Slave Auction; ca. 1831; ink and watercolor; The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1941.3.
When most people think of the slave trade, they imagine the hazardous crossing of the open Atlantic, with ocean-going ships bringing newly enslaved men and women into captivity in the Americas. While this was certainly part of the story, it obscures the thriving domestic slave trade of the antebellum United States, which flourished even after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished in 1808. New Orleans, as the most important trade center in the South, was at the center of this commerce in human beings.Last year, The Historic New Orleans Collection and curator Erin Greenwald presented Purchased Lives, an exhibition chronicling New Orleans’ place in the domestic slave trade. A recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will now allow the exhibit to travel to museums in Alexandria, La., Memphis, and Austin.
Purchased Lives was among the most popular exhibits in THNOC’s history, with many people returning several times, often with friends or relatives in tow. Greenwald attributes the success of the exhibit to the fact that a look at the city’s role in slavery was overdue: “We tend to look at positive ways the city is exceptional, but it’s exceptional in negative ways as well. We found fifty-two documented sites within the city where slaves had been sold. I think this exhibit has allowed people to recover their own pasts and to better understand how the New Orleans we know came to be.”
The NEH grant also covers the cost of teacher training to go along with the exhibition, lecture series at each of the exhibition’s stops, and the creation of a facsimile version to be displayed at smaller museums throughout Louisiana. Purchased Lives can be seen at the Alexandria Museum of Art June 3–August 20, 2016. For more information on the exhibition and related programming, visit themuseum.org.
