The Devil’s Half-Acre: Slave Jails and the Business of Human Bondage

Prisons of Profit: How Slave Jails Shaped America

Photo by Carol Spivey

If you can find the slave market, you can locate the jail. In the slave‑trading South, they stood side by side — one feeding the other — both essential to the buying and selling of human lives. Slave jails were not incidental; they were the machinery that kept the trade running. Yet across the country, the physical evidence of these places has been erased, paved over, or repurposed. Where memorials do exist, they are too often softened, stripped of the brutality that defined them. The result is a history that is palatable, but not truthful.

The Infrastructure of Slavery

To understand slave jails, you must also understand the system they served.

• Breeding farms in Virginia and Maryland produced a steady supply of enslaved people for sale to the Deep South.
• Partus Sequitur Ventrem, a colonial law, ensured that children inherited the status of their mother — guaranteeing that the children of enslaved women would themselves be enslaved, and shielding white men from rape charges against their own slaves.
• Coffles — chained groups of enslaved people — were driven on foot hundreds of miles to markets or ports.