Slavery

From the early eighteenth century, French settlers in Louisiana began to import enslaved persons to work on sugar, tobacco, and indigo plantations. During the 1760s, when Anglo-Americans settled along the Mississippi, they brought with them more slaves. The most significant increase came during the early nineteenth century when the invention of the cotton gin transformed the region into a plantation society dependent on slave labor. Louisiana’s enslaved population grew from 20,000 in 1795 to 168,000 in 1840, and to 331,000 in 1860. By the Civil War, slavery was entrenched in Louisiana, shaping the social structure, political priorities, and economy of the state. 

The most common kinds of sources that the library holds originated from slaveholders, such as daybooks, plantation diaries, slave sale records, legal cases, and correspondence that discuss enslaved property. Even collections not explicitly centered on plantation business will often mention slave ownership. Wills and succession cases are particularly useful for tracking how families built intergenerational wealth by bequeathing slaves to the next generation. 

Cotton growing. 

Cotton trade.

Enslaved persons. 

Free African Americans. 

Freed persons.

Plantations. 

Plantation life.

Plantation owners. 

Slavery.

Slaveholders.

Slave bills of sale.

Slave records.

Slave trade. 

Sugar growing.

Sugar trade.