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New Orleans Influence On American Culture

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Tourists would come from all around to see New Orleans. The city was on the rise and nothing was in its way to slow it down. People would flock in to see the ship yards, experience the open market, and attempt to become a part of the relentless reality we now refer to as slaver. New Orleans may have been vibrant on the outside, but once you dug a little deeper the unforgiving slave market could be found on nearly every street corner. As the city continued to grow, slave pens sprouted up one by one. Slave pens were often on a single plot of land, that was just big enough for a house. The pens were surrounded by towering walls that trapped the enslaved inside. Conditions were often barely livable and quite frankly unacceptable in our …show more content…

At any given time the pens would house upward to 100 enslaved individuals that were packed together like sardines. Once buyers began showing up, the enslaved people would be escorted to a showroom. The showroom, stripped the black community’s culture from their hands by forcing them to put on a show for potential buyers. Slave sellers and merchants would clothe these enslaved people in dresses and suits to make them more presentable or appealing to the eyes of a slaveholder. They would then put the enslaved individuals on a pedestal for everyone to see, as if they were buying an object instead of a human being. In Walter Johnson’s scholarly book he discusses many arguments, but the leading argument in his research is that New Orleans once had the most prominent slave market in the entire south. Through extensive research, I found Johnson’s

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