THE LARGEST SALE OF NEGRO (PERSONS OF COLOR) SLAVES (600) IN AMERICA DISCOVERED IN CHARLESTON, SC
THE LARGEST SALE OF NEGRO (PERSONS OF COLOR) SLAVES (600) IN AMERICA DISCOVERED IN CHARLESTON, SC
An advertisement which was included in classifieds in the Charleston “Courier,” now known as the “News and Courier,” on Feb. 24, 1835, listed 600 “ a very valuable GANG OF NEGROES” for sale. That is a recorded fact: 600 persons for sale! It is the largest sale of enslaved persons in American history. A stunning discovery. A horrible time of American history. ‘It shows the enormity of the slave trade in America which caused the Civil War.
Lauren Davila, a graduate student at the College of Charleston, discovered an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction. The uprooted of those persons was inhuman.
A report subsequently found the original ad for the sale, which ran more than two weeks before the one Davila spotted. Published on Feb. 6, 1835, it revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., scion of a slave-owning planter regime. Ball had died the previous year, and now five of his plantations were listed for sale — along with the people enslaved on them.
The Ball family might not be a household name outside of South Carolina, but it is widely known within the state thanks to a descendant named Edward Ball who wrote a best selling book in 1998 that bared the family’s skeletons — and, with them, those of other Southern slave owners. Interestingly, this sale of his family’s slaves was not included in his book.
“Slaves in the Family” drew considerable acclaim outside of Charleston, including a National Book Award. Black readers, North and South, praised it. But as Ball explained, “It was in white society that the book was controversial.” Among some white Southerners, the horrors of slavery had long gone minimized by a Lost Cause narrative of northern aggression and benevolent slave owners.
Sadly, we are still entrenched in the same type of battle today, it now known as “Woke” or “White Supremacy” among other various names.
JAMES L. BELL
THE BELL LAW FIRM, P.A.
June 20, 2023