NOLA's Thriving Slave Trade

I ran into this piece a few days ago and couldn't decide whether to post it, or not. Now, with all the hoopla over "Celebrate Confederate History Day" with no mention of slavery's impact on the Civil War - followed by southern politicians dismissing slavery as having little to do with that war, this post is important.

Slavery was a hideous part of our history and we will never know all the heartbreaking stories, this is a small part of what went on in my home town, and no one is proud of the facts presented. From the TP:

It was a chatty group that gathered this week outside the Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel. There was a happy buzz among the 20 or so men and women, delegates to a literary conference, as they waited for their guide to start their walking tour.

Then Walter Johnson, their leader, started talking about the subject of the excursion, and the mood quickly grew somber. For Johnson was talking about the business of buying and selling human beings that used to pervade the area where these people stood.

Reading from a 19th century ledger, Johnson, a Harvard historian who is an expert on the slave trade, told his audience about Charlotte Rankin, who was sold for $550 to John L. Day. She was 14 years old.

She was one of thousands of slaves who were cooped up in pens throughout the Central Business District, waiting to be sold.

Johnson, the author of "Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market," took his charges up Baronne Street and down Gravier Street -- streets now lined with hotels, stores and office buildings that used to teem with slave pens.

About 150 men, women and children would be crowded into a high-walled pen the size of a house lot, he said, and the stench of human waste was overpowering, There was a pervasive smell of bacon, too, Johnson said, because slaves who had been underfed to the point of near-starvation were hastily bulked up to make them more attractive to prospective buyers.

Shouting and moaning were common inside the pens, he said, because about half the approximately 100,000 human transactions that took place in pre-Civil War New Orleans broke up families. Nearly one-third of the sales were of children younger than 13.

People died in the pens, he said, but the bodies were hustled out at night so no one would know.

New Orleans was largest slave market.  Despite the squalor and suffering, slavery was an integral part of life in New Orleans, which became the country's largest slave market, according to the National Park Service. Because of slavery's importance to New Orleans -- and, indeed, the entire Southern economy -- there was no attempt to obliterate it.

And some of you may be surprised to learn that the Church condoned the practice, even Ministers owned slaves. Read On.

More later.
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