The Weeping Time slave auction

To clear debts, much of them from gambling, the absentee planter Pierce Mease Butler had 436 people from his Butler Island and St. Simons Island plantations offered for sale at the Ten Broeck Race Course outside Savannah. Over two days of heavy rain 429 were sold and families were scattered. Remembered as the Weeping Time, it was among the largest single sales of enslaved people in American history.