[The following is in regards to the business of selling slaves in pre-Civil War Tennessee and Kentucky.]
Some Tennessee masters did indeed request that traders not break up the slave families they put up for sale. One master had a policy of not selling any of the slaves he had raised from infancy. Another insisted that his three slaves – a stout man, his wife, and son – could be separated only if they remained in the same county. But in the heat of bidding, such stipulations often went by the board.
When Isaac Johnson’s mother was put up for bid with her baby son, “no one responded for some time, and it looked for awhile that they were to escape being sold. But someone called out: ‘Put them up separately.’ Then the cry was, ‘How much do I hear for the woman without the baby?’”
Source:
Ward, Andrew. “Bedford.” River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. Viking, 2005. 22. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Anonymous (née Caruthers) in UHS, p. 254.
Johnson, Slavery Days in Old Kentucky, pp. 10-11.
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