Joseph S. Donovan (April 20, 1800April 15, 1861) was an American slave trader known for his slave jails in Baltimore, Maryland. Donovan was a major participant in the interregional slave trade, building shipments of enslaved people from the Upper South and delivering them to the Deep South where they would be used, for the most part, on cotton and sugar plantations. As one Baltimore historical researcher and tour guide summarized, "the change from raising tobacco to wheat in the region caused a surplus of labor, whereas the South needed more labor due to the invention of the cotton gin".
Biography
Records of Donovan's early life are spare but based on census and death records he was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1800. It is possible he started out as what was called a tavern trader, as he is known to have operated a tavern called Vauxhall Garden.
As a landed, literate, adult white male, Donovan was permitted to participate in American democratic processes of that time and was briefly involved in local politics: In 1840, Donovan was a member to the First Branch City Council of Baltimore, elected from the eighth ward. In 1844 he placed a "cash for Negroes" add in the newspaper and described his premises as the former jail of Austin Woolfolk. He also placed a runaway slave ad seeking the return of 32-year-old Sarah Green, who had recently been purchased near Annapolis and whose mother, Hanna Green, lived on Strawberry Alley near Caroline Meeting House. In summer 1845, a man named Airheart Winter was Donovan's "agent for the purchase of Negroes in Carroll County." Another man named Lucius Winters also worked as a trading agent for Joseph S. Donovan in 1847.
According to historian Jonathan Pritchett, between 1845 and 1847, Donovan made eight coastwise slave shipments to New Orleans, totaling 395 people. In 1848, the Edmondson sisters were shipped to New Orleans; the manifest listed Donovan as the shipper although they were legally titled to Joseph Bruin and another trader called Hill. In 1849, a farmer named William Henry Warfield sold two recaptured runaway slaves named Big Sam and Little Sam to Donovan for $850 with a caveat that Warfield could change his mind within five days; Warfield and the Sams worked out a limited-term indenture agreement, and Warfield took them back from Donovan.
At the time of the 1850 census, Joseph S. Donovan reported that his occupation was trading, and that the real estate he owned was worth In 1850, following the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C., a man who lived in New Orleans requested that several enslaved people he owned who lived in D.C. be shipped down to him. The slave trader sent to collect these people for shipment was Joseph S. Donovan, and the people were the wife, daughters and grandchildren of a White House coachman named William Williams. Williams was understandably distraught, and U.S. President Millard Fillmore reportedly paid for Williams to visit Donovan's slave jail before they were shipped south. Upon arriving at Baltimore, Williams was informed he could buy back his family for $3,200. Funds were apparently raised from the likes of Fillmore, Daniel Webster, Winfield Scott, William Corcoran, Georgiana Patterson, Sophia Towson, and William Bliss. White House Historical Association scholar Pamela Scott found a receipt from Donovan for Williams, dated August 13, 1850, in the amount of $1,850, for Williams' wife Dolly, daughter Maria, daughter Susan Johnson, and Susan's three children, who were between three and six years old. In 1851, the newly passed Fugitive Slave Act was used to recapture James Hamlet, a self-emancipated man who had been living free in New York City. Upon his forced return to Maryland, Hamlet was promptly sold to Donovan and deposited in his slave jail.