Charleston attorney Stephen Schmutz is excited that a different kind of shingle will soon hang on his law office at 24 Broad St. It will reveal the building’s hidden past.
For more than three decades, Schmutz has practiced law in the two-story, salmon-colored building dwarfed by the towering People’s Building along Broad Street, the commercial pulse in the city’s historic district.
Schmutz says he was told in the summer of 2023 that in the 19th century his building was the offices for auctioneers Jervey, Waring and White, which sold 600 enslaved people in February 1835. It is believed to be the single largest sale of humans in U.S. history.
“I didn’t say much of anything. I was in disbelief, then stunned,” Schmutz said, describing his reaction when he heard the history of his building.
Schmutz is a self-described cheerleader for civil rights. But he revealed that both of his great-great-grandfathers fought on the Confederate side in a war to maintain slavery, and now he owns a building that once housed a slave-trading firm. “I think of the irony of it all,” he said.
The big reveal
The College of Charleston’s Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston on Oct. 11 will place a 21-by-18-inch bronze plaque on the building’s façade to mark the site of the company that handled the 1835 sale. Schmutz said he is “excited to be part of [a program] to display this bad history of a great country.”
The plaque is designed to disabuse the idea that all of the city’s human trafficking occurred at the Old Slave Mart on Chalmers Street, said Dr. Bernard Powers Jr., the center’s founding executive director. The Old Slave Mart, which operated from 1856 to 1863, is the only building with a label that ties it with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Powers said.
“With so many people moving to Charleston and visitors [to the city] they only know what they see,” he said. “We are trying to give them visual evidence that the historic district was immersed in this kind of human commerce. We hope they will have a better sense that there was a network of these places.”
“We know of family members who had a relative sold in this case, and they may attend the plaque’s unveiling,” Powers told the Charleston City Paper.
An unexpected find
When College of Charleston graduate student Lauren Davila interned at the center, Powers assigned her to search the digital archive at the Charleston County Public Library for 1830s newspaper ads announcing the sale of Africans. The center is interested in documenting the domestic slave trade that followed the trans-Atlantic slave trade, said Davila, who is now pursuing a doctorate degree in history at Tulane University.
The firm Jervey, Waring and White appeared in many of the ads, Davila said. “I homed in on that, and began looking only at their sales,” she said. “Through that search, I found the ad for the sale of the 600.”
Jervey, Waring and White placed a Feb. 24, 1835, ad in the Charleston Courier that announced: “This day, the 24 instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, a very valuable gang of negroes, accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of six hundred.”
Davila said initially she didn’t think it was true, but it had to be. “I immediately called Bernie to ask if this was real, and we confirmed it was,” she said.
The sale occurred in Charleston during America’s domestic slave trade that began after the international slave trade ended in 1808. Before then, an estimated 400,000 captured Africans were brought to Charleseton from the 10 million to 12 million people shipped to the Western Hemisphere. The size of Charleston’s domestic slave trade is unknown. It sent enslaved people to Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Ball family property
The 600 people who were sold in 1835 had been owned by John Ball Jr., a member of the Ball family that enslaved nearly 4,000 people in Berkeley County. When he died the year before, his plantations and enslaved workforce was put on the auction block along with other people owned by Ball’s relatives, Davila said. When the two-day sale ended, 770 people, just from the Ball family, had been sold away, a process that divided Black families forever.
Ball’s widow, Ann Ball, bought back 215 people her husband enslaved, Davila said. At that time in America’s history, she and other women didn’t have the legal standing to keep their husband’s property after they died, but she needed enslaved people to operate her plantations, she said.
“This narrative has been spun that White women weren’t able to run plantations well, they were just women,” Davila explained. “That was not the case. White women oftentimes were just as violent and were just as in charge of controlling a plantation as their husbands and that is what confuses people when they hear this story.”
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