Old Slave Mart Museum – An Important Piece of
History
My spouse and I visited the Old Slave Mart Museum on a
Saturday afternoon in mid-November 2016. The museum is open from 9:00 am to
5:00 pm on Mondays through Saturdays (closed on Sundays). Allow an hour to for
a self-guided tour that explores this museum. Admission costs $7 per adult.
The City of Charleston opened the Old Slave Mart Museum in
2007, over 150 years after Abraham Lincoln officially abolished slavery.
Previously, the building served as a museum for African-American arts and
crafts, an auto repair shop, and as a tenement (an overcrowded apartment house).
However, the reason that the buildings holds a place on the National Register
of Historic Places is its earliest history – it is the only known surviving
building in South Carolina that was formerly used as a slave auction gallery.
Located on a quiet cobblestone street in the Historic District, the building
operated as the actual showroom where traders sold and buyers purchased
Americans born into slavery.
In 1807, Congress
forbade the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the domestic inter-state slave trade
remained important. In the 700 years between the drafting of the US
Constitution and the Civil War, more than one million American-born slaves were
sold away from plantations in the upper South to work the rapidly expanding
cotton and sugar plantations in the lower South. Charleston was one of the main colonial ports of the 18th century,
dealing in rice, indigo, and slaves. In Charleston, slaves were originally sold
outdoors, near the Old Exchange Building. In 1856, the city banned outdoor
slave sales because they attracted unwanted crowds, so sales rooms, yards, and
marts opened indoors.
Originally, the Old Slave Mart was part of a complex of
buildings known as “Ryan's Mart” (owned
by Thomas Ryan, a government official and former sheriff) that occupied
the land between Chalmers and Queen Streets. The development consisted of a
yard enclosed by a brick wall and a four-story brick building that contained a
"barracoon" (which means “slave jail” in Portuguese), a kitchen, and
a "dead house" (morgue). When the main building (now the museum) was
first constructed in 1859, the open-ended space was referred to as a “shed”.
The interior consisted of one large room with a 20-foot ceiling; the front
facade contained a high arch, octagonal pillars, and a large iron gate. Slaves
stood on auction tables (three feet high and ten feet long) placed lengthwise
so that slave owners could pass by and examine them during the auction. The most valuable workers sold for nearly
$40,000 in 2007 dollars. Hundreds of slaves could be worth more than the
plantation they worked on. Although most white Southerners did not own slaves,
slavery’s presence was widely accepted.
The museum does
not present a history of slavery or an account of its abolition; it simply
chronicles the domestic trade via mounted wall panels that cover two floors.
(Mobility impaired guests can use a lift to move between the two floors.) A
great deal of reading is required to move through this museum; the introduction
of a few multi-media features might break the monotony, because visitors want
to absorb all the important information without the repetitiveness.
We felt an obligation to visit this museum to
learn more about this unsavory aspect of American history (much like we felt
past obligations to visit the National 9-11 Museum in NYC and concentration
camps in Germany), and we gained a better understanding of the Southern slave
trade when we departed.
