Source: NewsBank/Readex – October 25, 1817, City Gazette (published as City Gazette and Daily Advertiser.)
Charleston, South Carolina, Advertisement, Volume XXXVII, Issue 12043, Page [3]

“Payne-ful” Business:

Charleston’s Journey to Truth

By Margaret Seidler

Illustrations John W. Jones

2025 AAHGS International Book Award
2025 Phillis Wheatley Book Award
2025 SC Governor’s Award in the Humanities
2026 SC African American Heritage Commission Book Prize (Honorable Mention)

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“Payne-ful” Business: Charleston’s Journey to Truth follows Margaret Seidler’s mission to learn and process her family’s genealogical past. Using extensive research and personal experience, Seidler discusses the realities of Charleston’s racial history while highlighting the historians, journalists, and community members who work to reconcile those truths. The book features authentic, historic slave advertisements brought to life by vivid paintings by artist John W. Jones that uncover the humanity hidden beneath the detached advertisement descriptions. Seidler hopes that acknowledging a more complete truth about our past will motivate us to bridge today’s racial divide.

Author

Margaret Seidler

Margaret Seidler is a retired Organization & Leadership Development consultant, national conference speaker, and author. Her book, Power Surge: Energizing your Leadership Strengths, was published by HRD Press, 2008. Her practice focused on creating higher performance in leaders and in addressing local government and community system complexity.

Margaret was born and raised in Charleston. In the aftermath of the Mother Emanuel massacre, she and former City Police Chief Greg Mullen led the Charleston Illumination Project, a year-long effort, designed to give all parts of the community a voice in strengthening citizen/police relationships. A case study of the Charleston Illumination Project was published in The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox, Oxford University Press, UK, 2017.

Her broader work with the city of Charleston was published in Both/AND Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, Harvard Business Review Press, MA, 2022.

Margaret has a BA in Psychology and a Master of Public Administration from the University of South Carolina. She became a certified Polarity Thinking Master in 2009.

Painter

John W. Jones

John W. Jones is an African American artist who first gained acclaim for his series, Confederate Currency: The Color of Money. Self-taught and drafted into the U.S. Army in 1970, he served in Vietnam, eventually becoming an Army illustrator.

Examining Confederate banknotes, he became interested in the depiction of the slave economy in the American South before and during the American Civil War. Banknotes of the era often depicted slaves as happy workers on the cotton plantations. Jones has said he intended to demonstrate that banknotes served a propaganda purpose in depicting slavery as a natural state of affairs and one on which the Southern states’ economies rested. Jones recreated these scenes in large color paintings, using models and posing them as in the original etched images. He exhibited his paintings next to the banknote with the original etching.

More recently, he has created a series of paintings, “Lowcountry Gullah Series.” He also painted a series featuring the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a regiment of Black soldiers that fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War.