The "Great Slave Auction"

On This Day in History: March 2

If you had a lot of product that was about to be made illegal, you’d unload it, right? Sell it fast and get some cash while you still can. Two years before the U.S. Civil War, Pierce Mease Butler didn’t know chattel slavery was coming to an end. He was just a gambling addict with massive debts, so he hosted the single largest auction of enslaved people in U.S. history to pay them off.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 2, 1859--

Butler was a piece of fucking shit. You know how when you’re driving, and some asshole cuts you off, and you call them a piece of shit? Not even close. He didn’t even live on either of the plantations that made his family one of the wealthiest in the nation. He resided mostly in Philadelphia while enslaved people toiled and died over rice and cotton crops in Georgia so he could spend his inheritance like a spoiled idiot with lots of granddaddy money.

Pierce was dumb as an oversized bucket of dumbfuck. He tried all sorts of investment schemes and lost a bunch of money because he was stupid, spent lavishly on things he couldn’t afford, and was the shittiest gambler ever, burning through the family fortune in no time. Creditors sold his mansion in Philadelphia but that wasn’t enough. The only thing he had of value in racist slavery-nation America was the human beings working his two Georgia plantations, and so on March 2, 1859, the “Great Slave Auction” began in the city of Savannah. And it was “great” in the same way some people wanted to “Make America Great Again.”

What I mean is, it was a fucking horror; 436 men, women, and children were auctioned off like farm animals. It became known as “the weeping time,” because they were taken from the only home many of them knew as they were forcibly relocated. More awful was that, despite the auction having terms against separating families, little consideration was given to this. Sorry kid, I only want to buy you. I don’t need your mom and dad. Stop crying.

Who am I kidding? They would never say sorry.

One 23-year-old man named Jeffrey begged his new owner to also buy his wife, Dorcas, but the piece of shit basically said nah fuck you Jeff shut up and get in the wagon.

Butler was flush again after the sale, blew through much of his ill-gotten payday, and died in 1867 from malaria. If you want to piss on Pierce Butler’s grave, it’s in the Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.