Beneath the Bricks: New Orleans
The Legacy of the Slave Trade
Before the jazz, before the beignets, before the balconies dripping with ferns, New Orleans was a human marketplace. Not in metaphor, not in passing, but in the most brutal, literal sense.
When people come to New Orleans, they think about haunted stories and chasing ghosts. They don’t always realize they’re walking through a real haunting. A city built from the bodies and broken lives of enslaved people. The Quarter isn’t just modern day tourism. It’s a stage where some of the most horrific acts of the transatlantic slave trade played out in open air. Yet, most visitors sip cocktails without ever knowing they’re standing atop former slave pens. This story isn’t meant to ruin your view of New Orleans, it’s meant to help complete it.
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The French Quarter’s iconic street grid was laid down in 1726, a time when New Orleans was still clawing itself into existence. Long before it became a haven for tourists, this land belonged to Native people. The Chitimacha, Houma, Natchez, and others, traded in the open spaces where St. Anthony’s Garden now grows. That garden, behind St. Louis Cathedral, was once a bustling informal marketplace, long before the “official” French Market opened.
But 1720 saw the collapse of the Mississippi Bubble, a speculative economic disaster tied to a failed colonial dream of Louisiana riches. The bubble burst, but the need for capital didn’t. So instead of gold, the colony turned to a different currency: enslaved humans.
New Orleans quickly became a smuggling capital. The legal ports of trade were a front. Behind closed doors, enslaved people, fabrics, furs, and weapons changed hands in illegal exchanges. Native Americans peddled local goods, while the French, Spanish, and later Americans trafficked human beings as inventory.
The transatlantic slave trade found a fervent partner in Liverpool. That British port city became the engine of the triangle: finished goods left Liverpool for Africa, where they were exchanged for enslaved people, who were then sent to the Americas. There, they were traded for raw cotton, sugar, and other goods that returned to Liverpool. It was a revolving door of suffering. And in a deeply twisted arrangement known as the “trust trade,” enslaved people were used as collateral, a body pledged in place of a coin.
Every middle-class investor in Liverpool had some hand in slavery. Cotton lined their pockets. Even the last act of the American Civil War took place in Liverpool, where the final Confederate ship surrendered. That city, thousands of miles away, was still deeply tethered to the American South’s enslaved labor force.
Back in Louisiana, Jean Lafitte continued trafficking people well after the official abolition of the international slave trade in 1808. Piracy, smuggling, and slavery all blurred together in the murky waters of Barataria Bay.
New Orleans didn’t just participate in the slave trade, it performed it. Tourists in the 1800s came specifically to see the slave markets. At least 52 known slave sites operated in the city, where human beings were dressed in suits and dresses to enhance their “sale value.” Buyers could even sue if the enslaved person wasn’t as “advertised.” These were not haphazard sales. They were brutal business deals rooted in white male sociability and enforced by bounty hunters and vigilantes.
The banks in New Orleans, the ones whose names are carved into stone, were literally built atop slave markets. Human beings were the most liquid form of capital. They were the engine of the Southern economy. In fact, in 1860, the total economic value of enslaved people surpassed the value of every other asset in America combined. Cotton wasn’t king, the enslaved were.
The impact ripples far beyond the Mississippi. The average life expectancy of an enslaved person in Brazil? Seven years. Today, slavery still exists. In Niger, children wear “space bracelets” as symbols of ownership.
The legacy is here. You just have to know where to look. Court records still whisper stories between the lines. Letters and ledgers preserve chilling quotes. Descendants still recite their ancestors stories. Ancestors from not that long ago.
Slavery is not some distant past, it’s a scar beneath the cobblestones. The systems it built, the fortunes it generated, the violence it normalized, they’re still with us. But so is the resistance, the resilience, and the responsibility to remember honestly.
Let the past speak. It’s hidden in plain site.
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