BALTIMORE -- There is no evidence at Oriole Park at Camden Yards that people were sold at the site. In 1858, Joseph S. Donovan, one of Baltimore’s major slave dealers, built a slave pen near the southwest corner of Eutaw and Camden streets. It was one of about a dozen private slave jails downtown, according to a 1936 Sun article, that held enslaved people, suspected runaways and kidnapped free Black people. Many, ultimately, were forced onto ships for final passage to the Deep South.
The United States banned the importation of enslaved African people in 1808, but domestic sales of human beings grew after the War of 1812. Baltimore, a major port and shipbuilding center, was a pioneer in the coastal trade of human chattel. As Maryland farmers transitioned from labor-intensive tobacco to wheat, corn, oats and other grains, they realized their surplus workers were a valuable commodity. At the same time, cotton, sugar cane and rice plantations expanded in the lower South. Traders operated near Baltimore’s harbor, dispatching their human cargo to large markets in places such as New Orleans.
Seeing what is no longer there is a daunting task. Footprints once left on the dirt streets by coffles — mournful processions of enslaved men in chains, followed by women and children — are gone. Only a ghostly footprint remains etched in the ground we traverse today.
