Colonel Auctioned His Own Wife With 8 Enslaved Women - The Auction That Ended in Massacre 1862

In 1862 Georgia, Colonel Anthony Ferris's gambling addiction spiraled so catastrophically that he wagered his wife Helena in a card game—and lost. To pay remaining debts, he organized a public auction where Helena was sold alongside eight enslaved women from his plantation. This grotesque spectacle triggered a violent uprising that killed seven people and became a national scandal accelerating abolitionist sentiment.
Anthony Ferris owned Benediction Plantation near Savannah, a wealthy cotton estate worked by 150 enslaved people. But his compulsive gambling destroyed everything. By early 1862, he'd lost the plantation's liquid assets through years of escalating wagers in New Orleans gambling houses.
In March 1862, desperate and debt-ridden, Anthony made the most immoral gamble of his life: he wagered legal guardianship of his wife Helena to settle a poker debt. He lost. Helena, a refined woman of plantation aristocracy who knew nothing of this contract until afterward, found herself legally transferred to creditor Jacques Beaumont's control like property.
But Anthony still faced massive debts. Beaumont, now controlling Helena, proposed including her in a public auction in Savannah to liquidate Anthony's remaining obligations. Along with eight enslaved women from the plantation's main house—Benedita (45), Maria (38), Joaquina (52), Rosa (29), Esperança (34), Antônia (41), Cecília (25), and Josefa (31)—Helena would be sold at public auction.
On April 15, 1862, hundreds gathered in Savannah's public square for the scandalous auction. The eight enslaved women were sold first, examined and purchased like livestock, families separated. Then came the shocking moment: Helena Ferris, a white woman of elite society, was brought to the auction platform—the same spot where enslaved women had just been sold.
Bidding reached $3,000 as plantation owners and even a Catholic priest competed for legal guardianship of Helena. The visual of a white woman on a slave auction block, being sold like the Black women before her, shocked even people who accepted slavery as normal.
Joaquina, the fifty-two-year-old enslaved woman who had lost six children to previous sales, watched from the edge of the square where she and the other sold women were chained. Seeing Helena subjected to the same degradation crystallized something in Joaquina: she could no longer accept this system.
As bidding continued, Joaquina freed herself from her chains, grabbed a guard's knife, and ran toward the platform screaming "No more! No more selling people!" Rosa and Esperança joined her resistance, swinging their chains as weapons. Benedita seized a fallen man's pistol and fired into the crowd.
The violence lasted twenty minutes. Armed men fired at the resisting women. Stray bullets struck bystanders. Helena was hit in the chest while standing on the auction platform, dying in the arms of Cecília, one of the enslaved women who tried to help her. Joaquina was shot five times, dying near the platform. Rosa, Benedita, and Josefa were also killed. Seven people died total: four enslaved women, two white men, and Helena.
Anthony Ferris fled the massacre in horror. He was found dead the next morning from suicide, his note reading: "I destroyed everything. I destroyed Helena. I cannot live with what I have done."
The four surviving women—Maria, Esperança, Antônia, and Rosa (severely wounded but alive)—faced execution for participating in an uprising that killed white men. But the negative publicity and the advancing Union army complicated matters. In an unusual decision, authorities declared the four women free and transported them to Union territory.
Rosa spent the next thirty-five years ensuring the massacre was remembered, speaking at abolitionist meetings and freedmen's organizations. She framed it not as tragedy but as agency: "We knew we'd probably die, but we chose to fight rather than accept one more degradation."
Northern newspapers reported extensively on the "Savannah Massacre," focusing on the shocking fact that a white woman had been sold at slave auction. Abolitionists including Frederick Douglass cited it as proof that slavery corrupted everyone it touched. The incident became ammunition for arguments that the institution had to be abolished immediately.
The Savannah Massacre demonstrated that slavery's logic—reducing humans to property—could extend even to white women when convenient, exposing the system's fundamental evil in ways that years of argumentation couldn't.
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