Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831

Using two Atlantic World events— the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s Rebellion— as temporal bookends, this study examines the ways in which enslaved peoples of African descent were not only affected by, but influenced, the major societal and economic changes in Louisiana’s evolution into a slave society. In addition to analyzing Louisiana as a geographical and imperial borderland, I situate my study at the convergence of several sub-fields of Atlantic World slavery: studies of the impact of specific West African cultures on the New World, the scholarship on the Age of Revolution, and the literature on slave resistance. Relying on an array of Spanish, French, and English sources— from civil documents to church registers, and from judicial cases to plantation records— I re-construct the various identities that enslaved people developed as participants in the contested construction of a slave regime. Slaves were faced with two demographic upheavals that dramatically altered their culture, communities, and social relations during this period. First, in the 1790s, the slave population of Louisiana became “re-Africanized” as thousands of African-born slaves were shipped to the colony for the first time in several decades. Using the Catholic Church to incorporate these new arrivals, many of whom were Congolese, into their communities, enslaved people in Louisiana navigated this internal challenge at the same time they continued to tweak the slave control regime that American governance sparked. Second, with the close of the trans-atlantic slave trade in 1808, Louisiana’s slave population entered its second period of creolization. Given the immense numbers of forced migrants from the Upper South during the 1810s and 1820s, I argue that the domestic slave trade presented similar cultural challenges to the state’s re -Africanized slave population. In the end, slaves in Louisiana minimized African ethnic differences so much that the long-held goal of whites— establishing a biracial hierarchy that equated race with slavery— was fulfilled. While the Haitian Revolution had created near hysteria among frightened white Louisianans during the 1790s, their later counterparts perceived Nat Turner’s Rebellion to be evidence of their society’s stability.