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Eyre
Crowe, an English artist touring America, painted this scene in Richmond,
Virginia, one of the South's leading centers of the slave trade. The
painting depicts a group of slaves being loaded onto a cart for their
journey south. This was a familiar scene in the antebellum period,
when a million slaves were sold from older states like Virginia, where
tobacco cultivation was in decline, to the growing Cotton Kingdom
of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. In Crowe's 1893 memoir he recalled: "After the sales, we saw the usual exodus of negro slaves, marched under escort of their new owners across the town to the railroad station where they took places and 'went South.' They held scanty bundles of clothing, their only possessions. These were the scenes which in a very short number of years, made one realize the sources of the fiercest of Civil Wars." |
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After
the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond, by Eyre Crowe, 1853
Click image to enlarge. Copyright 2002 The Chicago Historical Society |
Image 15 of 25
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