The Great Slave Auction of 1859:
The Weeping Time
March 2nd & 3rd, 1859. Savannah, Georgia.
Under two days of unceasing rain, on a racetrack in Savannah, GA, 429 enslaved Africans were auctioned off in the largest documented sale of human beings in U.S. history. Over the course of those two days, families and loved ones were ripped apart and scattered across the South. To this day, many those familial bonds remain broken.
What is the Great Slave Auction of 1859?
Pierce Mease Butler was a plantation owner, enslaver, and absentee landlord living in Philadelphia. His wealth had come to him as an inheritance from his grandfather, but it was grown from the forced, unpaid labor of hundreds of enslaved Africans. It took Pierce Butler less than ten years to squander his unearned prosperity and, exacerbated by the Panic of 1857, by 1859 his debts could no longer be ignored. Facing bankruptcy, Butler decided to sell a portion of his largest asset: approximately 900 men, women, and children that he enslaved on his plantations in Georgia.
In late February of 1859, 429 individuals were transported by train from the Georgia lowlands to the city of Savannah, where they were housed in horse stables at a race track just west of the city. For several days, prospective buyers strolled the grounds to view the wares on offer. On March 2nd and 3rd, each of those 429 were put up on an auction block and sold to the highest bidder, scattering families across the South. It is thanks to Mortimer Thomson, a journalist from New York operating under an assumed name, that we have a detailed record of this horrific event.
The Great Slave Auction Resource Guide
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If one of the greatest injustices felt by descendants of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is the erasure of origins and family history, can genealogy be a form of repair?
We are launching a Weeping Time DNA Project to identify descendants who have little to no knowledge of their ancestry and to place the Weeping Time into the greater context of the African Diaspora.
Genetic genealogy can trace emerging lines of common ancestry that connect Weeping Time and Butler Island Descendants with relatives in St. Helena, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the wider African diaspora, following networks of forced migration in the Western Hemisphere, including potential genetic, cultural and historical intersections with families trafficked through the same transatlantic system.
This is a descendant-led stewardship effort, using advanced genetic genealogy, community-based research, interactive historical site mapping, and documentary practices to reconnect the living descendants of The Weeping Time. Our ultimate goals are to begin the process of healing broken kinship, deepen the public understanding of the Great Slave Auction and its legacies, preserve burial sites, and ensure that descendants shape how this story is told.
If you would like to learn more, or are interested in joining this project, please subscribe to our newsletter or fill out our contact us form