Louisiana Kindred: Historical Perspective
Situated on the banks of the Mississippi River and just 105 miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, antebellum New Orleans was the fifth largest city in the United States and—due to its proximity to both sugar and cotton cultivation—the country’s leading market for the buying and selling of enslaved men, women and children. In the 19th century alone, it is likely that as many as 150,000 people were bought and sold within city limits.
New Orleans was known as the “preeminent market in the South” for buying and selling enslaved people.
In New Orleans, enslaved people were bought and sold in private residences, at traders’ jails, from taverns and shops, and in ornately decorated auction houses. Using city directories, newspaper advertisements, property records, historic maps, and an 1854 merchant census, researchers from the Historic New Orleans Collection identified no less than 52 sites where enslaved people were sold “on a large scale between 1811 and 1862.” While “pens and auction houses were scattered throughout the city's core,” the researchers found, the three major “nodes of pronounced trading” were on Esplanade Avenue at Moreau (now Chartres) Street, on St. Louis Street between Royal Street and the levee, and within the area bounded by Common, Carondelet, Union, and Phillippa (now O'Keefe) Streets.
Pictured: “Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans” by William Henry Brooke (THNOC). This image depicts an auction of an enslaved person held at Hewlett’s Exchange: a site which likely surpassed all others in terms of the number of individuals bought and sold there over the course of its history. The Exchange building is now the Omni Hotel.
Many of the individuals sold in New Orleans were natives of the Upper South who had been trafficked to the Deep South by professional traders.
Traders trafficked thousands of men, women and children to New Orleans each year. Most were forced to march—from Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, or elsewhere in the Upper South—for hundreds of miles until they reached Louisiana. Others were conducted to New Orleans by river, captives aboard steamboats departing daily from Natchez, Memphis, and other points along the Mississippi. And at least 63,000 men, women and children—whose names are listed in the Oceans of Kinfolk database— were trafficked to New Orleans by sea in the coastwise trade.
No matter the setting, being bought and sold as property was a traumatic experience.
At traders’ jails, enslaved people were dressed and groomed to appeal to potential buyers, then coerced and threatened into demonstrating their skills and physical fitness. Solomon Northup—a free Black man who was kidnapped by traders in 1841 and trafficked to Louisiana, along with 50 other enslaved people, aboard the brig Orleans—later recalled his arrival at Theophilus Freeman’s jail in New Orleans.
In the first place we were required to wash thoroughly, and those with beards, to shave. We were then furnished with a new suit each, cheap, but clean. The men had hat, coat, shirt, pants and shoes; the women frocks of calico, and handkerchiefs to bind about their heads. We were now conducted into a large room in the front part of the building to which the yard was attached, in order to be properly trained, before the admission of customers…
The men were arranged on one side of the room, the women on the other. The tallest was placed at the head of the row, then the next tallest, and so on…Freeman charged us to remember our places; exhorted us to appear smart and lively, —sometimes threatening, and again, holding out various inducements. During the day he exercised us in the art of "looking smart," and of moving to our places with exact precision…After being fed, in the afternoon, we were again paraded and made to dance.
“Slaves Waiting for Sale: A Scene in New Orleans,” The Illustrated London News (Jan-June, 1861), vol. 38, p. 307 (SlaveryImages.org).
In addition to the humiliation of being put “on display,” enslaved people being sold in New Orleans were forced to endure invasive physical examinations. Northup wrote, “[the trader Theophilus Freeman would make us hold up our heads, walk briskly back and forth, while customers would feel of our hands and arms and bodies, turn us about, ask us what we could do, make us open our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse which he is about to barter for or purchase.” And “sometimes,” Northrup continued, “a man or woman was taken back to the small house in the yard, stripped, and inspected more minutely,” in which case “scars upon a slave's back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale.” During a 1930s interview, a formerly enslaved man named James W. Smith described similar assaults. “They lined the women up on one side and the men on the other,” he said. “A buyer would walk up and down ‘tween the two rows and grab a woman and try to throw her down and feel of her to see how’s she’s put up. If she’s purty strong, he’d say ‘is she a good breeder?”
Above all, enslaved people dreaded being sold—in New Orleans and elsewhere—due to the risk of being separated from their families.
We may never know how many family ties were irrevocably sundered in New Orleans, but a clue to the extent of this violence can be found in Jennie Williams’ finding that 88 percent of individuals sent to New Orleans in the coastwise traffic and sold there were permanently separated from their entire families. For example, the trader George Davis sent Hannah and Peggy Knox, 17 and 18 years of age respectively, from Petersburg, Virginia to New Orleans aboard the Parthian in March of 1843. When they arrived on April 5, Peggy and Hannah became the custody of Thomas Boudar. From there, the girls were likely taken to Boudar’s headquarters at 11 Moreau Street. Several weeks went by before either was sold. Hannah went first; on May 13, some 38 days after her arrival in New Orleans, Boudar sold her to Jacques Caillone of Lafourche Parish. Two weeks later, Boudar sold Peggy to Frederic Jauffroid, the owner of a shore store at 297 Burgundy Street in New Orleans. Roughly 50 miles then separated the girls, but without knowledge of to whom the other was sold, and where they were taken, 50 miles might as well have been hundreds.
Excerpt of manifest of the brig Parthian (Petersburg, VA to New Orleans). March 9, 1843 (NARA).
Enslaved people fought to influence their fates as much as possible.
Even as they were being inspected and assessed themselves, enslaved people were keen observers of would-be buyers. Ragged dress, poor manners, and unkempt appearances signaled to many enslaved people that they should strive to appear to potential enslavers as undesirable. Likewise, enslaved people sometimes endeavored to appeal to potential buyers if they seemed wealthy and well-mannered: traits that sometimes correlated with “better treatment.” It should be noted, however, that when enslaved people made these calculations, they did so within the context of lifetimes of enslavement and an intimate familiarity with slavery’s cruelties and injustices. We must be careful, therefore, not to confuse references to “better treatment” or “good masters” as suggestions that slavery was ever anything but freedom’s inverse. This is precisely why enslaved people developed the skills to measure one evil outcome against another, and when possible, to negotiate on their own behalf.
Page author: JKW