The Making of a Racist by Charles B. Dew

Author:Charles B. Dew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Price circular issued by Betts & Gregory, Richmond auctioneers, containing market guidance and showing a range of prices for multiple categories of slave men, women, and children, dated August 2, 1860. (Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.; Class of 1940 Americana Fund)

This broadside, dated August 2, 1860, is a market report—a list of prices current—prepared by the slave-trading firm of Betts & Gregory, Auctioneers, Franklin Street, Richmond, Virginia.1

I think this document hit me so hard because it represented, on a single page, the embodiment of the evil that was slavery. It spoke, more powerfully than anything else I had seen, to what lay at the core of the South’s slave system—the chattel principle, human beings as property, as commodities, as merchandise. My God, I asked myself as I looked at the Betts & Gregory price list, how had we come to this?

So I decided to go into the belly of the beast to try to find out. I decided to read the surviving correspondence and study the account books and papers of Richmond’s slave traders. If I could understand the traders and their agents and their customers, the parties who participated in the buying and selling of black men, women, and children on a daily basis, month after month, year after year, then maybe I could get my mind around some sort of answer to the question that has perplexed and troubled me for so long, the question I have been trying to answer, as I now realize, for as long as I have been studying history. Why did we not see the evil that was so clearly before us?

The shield in the upper left-hand corner of the circular suggested qualities that Betts & Gregory undoubtedly wanted the public to associate with their firm: security, stability, strength, permanence. “Betts & Gregory, AUCTIONEERS, Franklin Street, RICHMOND, VA.” read the lettering inside the shield. No hastily handwritten list of prices current this, as other less prominent firms were wont to send out. No fly-by-night outfit here. The partners had gone to the trouble and expense of having a stack (in all probability many stacks) of these forms printed up so that, courtesy of their auction house, buyers and sellers could get clear, up-to-date information on the state of Richmond’s “Negro Market.”

Any vibrant market relies on a steady flow of accurate information, and the buying and selling of slaves in late antebellum Richmond was a very vibrant market indeed. Agents out in the field looking to make purchases for local firms needed these figures badly and on a daily basis. Other traders and auctioneers in the city undoubtedly studied these lists with great care. The hordes of buyers up from the Deep South—slave dealers, planters, contractors, industrialists, those seeking to acquire a young, attractive female through the “fancy trade”—all had to have a sense of the market to guide their purchases or their bidding on the auction floor. Frequent articles on the trade in the Richmond press suggest that the average man in the street followed the market closely as well.

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