"It was a Mournful Scene Indeed" - A Slave Auction Described by a Slave - Textual Background and Context to Uncle Tom's Cabin

In the critical edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, there are several short essays and images following the novel to provide more background and context to the story. One short essay “A Slave Auction Described by a Slave, 1841” by Solomon Northup, provides more insight into what it actually felt like to be in a slave auction.  

            Slave auctions were very common during this time period. Slaves changed hands all the time. They were bought, sold and traded. It was all just a business for white families to make money. These slaves weren’t seen as human beings to the whites. Solomon Northup describes his experience in a slave auction. They were forced to clean themselves up to look presentable for the sale.      

        

            “We were then furnished with a new suit each, cheap, but clean. The men had hat, coat, shirt, pants, and shoes; the women frocks of calico, and handkerchief to bind about their heads.” (435).

It’s interesting that they were required to dress up and wear clothes to make them seem more human and respectable. They weren’t bought because of how nice they would look in a suit. They were picked based on size, muscle, weight, and whether or not they would work hard and be obedient. It seems to me that slaves were dressed up for two reasons. One it seems more degrading. White people are literally playing dress up with these other human beings. Slaves don’t have control over anything in their lives. This is just one more thing that they are forced to depend on white people for. I think they are dressed up for the convenience of White people. To me it could be for their conscious. It’s easier to buy human life when they are trying to represent white people. They try to look proper and were taught “the art of ‘looking smart’’” (435). All this is done to make white peoples’ lives easier.

            Northup goes on to depict what runs through his mind, and all slaves minds, when being picked over by Whites. Slaves hope to be bought by certain people more than others. Is this new master going to be a harsh master, kind, respectable, terrifying? Where would they be sent to? Would their family be bought with them? Are they going to be separated? And of course slaves have no control over any of the various outcomes. Northup wanted to be bought by a particular man because he was from the city and Northup “conceived with would not be difficult to make [his] escape from New Orleans on some northern vessel” (436). Some slaves just want that chance to escape. It’s sad that they are hoping and praying to be bought by particular people when they shouldn’t have to be in situations to be bought in the first place. Northup is concerned with escaping from his next master as he watches other slaves at this auction just pray that they won’t be separated from their families. He watched one family get ripped apart.

            “What has become of the lad, God knows. It was a mournful scene indeed. I would have cried myself if I had dared,” (437).

If you got separated in an auction you almost never saw your family again. You didn’t hear from them, you didn’t know where they went. It was over. But White people didn’t care. They didn’t understand why slaves would be crying over something like that. They would threaten the slaves to stop crying. Saying that they “would soon give [them] something to cry about,” (437). Apparently losing your children, or husband, or siblings wasn’t something to cry about. White people had their own agenda at slave auctions and didn’t care about the slaves or what they could possibly be putting them through. It was all just business.

            When reading this essay and thinking about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, it makes you just relish the slave market and that period of time. In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” there are several examples of slaves being taken from their “home” and sold to new masters. Tom is sold away from his family and Eliza and George are fighting to escape together. It’s terrible to realize that white people didn’t care that they were responsible for breaking up a family. In this day and age it doesn’t make sense to me how human beings couldn’t understand what they were doing. How would anyone feel to be torn away from their family forever without knowing what may happen to each other? Slavery was brutal. The disregard for human life and it’s capacity for cruelty was evident throughout the south. I think that how Stowe depicted different slave families and the hardships they were forced to go through help her get through to people that what Americans are doing to Blacks is wrong. Human life is human life.