HNOC exhibit documents history of New Orleans slave trade

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

In the four decades prior to the Civil War, more than 40,000 enslaved persons were bought and sold in New Orleans as part of one of the largest forced movements of people anywhere in the world. Now, a new exhibit at The Historic New Orleans Collection documents the domestic slave trade in local detail. The exhibit “Purchased Lives: News Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808-1865” is two years in the making and depicts more than 100 pieces of original art, reproductions and other materials.

The stories of those enslaved increase “our understanding of who we are as New Orleanians,” says Erin Greenwald, curator of the first-of-its-kind exhibit. New Orleans, says Greenwald, was once home to the largest slave market in pre-Civil War America, calling the city “the nexus of the domestic slave trade.”

The exhibit, which opened March 17 and runs through July 18, pulls materials from more than a dozen sources, including the University of New Orleans, Tulane University and Louisiana State University. Among the items on display, are ship manifests for vessels carrying bondspeople, personal diaries, slave narratives, photographs and paintings, other depictions and articles of clothing worn by slaves.

“First-person accounts excerpted from published slave narratives and oral histories will also be included throughout the exhibition,” Greenwald says, including the story of Solomon Northup, whose story of being sold into slavery from New York to Louisiana was immortalized in the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave. The diary of John Pamplin Waddill, a lawyer hired to help free Northup, is also a part of the exhibit. Other tales of area ex-slaves include Betty Krump, Delia Garlic, Mittie Freeman and Taylor Jackson.

Greenwald says the “sheer volume of the trade and the sprawling nature of the market within our city,” makes the domestic transport of slaves in New Orleans unique. “New Orleans did not confine its slave trade to a single market structure or even a handful of locations,” unlike other cities. “Instead, slaves were sold citywide. Auction blocks in the sumptuous St. Louis Hotel,” on the site of what is now the Omni Royal Hotel, “private residences, public parks, decks of ships moored along the Mississippi, high-walled slave pens, and commercial [areas]…all served as sites for the buying and selling of human beings.”

She says successes include “a small number of individuals… made their way to freedom, advocated for emancipation and shined light on the horrors of slavery through their work as abolitionists, but the vast majority of people were unable to get out from under this system. [Yet] our best-known examples of men enslaved in Louisiana who got out are Solomon Northup…and Williams Wells Brown.”

Despite the exhibit, says Greenwald, historians’ efforts to bring attention to the history of American slavery is lacking. She says better equipping grade- and high-school teachers with the skills to address slavery will go a long way toward mitigating the fears and discomfort many feel around the subject. Staffers at the Historic New Orleans Collections are partnering with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to develop subject-specific lesson plans for elementary, middle and high school teachers.

The partnership also includes creating day-long training workshops for area high school teachers. The training programs, says Greenwald, are the result of the decades-long “amazing progress” by university professors in documenting the period of enslavement. “It’s a painful but fascinating subject.”

Several museums in America and abroad are fully dedicated to the memory of atrocities such as the Holocaust, says Greenwald, “but until…the Whitney Plantation opened in Wallace, Louisiana, just upriver from here, there was no single museum in this country dedicated solely to the remembrance of slavery.”

Greenwald believes the exhibit is important and meaningful because “We continue to deal with the legacy of slavery in this country, but it is sometimes difficult to understand the magnitude of that legacy without better understanding,” first, “how dependent our country’s development was on the racialized system of hereditary slavery that existed from 1619 to 1865 and,” secondly, “how that dependence affected the lives, families and communities of the enslaved individuals and their descendants.”

In 1807, Congress passed the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves, beginning the slow march to the complete abolition of slavery in the United States. The law, however, did nothing to uproot the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of peoples in the Upper and Lower South already living in the country.

The abolition movement gained steam in the following decades as northern states gradually phased out the practice of slavery and the movement bracketed into pure abolitionists and opponents dedicated to curbing slavery’s expansion into new states. The practice ended nationwide in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, spurred by the presidential election of anti-slavery Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.

This article originally published in the April 6, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.