They were auction houses where men and women were sold, slave jails where they were held prior to sale, and auxiliary businesses that supported the trade. Those in red were in 1853 together constituted Richmond's slave market. Beers' 1876 Richmond City Atlas.) Those represented as grey had a wide assortment of uses: some were manufacturing or commercial establishments, others private residences, others combined both private and public functions. (The footprint of these buildings comes, for the most part, from Frederick W. On an 1856 map of Richmond we have placed representations of buildings from Richmond's commercial district. It shares one of the English painter's goals: to document the material culture of Richmond's slave market. This map, the accompanying essay, and the book on which they draw (Maurie McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Visualizing the Southern Slave Trade ) provides the twenty-first century public a look at the Richmond Crowe saw. While, by his own account, he didn't immediately flee lest he betray cowardice, he did display common sense he soon if unhurriedly left, making his retreat from Richmond's slave district.

Fearing he might be an abolitionist, the dealers and buyers in the room soon threatened Crowe. Drawing these enslaved men and women rather than buying them was a suspicious and provocative thing to do. In that third room, he took out paper and pencil to sketch a group of slaves waiting to be auctioned. He witnessed one auction, moved a bit down the road to another auction house to witness a second, and again to a third. He didn't have to travel far down Main Street -just a few blocks-before he located the nucleus of Richmond's slave trading establishments on 15th or, as it was also known, Wall Street. Having recently read Uncle Tom's Cabin, on his first morning in the city Crowe promptly located some advertisements for slave auctions in a local paper, asked someone at his luxurious hotel (the American Hotel, located just a couple blocks south of Virginia's Capitol) for directions, and set off to witness the slave trade firsthand for himself. In March 1853, the English painter Eyre Crowe visited Richmond.

Black market auction house tracker