When the Poor Were Bought and Sold

A Brief History of Pauper Auctions

The atmosphere was festive outside the Tucker County courthouse in tiny St. George, West Virginia, on the morning of Saturday, May 24, 1884. About 600 men, women, and children were gathered to witness a spectacle widely assumed abolished since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment nineteen years before: the auctioning off of human beings. But the people on this auction block weren’t enslaved. They were poor.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, pauper auctions were common in small towns and rural counties where it was considered impractical and economically inefficient to operate a poorhouse. Sometimes called a vendue (from vendre, the French word for sell), a pauper auction was a simple, affordable way for communities to address the poverty in their midst.

Eighteen paupers would be auctioned off that warm spring day in St. George, each for a period of one year. The county would sell the able-bodied to the highest bidders, who would put the paupers to work without pay.

Those unable to work — children, the aged, infirm, and disabled — would be awarded to the lowest bidders in a so-called Dutch auction. The county would pay the low bidders the amount of their bids to compensate them for caring for the paupers. Their profit would be the difference between their low bids and the cost of that care. This was not an incentive to provide lavish living conditions.

“People made the occasion a gala day, and came in from all parts of the surrounding country,” wrote a New York Evening Telegram reporter who attended the auction. “They attended just as they would do at a sheep or cattle market, and the crowd embraced farmers and their wives, ministers of the gospel, and townspeople.”

An auction block was set up in front of the courthouse doors. At precisely ten o’clock, the auctioneer — “a stout, jolly-faced individual,” according to the anonymous reporter — commenced the proceedings.

The first to step upon the block was an old man seventy years of age. Turning him around for the better inspection of the bidders, the auctioneer began: “Now, gentlemen,” said he, “here you have a fine man. He is sound, solid, and gentle as a kitten. He is good for a big day’s work. How much am I offered?” The old fellow looked anxiously at the crowd of bidders as the amounts offered were outbid. Finally he was sold to a man named John Anderson for $26, who after paying his money took the old fellow, who looked sad and weary and sighed heavily as he went away with his new “owner.”

A ten-year-old girl, apparently an orphan, wept bitterly when she was sold to a different family than the one who’d bought her the year before. She was sold for $8.50 — to a minister.

“My God,” an old woman wailed as she was put on the block for the first time, “I wish I could die.” She was sold to the keeper of a boarding house for $7.

An “aged colored man” was sold to a farmer for $11.

An “idiotic girl” was handed over to a “hard-looking mountaineer” for a low bid of sixty cents per week.

The Evening Telegram reporter calculated that the sale of the able-bodied paupers netted the county $113. The “invalids” would cost the county an average of just 32 cents each per week ($16.64 for the year). On the whole, it was a profitable day for Hancock County.

“At the conclusion of the sale the jolly auctioneer, with a parting jest to the crowd, stepped from his stand and entering the hotel refreshed himself after his fatiguing duties,” the reporter wrote. “The purchasers with their ‘bargains,’ as some of them termed the unfortunates whom they had bought, started off homeward.”

Sometimes, as in the St. George auction, the able-bodied were sold to the highest bidder, who paid the town, while the infirm were sold to the lowest bidder, who was paid by the town. In most cases, however, all paupers were sold to the lowest bidder, who was often poor himself and calculated the value of his purchase very carefully to maximize his profit.

The practice began before the Revolution, primarily in New England, but spread across the nation in the first half of the nineteenth century, as industrialization, immigration, and a series of economic downturns swelled the ranks of the impoverished. Old men, once proud, hardworking taxpayers, frequently found themselves on the auction block.

Ebenezer Mackintosh, a Boston shoemaker and veteran of the French and Indian War who led demonstrations against the Stamp Act in 1765 and later (he claimed) took part in the Boston Tea Party, became indigent in old age and was annually auctioned off by the town of Haverhill, New Hampshire, where he died in 1816 and was buried in a pauper’s grave (though, in acknowledgment of his patriotism, the grave was marked).

Widows and children were auctioned off, as were those rendered poor through misfortune, intemperance, or “other open vices.”

The practice faced periodic legal challenges, but none succeeded. “A town has undoubtedly a right to the services of a pauper to aid in his support,” the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in 1822. “So has any person who may have become liable for his support by virtue of a contract with the town.”

The economic benefits were obvious. Not only was a town saved the cost of constructing an asylum for the poor, requests for assistance decreased dramatically once auctions were instituted. Officials in the upstate New York town of Chazy boasted that their pauper rolls were reduced by two-thirds after they commenced auctioning because “none except those that are objects of charity, will apply to the town for assistance, and be exposed for sale, and liable to labor.” William Plumer, a New Hampshire governor and senator in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, enthusiastically endorsed the auctions as “the most eligible and cheapest method” for addressing poverty.

The human cost, on the other hand, was high indeed.

“Pauper sharks” frequented the auctions, happy for the money and the cheap labor.

“When stripped of all disguise, selling the poor to the lowest bidder, is simply offering a reward for the most cruel and avaricious man that can be found to abuse them,” the social reformer Thomas R. Hazard wrote in 1851. “Without making continual sacrifices from year to year, it is impossible under such a system, that a conscientious man should long continue to be their care-taker.”

Paupers who were auctioned off became indentured servants, practically slaves. In fact critics often called the vendue a form of “white slavery.” While the winning bidder was sometimes required to “give security that he would keep the poor ‘in a christian like manner,’” more often than not the poor were treated cruelly, even savagely.

Families were broken apart. In March 1825, a single mother and her four children were auctioned off in Manchester, New Hampshire. They went to five different homes. Most paupers were elderly, so the auctions were a perverse precursor to Social Security.

Some paupers were terribly abused. According to an 1824 report prepared by New York Secretary of State John Van Ness Yates for the state legislature, “The poor, when farmed out, or sold, are frequently treated with barbarity and neglect by their keepers.” In “more than once instance,” the report noted, paupers had been killed by their keepers.

Before the Civil War, pauper auctions were almost entirely a Northern phenomenon, white poverty being unacknowledged, if not unknown, in the South. Defenders of slavery frequently cited pauper auctions as a sign of the North’s depravity and hypocrisy. “It is a notorious fact that the slaves of the South are in a better condition, physically and mentally, than the poor of the Northern States; they are better fed and clothed, and have more leisure for enjoyment,” the Columbus (Mississippi) Southern Standard noted in an 1851 editorial titled “Northern vs. Southern Slavery.”

“Instead, however, of taking better care of their paupers, they seek to take care of our negroes; and in doing so, they meddle with matters which do not concern them at all.”

Noting that it was the custom in many Northern towns to “set up the paupers at auction every year, and knock them off to the lowest bidder,” the newspaper claimed the auctions “force poor white men into a state of slavery which is quite as odious as black slavery.”

After the war, however, pauper auctions quickly spread south. In Jones County, North Carolina, in 1876, whites were outraged when freed blacks had, in the words of the Carolina Messenger (Goldsboro, North Carolina), the “impudence and effrontery to bid unreduced on white paupers.” According to the newspaper:

It has been so common in this county for negroes to bid at auction for white paupers, of both sexes and without regard to age, that it has almost ceased to excite surprise and but little indignation, and the competition in bidding at such auctions is as spirited and brisk with our negroes as it would be at the sale of any personal property. The aged, lame, blind and infirm of both sexes are alike subjected to this indignity. [original emphasis]

The Messenger reported that “an aged blind white lady, a pauper but respectable was … bid off by a negro. When told who had bid her off, she burst into tears and with uplifted hands groping her way through the crowd, begged her friends ‘For God sake, spare me! save me!’ All who witnessed this pitiful scene stood appalled.”

Ultimately, however, no white paupers auctioned off to blacks went to live with them because “they would likely prefer death to starvation sooner than yield to be made slaves to negro masters. Their friends and acquaintances generally intercede and provide homes for them.”

The newspaper blamed the situation on the five county commissioners, three of whom were black and all of whom were Radical Republicans. The integrated pauper auctions became a major issue in the 1876 election in North Carolina. Anti-Republican campaign literature warned,

The civil rights bill aimed its deadly blow at Anglo-Saxon supremacy by an effort to consign to one dead level races between whom the Creator had fixed the most significant of outward distinctions and the most striking of mental and moral differences. The transaction in Jones goes farther than this. It subverts, and puts the white under the foot of the negro. If this is tolerated how far will it not go? A victory once gained, the fruits of it will be secured if possible. Not that the evil can possibly become a general one. But the principle of white degradation and slavery to an inferior race once admitted, the prestige of the white race is broken. It has submitted to the yoke and it has accepted the name and condition of SLAVE!

“Remember the Jones county paupers!” became a rallying cry for North Carolina Democrats, who swept the state that fall, winning control of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion. The Messenger attributed the Democrats’ “rousing victory” to “the Jones county negro outrage.” The new legislature quickly passed a law banning pauper auctions in the state.

In 1879, an 80-year-old pauper named Betsy Wright was beaten to death in Montgomery, Massachusetts, by Louisa Avery, a 68-year-old woman whom the town paid $1.75 per week to care for Wright.

Wright suffered from St. Vitus’s dance, a disorder now known as Sydenham’s chorea, which causes spasms affecting the limbs. As a result, she would fall out of bed several times a night. When she did, Avery would beat her with a horsewhip, ultimately killing her. At her trial for murder, Avery’s own granddaughter testified to the cruelty with which “Aunt Betsy” was treated. ”Aunt Betsey [sic] was whipped several times every night I was at grandmother’s until the night she died,” nineteen-year-old Ida Avery told the court. “I asked grandmother not to whip her so, but she didn’t stop.”

“The prisoner is a stolid looking old woman,” one newspaper noted, “has quite a moustache, and her cold expressionless eyes seem not made for kind looks or acts.”

In her defense, Avery claimed “the old woman caused [her] more trouble than she expected.” She was found guilty.

The Boston Post called Wright’s murder “a shocking tragedy,” and the sensational trial triggered a wave of public outrage.

Two years later, on March 1, 1881, outrage was stoked again when a correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial reported on a pauper auction he’d witnessed in Hancock County, West Virginia:

The price bid, and which the county pays per year for the maintenance of the poor per head, runs from $80 to double the amount, with very few at the latter price, the majority being at less than $100. This includes food, clothing, and everything else except medical attendance. Occasionally the paupers fall into good hands, but more often into the hands of the “pauper shark” (who does not pretend to work, but lives off of what the county allows him and what work he can get out of his worse than slaves, whom he feeds just enough to keep life and body together), and then, truly, his or her life is a pitiable one.

The reporter said he interviewed an old man of about 90 who told him he’d been sold to a shark the pervious year. “He was compelled to sleep in a filthy out-house, having nothing for a bed but a few old rags. He said his whole body was covered with filth and vermin, his legs being alive with maggots.” The old man finally ran away. A friend took his case to the local overseers of the poor, who sold him again, but to “a better home.”

Newspapers condemned pauper auctions and called for their abolishment. “There is a slight disposition shown by the better class of citizens to have this evil corrected,” one noted. “It hardly seems credible that a civilized community would allow such a reproach upon their common humanity to be continued much longer.”

Hancock County officials were unrepentant. “There is not a county in any State where the poor are more comfortably kept, or where their feelings are more tenderly consulted,” huffed an editorial in the New Cumberland Independent, one of the county’s leading papers.

But pauper auctions would soon go the way of slavery, swept away by the wave of social reform that crested at the turn of the century. The last pauper auctions that I have been able to document occurred in Maine’s Somerset and Piscataquis counties in 1899.

By 1910, even the most remote counties had replaced their pauper auctions with poorhouses. That year’s census reported that more than 2,300 of the nation’s 2,962 counties operated a poorhouse. Counties without one usually contracted with a neighboring county to house its paupers. Poorhouses would remain the principle means of addressing rural poverty until the New Deal ushered in sweeping new welfare programs during the Great Depression.

© 2023 by Matthew Algeo

Matthew Algeo is an author and journalist. His latest book is All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Tour of Appalachia (Chicago Review Press). His website is malgeo.net.