What Is The Origin Of (243)?…
Sell down the river
Slavery in all its manifestations is abhorrent and, rightly, there is a concerted attempt to raise awareness of the evils of the trade and the ill-gotten gains resulting from this iniquitous practice. But the fact remains that from time immemorial those in power have sought to exploit those they perceive to be weaker and as the practice was so embedded into the way many societies operated that, inevitably, it has left vestiges in the idioms that pepper our language. Take the phrase to sell down the river which in modern parlance means to betray someone usually for your own benefit, for example.
Although the Atlantic slave trade was officially abolished by Britain and other countries in 1807, the demand for slaves to work on the cotton plantations in the southern states of America was so voracious that it is estimated that a quarter of all of the slaves enslaved between 1500 and 1870 were transported illegally across that ocean after 1807. Within the United States, the increasing was met by the development of an internal market where slaves in the north, in the so-called slave-growing states like Kentucky, were sold to plantation owners in the south.
Perhaps the most famous fictional character to suffer this phase was the eponymous hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Tom, raised in Kentucky, was sold in middle-age by his owners to help pay their mounting debts. He is transported down the Mississippi in a river boat and ends up in the hands of a sadistic owner, Simon Legree. To give a sense to the extent of the internal slave market it is estimated that In the decade from 1830 nearly a quarter of a million slaves were transported over state lines and that by the start of the Civil War the slave population numbered some 4 million.
The river in question in our phrase is the Mississippi and the original version of the phrase, to go down the river, meant to be sold and transported to a plantation on the lower reaches of the river. Aaron S Fry in his journal for April 1835 reported a truly horrific suicide of a slave; “A Negro man of Mr Elies, having been sold to go down the river, attempted first to cut off both of his legs, failing to do that, cut his throat, did not entirely take his life, went a short distance and drowned himself”.
To sell a slave down the river was to sell them to a plantation lower down the Mississippi and was in currency in 1836. A letter from a J.F.C published in The Christian Register and Boston Observer on September 3rd of that year, noted that the proposed abolition of slavery in 1840 would have one of its consequences that “all who chose could sell their slaves down the river.” And many did and did very well out of it, the Ohio Repository noting in May of the following year, “one man, in Franklin County, has lately realised thirty thousand dollars, in a speculation on slaves, which he bought in Virginia, and sold down the river”. Literally and figuratively.
It was only a matter of time that the phrase would be divorced from its distasteful origins and be used in a figurative sense. The Chicago Daily Tribune, commenting on the controversial sale by Chicago Nationals of a baseball player, Pat Moran, in their edition of May 12, 1910 noted “Pat has been sold “down the river””. And P G Wodehouse, who had a wonderful ear for idioms American or otherwise, wrote in The Small Bachelor, published in 1927, “when Sigsbee Waddington married for the second time, he to all intents and purposes sold himself down the river”.
We use the phrase these days without realising its dark origin.
