The Business of Slavery

My name is Dan Piazza. I am the National Postal Museum’s chief curator of philately, as well as the curator of the Freedom Just Around the Corner exhibit, and we are looking at a piece of mail with the return address of Davis, Deupree, and Company, one of the largest slave dealers in Richmond, Virginia right before the Civil War. This envelope was mailed in October 1860, and within about seven months Richmond would become the capital city of the Confederacy. This section of the Freedom exhibit is called “the business of slavery,” and I wanted to show the commodification – the buying and selling – of men, women and children through stamped documents and mail of the period. I went looking through the museum’s collection for an envelope from a slave dealer, and didn’t find one. So I asked around at stamp dealers and auction houses, and I got the same response everywhere – “Oh, those are very rare,” and “I’ve never actually seen one.” Finally I lucked out and was able to buy this piece for the permanent collection and use it in this exhibit. That got me to thinking about why these covers are so rare. Nineteenth century advertising mail of any kind is highly desirable to collectors, and it seemed to me that the slave trade, as one of the bigger industries, would have generated lots of mail. But most of the early covers and letters on the market today were purchased from old businesses and old families in the early 1900s, when enterprising dealers and collectors went around offering to buy up their archives. My suspicion is that by that time people had become sufficiently embarrassed by their forebears’ involvement in the slave trade, that they destroyed those letters rather than sell them. The result is that today, fewer than a dozen letters like this one survive.