New Orleans Slave Market Sites — The Largest in the Nation

Between 1804 and 1862, an estimated 100,000 enslaved people were sold in New Orleans — more than in Richmond, more than in Charleston. By the 1840s, this was the largest slave market in North America. The trade filled hotel lobbies and auction houses along Chartres, Gravier, and Baronne Streets. In the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, enslaved people stood on a marble block while buyers appraised them. By the 1850s, seven slave dealers occupied a single block on Gravier. On one square of Moreau Street, eleven slave pens stood in a row. Show-windows, verandas, depots — people displayed like inventory. New Orleans was the cotton port, the sugar port, the Mississippi's mouth. Enslaved people trafficked from the upper South and Chesapeake arrived by land and by sea, then sold at markup to plantation owners who needed labor for the fields that made the city rich. Frederic Bancroft wrote that nowhere else did slave-trading "seek public attention" the way it did here: auctions in grand hotels, slaves "gayly dressed" and exhibited in the most frequented streets. The trade "rejoiced in its display and prosperity; it felt unashamed, almost proud." The United States Army closed the market in 1864. Most of the sites are unmarked today. A few small plaques exist. No major memorial marks the corridor where a hundred thousand people were bought and sold.