The Slave Trade in St. Louis: Lynch's Slave Pen and the Courthouse Auctions

Bernard Lynch's "slave pen" at 5th and Myrtle Streets, centre of the St. Louis slave trade, in 1852: the only known photograph of it, by Thomas Easterly. Missouri Historical Society.

Part of the National Park Service series The History of Slavery in St. Louis.

Lynch's slave pen

Missouri law treated enslaved Black people as property, so they lived with the threat of being sold and separated from their families at auction. William Wells Brown never saw several of his siblings again after they were sold. As cotton spread through Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and the rest of the Deep South in the 1830s, enslaved Missourians constantly feared being sold "down the river".

Bernard Lynch was the city's leading trader in enslaved people. His "slave pen" at 5th and Myrtle Streets imprisoned people awaiting auction, captured freedom seekers, and free Black people who had broken the law, and his employees regularly beat them. Auctions were held at least once a week near the St. Louis Courthouse.

When the Civil War began in 1861, the U.S. military seized the pen and Lynch abandoned it; the army then held Confederate prisoners there. As the St. Louis historian Angela da Silva has put it, the pen became a prison for the very people who had shopped there before the war. The site is now Ballpark Village.

A notice posted around St. Louis in May 1843, announcing the sale of seventeen enslaved people, aged one to thirty, at the courthouse on May 31. Missouri State Archives.

Remembering the victims

Buying and selling human beings is one of history's greatest atrocities. Appraisers inspected enslaved people, sometimes assaulting them, to set their price; at sales they were often made to stand naked or nearly so before large crowds; and many families were broken apart. On May 31, 1843, the St. Louis County sheriff auctioned seventeen people, from one to thirty years old, to the highest bidders. Some were surely sold away from St. Louis and never saw their families again. After the Civil War, newspapers, especially those run by Black journalists for Black readers, often carried notices from freed people searching for their families.

Few reminders of the trade remain in the city. In 2021 Missouri State Representatives Rasheen Aldridge and Trish Gunby called for a memorial at the site of Lynch's pen, and a group of advocates has been working since to secure the land and funding for a marker.

Two advertisements from the Missouri Republican of August 4, 1860. State Historical Society of Missouri.

The city's most proslavery, pro-Democratic newspaper of the 1850s and 1860s was, confusingly, the Missouri Republican, where Lynch advertised regularly. His notice of August 4, 1860, announced his "large, airy, new quarters" at 57 South Fifth Street, offered "the highest prices known to the trade for all descriptions of negroes suited to the Southern markets", and promised "Negroes on hand and for sale at all times." Beneath it an anonymous seller offered a boy of ten to twelve as "a good hand to wash dishes, wait on the table, take care of children, run on errands."

"Last Sale of the Slaves," completed in 1865, the first professional painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, who had served the Confederacy. It shows an auction reportedly held on the courthouse steps on January 1, 1861.

In 2011 Gateway Arch National Park staged a re-enactment of a slave auction at the courthouse.

Sources

• National Park Service, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, "The Slave Trade in St. Louis." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-slave-trade-in-st-louis.htm
• In the series: previous, Slavery and the Law; next, Resisting Slavery.
• A museum photograph of Lynch's oak cash box, the only surviving object from his business, is not reproduced here.