COMMISSIONER’S SALE BROADSIDE ANNOUNCING THE COURT-ORDERED SALE OF ENSLAVED PERSONS, WASHINGTON CIRCUIT COURT, SPRINGFIELD, KENTUCKY, 1851

Broadside, letterpress on laid paper. Bardstown, Kentucky: W. W. Jack, Printer, dated November 18, 1850. Approx. 13 x 9 1/4 in. 

A stark and impactful broadside announcing a “Commissioner’s Sale” conducted under decree of the Washington Circuit Court, ordering the public auction of ten enslaved individuals on January 1, 1851, at the courthouse in Springfield, Kentucky. Issued by Nathaniel Wright, administrator of the estate of Coleman Brown, deceased, the broadside lays bare the routine bureaucratic mechanisms by which slavery was enforced, normalized, and perpetuated through American courts in the antebellum South.

The text provides a unsettling inventory of human property, listing the enslaved individuals by age, gender, and familial grouping: “one very old woman,” an adult man, adult women, adolescent girls aged fifteen or sixteen, boys “ten or twelve years of age,” a small girl, and two children. Such enumerations, intended to inform potential bidders, document both the commodification of enslaved people and the casual indifference of the legal system to the destruction of families.

Survival rates for ephemeral broadsides of this nature are low, owing to their utilitarian purpose and the moral reckoning that followed emancipation.

[Civil War, Union, Confederate] [African Americana, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Enslavement, Abolition, Emancipation]  [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs]