The 'Weeping Time'

Park that commemorates the "Weeping Time'

Savannah is one of America’s great cities. Yet she is a creature of the South. Which means a lot of her wealth was built on the brawn and brains of slaves. It is our shameful history. This history has repercussions unto this very day. One of the saddest, criminal slave incidents in the United States occurred here in our City.

It is called the ‘Weeping Time”. It was the largest sale of human beings in the history of the United States. It was in March 1857 when Pierce Butler, an inheritor of his family’s Georgia plantations, sold 436 men, women, and children. He had squandered his inheritance of over three quarter of a million dollars and found himself in deep debt. The creditors were breathing down his neck and he was not able to live the rich lifestyle to which he was accustomed. So a board of trustees had stepped in to pay his debtors by liquidating his capital and help him recover the lifestyle he felt he deserved.

They sold his Philadelphia mansion and other properties but this was not enough. All that was left were the plantation and the slaves. The estate had nine hundred slaves. 450 would go to his now deceased brother’s estate, he would be able to maintain twenty slaves, and the other 429 slaves would be sold.  
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Philadelphia socialite Sidney George Fisher noted in his diary,

‘It is a dreadful affair, however, selling these hereditary Negroes. . . . Families will not be separated, that is to say, husbands and wives, parents and young children. But brothers and sisters of mature age, parents and children of mature age, all other relations and the ties of home and long association will be violently severed. It will be a hard thing for Butler to witness and it is a monstrous thing to do. Yet it is done every day in the South. It is one among the many frightful consequences of slavery and contradicts our civilization, our Christianity, or [do you mean our here] Republicanism. Can such a system endure, is it consistent with humanity, with moral progress? These are difficult questions, and still more difficult is it to say, what can be done? The Negroes of the South must be slaves or the South will be Africanized. Slavery is better for them and for us than such a possibility,

The sale was at the Savannah racetrack (one of the few places big enough to hold such an event) outside the downtown area. For two days people and families who had grown up together were sold. At the end of the sale he had netted $303,850.  Although it was said Pierce Butler was sad about having to sell the slaves, after the last slave was sold champagne bottles popped in celebration.  Pierce Butler took a trip to Europe and was able to return home to Philadelphia in high style.
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Today in a small park stands a historical plaque marking the greatest sale of humans in the United States. It stands as a reminder of the fact that Savannah’s wealth, to a large extent, is a result of slavery. One can only hope that the “Weeping Time” for such a horrid event will never stop.

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