ENTRY 8: Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia (1856)

(Picture from, Eyre Crow A.R.A.: Slavery paintings and sketches: http://www.geocities.com/eyre_crowe/art_slavery.html)


Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia is a pen and ink sketch by Eyre Crow that was engraved and published in the Illustrated London News on September 27, 1856. This was part of an essay Crow wrote (“Sketches in the Free and Slave States of America”), in which he wrote, “No pen, we think, can adequately delineate the choking sense of horror which overcomes one on first witnessing these degrading spectacles.”

I chose this sketch because it shows that selling slaves was so prominent and so familiar to America in the past. Something so degrading like this shouldn’t be highlighted, but at the same it should be so that future generations realize just how much suffering blacks went through during slavery. The sketch also gives off a feeling of pride for the whites, and fear for the slaves.
Blacks were treated so inferiorly that not only were they bought and sold, but they were also beaten, hunted down, and killed. Whites made money by buying and selling slaves, who would then work on their plantations. Not only did whites easily buy slaves, but they bought them so frequently that it was almost second-nature to them. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred Tom Weylin offered to buy Dana so that she could teach Rufus (91). The way that Tom Weylin approached Dana about this was so nonchalant that it caught her off guard. It was apparent that Tom Weylin was used to buying and selling slaves.

This sketch also display’s Richard Wright’s idea that blacks had to know their place in the workforce. Slaves knew that they had to stay slaves in order to stay alive. They didn’t try to fight being bought or sold because that would result in dire consequences. They had to know their place, and that was working for whites, and respecting them. Slaves that tried to fight against the whites were punished and killed. Howard Zinn tells of these types of happenings in “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom”. For example, David Walker, son of a slave, was killed after he wrote and printed Walker’s Appeal, which infuriated Southern slaveholders (Zinn 134).

This sketch depicts the buying and selling of slaves as an act that is so second nature to whites. It is sad to know that whites once bought people just to make money for themselves. It is bad enough that they are making a profit off of other humans, but they make it worse by beating and killing blacks. Times are never perfect, and this time in American history shows just how much the country faltered, and how imperfect it once was.


Butler, Octavia. Kindred. New York: Beacon Press, 2004.

“Chapter 9: Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom.” Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: Teaching Edition. 129-160.

“The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.” Wright, Richard. Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, Sixth Edition. Edited by Rothenberg, Paula S.. 2004. p. 22-30.