Entitled: "Front of slave pen, Alexandria, Virginia" showing a Union army guard and other men in front of a building designated Price, Birch & Co., dealers in slaves, at 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia. Before that, the premises were owned by the s
Entitled: "Front of slave pen, Alexandria, Virginia" showing a Union army guard and other men in front of a building designated Price, Birch & Co., dealers in slaves, at 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia. Before that, the premises were owned by the slave-trading firm Franklin & Armfield. The Union army used the former slave jail to house Confederate prisoners. Slave Auctions were advertised when it was known that a slave ship was due to arrive. When the slave ship docked, the slaves would be taken off the ship and placed in a pen. There they would be washed and their skin covered with grease, or sometimes tar, to make them look more healthy. This was done so that they would fetch as much money as possible. They would also be branded with a hot iron to identify them as slaves. Slavery in the United States was the legal institution of chattel slavery that existed in the United States of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws and sentiment gradually spread in the Northern states, while the rapid expansion of the cotton industry from 1800 led to the Southern states to depend on slavery as integral to their economy, and they attempted to extend it as an institution into the new Western territories. The United States was polarized by slavery into slave and free states along the Mason-Dixon Line, which separated Maryland (slave) and Pennsylvania (free). Although the international slave trade was prohibited from 1808, internal slave-trading continued at a rapid pace, causing the forced migration of more than one million slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South in the antebellum years. The total slave population in the South eventually reached four million before abolition. Photographed by Andrew J. Russell, circa 1865.
Size: 4500px × 3044px
Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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