Slaves for Sale, 156 Common St., watercolor and ink by draftsman
Pietro Gualdi, 1855"A Slave Pen at New Orleans—Before the Auction, a Sketch of the Past" (Harper's Weekly, January 24, 1863)View of the Port at New Orleans, circa 1855, etching from Lloyd's Steamboat Directory1845 map of New Orleans; the trade was ubiquitous throughout the city but especially brisk in the major hotels and exchange buildings; by the coming of the Civil War, Baronne, Gravier, Moreau,
Esplanade, Camp and other streets in what is now the
Central Business District were lined with slave marts Slave sale broadside (Gail and Stephen Rudin Slavery Collection, Cornell University Libraries)
New Orleans,
Louisiana was a major, if not the major,
slave market of the lower
Mississippi River valley of the
United States from approximately 1830 until the
American Civil War. Slaves from the upper south were trafficked by land and by sea to New Orleans where they were sold at a markup to the cotton and sugar plantation barons of the region.
History
In the years immediately following the
War of 1812, the most active slave markets in the
Deep South of the
United States were at
Algiers, Louisiana, and
Natchez, Mississippi.[1] One New Orleans historian found evidence of that "the mistress of the trade", [2] as New Orleans was later known, was open for business in the first years of the 19th century, but "it was not till the 1820s had well set in that the number of American slave merchants grew to impressive proportions" and by 1827 "New Orleans had become the chief center of the slave trade in the lower South"[3]: 151
By the 1850s the city had what was essentially a dedicated "slave district" that was "dominated by traders' pens and offices: in 1854, there were no fewer than seven slave dealers in a single block on Gravier, while on a single square on Moreau Street there was a row of eleven particularly commodious slave pens."[4] As
Frederic Bancroft put it in his Slave-Trading in the Old South:[2]
Nowhere else, except next to the Exchange in Charleston and in the marketplace in Montgomery, was slave-trading on a large scale so conspicuous. In New Orleans it sought public attention: slave-auctions were regularly held in its two grand hotels besides other public places; and in much frequented streets there were slave-depots, show-rooms, show-windows, broad verandas and even neighborhoods where gayly dressed slaves were prominently exhibited. In New Orleans, markets and buyers were most numerous, money was most plentiful, profits were largest. Slave-trading there had a peculiar dash: it rejoiced in its display and prosperity; it felt unashamed, almost proud.[2]
The New Orleans slave market was closed in 1864 by the United States Army: "By order of
Major General Banks, all the 'signs' of the slave-pens or auctions were erased. The names of
Hatch's [sic], Foster's,
Wilson's,
Campbell's, have disappeared from their respective houses. Campbell's slave pen is a rebel-prison. 'Got in dar ye-self,' a black woman said, as she saw the rebel prisoners tiling into the old pen. 'Use' to put us dar! Gos dar ye-self now. De Lord's comin'.' A few of the old slave-traders remain, gliding about like ghosts, and wasting away daily in the uncongenial atmosphere of freedom."[5]
Slave dealers
Traders listed in the 1846 New Orleans city directory:[6]
Boudar Thomas negro trader 11 Moreau St.
Chriswell, E. negro trader, Circus b. Gravier and Perdido streets
^Johnson, Walter (2000). "The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s". The Journal of American History. 87 (1): 13–38.
doi:
10.2307/2567914.
JSTOR2567914.
Tadman, Michael (1989). Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
ISBN978-0-299-11850-1.