For the final 22 months of the legal slave trade into the United States, nearly every ship bringing captive Africans to Charleston landed them at Gadsden's Wharf on the Cooper River, whose frontage ran from Calhoun Street south to Laurens Street. On 17 February 1806, Charleston's City Council ordered that incoming vessels carrying enslaved people go only to that wharf. The first cargo sold there under the rule came off the ship Duddon, with 173 people, in a sale recorded on 22 February 1806. By the end of December 1807 the Charleston Times counted about 26,000 arrivals, and the slavevoyages.org database suggests about 30,000 in nearly 200 voyages. The federal ban on importing enslaved people took effect on 1 January 1808.
Several merchants then held newly landed captives in the wharf's warehouses into the spring of 1808, keeping them off the market to drive up prices as the last legal supply ran out, and people packed into those buildings died of fevers, exposure and frostbite. Christopher Gadsden had begun building the 840-foot wharf in 1767, but he died in August 1805, and the historian Nic Butler found no record of slave ships landing there before February 1806.
The International African American Museum opened on the site in June 2023, raised on 13-foot pillars above the ground of the old wharf. Remnants of the original wharf were found during excavation for the building.
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32.7887, -79.9258
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