In early March 1859, rain fell relentlessly on the Ten Broeck Race Course just west of Savannah, Georgia. For two days, as more than 400 enslaved men, women, and children stood on the auction block, the sky poured without pause. When the final sale concluded, the clouds parted. Those who lived through it, and their descendants, named the event “The Weeping Time”—a phrase that captured both the heavens’ apparent mourning and the human grief of families torn apart.
The Background: Debt and Inheritance
The people sold belonged to Pierce Mease Butler, grandson of Major Pierce Butler, a signer of the U.S. Constitution and a wealthy South Carolina-Georgia planter who had helped shape the Fugitive Slave Clause. The younger Butler inherited half of the family’s vast Georgia holdings: a rice plantation on Butler Island near Darien and a Sea Island cotton plantation on St. Simons Island. Together the properties held roughly 900 enslaved people, many of whom had lived their entire lives in the tightly knit Gullah-Geechee communities of the coastal lowcountry.
By the late 1850s, Pierce Butler had squandered much of his fortune through gambling, stock speculation, and lavish living in Philadelphia. The Panic of 1857 accelerated his collapse. Trustees took control of his affairs. After selling his Philadelphia mansion and other assets, they determined that the only remaining property of sufficient value was human. Approximately half of the enslaved population—those allotted to Pierce—would be sold to settle his debts.
The Auction
Slave broker Joseph Bryan advertised the sale for weeks in newspapers across the South: “Long Cotton and Rice Negroes… a gang of 440… among them are several good mechanics and house servants.” Savannah was chosen for its status as a major slave-trading center and its proximity to the plantations. When Johnson Square proved too small for the expected crowds, the venue shifted to the Ten Broeck Race Course, about two miles west of downtown.
On March 2 and 3, 1859, buyers from Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama, Louisiana, and beyond gathered despite the driving rain. The enslaved people had been brought by steamboat and rail and housed in the racecourse stables. 436 individuals were listed in the catalog; 429 were actually sold (the rest were ill or otherwise withheld). Among them were field hands, carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, shoemakers, cooks, and about thirty infants. The youngest was only weeks old.
Butler’s agents claimed families would not be broken up, and many lots were sold as family units. Still, separations occurred. Young adults, the elderly, and some spouses were sold apart. Newly married couples were parted on their “honeymoon.” Mothers with nursing babies fetched higher prices. The two-day sale brought $303,850—roughly the equivalent of more than $10 million today. Individual prices ranged from about $250 to $1,750; one mother and her five grown children sold for the highest family price of $6,180.
An Eyewitness Account
New York Tribune journalist Mortimer Thomson, writing under the pseudonym Q.K. Philander Doesticks, attended the auction undercover and published a detailed, unsparing report. He described the rain-soaked grounds, the examination of bodies by prospective buyers, the quiet despair on the faces of those being sold, and the occasional quiet tears. He noted Butler walking among the people he had known, sometimes shaking hands and giving each person sold a single silver dollar—a small gesture that did nothing to soften the rupture.
Thomson recorded specific sales: a young married couple sold separately for more than $1,000 each; a family of four including a newborn; skilled workers valued higher than ordinary field hands. His account helped bring the event to national attention in the tense years just before the Civil War.
Aftermath and Memory
The people sold were scattered across the South. Some later searched for relatives after Emancipation. A few eventually returned to the Georgia coast. Descendants have continued to piece together family histories through oral tradition, census records, and DNA, recovering names and stories long obscured.
For generations, the site itself faded from public view. Interstate construction and industrial development overlaid much of the old racecourse. A historical marker was eventually placed nearby. In recent years, local commemorations, genealogical research, church memorials, and preservation efforts have sought to keep the memory alive and protect what remains of the ground where the auction took place.
The Weeping Time stands as one of the largest single slave sales in U.S. history (a larger 1835 Charleston auction of more than 600 people came to light only in 2022). More than a footnote of scale, it illustrates the domestic slave trade’s capacity to shatter communities that had endured for generations, the economic calculus that treated human lives as collateral, and the resilience of those who survived separation and carried their stories forward. The rain that fell for two days in March 1859 has long since dried, but the name given to those days continues to mark the cost of that commerce.