I just returned from a meeting in Charleston, SC.  While I was there I
went to The Old Slave Mart Museum, which is now owned by the City of
Charleston.  The building was the site of Ryan's Mart, a well-known
slave market in antebellum Charleston.

This past October the city installed an exhibit within the building
about the impact of the 1808 abolition of the external slave trade to
the United States on the internal slave trade.  The point was clearly
made and documented in the exhibit that free African-Americans were
also slave owners, either of their own husbands/wives/children, or of
unrelated men, women and children, whom they purchased for their
labor, as any white slaveholder did.  I would encourage visitors to
Charleston to visit the museum and see the exhibit, which is very well
done and very informative.

Colonial Williamsburg interprets the life of Matthew Ashby, born a
free Negro who, in 1769, purchased his wife and two children from
their owner, Samuel Spurr, and then successfully petitioned the
Governor's Council for their freedom.  There is more information here:
http://www.history.org/Almanack/people/bios/bioash.cfm

Martha Katz-Hyman
Independent Curator

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