Shockoe Bottom and the Slave Trade

The neighborhood called Shockoe Bottom sits just east of downtown Richmond, between the bluffs and the James River. It is one of the oldest parts of the city. It is also the site of what was, by the eighteen fifties, the second-largest domestic slave trade in the United States, behind only New Orleans.

Between the eighteen thirties and the end of the Civil War in eighteen sixty-five, more than five dozen firms traded in enslaved people within a few blocks of what is now Fifteenth Street, an area then known as Wall Street. The James River and Kanawha Canal connected the neighborhood to the interior of Virginia. The railroads ran out of nearby depots.

Those transportation links made Richmond the ideal clearing house for the domestic slave trade, as enslaved people from the upper South were sold and moved to cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South. The most notorious site in this district was Lumpkin's Jail, three lots on Wall Street purchased by Robert Lumpkin in eighteen forty-four, just three blocks from the Virginia State Capitol. The compound included a slave pen roughly forty feet long, a two-story brick building where men, women, and children awaiting sale were held.

Lumpkin became known for cruelty. His name attached to the alley, and the Devil's half acre attached to the compound. When Union forces took Richmond in April eighteen sixty-five, the enslaved people held at Lumpkin's were freed.

Robert Lumpkin died in late eighteen sixty-six. He left the property to Mary, the woman he had enslaved and later lived with. She leased the land the following year to a Baptist minister named Nathaniel Colver, who established a theological seminary for freedmen there.

What had been called the Devil's half acre became, briefly, God's half acre. That seminary eventually became Virginia Union University. Interstate Ninety-Five now runs through part of the site.

Archaeologists excavating in the two-thousands found the original jail foundation fourteen feet below grade.