International African American Museum Opens
Photos by Sean Rayford for Getty Images
According to historian Nic Butler, enslaved Africans didn’t begin arriving at Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina until the final 22 months of legal transatlantic slave trade. In 1806, city council decreed, “no vessel, importing negroes from abroad ... shall, under any pretense whatever, be hauled into any dock, or to any wharf but Gadsden’s wharf.” Before this, at least ten other wharfs received ships transporting human cargo.
The timing of the 1806 mandate corresponds with the deaths of Christopher Gadsden and Ann Wragg Gadsden, who lived on the wharf property. No records show transatlantic slave trade before they vacated the property - but they owned humans and participated in other parts of the slave trade.
“The evidence regarding the volume of slave traffic at Gadsden’s Wharf in the months between late February 1806 and early 1808 represents the busiest and most tragic episode in the long history of the transportation of Africans into the United States. During that brief period, it might be reasonable to say that more Africans were sold into slavery at Gadsden’s Wharf than at any other site in North America.”
On Tuesday, the International African American Museum opened their doors to the public on the former site of Gadsden’s Wharf. Butler’s research on the wharf and Charleston is fascinating. Take a dive: The Story of Gadsden’s Wharf.
Scholars estimate 40% of enslaved Africans brought into the U.S. arrived at the port of Charleston.
To see more photos from opening day at the museum or to license them for publication: click here. All photos made June 27, 2023 in Charleston, SC
About the author: Sean Rayford is a 2001 graduate of the University of South Carolina and has been documenting the state as a photojournalist since 1997.
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