Smalls' experience is one of many that will be shared in the $100m museum built on the site of Gadsden's Wharf on the Cooper River, once one of the most prolific slave-trading ports in the US. Historians estimate that of the approximately 388,000 Africans brought to America as enslaved people, 40% of them entered through Charleston between 1783 and 1808. (In 1808, the United States banned the international importation of slaves, but the trade continued domestically until 1865.)
