CHARLESTON, SC – Ned. Amelia. Hagar. Flora. Anthony. Nancy.
Margaret Seidler read the names out loud enough that people around her could hear over the traffic on Broad Street.
She was in front of a large white building with large columns that used to be two smaller buildings without columns – something that anyone who passes by can now see, thanks to a photo printed on a new bronze marker.
If someone stops and reads the text, that person will learn, perhaps for the first time, that the street he is walking on, now full of law firms, galleries, bars and restaurants, a street that appears in magazine magazines spreading the beauty of Charleston , was, for decades, a thriving place for the domestic slave trade.
Enslaved people were sold at public street auctions and inside buildings at private sales.
And in that specific place, Seidler’s fourth great-grandfather, William Payne, had brokered the sale of enslaved people.
The known number of how many people continues to grow. Seidler found seven more this week. The probable total is well over 10,000, she said.
Massy. Daniel. Lowry. Phelde. Simon. Judy.
That fact came as a shock to Seidler when she traced her family’s lineage in 2018. A native Charlestonian, she always heard the same thing growing up, that her ancestors were poor German immigrants from the city’s East Side.
She didn’t question.
But a DNA test took her on a tortuous, research-and-emotional path, ending in reality that she was descended from people who profited from selling human beings. There was John Torrans, a wealthy Charleston trader in the transatlantic slave trade. She discovered her story first. Torrans’ daughter, she discovered, married Payne.
She did not claim responsibility for the actions of her ancestor. The answer she often received when telling people about the connection was that it had nothing to do with the sins of her ancestors. But she felt a responsibility to know that – that she had to do something to advance efforts to make the truth of Charleston’s story more visible.
The fact that Charleston was, after years of talking about it, making progress towards building an International African American Museum, helped bring it to the idea of placing a landmark.
The museum is paying homage to an unidentified place, Gadsden’s Wharf, a place of the transatlantic slave trade. And the aim of the museum is to promote a more truthful narration of history beyond its walls, that does not erase African Americans and does not turn a blind eye to the actions of people who have profited from selling human beings.
Seidler could do something to promote this.
“I believe that when you share the whole truth, there is potential for healing,” said Seidler. A landmark seemed to be “the most effective way to illuminate” that truth, she said.
Seidler went deeper into the research. Now, in order to place a marker, she had to build a box to explain why it should be there.
She studied the newspaper ads that Payne placed, and the number of sales grew from hundreds to thousands.
She tracked them on spreadsheets, recording the names when they were added.
Alick. Nelly. Paulo. Isaac. Clarinda. Patty with two children.
The task of simply pointing out where the auction house was located turned out to be a journey of its own. Frustrated by the confusing task of combing through old property records, she consulted a list of professional scripture researchers provided by the county scripture office. She reached out to one of them, Doreen Larimer, who was listed as a researcher of historical achievements.
Genealogical research is needed to do this type of real estate research, said Larimer. They go hand in hand.
Relying on numbered addresses does not work: the streets of the peninsula have been renumbered several times in the past three centuries. Therefore, while the records may include a numbered address for a historic property, it is unlikely to match the modern address.
Larimer’s work involved “joining the bonds of a chain of bonds” or finding the bonds of the current owner to the previous owner and the owner before that, and so on, a process that, in Charleston, can go back a few hundred years.
Charleston is incredibly resource-rich when it comes to historical documents, said Larimer. The hardest part for many people is just reading what is written. Most people are not used to the script that fills the many pages of historical property records that document land ownership on the peninsula.
Historical action itself creates a kind of puzzle. The legal description defines the location by the plots around it – this person’s land is on the east side of the property, this other one on the west side – meaning that the task also involves tracking the property of the surrounding plots, too, to prove that the location in question is what are you looking for in this case, the auction house of Payne.
Local historian and author Peg Eastman added another piece: a photo to show how the building, which used to have a 32 Broad address before being combined with the structure next door, looked at the time Payne operated his business.
To write the language in the marker, Seidler relied on the experience of other local historians, such as Nic Butler of the Charleston County Public Library and Bernard Powers, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery at the College of Charleston, who became the sponsor of the project.
Standing in front of the newly placed marker on Thursday, Powers said he hoped it would have a ripple effect, that others would research his family history, face it head-on and use the knowledge proactively.
“You know, many people, when they discover this aspect of their family – and we saw examples – they would run away from it. They would hide it. They would bury it.”
It didn’t happen this time, he said.
“Silence can be deadly because it can be uneducating,” said Powers. “It can also make people a lot more comfortable than they should be with the status quo.”
The words on the marker are intentionally pragmatic, Powers said, to show “how routine it really was”.
As the marker says, “many buildings on Broad Street between Church and East Bay” – not just Payne’s – were “private places for the sale of human property”.
Payne’s, however, was probably the busiest between 1803 and 1834. In his biggest sale in February 1819, Payne sold 367 enslaved human beings, a fact that is included in the new marker, along with the estimated dollar value of that sale, about $ 6.5 million in 2021
dollars.
Several years ago, a marker was placed in the Old Exchange Building, on the same street as the place where the new sign was installed. He explained that Charleston was “one of the largest slave trading cities in the United States” and that auctions took place there, usually north of the
Exchange.
He also notes that traders were selling enslaved people “in nearby stores on Broad, Chalmers, State and East Bay streets”.
The new marker in Broad is the only one that points to one of these places, not in a building that has been preserved for its history, but one that is part of the modern day-to-day function of the street. A bank’s offices are there now – the owners of the building, a company called Wessex Capital Investments, have given their permission to place the marker – and a popular bar is on one side, an elegant seafood restaurant on the other.
That area “has been linked almost exclusively to whiteness,” said Powers. But the history of the Black Charlestonians is there. National Freedman’s Savings Bank, a bank created for African Americans after the Civil War, was on Broad Street. Also on Broad Street, Jehu Jones Sr., who was born a slave, opened a business that was once described as “the best hotel in Charleston”.
The list goes on and there is work to be done, Powers said, to make more of these stories physically visible on the streets of Charleston.