By Ana Edwards and Phil Wilayto
For three decades before the emancipation that came with the end of the Civil War, Richmondâs Shockoe Bottom was the epicenter of the U.S. domestic slave trade.
Second only in size to the slave-trading district of New Orleans, the Bottomâs more important significance was its role as the fountainhead of that trade, the wholesale district that supplied hundreds of thousands of human beings to the retail markets further South.
Because of the massive numbers of enslaved people sent by ship, rail and overland coffles, most African Americans today likely could trace some ancestry to this small, long-neglected area.