Charleston's Broad Street Slave Auction Site: The Largest Slave Market in North America

By 1750, the area at the east end of Broad Street and East Bay Street in Charleston, South Carolina — at and around the Watch House, later the site of the Old Exchange Building (opened 1772) — had become the primary auction site for enslaved people in North America. By a law of 1710, the east end of Broad Street was designated the authorized site for market activity. Enslaved people newly arrived through Sullivan's Island were quarantined, inspected, and then brought to these waterfront wharves and the surrounding streets for public auction. Buyers examined enslaved people's teeth, skin, muscles, and hands; women were stripped and inspected for reproductive capacity. Families were routinely separated — the enslaved person's value was calculated purely as labor or reproductive capital, and buyers' preferences determined who would be sold away from parents, spouses, and children. Charleston was the entry point for approximately 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to mainland North America, and the Broad Street market was where the trade in human beings was conducted at its most concentrated.