Mapping the Slave Trade in Richmond and New Orleans

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Richmond and New Orleans were seemingly very different cities. One was the capital city of the Old Dominion, a state often associated with a stagnating agricultural economy and often described by observers as conservative in its social norms; the other was a city with a booming economy and extensive trade from the rich agricultural lands along the Mississippi River, often described as the seat of debauched and decadent behavior. Nevertheless, they shared one feature in common: they were the two largest slave-trading markets in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. Additionally, they were two endpoints of an internal American slave trade, a trade worth millions annually. Slaves sold in Richmond, for example, were often purchased by other dealers, transported hundreds of miles by land, ship, or railroad, and then resold in New Orleans, where they were forced to labor in the newly expanding cotton and sugar fields and fueled the economic boom of the region.

Discussion of the slave trade usually prompts a consideration of the international Atlantic slave trade that forcibly took millions of Africans to the New World. Britain ended its participation in 1807; the United States did so in 1808; but France, Portugal, and others continued for decades longer.¹ Less well known is the internal American slave trade that strengthened and expanded after the United States ended its participation in the international trade. Historians estimate that from 1820 to 1860, two million enslaved African Americans were sold from one owner to another within the United States, about four times the number that were brought from Africa into what would eventually become the United States. Of those two million people sold, about two-thirds of a million were forcibly relocated from states in the Upper South (especially Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) to states in the Lower South (especially Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana), where the boom in cotton production fueled a demand for slave labor.²

Within America slaves were sold for a wide variety of reasons: as punishment, to pay debts or secure mortgages, at the death of an owner to settle an estate, or simply because the owner wanted cash. This trade proved particularly devastating to enslaved families, who were rarely sold together, because slave traders, wanting to maximize their profits, preferred slaves aged fifteen to thirty. As a result, young mothers were sold away from their husbands and children; young fathers, from their wives and children; and children, from their parents.

The slave trade took place in nearly every town and city in the South. In most, however, the trade did not have a permanent physical location. Commonly, slaves were sold on court days, usually outdoors at a location near the courthouse, yet those cities with a large slave market had a significant infrastructure dedicated to the buying and selling of humans. Certain cities in the Upper South—particularly Baltimore, Alexandria, Washington, D.C., and Richmond—had become slave collecting and resale centers. Traders in those cities were often connected to a large network of traders who worked in the surrounding counties and purchased slaves to send to urban markets for resale. Slaves purchased in these cities were often relocated to the Lower South and sold again.

What was particularly distinctive in these larger markets is that cities had dozens of permanent business establishments, both buildings and persons, dedicated to the trade. There were slave jails where slaves were held until sale, auction rooms where they were sold, and clothing and shoe stores that provided dealers with new goods. In Richmond and New Orleans, the trade amounted to millions of dollars annually. Despite the similarities, however, the cultural dimensions and the physical experience of the trade in the two cities were quite distinct. This essay maps the slave trade in each of these cities at the height of the market in the 1850s and explores what those differences reveal about the distinct place of slavery in each region’s economy. In Richmond the slave trade was tucked away and almost hidden, relegated to the least-desirable locations...