Existing comment:
During the more than ninety years of active Trans-Atlantic Trade of enslaved Africans to North America, white Virginian colonists, plantation owners, and traders purchased roughly 114,000 Africans from Atlantic slaving brigs. Most of the early sales took place along the banks of the York, Potomac, and Rappahannock rivers or in nearby towns. A few ships travelled up the James River, but after 1746 forty percent of the enslaved Africans in Virginia where [sic] brought to Bermuda Hundred where the James and the Appomattox River converge and Osborne's Landing a few miles farther up the James River. From there, smaller vessels could navigate nearly thirty miles of twisting waterways to Petersburg and Richmond.
Until the time of the American Revolution, Richmond was a small collection of villages situated at the Falls of the James. The earliest sales and auctions that took place in this area, including Petersburg, were most likely secondary sales of captives that had been purchased elsewhere. Rocky Ridge, now known as Manchester, and Richmond were both advertised points of sale during the 1760s and 1770s and usually sold enslaved Africans who had been born in Virginia or had lived in Virginia for some time.
In an act of defiance against British rule, Virginia's leaders temporarily banned the importation of African captives in 1775. The ban became a Virginia law in 1778 and in 1782 a second law was passed that allowed for private manumission, or the freeing of enslaved people. While some owners released their captives out of justice and compassion, others served their own self-interest and took advantage of the growing demand for labor in the Deep South. Worn out by years of tobacco production, Virginia's fields could no longer support its growing enslaved population; at the same time, the invention of the cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry by introducing a method of harvesting the crop that made it a very profitable -- yet still labor intensive -- commodity. Desperate to work every inch of available land, the Deep South clamored for ready labor and the Old Dominion happily responded. Enslaved Africans were "sold down the river" to plantation owners ready to pay premium prices that allowed traders to amass huge fortunes. As noted by the Richmond Enquirer receipts from slave sales in 1857 approached $3.5 million dollars, an amount that equates to about $100 million in 2010. |