Crowe’s primary duty during his visit to the United States was as the amanuensis for the popular British writer William Makepeace Thackeray who toured the country from 1852 to 1853. While Thackeray lectured to enthralled American audiences, his secretary meticulously recorded the trip in words and pictures. Crowe, who studied painting in France, later published an illustrated memoir of his experiences called With Thackeray in America. Among the sights and illustrated stories Crowe included in his account, the most vivid and haunting was his visit to the Richmond, Virginia, slave market where he witnessed a slave auction. As his experience revealed, the simple act of drawing the harsh circumstances of the slave trade engendered the wrath of the system’s patrons and defenders.

Crowe later recollected that on the morning of March 3, 1853, while perusing the morning newspaper he came across the advertising columns containing announcements of the day’s slave sales on Richmond’s Wall Street: “Fifteen likely negroes to be disposed of between half-past nine and twelve—five men, six women, two boys, and two girls.” Carrying a “small notepaper and pencil,” Crowe went to the city’s market for the traffic in humans, where he witnessed the inspection and testing of men and women up for sale “as would be done with a horse.” Crowe began to sketch “some of the picturesque figures awaiting their turn.”

“On rough benches were sitting, huddled close together, neatly dressed in grey, young negro girls with white collars fastened by scarlet bows, and in white aprons. The form of a woman clasping her infant, ever touching, seemed the more so here. There was a muscular field-labourer sitting apart; a rusty old stove filled up another space.”

Crowe was still sketching when a group of buyers and dealers entered the room. Merely glimpsing Crowe’s activity froze the slave traders and no one stepped up to bid. As the crowd grew angrier at the interference in trading, the auctioneer confronted Crowe. “I got up with the intention of leaving quietly, but, feeling this would savour of flight, I turned round to the now evidently angry crowd of dealers, and said, ‘You may turn me away, but I can recollect all I have seen.’”

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