OPENING RECEPTION:
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2016 • 6:00PM

CHECK OUR EVENTS PAGE FOR OTHER EXHIBIT-RELATED EVENTS.

Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 and 1865 exhibition covers a 57-year period, from America’s abolition of the international slave trade through the end of the Civil War. During this time, more than two million people were forcibly moved within the boundaries of the United States and its territories, wreaking havoc on the lives of enslaved men, women and children. Owners and traders in the Upper South—Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, DC—sold and shipped surplus laborers to the expanding Lower South. For many enslaved people their long and difficult journeys led them to New Orleans—the largest slave market in antebellum America—where they were then sold and scattered to points across Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

The exhibition includes more than 75 original items, including period broadsides, paintings and prints illustrating the domestic slave trade, ship manifests and first-person accounts from slave narratives and oral histories. The display also includes a collection of “Lost Friends” ads placed after the Civil War by newly freed people attempting to locate family members. Three interactive displays will allow visitors to engage directly with the historical record, including a database tracking the shipment of more than 70,000 people to New Orleans from other US ports.

Curated and originally hosted by The Historic New Orleans Collection, the display examines one of the most challenging eras of U.S. history.  It is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.