The African American Experience in Louisiana

was apparently different when they had a brick slave chapel erected near the main house. Just as
religion among the enslaved held different connotations for slave owners, it also had different
meanings for the enslaved. Even though the chapel and the preacher were very much under the
control of the planter, the construction of a chapel offered a special opportunity for slaves to
have a spiritual space unto themselves. 63 The aforementioned were not the only buildings on
plantations – there were many dependencies for every purpose – however these were among the
most significant in the African American experience on rural plantations.
The urban architecture of slavery was not as conspicuous as its country counterpart and it
has not been analyzed as much, but it was an integral aspect of cities and towns dependent upon
the labor of slaves. The buying and selling of the enslaved people who provided the labor for
both the rural plantations and the urban businesses and households occurred in the towns.
During the active influx of slaves in the first half of the nineteenth century, enslaved people had
to be held somewhere between their arrival and their purchase and transfer to a new owner.
Those places were the slave pens of slave traders, of which Walter Johnson creates a vivid image
based on his archival research:
The walls surrounding the pens were so high – fifteen or twenty feet – that one New
Orleans slave dealer thought they could keep out the wind. Inside those walls the air
must have been thick with overcrowding, smoke and shit and lye, the smells of fifty or a
hundred people forced to live in a space the size of a home lot. And the sounds that came
over the walls from the street outside must have been muted and mixed – horses’ hooves
striking the stone-paved street, cart wheels and streetcars, fragments of conversation,
laughter, shouting. Along the inside walls were privies, kitchens, dressing rooms, and
jails. The jails were sometimes as many as three stories high and built of brick. They
looked like the slave quarters that can be seen today in the yards of many New Orleans
houses: steep-backed, one room deep, and fronted with railed galleries. In the nineteenthcentury
slave pens, however, those galleries were lined with barred windows and doors
that locked from the outside. Behind the doors were simple rooms with bare pine floors
and plain plastered walls; measuring ten or twelve feet across, they were intended for
multiple occupancy. On the ground floor of one of the jails or across the yard were
offices and a showroom. . . . The real business took place in the showrooms, which were
large enough for a hundred slaves to be arrayed around their walls, questioned, and
examined. Theses rooms had finished floors and painted walls, a fireplace, a few chairs,
and doors all around – a door from the offices where the traders did their counting and
signing, a door from the street where the buyers gathered before the pens opened, and a
door from the yard where the slaves waited to be sold. 64
An even more ironically fine setting was provided for the vulgar business of slave trading in the
lobby of the 1840 St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans. On marble floors beneath coffered elegant
ceilings supported by massive ionic columns, one of the major slave exchanges was operated. 65
63 Durant.
64 Walter Johnson, Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2-3.
65 Malson Heard, French Quarter Manual: An Architectural Guide to New Orleans’ Vieux Carré (New Orleans:
Tulane School of Architecture, 1997), 77.
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