Brown’s raid and the turmoil that followed had little lasting effect on the slave trade. By January 1860 prices were soaring. “Our Negro market is very brisk indeed at this time,” wrote Hector Davis, a Richmond trader. “In fact good young men are as high or higher than I ever saw them.” In Charleston that month, business at Ryan’s Mart flourished, with at least eight slave auctions involving 658 enslaved Black men, women, and children, including infants and toddlers.
