Where tourists and revelers today flock to the Baltimore waterfront, a grim trade in human beings once flourished. Ralph Clayton has spent much of the last 25 years poring over faded documents, trying to bring its lost history to light.
He can tell you how slave trader Austin Woolfolk marched slaves in chains down Pratt Street to ships moored in Fells Point, passing the very buildings that now house trendy bars. Woolfolk moved at night to reduce interference from the slaves' despairing relatives, who would never see their family members after they departed for the auction blocks of New Orleans.
The pier where schoolchildren now line up for the National Aquarium was once the Frederick Street dock, embarkation point for more than 2,000 slaves sold and shipped to the Deep South. The Babe Ruth statue outside Camden Yards stands on the exact site of slave dealer Joseph S. Donovan's private "jail," built in 1858 to hold slaves awaiting shipment.
"There's not even a tiny plaque there," Clayton says. Nor is there a plaque at the corner of Howard and Pratt, where Hope Slatter and later Bernard Campbell ran a slave jail from which 56 men, women and children were liberated by the Union Army after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Nor is there any marker where John Denning ran his slave business - on Frederick Street, just north of the city's Holocaust Memorial.
Now, however, there is Clayton's new book, Cash For Blood: The Baltimore to New Orleans Domestic Slave Trade (Heritage Books). In a 131-page narrative, the book documents for the first time the horrors of the commerce that thrived in the city for a half-century before the Civil War. A 500-page appendix lists the names and ages of more than 8,000 enslaved African-Americans shipped to New Orleans, with partial information for several thousand more.
The people shipped from Baltimore were among the estimated 500,000 to 1 million people sold south in the domestic slave trade after the importation of slaves from Africa was banned in 1808.
The trade was driven by economic change. As farmers in the upper South switched from labor-intensive tobacco to grain, they found themselves with excess workers. At the same time, the invention of the cotton gin caused a cotton boom in the Deep South, creating a severe labor shortage.
Baltimore became a center of the resulting business. Advertising in The Sun and other newspapers, dealers bought slaves throughout Maryland, imprisoned them temporarily in slave jails or "pens" around the harbor and moved them on packet ships down the Chesapeake Bay to New Orleans and other markets.
While shipboard conditions were not as horrific as those of the Middle Passage from Africa, the domestic trade often split families forever. Even when mothers and children or wives and husbands traveled together, Clayton shows, they often faced sale to different owners in New Orleans.
So when a Maryland slave owner died or ran short on cash, the consequences for an enslaved family could be dire.
"You were always a heartbeat or a failed business deal away from losing your family," Clayton says. "A season without rain could do it. ... Can you imagine? You're in the darkness in the damp belly of the ship, trying to hold on to your children, because you know you may soon be separated forever."
'Labor of love'
For Clayton, 53, a periodicals librarian at the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Library, Cash For Blood is his fourth book on local aspects of slavery and African-American history. It resulted from more than 3,000 hours of work, most working in the basement of his Northwood home on a broken microfilm reader whose reels he turns by hand.
A tall man with a shock of white hair across his forehead and a close-cropped beard, Clayton seems in some ways an unusual person to become a historian who focuses on slavery.
For one thing, he never finished college, dropping out and taking a job as a book-sorter in the basement of the Pratt in 1969. For another, he's white, and he grew up in the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood of Hamilton when it was strictly segregated.
But while Clayton says he "came up in a totally racist time in Baltimore history," a series of accidents led to his avocation. Because he was asthmatic and couldn't play sports, he was shunned by his white schoolmates and found the mostly black children he met in the Johns Hopkins Hospital allergy clinic more congenial. When he joined the Pratt staff, most of his colleagues were African-Americans. In 1974, he married the sister of one of them.
Alma Clayton, who teaches at a Baltimore elementary school, does not share his fascination with the history of slavery, finding it too painful to dwell on. But Ralph, who first got intrigued in the late 1970s while researching a black burial ground off Belair Road that was bulldozed in the 1950s, has devoted himself for years to the meticulous reconstruction of lost local history.
In 1987, he published Black Baltimore, 1820-1870 and The Free Blacks of Anne Arundel County, 1850, and in 1993, Slavery, Slaveholding and the Free Black Population of Antebellum Baltimore . He also writes articles for the genealogical press and occasional op-ed pieces for The Sun.
The work - combining history with laborious compilation of names - has won the admiration of other local historians.
"He's put his heart and soul into this work," says Philip J. Merrill, a history and memorabilia expert and author whose Baltimore-based Nanny Jack & Co. offers history tours based on Clayton's research. "To Ralph, it's not work. It's a labor of love. It defines who he is."
As for the question of Clayton's race, Merrill, who is black, says he is aware of some resentment that a white man has become so active in local black history. But he says: "I think it's time we got over the issue of color in who's doing the research." The slave trade - run by white dealers for white slaveholders - is "white history" as well as black, he notes.
The rewards of the work are not pecuniary; Clayton spends far more on research than he makes on the books. Priced at $48.50 by Heritage Books Inc., a genealogical publisher in Bowie, Cash For Blood is not likely to be a best-seller.
Constant jeopardy
Clayton has found that almost no traces remain of the physical infrastructure of Baltimore's slave trade, though on rare occasions a clue has surfaced. In 1937, for example, workers digging to install electrical conduits discovered a tunnel used by slave trader Hope Slatter to move slaves from ships to the jail on Pratt Street. Around the same time, an aged Baltimorean named Rezin Williams told a government interviewer he had been hired as a free black man to judge the slaves' physical condition and to lead them through the tunnel.
"He was told to sort of pacify the black women who set up a wail when they were separated from their husbands and children," according to the Federal Writers' Project historian who recorded Williams' recollections in the 1930s. "It was a pitiful sight to see them, half naked, some whipped into submission, cast into slave pens surrounded by iron bars."
Poring over the microfilm of slave ship manifests and other archival documents, Clayton discovered other powerful stories. He describes the rebellion of 31 slaves shipped from Fells Point in 1826 aboard the Decatur, in which the captives overwhelmed the crew. They threw the captain and another man overboard before drifting about, unable to navigate and finally being recaptured.
The subsequent hanging of one of the mutineers led the publisher of a Baltimore-based abolitionist newspaper to denounce the trader who shipped the slaves and witnessed the hanging, Austin Woolfolk, as "a monster in human shape." In a famous confrontation, Woolfolk met abolitionist Benjamin Lundy on the street and beat him nearly to death - an offense for which a judge fined the slave trader exactly $1.
Cash for Blood documents the constant threat to free black adults and children of being kidnapped by thugs and sold into slavery. That was almost the fate of a free black carpenter named Fortune Lewis, who was grabbed one night while walking to his house off Pratt Street and taken to Woolfolk's house nearby.
Rushed by carriage to a jail in Washington, Lewis, 25, was released by the jailer the next day after he produced a certificate of freedom he had concealed in his clothes.
His abductors apparently were never punished - but Lewis soon moved away from the harbor, evidently feeling less in jeopardy farther from the slave dealers' operations.
Never forget
Clayton seems not to have lost his astonishment over such tales - or over the failure of the city to remember the history of perfidy, greed and suffering the slave trade entailed. He says commemoration should begin with teaching the facts of the local trade in the schools. There's an obvious need for a monument to the trade's victims, he says, suggesting the small park at the corner of Pratt and Light streets as an apt site.
Some people have suggested re-enactments of the slave "coffles," the processions of chained men - women and children were usually not chained - walking to the docks. A mild version was tried in October 2000, when several hundred students and others, wearing the names of slaves, walked from Camden Yards to Fells Point, the route Clayton calls "Baltimore's trail of tears."
There was no attempt to reproduce the actual horrors of the trade. Clayton says that perhaps there should not be.
"I don't want to see fake re-enactments," Clayton says. "And I don't know that people could take a realistic re-enactment. But we owe it to all the people who suffered to remember them."
For more information on Cash For Blood or to order the book, go to www.heritage books.com.
The story of one voyage
Among the larger Baltimore-New Orleans shipments of slaves documented in Ralph Clayton's Cash For Blood is that of 144 enslaved people aboard the ship Henry Clay:
"When the forty-one slaves of Austin Woolfolk were roll-called on Dec. 4, 1828, they were placed below deck for their final passage to New Orleans. Eight members of the Sephus family, some of whom would surely have been separated by sale in New Orleans, were segregated in the belly of the Baltimore-built, 371-ton ship Henry Clay moored at Price's Wharf [at the south end of Wolfe Street in Fells Point]. Also placed on board were four members of the Haman family, Ann Guy and her two children, Ann and Mariah Finley (both 19), Bill and Margaret Heath, Rachel Stanley and her children Harriet and Dinah, Fanny and Jack Brown, Sinah Gibson and her children Henry and James. James W. Bennett (12 years old) and Neal Boyer (11 years old), despite their age, were shipped without accompanying family members, as were a number of young adults.
"What made this shipment particularly unusual is that the Henry Clay was scheduled to dock at Nottingham, Anne Arundel County, and pick up additional slaves. ...
"Sixty-one of the slaves on board were twelve years of age or under.
"Their thirty-five day journey ended with the final roll call in New Orleans on Jan. 8."