Anne C. Bailey. The Weeping Time

Over the course of two days in early March 1859, a racetrack in Savannah, Georgia, hosted a massive auction of enslaved persons. In The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History, Anne C. Bailey surveys the event and its aftermath. By the time the auctioneer’s gavel fell silent, she explains, 436 enslaved persons belonging to a single owner, Pierce Mease Butler, had been sold to bidders from across the South and beyond. Butler inherited several Sea Island cotton and rice plantations along with their inhabitants from his grandfather, also named Pierce Butler, who was a Revolutionary War hero and a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The younger Butler lived in Philadelphia, pursuing the life of a dandy underwritten by profits from the estates. In 1834 he wooed and wed the celebrated British actress Frances Anne Kemble. A sojourn on the plantations in the winter and spring of 1838–1839 (an account of which she published from her journals in 1863) intensified Kemble’s antipathy toward slavery, both as the source of the family’s wealth and as an affront to modern sensibilities. By the late 1840s the marriage had crumbled; Kemble returned to England—without her young daughters, who remained in their father’s custody—and Butler squandered his inheritance. To be sure, the auction staved off Butler’s financial ruin, but it broke apart scores of black families and destroyed the community that was generations in the making.

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