Most people in Richmond know that Virginia was long associated with slavery. Few, however, are aware of the central role the capital city played in that “peculiar institution.”
 
The importation of captured Africans into the United States was banned in 1807, and the ban took effect the following year. Virginia itself had banned importation in 1778. Before that time, African men, women and children who had survived the horrors of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic were brought by ship up the James River, unloaded at Manchester Docks and delivered to various river and inland sites. 
 
After 1808, Shockoe Bottom took on a different role: instead of receiving human cargo from overseas, it instead functioned increasingly as the port of embarkation for enslaved Africans being sold from Virginia to new plantations in the Deep South.
 
The United States was changing. The year 1793 had seen the invention of the cotton gin by the enterprising Eli Whitney. This ingenious mechanism greatly facilitated the harvesting of cotton at a time of expanding world markets for machine-made linen.
 
Meanwhile, the successful Haitian slave uprising was convincing Napoleon to abandon his dreams of a New World empire. The result was the vast Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
 
So, at the same time that the importation of captured Africans became illegal, the demand for slave labor in the Deep South had greatly increased as new plantations of fresh cotton fields were established to compete with Upper South growers.
 
These factors formed the material basis for the decision by many of the gentry to invest in a new “cash crop.” Virginia quickly became what was known as a “breeder state” — it literally grew human beings for profit. (One successful entrepreneur bragged that his plantations had produced 6,000 children for sale.)
 
And so the great trading center of Richmond came into its own.
 
From the time that U.S. participation in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was banned until the end of the Civil War, Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom functioned as one of the most important slave trading centers in the United States, along with New Orleans and Natchez, Miss.

In the decade between 1830 and 1840 alone, it is estimated that between 10,000 and 11,000 people of African descent were sold each year on the auction blocks of Richmond and transported by ship, railroad or by foot to the sweltering fields of their new owners.
 
In the process, the area bounded by Main, Marshall, 14th and 19th streets became one of the great wealth-producing areas of the South. And it wasn’t only slave traders who plied their trade there. No, an enterprise this vast required many skills.
 
The heart of the business, of course, was made up of the traders themselves, some of them formal corporations, some free-lance individuals. But slaves also had to be housed. Lumpkin’s Jail, the largest of the slave-holding businesses, was located just west of the present Main Street Station. (This area, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre,” later housed the origins of Virginia Union University.) Omohundro’s Jail sat at the southeast corner of what is now 17th and East Broad streets. Auction houses lined 15th Street, known at the time as Wall Street. The town whipping post likely stood in what is now the 17th Street Farmer’s Market.
 
For those who didn’t survive the Passage, or who died from their labors in the city, there was the Burial Ground for Negroes, situated just north of what is now East Broad Street between 15th and 16th streets. In the center of that unhappy place was the town gallows, where the great slave rebellion leader Gabriel was executed on Oct. 10, 1800. The site is now a privately owned parking lot, used daily by students and faculty at the VCU Health Centers. 
 
Then there were the many service industries: the law firms, clothing houses, insurance companies and offices of the shipping and railroad lines. One of those railroads developed into the present-day CSX Corporation. To help attract the trade of the slave dealers, it offered free transportation for children.
 
And, of course, there were the newspapers. The media wasn’t located in Shockoe Bottom itself, but the direct predecessors of today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch contributed by announcing the auctions, complete with the number, ages and genders of the “products” to be sold. They also assisted the slave owners by publishing advertisements for runaway slaves.
 
There was much profit to be made, and in one way or another most of the city’s merchants and professionals found ways to take part. (For example, famed attorney Patrick Henry did legal work for Thomas Prosser, who owned Gabriel.)
 
Slave labor literally built many of Richmond’s magnificent buildings, including its state capitol.  And it was the trade in slaves that built the fortunes that allowed a privileged few to assume the political leadership of what was to become the capital of the Confederacy — the political expression of the rule of the slaveholders and their merchant allies.
 
This is the area that the Richmond Braves, the Global Development corporation and their supporters among Richmond’s present-day merchant class have now targeted for a baseball stadium.
 
But there is another reason why present-day Shockoe Bottom is so ill-suited for a stadium.  And that is because it was in many ways the crucible where the present-day African-American nation was forged.
 
The slave prison on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal in West Africa is recognized as a sacred place for African-Americans. It is the bit of land where many of their ancestors were held before their final journey from the Motherland.
 
In a similar way, Shockoe Bottom is that bit of land where many of the ancestors were held before their forced journey South to lives of desperate servitude.
 
Altogether, it is estimated that up to 350,000 people of African descent were sold out of Virginia between 1790 and 1859. Many of these were sold in the auction houses of Shockoe Bottom.

 

By the beginning of the Civil War in 1860, there were fewer than 4.5 million Black people in the entire country. That means that, all across the United States, as well as in Canada and Mexico, African-Americans can trace their lineage to Shockoe Bottom. Just as Americans of European descent can travel to the Statue of Liberty to see where their ancestors first stepped ashore in the New World, so Americans of African descent should be able to travel to Richmond to see where their ancestors were forced to leave behind the Old World.  
 
Properly preserved, this area that once held such cold, commercial brutality could become a life-affirming place of study, reflection and meditation. Like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., it could become a place where people of all backgrounds gather and resolve to never again allow such inhuman cruelty. It could become a place of understanding, of healing, of reconciliation born of a country finally facing the reality of its origins, finally resolving to make right what has been so wrong for so long.
 
Because of all this, this small piece of land does not belong to Richmonders alone. It belongs to the whole country and especially to all those people whose ancestors once stood there, bound and chained, forced to watch while their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and even their own children were sold away to lives of torment.
 
It is exactly the wrong place for a commercial sports stadium. We do not have the right to allow that kind of desecration to compound all the wrongs already committed there.

What was once a place of horror and sorrow must be restored materially and spiritually, so that it can play its rightful role as a reminder of what once was, and what can never be allowed to be again.

 

 

End