Purchased Lives at Bayou Teche Museum

In the half century following America’s 1808 abolition of the international slave trade, an estimated three-quarters of a million people found themselves at the center of a forced migration that separated husbands from wives, children from parents, and brothers from sisters. The domestic slave trade wrought havoc on the lives of enslaved families as owners and traders in the Upper South—Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.—oversaw the shipment and sale of surplus laborers to the expanding territory of the Lower South—Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—often breaking up families in the process. The traveling exhibit Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, examining the lives of individuals caught up in the trade and considering New Orleans’ role as antebellum America’s largest slave market, comes to the Bayou Teche Museum. Period broadsides, paintings, and prints illustrate how the domestic slave trade appeared in the public sphere, while manuscript, photographic, and three-dimensional objects—including ships’ manifests, slave clothing, a patient admission book from Touro Infirmary, and a diary from John Pamplin Waddill (the Louisiana lawyer who helped free Solomon Northup)—speak to the experiences of those whose lives were bought and sold. First-person accounts excerpted from published slave narratives and oral histories are included throughout the exhibition. At Bayou Teche Musuem July 20-August 26. bayoutechemuseum.org.