Amazing Grace

Arriving in an unfamiliar country, where people did not speak their language, captured Africans were bought and sold at auction as though they were farm horses or cattle. Such was expected in the world of chattel slavery which had developed on "New World" plantations.

The U.S. Library of Congress contains graphic drawings, and photographs, of the buying and selling of Africans in America:

• Buyers gather for a slave sale in Easton, Maryland.


• Captured Africans are grouped together in "slave pens" as they wait to be sold in Alexandria, Virginia.


• White buyers inspect a kidnapped African and negotiate a purchase price with slave traders.


• Arriving in South Carolina in the 1780s, a group of Africans are slated to be sold at Ashley Ferry (outside Charleston).


• Men, women and children are auctioned as though they were farm implements.


• Advertisements highlight the virtues of particular slaves.


• Families are split apart as the cries of a pleading mother - "Buy us too" - fall on deaf ears.


• In Savannah, Georgia "slaves were raised for market."

We are left to wonder what we might do, were we involved in a slave auction as a participant, a bystander or an object of bidding.

Once purchased, the newly arrived slaves endured hard work - and punishment:

• Plowing fields and picking cotton on cotton plantations were major jobs for American slaves.


• Preparing cotton for the gin on "Smith's plantation" was a typical scene after the cotton was harvested.


• It wasn't just overseers, or male "masters," who punished workers as evidenced by this drawing of a white mistress, whipping a black slave girl.


• Before a beating, slaves were often hanged from the ceiling with their hands and feet bound. The next step was the cowhide lash on their backs.


• Wilson Chinn, an African slave in Louisiana, bears the marks of branding and torture.

John Wesley, the famous British pastor and founder of the Methodist Church, had an apt description for American slavery. He called it "the vilest that ever saw the sun."