New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade

Esplanade was a trading street. City directories for 1846 and 1861 list many slave traders on Esplanade, Moreau and Gravier streets, with two 1861 entries at Esplanade and Chartres. By the 1850s the city had a slave district of its own: in 1854 seven dealers worked one block of Gravier Street, and eleven pens stood on one square of Moreau Street. Algiers and Natchez had been busier markets, but by 1827 a historian called New Orleans the chief center of the trade in the lower South. Union General Banks ordered the signs of the pens erased in 1864.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cabildo — 0.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• Congo Square — 0.6 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.6 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — 0.6 mi
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.

More markers nearby

• Faubourg Marigny — steps away
• Gallier House — steps away
• Old Ursuline Convent — steps away
• Birthplace of Danny Barker — 0.2 mi