The Parallax View 2021-03-03
E09: The Weeping Time

Today on the show, we discuss The Weeping Time with Professor and author Anne Bailey and author Kristopher Monroe.

162 years ago, on March 2-3, 1859, began the largest slave auction on American soil, commonly referred to as The Weeping Time. 436 men, women, and children were sold over two days as a soft rain fell on Savannah. It was said the heavens were ‘weeping’ for the destruction of the families. The plantation and slaves situated on the Georgia Coast near Darien were inherited by Pierce Butler, Major Butler's grandson, a signee of the US Constitution.

Pierce Butler, grandson and resident of Philadelphia was a gambler and quickly accrued astronomical debts, burning through his inheritance. In 1859 a group of trustees was appointed to secure “movable property” that could be used to pay off Mr. Butler’s creditors.

The breakup of families and the loss of home became part of the African-American heritage remembered as The Weeping Time. Mortimer Thompson’s articles on the auction for newspapers in the north deepened the nation’s growing sectional divide in the years preceding the Civil War.