THE TYPICAL SLAVE IN ANTEBELLUM NEW ORLEANS DID NOT, ASan old adage has it, get his name in the paper on two occasions, birth and death. Thousands of slaves did make the newspapers, but in the classified section. Slaves were listed for sale and for hire by owners; owners advertised for the return of runaway slaves and described them in detail; and jailers placed notices of captured runaways in the public prints. This article represents a detailed analysis of the several thousand advertisements for bondsmen in the New Orleans newspapers for the year 1850. The resulting picture of labor practices in the Crescent City indicates a booming slave trade in which the equivalent of one in five of the bondsmen in New Orleans were sold annually. Most of the sales were auctions occasioned by a legal procedure, and most sales were of broken lots rather than complete slave families. There were substantial numbers of runaways too. Most slaves ran away to join family members, although most bondsmen chose to run alone. Lighter-skinned slaves tended to be the most likely fugitives, whereas black slaves tended to be more often sold. Women were sold and also became fugitives at an earlier age than men, although there was no seasonal variation for running away among either sex. Rural owners valued their slaves more than did owners in urban areas if the size of the reward can be taken as an indication.The fragility of the slaves' lives is exemplified over and over by the volume of the slave trade. The fact that a slave could be sold at all was a forceful reminder of his status. The auction block was a compelling symbol of his servitude; it transformed the slave from a person to mere property. As long as any slave sales occurred no normal life was really possible for the bondsman. The chance that an urban black would be sold several times during his life was very great' and was dictated by the white family's fluctuating need for I Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820-1860 (New York, 1964), 197.MS. SCHAFER is a graduate student in history at Tulane University. 34 THE JO URNA L OF SO UTHERN HIS TOR Y domestic labor. For example, an urban slave who was a child's nurse might be sold when the white children were grown, whereas a rural field hand would always remain useful.New Orleans was second only to Charleston in the size of its slave trade in 1850; it was unsurpassed in the lower South. In New Orleans the markets and buyers were numerous, money was plentiful, and the profits large. Seven professional slave dealers placed thirteen different classified advertisements in the New Orleans newspapers in 1850. Most of these dealers advertised for sale slaves from Virginia and Maryland.2 A typical notice stated that a slave dealer had just received ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY Negroes, direct from Baltimore" which included "a choice lot of field hands, waiters, cooks ... blacksmiths, carpenters and a fine engineer ... ." To encourage prospective buyers, the vendor stated "I am determined to sell low . . . .' One slave dealer, Elihu ...
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