Now, a search for descendants of the Weeping Time.
It poured rain relentlessly on those two days in early March 1859 at the Ten Broeck Race Course near Savannah, Georgia, transforming the open grounds into a muddy quagmire and driving sheets of water even into the covered grandstand. There, amid the downpour, the merchandise—hundreds of human lives reduced to commodities—had been assembled for the grim spectacle of an auction. The wind howled through the open sides of the structure, whipping the rain sideways and soaking the clusters of potential buyers who huddled under oilcloths, their faces set in expressions ranging from calculating detachment to barely concealed avarice. What the auction catalog described as “prime” offerings stood or sat in pens and stalls originally meant for racehorses and gentlemen’s carriages: sturdy field hands, skilled carpenters and wheelwrights, plowmen, rice and cotton pickers, cooks, laundresses, and seamstresses, alongside women, children, infants, the elderly, the lame, the blind, and the unsound.
Names like “London’s Kit,” “Smith’s Bill,” and “Hector’s Bess” adorned the listings, evoking a false sense of familiarity for these individuals who had been stripped of their autonomy. Five bore the name Sukey—one a robust 50-year-old cotton hand, another a wide-eyed 8-year-old girl—while three were called Pompey, including an 11-year-old boy and a rice hand hobbled by a lame foot. The Brams numbered five as well: a 47-year-old “prime cotton driver of high character,” a strapping 17-year-old, and younger ones aged 9 and 7. Of the 436 men, women, and children ultimately sold—though some records tally 429—only four or five carried what might be recognized as surnames; the rest, like the vast majority of the enslaved across the South, had been denied even that fragment of identity.
Behind this catastrophe loomed Pierce Mease Butler, a 49-year-old Philadelphia aristocrat whose lineage traced back to the very foundations of the American republic—and its moral contradictions. His grandfather, Major Pierce Butler, had emigrated from Ireland in the 1760s, amassed a fortune through rice and cotton plantations on Georgia’s coastal islands, and represented South Carolina at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. There, he had championed—and personally introduced—the Fugitive Slave Clause, embedding the machinery of human bondage into the nation’s founding document by mandating the return of escaped enslaved people across state lines. The elder Butler’s wealth, built on the backs of hundreds of enslaved laborers on Butler Island and St. Simons Island plantations, set the template for his grandson’s inheritance: sprawling estates yielding indigo, long-staple Sea Island cotton, and rice, worked by generations who toiled under the lash from dawn until dusk.
Pierce Mease, however, had grown up far from the humid fields of Georgia, ensconced in Philadelphia’s elite circles, where he cultivated a reputation as a duelist, gambler, and philanderer. His 1834 marriage to the luminous British Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble had been a whirlwind romance, drawing crowds of admirers to their wedding. But the union unraveled amid irreconcilable clashes: Kemble, a fierce abolitionist who had thrilled London and New York audiences with her portrayals of tragic heroines, was appalled by the realities of slavery she witnessed during a 1838-1839 sojourn on the Butler plantations. She documented the horrors in private journals—descriptions of half-naked children shivering in the chill, women bent double in the rice fields, families sundered by whim—passages that later formed the basis of her 1863 anti-slavery memoir, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation.
“My heart is full almost to bursting as I walk among these poorest creatures,” she wrote. “Their nakedness clothes me, and their heavy toil maintains me in luxurious idleness.” Butler, fiercely protective of his family’s “peculiar institution,” forbade her from publishing earlier drafts and, after years of bitter separation, secured a divorce in 1849, stripping her of custody of their two children. By the late 1850s, the Panic of 1857 had ravaged his fortunes; speculative investments in railroads and real estate had evaporated, leaving him with debts exceeding $300,000. With no other assets to liquidate save the human property that underpinned his legacy, Butler turned to the unthinkable: dispersing his “people,” as he euphemistically called them, in the largest single sale of enslaved individuals in U.S. history.
The auction, orchestrated by Savannah slave broker Joseph Bryan, unfolded over March 2 and 3, drawing speculators, planters, and traders from across the South to the rain-lashed racetrack—once the pride of thoroughbred enthusiast Richard Ten Broeck, now a profane stage for commerce in flesh. Heavily advertised in Southern newspapers, the event filled Savannah’s hotels to bursting, with buyers required to pay one-third of the purchase price upfront and the balance in two annual installments bearing interest. The enslaved, many of whom had spent their entire lives on the isolated Butler estates some 60 miles south, had been marched or carted to the site the previous week, clutching meager bundles of belongings: tin dishes, drinking gourds, a few ragged clothes. Thomson’s vivid dispatch captured their arrival in the horse pens, where they endured the indignity of public inspection.
“The Negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes,” he observed, as prospective owners yanked open mouths to inspect teeth, pinched limbs for muscle tone, and prodded scars from old whippings like appraisers eyeing livestock. On the faces of the condemned, Thomson noted an “expression of heavy grief”: some sat brooding, chins in hands, eyes vacant and bodies swaying in ceaseless, restless motion; mothers clutched infants to their breasts, whispering futile prayers; siblings clung to one another, knowing the block would likely tear them asunder.
As the gavel fell under the relentless drumming of rain on the tin roof, families were rent apart in a frenzy of bids. Among the first offered were Elisha, 39, a “prime rice planter,” his wife Molly, 35, a capable rice hand, and their children Israel, 12, and Sevanda, 3. In a heartbreaking tableau, Elisha spotted a “benevolent-looking” buyer in the crowd and beseeched him: “Buy us all together, massa—don’t separate us.” He touted his own strength, Molly’s vigor and “good teeth” (prompting her to curtsy demurely), Israel’s spryness, and Sevanda’s promise as a future worker. “We’s a first-rate bargain,” he pleaded. The man demurred, acquiring another lot instead, and the family’s ultimate dispersal went unrecorded in the ledgers—a fate shared by countless others. Over two days, the total haul reached $303,850—equivalent to about $9 million in today’s dollars—capped by the sale of one intact family (a mother and her five children) for the auction’s high of $2,500.
As the final lots cleared, buyers and brokers toasted with champagne, while Butler pocketed two canvas sacks bulging with freshly minted coins. In a grotesque flourish of paternalism, he doled out a single dollar to each person he had just condemned to uncertainty— “to give an additional glitter to his generosity,” as Thomson acidly remarked. The reporter himself, Mortimer Thomson—writing under the pseudonym Q.K. Philander Doesticks for the abolitionist New York Tribune—had infiltrated the proceedings at great personal risk, posing as a mild-mannered buyer and even tossing in sham low bids to deflect suspicion. A Savannah paper later branded him a “spy,” but his exposé, published six days later, ignited Northern outrage, reprinting in pamphlets and fueling the growing sectional divide.
The “Weeping Time,” as it came to be mourned—evoking the biblical floods of sorrow—marked not just a personal downfall for Butler but a stark emblem of slavery’s brutality on the cusp of its collapse. Just two years later, in April 1861, the Civil War erupted, hastening the end of the system that had enriched the Butlers for generations. Butler himself, ruined further by the conflict, died in 1867 amid the ashes of Reconstruction, his plantations confiscated and his heirs scrambling to reclaim scraps of the fortune. Yet the auction’s echoes lingered, chronicled in works like historian Anne C. Bailey’s 2017 The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History, which draws on Thomson’s account to resurrect the voices of the sold.
In the present day, that history refuses to stay buried. Since 2019, Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.—renowned for his PBS series Finding Your Roots and his 2019 book Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow—has partnered with James L. Swanson, the bestselling chronicler of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, on a multifaceted project to reexamine the auction and trace its living legacy. “The auction … was horrible,” Gates reflected in a 2019 interview at Washington’s National Book Festival. “They did filthy things to people. Women stripped them, poked them. Horrible.” Their collaboration, dubbed “The Weeping Days,” extends beyond academia: researchers have already identified some descendants scattered across the U.S., from Georgia’s Lowcountry to Northern cities, and continue the search for others who may unknowingly carry this lineage.
“Some of them won’t know that they’re part of this story,” Swanson emphasized, underscoring the project’s dual focus on past atrocities and contemporary reckonings with race. “Slavery and race are not at the periphery of the American experience—they’re at the very core of what America is.” Those suspecting a connection are invited to reach out via TheWeepingDays@gmail.com, offering a thread back to ancestors whose “aching hearts,” in Thomson’s poignant words, were “divorced by this summary proceeding” no one could fully tally. In an era still grappling with the auction’s foundational wounds—evident in ongoing debates over reparations, historical markers at the overgrown Ten Broeck site, and cultural retellings—this effort illuminates how the rain-soaked cries of 1859 ripple into 2025, demanding that the weeping time never truly end.