A one-stop shop of misery in New Orleans
Number 58 Esplanade Street New Orleans is just across the street from a bend in the Mississippi River on the same block at the New Orleans Jazz Museum and is in the city’s French Quarter.
It is also just across from what was once a busy wharf area in New Orleans with hundreds of ships sailing in and out on an ongoing basis. Today a large truck parking lot exists at 58 Esplanade Street, no sign of the history of that piece of land.
In 1839, New Orleans businessmen Austin Woolfolk and George T. Kausler saw 58 Esplanade as the perfect place to have a facility that would hold up to 300 slaves that could be housed when necessary, or sold, or even leased out to those willing to pay the money.
It isn’t clear whether the facility was built strictly for that purpose or if it already existed but it was used for years as a “service” to those buying, selling or travelling with human capital.
The proprietors promised that it would hold 300 slaves without any of them “being crowded in any way whatsoever.”
It is doubtful that it provided those held there any creature comforts.
By 1839 it was illegal to capture slaves from foreign countries and sell them in the United States and had been so for several decades. There was, though, still an active slave trade that brought slaves by ship from the East Coast to the Gulf Coast.
Most of the time the slaves were brought to 58 Esplanade Street to be sold at auction, often then to be transported miles to work in cotton fields in Northern Louisiana or West Texas or Mississippi. Many also worked in the sugar cane plantations in Louisiana.
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