In the African American community, New Year’s Day used to be widely known as “Hiring Day” or “Heartbreak Day,” as the African American abolitionist journalist William Cooper Nell described it because enslaved people spent New Year’s Eve waiting,
wondering if their owners were going to rent them out to someone else, thus potentially splitting up their families. The renting out of slave labor was a relatively common practice in the antebellum South, and a profitable practice for white slave owners and hirers.
Some enslaved people were put up for auction that day, or held under contracts that started in January. (These transactions also took place all year long and contracts could last for different amounts of time.) These deals were conducted privately among families,
friends and business contacts, and slaves were handed over in town squares, on courthouse steps and sometimes simply on the side of the road.
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