“In the same way that Detroit is shorthand for auto manufacturing and Hollywood is shorthand for filmmaking, New Orleans was, for generations, known essentially as the place one went to buy African American people.” — Calvin Schermerhorn, historian, Arizona State University, “‘As I Have Seen and Known It,’ Ex-Slave Autobiographers and the New Orleans Slave Market” from “New Orleans: A Literary History”
The following is an account of what it was like for some of those enslaved people to make the weeks-long journey by ship from the mid-Atlantic states to be sold in the New Orleans slave market of the 1840s. Thousands of others were forced to march to the city over hundreds of miles of primitive roads and trails. The events described here are based on historical documents and the first-hand accounts of the enslaved people themselves, including narratives from Henry Bibb, John Brown, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, and Solomon Northup.
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