Excitement, shouting, and pointing: yes. Fast-paced auctioneer's chant: probably not.

Today's auctions use the auctioneer's chant: rapidly articulated run-on sentences of many short words, frequently with internal alliteration or indirect rhyme, organized around an increasing series of numbers (the bid amounts). The auctioneer's chant is designed to keep the bids rising in a steady rhythm, but provide a sense of urgency with the fast pace of the words. It's a fine balance. The audience has to be able to predict when the bid will increase, but also feel like time's running out and they're in a tense competition.

There have several studies and historical surveys, including a very informal one by the National Auctioneer's Association, attempting to establish the history of the auctioneer's chant. There are two major origins for the auctioneer's chant:

1. Post-Civil War army auctions of plundered goods. At the very end of the Civil War, there was a lot of sacking & looting of Southern plantations by Northern troops, a la Sherman's March. After the war, soldiers were ordered to surrender their plunder to the US Army, which auctioned it off to the public. Auctioneers are still called "Colonel" today because colonels were frequently in charge of these public auctions.

2. The (public or loose leaf auction)[http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/nc/nc2b.htm] of tobacco in Virginia. Prior to the early nineteenth century, the staple crop of tobacco was sold via private agreements between merchants and growers. In the 1800s, tobacco growers started adopting the French auction system. Growers would be bring their tobacco to a single warehouse. Merchants would walk between lots and negotiate directly with the growers, or wait until the lots went to the auction block. By the 1820s, tobacco warehouse managers were employing private auctioneers to conduct the auction. These auctioneers had to make sure the bidders were competing at the block-- not off making private deals with growers. The fast-paced speech provided a sense of urgency and competition. Growers were encouraged to wait for the auction, because competition tended to result in higher offers. Merchants had to pay attention, or the lot they were inspecting could be sold at any moment.

After the Civil War, the public leaf auction style spread throughout the South. Many auctioneers found employment in the Fort Worth Stockyards (founded 1876). Drovers would deliver their cattle to the stockyards, where they were auctioned, butchered, and loaded on trains bound North. Time was essential to the stockyards' function. Cattle needed to be moved through the lots, butchered, and packed ASAP. The auctioneer's elocution sped up and incorporated features of the local dialect, including clipped syllables and attention to tonal inflection.

So, to recap: the auctioneer's chant developed in the wake of the Civil War. The style had more or less codified by the turn of the century-- there was a shared national sense of how auctioneers talked. And the first place of formal auctioneer education, Jones' National School of Auctioneering and Oratory, was founded in Davenport, Iowa, in 1906.

Before the Civil War, slave auctioneers used some features of the auctioneer's chant (bids at regular intervals). But most surviving accounts of slave auctions describe the auctioneer using visual, rather than rhythmic, elements to sell the goods. It was more spectacle than oratory. The auctioneer would command slaves to take off their shirts, lift heavy objects, strip naked and turn around and bend over, etc.. See, for example, the auction scene from Henry Watson's fugitive slave narrative.

Slave auctions were certainly exciting, even theatrical. Other accounts describe the audience jeering at especially beautiful female slaves, white children mocking slave children, whistles and applause at exceptionally strong laborers, etc. But the auctioneer spoke less like a verbal performer and more like a ringleader at a circus.

And the slave auction was as much a social event as it was an economic one. Slave owners who sold old, faithful slaves could be booed. Masters could bring slaves they didn't intend to sell to the auction, then sell a disobedient slave to a chain gang or Mississippi trader. The slave auction was a stage for consolidating or changing social status, in a way that the post-Civil War property auction wasn't.

tl;dr : Slave auctioneers probably didn't have the same fast-paced, rhythmic speech patterns of contemporary auctioneers.

Sources:

Charles Gerena, "'Sold, American!': How Auction Markets Improved the Tobacco Trade and Why They are Becoming Obsolete." Economic History, Spring 2004.

Brian Learmount, A History of the Auction. Barnard & Learmount, 1985.

Nicole Edwards Malley, The Sound That Sells: the Musical and Improvisatory Practices of the American Auctioneer. University of Iowa Research Online, 2012.

Nikki Malley, "A Sale You Can Dance To: Entertainment, Flexibility, and Improvisation in the Metric Practice of the American Auctioneer." Journal for the Society of American Music, 7.03: 2013.

Max Khan Plumpton, Selling the American Body: the Construction of American Identity through the Slave Trade. 2016.