Bibliography: Slave Trade and Slavery

The history of modern slavery is enmeshed with ideologies of racial domination and commodification. Walter Johnson’s question, “was the Southern social order based on race or on slavery?” was asked in antebellum times and continues to be debated by researchers today. The earliest European settlers to Louisiana brought chattel slavery, first enslaving Native Americans then captives from Senegambia, Bight of Benin and Congo/Angola. During the eighteenth-century, a system of service and domestic-oriented urban slavery emerged in New Orleans, contrasting but complementing the agriculture-based slave labor of the surrounding parishes. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the 1808 ban on importing enslaved Africans, New Orleans became the center of the domestic slave trade. Slave owners traveled from all over the South to purchase laborers for sugar and cotton plantations and to work in plantation households. New Orleans also became a hub for illegal slave trading with the Caribbean and Latin America. Alternatively, in New Orleans, more than most Southern cities, enslaved people found freedom in self-purchase, manumission, and escape. Scholarship on slavery in New Orleans and the city’s role in the slave trade reflects the multiple difficulties, influences, and approaches to the study of the subject itself.

Baade, Hans W. “The Gens de Couleur of Louisiana: Comparative Slave Law in Microcosm.” Cardozo Law Review 18 (1996): 535-586.

Bailey, John. The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans. Waterville, Maine: Thorndike Press, 2003.

Baugh, John. “It Ain’t About Race: Some Lingering (Linguistic) Consequences of the African Slave Trade and Their Relevance to Your Personal Historical Hardship Index.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3, no. 01 (2006): 145-159.

Bibb, Henry. “Henry Bibb, 1815-1854 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself.,” 1849. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/menu.html.

Bond, Bradley G. French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World. LSU Press, 2005.

Brown, William Wells. “William Wells Brown, 1814?-1884 Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself.,” 1847. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brown47/menu.html.

Din, Gilbert C. Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763-1803. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999.

Donaldson, Gary A. “A Window on Slave Culture: Dances at Congo Square in New Orleans, 1800-1862.” Journal of Negro History 69, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 63-72.

Follett, Richard. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Foner, Laura. “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies.” Journal of Social History 3, no. 4 (Summer 1970): 406-430.

Gould, Virginia Meacham. “’A Chaos of Iniquity and Discord’: Slave and Free Women of Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola.” In The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, edited by Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, 232-246. Oxford University Press, USA, 1997.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. “African Ethnicities and the Meaning of Mina.” In Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, 65-81. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.

Hanger, Kimberly S. “Landlords, Shopkeepers, Farmers, and Slave-owners : Free Black female Property-holders in Colonial New Orleans.” In Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, edited by David Barry Gaspar. University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Ingersoll, Thomas N. “Free Blacks in a Slave Society: New Orleans, 1718-1812.” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (n.d.): 173-200.

———. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819. 1st ed. University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

———. “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s.” The Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 13-38.

Kerr, Derek Noel. “Petty Felony, Slave Defiance and Frontier Villainy: Crime and Criminal Justice in Spanish Louisiana, 1770-1803.” Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1983. http://proquest.umi.com.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/pqdweb?did=748541841&Fmt=7&clientId=41143&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

Korn, Bertam Wallace. Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865. Elkins Park, Pa: Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, 1961.

Lachance, Paul. “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade, 1786-1809.” Plantation Society in the Americas 1 (1979): 162-197.

“Le Code Noir, ou Édit du Roi, servant de règlement pour le gouvernement et l’adiminstration de la justice, police, discipline et le commerce des esclaves nègres, dans la province et colonie de la Louisianne; donné à Versailles au mois de Mars 1724.” In Le code noir, ou, recueil des réglemens rendus jusquà présent: concernant le gouvernement, l’administration de la justice, la police, la discipline & le commerce des négres dans es colonies françoises, et les conseils & compagnies établis à ce sujet. Paris: Chez L. F. Prault, 1742.

Long, Alecia P. The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

Malone, Ann Patton. Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana. The Fred W. Morrison series in Southern Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Northrup, Solomon. Solomon Northup, b. 1808 Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853., 1853. http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/menu.html.

Peabody, Sue, and Keila Grinberg. “French Crown, The Code Noir, 1685.” In Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic World: A Brief History with Documents, 31-35. New York, NY: Macmillian, 2007.

Pope, John. “Slave trade in New Orleans Was a Thriving Business.” Times Picayune, April 13, 2010, sec. Education. http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/04/slave_trade_in_new_orleans.html.

Schafer, Judith Kelleher. “’Guaranteed Against the Vices and Maladies Prescribed by Law’: Consumer Protection, the Law of Slave Sales, and the Supreme Court in Antebellum Louisiana.” The American Journal of Legal History 31, no. 4 (October 1987): 306-321.

———. Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862. Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

———. “New Orleans Slavery in 1850 as Seen in Advertisements.” Journal of Southern History 47, no. 1 (February 1981): 33-56.

———. Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Thrasher, Albert. On to New Orleans! Louisiana’s Heroic 1811 Slave Revolt. 2nd ed. New Orleans: Cypress Press, 1996.

Usner, Daniel H. “From African Captivity to American Slavery: The Introduction of Black Laborers to Colonial Louisiana.” Louisiana History 20, no. 1 (n.d.): 25-48.

Walker, Daniel. “Cultures of Control/Cultures of Resistance: Slave Society in Nineteenth Century New Orleans and Havana.” ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2000): 1.

Walker, Daniel E. No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Wheat, David. “The Language of Slaves and Servants: African Agency and the Mobilian Trade Language in Eighteen-Century Alabama.” In Africa and Trans-Atlantic Memories: Literary and Aesthetic Manifestations of Diaspora and History, edited by Naana Opoku-Agyemang, Paul E. Lovejoy, and David V. Trotman, 47-59. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008.