As the largest city in Virginia west of Richmond prior to the Civil War, Lynchburg also maintained a brisk slave trade. The biggest surprise for John Marks when he began doing local research on this subject was the randomness of the human commerce.
“There was no central slave market, as such,” said the Lynchburg College senior, who wrote a paper on the subject as a freshman. “It might have taken place in front of a tavern, or some other business, or just out on the street.”
As Marks discovered: “Visitors to the city could not avoid the slave trade, as many of Lynchburg’s most prominent citizens participated in it very actively and at locations literally all across the city.”
Historian Frederic Bancroft devoted a page to Lynchburg in his book “Slave Trading in the Old South.”
“In the little city of Lynchburg,” Bancroft wrote, “four traders — George Davis, M. Hart, E. Myers and Seth Woodroof — were advertising in ... the Lynchburg Republican, and auctioneer Charles Phelps was selling slaves both privately and publically.” This was in 1845.
According to Bancroft, Woodroof even put up a brick building downtown to “board negroes sent to Lynchburg for sale ... and keep them as secure, as if they were placed in the jail of the Corporation.”
Some slaves actually were kept in the city jail — where, Bancroft said, “they were treated much like felons.”
Marks found that during the decades just before the start of the Civil War, almost 40 percent of the white households in Lynchburg owned or hired at least one slave. Many of these worked in the tobacco warehouses, most of the others as household servants.
And although there were no doubt Lynchburg residents who were put off by this commerce in human beings, those who engaged in it were neither shunned nor avoided.
On the contrary, Marks wrote, William Norvell was Lynchburg’s court clerk and Chiswell Dabney a respected attorney, but both placed newspaper advertisements offering slaves for sale.
One of the most common venues for slave auctions in Lynchburg was the Franklin Hotel at the corner of Main and 11th streets.
When that closed, traffic moved three blocks away to the Indian Queen Tavern, located on Main between Seventh and Eighth streets.
Other sales were held in front of private residences, or in vacant lots — especially, Marks wrote, “if they were trying to sell the lot itself.”
In other words, Marks said, the sale of slaves was part of the Lynchburg landscape, and the practice died hard.
“The day before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter,” he wrote, “traders sold four slaves at the community market: a woman for $940, a 17-year-old boy for $1,130, a 12-year-old boy for $640 and an 18-year-old girl for $1,100.”
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