Summary: The New Orleans Slave Market

The historical records of the 1640s show the beginning and growth of African slavery in the Chesapeake area. The constantly growing of tobacco planting caused a higher demand for labor, resulting in an increase in African slavery and indentured servants. The condition for black and white servants varied sharply. The white indentured servants started getting an improved status while the black servants began losing more freedoms. A Virginia law of 1662 also caused a rise in the number of slaves because it stated that the status of the offspring followed that of the mother. This means that any children of a slave woman and a white man would live as a slave, which led to an increase in the sexual abuse of slave women. The shift from white indentured

slave pens of New Orleans and the selling and buying of slaves that had been put up for

When black slavery first started in the United States, all the slaves were being imported from Africa. Slowly overtime slaves were being born in the United States instead of solely being brought from Africa. The birth rate of the slaves was not high enough to depend on the reproduction of slaves in the south though. This resulted in a combination of both American-born slaves and African-born slaves on plantations. Eventually, there was a division between the two groups of slaves in the Southern part of the United States.

In this assignment I will be taking a further look into the history of slavery. When thinking of slavery the immediate thought that comes to mind is all the negative aspects of the system. Prior to this research, I was unaware of slave systems that were not based on the long labor hours and the torture of slaves. Granted, there were still forms of slavery that practiced these brutal rituals, where slaves were treated as animals and were malnourished. One prime example of this, is the book titled “Am I Not A Woman And A Sister”, looks at the history of a Bermudan slave named Mary Prince. Another example of slavery that will be incorporated in this paper will come from a source about a woman slave named Semsigul, born in Caucasus an area that

Everyone has their own understanding of what slavery is, but there are misconceptions about the history of “slavery”. Not many people understand how the slave trade initially began. Originally Africa had “slaves” but they were servants or serfs, sometimes these people could be part of the master’s family. They could own land, rise to positions of power, and even purchase their freedom. This changed when white captains came to Africa and offered weapons, rum, and manufactured goods for people. African kings and merchants gave away the criminals, debtors, and prisoner from rival tribes. The demand for cheap labor was increasing, this resulted in the forced migration of over ten million slaves. The Atlantic Slave Trade occurred from 1500 to 1880 CE. This large-scale event changed the economy and histories of many places. The Atlantic Slave Trade held a great amount of significance in the development of America. Africans shaped America by building a solid foundation for the country.

In the United States, slavery had an overwhelming impact on their political, social, and economical. Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, the first African slaves were brought into the United States. Reasons were because the tobacco, sugar, rice, and coffee fields were expanding which led to increasing the demand for labor. The Atlantic slave trade was an inhuman systematic importation of slaves between the African traders, American planters, and the European merchants bargaining over human lives which led to the Middle Passage. 1675-1775, the slaves were the backbone of monoculture labor and so it was put into law to keep the Africans as slaves. “So prevalent was this Italian-operated slave trade that the word “slave” was derived from the word “Slav,” name for people from Slavic countries” (Williams 3). In both seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the African-American slaves helped build the economic foundations of the new nation.

There is no doubt that the United States was built upon the hard work of Black-American slaves, referred to at the time as bondpeople, who were the main labor force in producing important American exports, such as cotton or tobacco, which were, in fact, the backbone of the American economy during that time. Due to bondpeople’s overall importance in keeping the United States the powerhouse that it was, the domestic slave trade was a value market that “‘was roughly three times greater than the total amount of all capital, North and South combined, invested in manufacturing, almost three times the amount invested in railroads, and seven times the amount invested in banks’”(23). In “‘In Pressing Need of Cash,’” Daina Ramey Berry, a professor for the Departments of History and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, looks at a fifteen year period, from 1850-1865, of the economic factors of the domestic slave trade. Berry uses Steven Deyle’s findings in his study, "Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life” which examined both the "long-distance interstate trade" and the extensive local or "intrastate" trade of enslaved males and females, who were priced differently depending on their perceived market value (23). With Deyle’s findings, Berry specifically discusses the relationships among gender, age, skill, or type of sale and how those factors, generally, determined the priced paid of enslaved workers.

New Orleans is one of the major states that experienced the issue of slavery although it was not considered to be a negative thing. This photo of a woman holding captive a young girl has been taken into consideration in the paper as it directly relates to the issue of slavery. Therefore, the image is of paramount importance because it tries to explain the numerous issues that were experienced including war, slavery and hurricanes among others. In the image, there are two people who include a woman and a child. Since slavery was a common thing in New Orleans, it is evident that the woman is happy to have the child as a slave and the child is also happy as well. This essay aims at exploring

The ways and reasons in which the slave trade in colonial Charleston, South Carolina was so relevant are surprisingly interesting. The slave trade was important economically and capitalistically speaking: the economy highly depended on the slave trade and was literally dominated by it in some states. Besides the economy, other reasons of its importance were implied in politics and business: what made it really big in Charleston and in South Carolina in general was that slaves ended constituting the majority which means that slavery was focussed much more in this state than in any other one. Another reason we can mention why the slave market was so alive in South Carolina and also well present in other states and islands is because whites

The institution was throughout Louisiana including St. Mary’s Parish. Historical statistics reveal that the slave population in the sugar parishes (excluding New Orleans) mushroomed from under 10,000 in 1810 to more than 42,000 by 1830. 8 There were fourteen sugar parishes in Louisiana; St. Mary’s had more large slaveholders than any other sugar parish. It was number five out of forty-seven parishes when lumped together with sugar, cotton and piney woods parishes.9 In 1860 St. Mary’s Parish was rated first of all of the sugar parishes in the number of slaves, being 13, 057 and less than 3,500 whites.10 Also it was first in the number of acres of improved acreage and upper echelon of the number of slaveholders and the number of landholders.11

The book Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson gives us a flashback into the slave market located in New Orleans during the 19th century. While many of the information we obtain from slavery is all written account, this book puts everything together to help us get a better idea of what the auctions, slave trades, and antebellum slavery were actually like. The concepts discussed in the book revolve around the rise of domestic slave trading, slavery as compared to a commercial market, the formation of slave community bonds, economic dependence on the slave markets, turning people into a price point, buying based on complexion, and the performance of a slave sale.

In 1808, the slave exchange was nullified in the United States, expressing that there would never again be no more importation of slaves from outside nations since it was presently unlawful. This cleared out the South with an emergency of where they were going to get slaves. After the death of this law, numerous Southerners contemplated that it would be best for them to set up a household slave exchange the South. The Southerners concluded that they would make firms and organizations that would offer slaves to the grower that were going west to fire up cotton ranches that required work. There were profoundly sorted out firms in Baltimore, Charleston, and Virginia that sold slaves. Since the interest was so incredible, the expense of slaves

Firstly, location was important if talking about rural and urban slavery. Within the rural slavery system, there were different sized farms that a slave might belong to. Smaller farms were the norm in places like Kentucky, and they did not require large amounts of slaves like the cotton plantations. Within those smaller farms like in Kentucky, slaves were not needed in large numbers like the Deep South simply because Kentucky grew different crops like corn and hemp which did not require large numbers of gang laborers. A farmer only needed the amount of slaves necessary for the job to be done which set artificial limits on farmers for the number of slaves a farmer would own. A farmer in Kentucky growing hemp is not going to need 300 slaves to do the job, only 5 or 6, 1 and this smaller sized farm relied on the few slaves it had in order to survive. The, “…size of most Kentucky farms was a contrary variable to slave efficiency and also diminished the need for an expanding slave population. In comparison, the expansion of cotton production in the Lower South created not only changes in the nature of slave employment, but a seemingly insatiable demand for more slaves.”1 Here in looking at the size of plantations,

Throughout history, slavery has played a role in the growing of empires and industry. We will look at the slave systems of South Carolina under British rule, and Louisiana under French rule to explore the treatment of their slaves. We will see although no slave system is right, Louisiana held a better treatment of their slaves under their rule, even though it was for production.

In the 1600’s, Slavery played a significant role in European history. The negative aspects that made up the dark times in history are, mainly centered on the brutalizing effects of the enslaved people, which can be best explained by the destroyed family bonds, history of the enslaved people erased, and unjust treatment of the slaves.