The Devil's Bargain: How the slave trade built New Orleans

Yahoo

4 days ago

This photo shows the old slave auction block where enslaved people were sold in the St. Louis Hotel at 621 St. Louis St. in the French Quarter. The block rested under recessed arches and between columns in the hotel's rotunda. (Credit: From the Historic New Orleans Collection; gift of Samuel Wilson Jr.)
NEW ORLEANS – Stretching 3 miles from the Mississippi River to City Park, Esplanade Avenue is today a leafy thoroughfare lined with 19th-century mansions, restaurants, bars, and other businesses. In the evenings, tourists make their way across the avenue from the French Quarter, drinks in hand, ready to take in some jazz at the clubs on Frenchman Street.
These visitors — or the current residents, for that matter — have little reason to give any thought to what once happened here in centuries past. The streetscape then could have included a cortege of enslaved Black people being forced-marched in chains from far away or from ships at the nearby docks or unloaded from wagons, all to be delivered to what amounted to urban prison camps.
Before the Civil War, the blocks on and surrounding Esplanade Avenue were home to dozens of slave pens, stockyard-like enclosures of dirt lots surrounded by high brick walls to deter escape and shield public view. Inside were men, women, and children warehoused until they could be sold, either directly from the pens or on the auction blocks somewhere in the prosperous city of New Orleans.
The pens were 'foul places, attractive to flies and lice and vermin, hazy with acrid smoke from cheap pork cooked over open flames, and reeking of sweat and urine and feces and garbage,' historian Joshua D. Rothman said in his book 'The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America.'
It was the stench and health concerns — not the inhumanity of the slave trade itself — that had prompted Quarter residents to push for the pens to be moved away from their fine homes into the neighborhoods along Esplanade.
The prisoners, many torn from family and friends and forced to walk or endure ship passage for hundreds of miles from the Upper South to serve new masters, were crowded inside by overseers concerned only with keeping them healthy and fit enough to bring top dollar on the market.
Passersby 'might hear the cries of small children' or 'the muted anguish of adults who are there, who are suffering what we call today PTSD or some sort of traumatic injury, who are trying to wrap their heads around what's happening,' Calvin Schermerhorn, history professor at Arizona State University said in an interview.
An alert visitor can find a historical marker on the neutral ground near Esplanade Avenue and Chartres Street, marking the city's connection to the brutal slave trade. Another marker across the intersection toward the river marks the location of the infamous slave pens where Solomon Northup, known for 'Twelve Years a Slave,' was sold into slavery.
'There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever,' Northup said in his 1853 memoir of his life as a free man sold into slavery. 'There will be reckoning yet … It may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just.'
That accounting has yet to fully come to a city more associated with letting the good times roll than dealing with past sins.
Outside of historians, academics and the generational memories of Black New Orleanians, relatively few people understand the enormity of New Orleans' involvement in the slave trade, which helped build generational wealth for white residents and made the city the most financially powerful and influential in the South.
Gregg Kimball, Senior Consulting Historian for the Shockoe Institute in Richmond, Va., maintains that the slave trade was part of the 19th century U.S. economic boom 'that really made the United States a world power. It basically created American capitalism. That's a big deal. Right?''
For New Orleans, sugar and slaves were the driving forces for an economy that also thrived from the global cotton trade and its position at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
'It's those three intertwined. It's New Orleans's status as not only a port city, but as a place where banking is based and where trading happens in sugar and cotton and slaves,' New Orleans historian Erin Greenwald said.
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Slavery is in the very bones of New Orleans, where the essential protective levees, streets and core buildings were constructed by enslaved workers. Captive Black laborers helped grow and harvest the lucrative sugar and cotton crops, loaded the yield onto the ships for export and even served as collateral for plantation owners' bank loans to expand their land holdings and buy more enslaved workers.
From the early 1800s until Union Troops occupied the city about a year after the beginning of the Civil War, New Orleans was known as the 'slave market of the South.' An estimated 135,000 people were bought and sold in the city and its immediate environs at more than 50 documented places.
These are the same places where residents and tourists today celebrate Mardi Gras, sleep in luxury hotels, drink in dive bars, and eat at fine restaurants. In 2025, there is little public acknowledgement of the atrocities of slavery beyond a few mostly low-key historical markers and some local tours designed to go beyond the usual sightseeing fare.
The history of how slavery made New Orleans the city it is today rarely intrudes on the daily awareness of most people.
Greenwald said she values what she gets from reading academic histories.
'It's great. But that's not what's going to penetrate the consciousness,' she said. 'It's just not. It's expensive, it's jargony. … Historians are speaking generally to each other. You have to have a lot of prior knowledge to access a lot of the narrative in academic history.'
There is also the city's reluctance to confront its painful past, focusing instead on tourism-friendly narratives and laissez les bons temps rouler marketing.
'There's a powerful impulse to keep slavery in the rearview mirror, to present a story about the United States that is one of progress and improvement,' Rothman, chair of the history department at the University of Alabama, said in an interview. 'People like to think slavery was terrible, but we fixed it. In fact, we've forgotten about it.'
To those who know, the city's slave history is everywhere: former slave quarters operating as apartments and short-term rentals, historic structures built with slave labor and a culture of music and art that wouldn't exist without the influence and contributions of enslaved residents. But it isn't easy to track down the markers, read the academic research and all the other things that provide a thorough understanding of what happened.
In an upcoming series of articles, Verite News hopes to make the city's connection to slavery better known and understood by residents who are not familiar with stories and connections held dear by descendants of the enslaved and to the millions who come to visit 'the city that care forgot.'
The historical marker for the St. Louis Hotel, the most famous slave auction site in New Orleans, is placed at the back of the luxurious Omni Royal Orleans hotel, next to a loading dock. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people walk past it each day without pausing to read about what took place there.
The marker itself seems to downplay the connection to the slave market and its inhumanity. 'The luxurious St. Louis Hotel included a bank, ballroom, shopping arcade, and trading exchange,' the marker boasts. 'Six days a week, under the hotel's domed rotunda, auctioneers sold land and goods,' before what almost seems like an aside of 'as well as thousands of enslaved people.'
Slavery-related markers on The Moonwalk by the Mississippi River, The Merieult House on Royal Street, The Cabildo in Jackson Square, slave pen locations at Esplanade and Chartres, the New Orleans Slave Depot at Common and Baronne streets, and Congo Square are also easy to overlook.
And even for those who do stop and read, the official city guidance and literature provides little context for what it means and what the reader should think or do about it. While other cities around the world have benefited from building museums, permanent exhibits, and other educational structures on painful events, including the Holocaust, race massacres, and the atrocities and injustices of the Jim Crow era, New Orleans has mostly remained on the sidelines.
The removal of Confederate monuments from prominent positions in the city sparked a great outcry in 2017 from those who said they saw it as 'erasing history,' but the recognition of enslaved people's contributions to building and molding New Orleans has not received similar support.
'There had been this resistance, I think, in New Orleans generally to recognizing darker sides of history that complicate the fun-time celebration, exotic nature tourism of the city,' said Greenwald, who put together 'Purchased Lives,' an extensive exhibit on slavery that was on display at The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2015. 'New Orleans is not alone in that, but they might be one of the worst examples of covering up things that aren't part of their tourism narrative, and that has changed.'
Many of the slave markers were placed by a city commission appointed to mark the New Orleans Tricentennial in 2018. Freddi Evans, a New Orleans author and educator who was on the commission, said in an interview that the markers have had a positive effect.
'Well, I don't know if it has an impact on the people who are coming here as tourists, but it has an impact on the people who are here, the citizens,' she said, including the descendants of enslaved people who have taken it upon themselves to keep their history from being erased. The New Orleans Tricentennial Commission does offer a slave marker tour app that provides 'an immersive and dramatic self-guided tour of sites that played an important role in the domestic slave trade of New Orleans.'
Each year, over the July 4th weekend, the New Orleans MAAFA Commemoration takes place. Sponsored by the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, participants wearing white begin at Congo Square with stops at the Esplanade site, the Tomb of the Unknown Slave (next to St.Augustine Catholic Church on Governor Nicholls Street), and other locations. Maafa is a Kiswahili word that means 'great disaster' or 'great tragedy.'
'Hundreds of people come,' Evans said. It's one way the city can memorialize those who suffered under slavery.
Harvard historian Walter Johnson has written that the whole city should be considered a memorial to slavery.
'The levee is a slave-built levee. The entire economic development of the city was premised upon slavery. All the buildings were built by enslaved people or free people of color,' Johnson told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2017.
'You could memorialize the city of New Orleans with a million markers of which enslaved people lived there, which enslaved people worked there, which enslaved people built this.'