases a first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
March 3, 1853
On his first morning in Richmond, Eyre Crowe reads of slave auctions in the newspaper and visits the slave auction rooms on Wall Street near downtown Richmond. There he sketches slaves waiting to be sold.
1854
Eyre Crowe's painting After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond, which depicts slaves being transported to a railway terminal in Richmond and bound for the Deep South, is exhibited under the title Going South: A Sketch from Life in America at the annual exhibition of the Society of British Artists, in London.
September 27, 1856
"Sketches in the Free and Slave States of America" by Eyre Crowe is published in the Illustrated London News; the series includes Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, and Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia.
June 1, 1861
In an unsigned review, "Exhibition of the Royal Academy," London's Art-Journal declares Eyre Crowe's Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia "one of the most important pictures of the exhibition."
FURTHER READING
  • Bancroft, Frederic. Slave Trading in the Old South. Second ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
  • Deyle, Steven. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Gudmestad, Robert H. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.
  • Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • McInnis, Maurie D. Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
  • Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
McInnis, Maurie. Slave Trade, Eyre Crowe’s Images of the. (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/slave-trade-eyre-crowes-images-of-the.
MLA Citation:
McInnis, Maurie. "Slave Trade, Eyre Crowe’s Images of the" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 06 Dec. 2023
Last updated: 2022, January 25
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