Antebellum British writer and traveler John Lambert witnessed the making of coffins in Charleston for the bodies of 700 Africans, who died 200+ years ago before they could be sold into slavery.
“Carpenters were daily employed at the wharf, in making shells (coffins) for the dead bodies,” Lambert wrote in 1810 in describing activity at Gadsden’s Wharf.
Lambert came to Charleston in late 1807 to observe the ending of the international slave trade. In advance of that, traders rushed to sell people from The Gambia, Congo and Angola, he wrote…