Tucked away on a picturesque cobblestone street in downtown Charleston sits a building with a unique and bitter past—the Old Slave Mart Museum. The Old Slave Mart is believed to be the only building in South Carolina where slave auctions took place to survive into the modern day. Originally part of a much larger, walled outdoor complex, the building that stands at 6 Chalmers Street is the only portion that remains. Visitors have inquired as to whether or not slaves were truly sold in the museum you will visit; the answer is yes. As visitors of 2008 walk through the glass doors into the brick and mortar entrance of the present museum, they are really stepping through a portal of history into the bustling Ryan’s Slave Market of 1859.

Slaves that belong to the Market itself are scurrying about the compound, bringing food cooked in the on-site kitchen for the new arrivals, or perhaps preparing a dye for gray hair in an attempt to take a few years off an older slave. The platform in back is busy with trading humanity as the wealthy and powerful look on. Slaves are brought upon the platform, inspected, and then the bidding begins. Today—just one day, only the barest glimpse of the past—trader Z.B. Oakes is selling:

The aim of the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston is to universally reach a better understanding of the domestic slave trade. When people think of the slave trade, most often the image conjured up is the horror of the Trans-Atlantic “Middle Passage,” where European traders bartered with African kings to enslave an estimated 12 million Africans or more during the latter part of the 18th century, 7% of which came to North America (the vast majority of exported African slaves were not sent to North America; rather, the Caribbean, Central America and Brazil). However, importation into the United States ended in 1808, thus necessitating a domestic trade of which Charleston was an integral part. “Educating people on the domestic slave trade and auction life is our goal,” says museum curator Nichole Green. “It was in this that Charleston was central.”

In May of 1853, Thomas Ryan and his partner, James Marsh, purchased a large Chalmers Street lot along with two lots on Queen Street that contained several buildings. This gave the partners an L-shaped holding of property, where they had a market selling various goods and services. Only three years later the Charleston City Council passed an ordinance “to prevent sales at auctions, in the streets and places surrounding the customs house after July 1” (present day north side of Old Exchange Building & Provost Dungeon). The first slave to be sold out of Ryan’s Slave Market on July 1, 1856, was a twenty-year old African-American slave named Lucinda. Congestion of street traffic was a major factor in moving it from the customs, though it was also rumored that the genteel ladies of society did not want to look at “families ripped apart before breakfast.”

In February of 1859, Charlestonian Z. B. Oakes acquires the auction complex and does extensive renovations, using the east wall of the German Fire House to build a shed in the Chalmers Street lot for use as a sales room. A barracoon, or slave jail, was also housed on the property, where slaves would be kept before and after sale. They would be washed, oiled and otherwise readied for sale, fed from an on-site kitchen house to give them a few extra pounds for the auction.

“While it is known universally that there cannot be a value placed on human life, one must also understand that these were the views of 1859,” explains Green. Slaves were valued anywhere from $50 to several thousand dollars, based on their skills, trade or beauty. The price structure today stands for us in part as a testament to the wealth of pre-Civil War South. A carpenter or other skilled slave sold at Ryan’s auction would have sold in modern money for more than $30,000. There are artifacts on display at the Old Slave Mart Museum that illustrate the price structure and how plantation owners would often keep lists of their slaves and prospective value at auction. Some owners would sell their slaves simply to re-acquire a fortune. One artifact in particular has Green’s interest—a slave pass, where the creases on the paper spark to life the memory of an enslaved man folding the paper to put in his pocket. Also kept at the museum is an authentic slave manacle. Displays detail how the auction worked and how slaves could in some part sway their own sales, being lethargic before a master who was notorious, or expressive and friendly before a master reputed to be kind.

While slave auction houses like Ryan’s sold goods besides slaves, in mainstream advertising the slave auction was generally the focal point of talk and signpost. Ryan’s Slave Market was listed in magazines and newspapers of the antebellum period all over the southern states whenever large auctions were to be held. One auction that took place here had well over 200 slaves for sale and was a three-day process that was advertised as far west as Louisiana and Texas to other major slaveholding cities. If you were to have said to an 1850s trader the name “Ryan’s Market,” they would have known you meant 6 Chalmers Street in downtown Charleston, though it was only one of approximately forty slave auction locations in the State, Broad, and Chalmers Street areas of the peninsula.

To learn more about slave auctions and the domestic slave trade, please visit the Old Slave Mart Museum, 6 Chalmers Street. Hours are Monday-Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm, and admission is $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and students.