Description
An 1854 oil painting by English artist Eyre Crowe depicts newly purchased slaves being loaded into a railroad car at the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad depot on Eighth Street in Richmond. While accompanying British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray on a speaking tour in the United States in 1853, Crowe attended a slave auction in Richmond and afterwards noted, We saw the usual exodus of negro slaves, marched under escort of their new owners across the town to the railway station, where they took places, and went South. Written on the side of the railroad car are the words Warrenton Ridgeway, which indicate that the slaves are being moved south toward Ridgeway, North Carolina. (From North Carolina some or all of the slaves might have been sent farther south, part of the large-scale movement of slaves from the Upper South to the Lower South.) The Virginia State Capitol is visible in the distance beyond the chaotic railway scene. This oil painting, titled After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond, was first exhibited in London at the 1854 Society of British Artists under the title Going South: A Sketch from Life in America.
