Augusta Avenue marks the largest slave sale in United States history

On 2 and 3 March 1859, Pierce Mease Butler sold about 436 men, women, children and infants on the grounds of the Ten Broeck Race Course. It remains the largest recorded sale of enslaved people in United States history. Butler held the auction to pay off his debts, much of them from gambling, and he made $303,850, which equals more than $10 million today.

The people brought to the auction came from Butler's cotton and rice plantations on Butler's Island and at Hampton, along the Georgia coast. Most had lived on that land their whole lives. Buyers had four dry days to inspect them in the barn stalls and sheds of the racecourse. Over the two days of the sale, families were separated, and many never saw one another again. It rained violently with howling wind through both days of selling, stopping only after the last person was sold. The event has been called the Weeping Time ever since.

The sale was documented because Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, sent a journalist named Mortimer Thomson to Savannah. Thomson, writing under the pen name Q. K. Philander Doesticks, posed as an interested buyer, spent four days walking among the crowd, and recorded what happened.

Thomson's article, titled "Great Auction Sale of Slaves at Savannah, Georgia", was reprinted in Philadelphia and London, where it caused an international outcry. The racecourse buildings are gone, and the site now sits along Augusta Avenue in west Savannah, marked only by the sign installed beside the houses in 2008.