Historical Context
the coastwise traffic of enslaved persons to New Orleans
by Jennie K. Williams, Ph.D.
In late August of 1619, 20 to 30 enslaved Africans landed at Point Comfort (now Fort Monroe in Hampton, VA) aboard an English privateer ship called the White Lion.
At Jamestown, the White Lion’s crew traded the African prisoners for food and other supplies. Historians mark this event as the beginning of inheritable, race-based slavery in the United States.
Fort Monroe in Hampton, VA.
Over the course of nearly two centuries after the White Lion’s arrival in 1619, more than 300,000 African men, women, and children disembarked in North American ports in chains.
The vast majority of enslaved Africans trafficked to North America disembarked in one of two regions the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland) or the Lowcountry (South Carolina and Georgia). In fact, over 40 percent of all enslaved Africans trafficked to North America arrived through the port of Charleston.
“The ichnography of Charles-Town at high water,” 1793. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library @ Brown University.
By 1720 or 1730, however, the enslaved population of North America was primarily growing as a result of natural reproduction, so from many enslavers’ perspectives, the transatlantic traffic of enslaved Africans to North America became increasingly superfluous.
This is crucial context for the Congressional ban on the “importation” of enslaved Africans to the United States which took effect in 1808.
In this way, slavery in much of North America differed from slavery elsewhere in the Americas, where mortality rates of enslaved persons remained extremely high as long as slavery lasted: a difference largely attributable to the fact that sugar cultivation—which was as central to the slave economies of South America and the Caribbean as it was deadly for enslaved workers—was impossible in the temperate climates of North America. By contrast, Brazil—where enslavers made fortunes working enslaved Africans to death on sugar plantations—did not ban the transatlantic slave trade until 1831. However, sugar cultivation was not entirely absent in North America; it became one of Louisiana’s primary cash crops in the antebellum era.
"Enslaved people working in 17th-century Virginia," by an unknown artist, 1670. This image depicts enslaved people working at various tasks related to tobacco cultivation. Tobacco was the Chesapeake’s first major cash crop.
In the wake of the 1808 ban on the transatlantic traffic of enslaved Africans to the U.S., a thriving domestic traffic developed.
Several factors explain the rise of the interregional domestic slave trade. The first was the natural growth of the enslaved population of the Upper South even as demand for enslaved laborers in that region was declining. That decline reflected the fact that well before the nineteenth century, many Chesapeake enslavers had made the decision to stop or reduce tobacco cultivation on their land in light of that crop’s deleterious effect on the region’s soil. Many former tobacco planters turned to wheat or mixed agriculture, both of which required comparatively small workforces. Of course, enslavers could have freed the people they deemed “surplus.” In fact, a few did. Far more, however, sold the people they no longer needed or wanted to traders buying up people for resale in the lower south where demand was skyrocketing as cotton cultivation and—in Louisiana at least—sugar cultivation became immensely profitable.
“The land of the free & home of the brave” by Henry Byam Martin. Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1981-42-42 Source: Dr. Nigel Davies, Gelati, Mexico.
Between 1820 and 1860, more than one million enslaved persons were trafficked from the Upper South to the Lower South.
Some were forced to accompany enslavers migrating from one region to the other, but most were trafficked by professional traders: men who bought enslaved people in the upper south and then trafficked them to the lower south where they could be resold at a profit.
Most enslaved people trafficked from the Upper to the Lower South were forced to march hundreds of miles on foot. There is, however, no comprehensive record of this traffic, the overland domestic slave trade.
The federal government did not require enslavers to file any records or reports about the enslaved men, women, and children they marched in coffles to the Deep South. As a result, we have no way of knowing the names of the hundreds of thousands of enslaved persons who were trafficked in the overland domestic slave trade.
However, thousands of enslaved people were also trafficked to the Lower South by sea. This is called the "coastwise traffic." And unlike the overland traffic, the coastwise traffic of enslaved persons was systematically documented.
The same act that outlawed the transatlantic traffic of enslaved Africans to the U.S. also required any captain of a coastwise vessel with enslaved people onboard to file a manifest listing those individuals by name at the ports of departure and arrival. The intention behind this law was to prevent the introduction of additional enslaved people from Africa to the United States, but the Act had a second result: the coastwise traffic of enslaved people was systematically documented. In this way, the coastwise traffic differs from both its historical precedent, the transatlantic traffic of enslaved Africans, and its contemporary counterpart, the overland domestic trade.
The primary artery of the coastwise traffic conducted 63,000+ enslaved people to New Orleans, the nation’s largest market for the buying and selling of human beings. Most enslaved people trafficked to New Orleans came from families that had been enslaved in Virginia and Maryland for generations: American ancestries that predated the nation itself.
Being “sold South” thus meant separation from extensive family networks and longstanding communities.
Traders generally thought little to nothing of ripping enslaved people’s families apart; 88 percent of individuals sent to New Orleans in the coastwise traffic and sold there were separated from their entire families.
We live with the many and compounding legacies of the coastwise traffic today.
Primary among the coastwise traffic’s legacies are those of the systematic ripping apart of families. After the Civil War, countless freed people posted advertisements seeking information about loved ones taken from them by the coastwise trade. Celia Rhodes sought information about four relatives she had last seen in the slave trader Isaac Franklin’s “yard” in Alexandria. Jacob Stewart, who was brought to New Orleans by another trader in 1856, sought word of the mother he was forced to leave behind in Baltimore. And now, more than a century and a half after the advent of freedom, these searches for kin and kindred continue. The violence slaveholders and slave traders inflicted on enslaved families through the coastwise traffic is a crime with which we have yet to fully reckon.
The economic legacies of the coastwise traffic demand an accounting of their own. The interregional maritime slave trade was the market of choice for many, if not most, of the major domestic traders in American history: men who alchemized the commodification and forced relocation of enslaved people into sizable fortunes. The blood money of the coastwise traffic poured into several universities, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins among them, multiple state governments, and the coffers of countless private slaveholders whose descendants continue to enjoy the benefits of the kind of multi-generational wealth that has seeds planted as deep as the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.