Senegambia to Nouvelle-Orléans

Brutal human bondage made the plantation system possible, leaving a legacy of injustice and inequality, which has influenced patterns of land use and development; and class and cultural divisions for centuries.

Tulane University professor Emily Clark writes, “[t]he connections between New Orleans and Senegal began in the early eighteenth century, when thousands of captives were transported from their homeland in Senegambia, today’s Senegal, to become slaves in the French colony of Louisiana. Two thirds of the enslaved men, women and children forced to immigrate to Louisiana during the colony’s French colonial era (1699–1769) came from this region of Africa.” The Senegambian people played a role in shaping the economy, the landscape and the culture of Louisiana and its capital city of New Orleans, ensuring Senegambia’s permanent imprint on the Gulf South. Notably, the Senegambian contributions of music helped New Orleans to become the birthplace of Jazz.

What would life have been like on and around the Landry plantation? Plantations were a composite entity of activities: land, buildings and people subsisting within a hierarchy, with enslaved people fulfilling a multitude of roles, including farming, domestic work, carpentry and blacksmithing. As such, plantations were not monoliths; they had specific functions and purposes, often resulting in distinct features and layouts which varied based on the crops that were grown.

When French leaders established the colony of Louisiana in 1699 and later designed its capital of New Orleans in 1718, their hope was to make money with tobacco, rice and indigo cultivation. In writing about the technological savvy of the enslaved, scholar Freddi Williams Evans says, “the Africans brought agricultural and technological skills that helped to provide sustenance for everyday survival.” By 1732, the idea of tobacco had failed, and French colonists were dying at a much faster rate than enslaved Africans, causing the colony’s population to represent twice as many enslaved residents as French.

“One type of plantation could be distinguished from another by its barns, mills and other gear,” writes Fredrick Law Olmstead in The Cotton Kingdom. Olmstead goes on to describe their differences: “The identity of a tobacco plantation was marked by distinctive tobacco barns used to cure the leaves before they were packed into huge barrels. Standing in the yards of most cotton plantations were both a gin house and press for compacting processed lint into bales. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, rice plantations often had large steam-powered mills to complement the older threshing platforms and winnowing houses where slaves had previously refined rice by hand. The mills located on Louisiana’s sugar plantations were large sheds, sometimes as much as three hundred feet long, containing boilers, engines, conveyor belts, rollers and evaporators. Because these mills spewed clouds of smoke and steam as the cane juices transformed first into syrup and then into raw sugar, it is not surprising that sugar plantations were said to resemble New England factory towns.”

Follow the Records, Follow the People

Legally, enslaved people were considered property, and though at times difficult to trace, records of the enslaved do exist in various government repositories. One such common document wherein enslaved people can be found is one that we still use today: a succession record. A succession record is a recorded listing of all properties, movables (including slaves) and other assets owned by a deceased individual at the time of death. Enslaved persons owned would be appraised according to their craft, gender, health, ability to have children and even their temperament. A succession record also discloses any debts owed and how a person’s assets and properties should be partitioned and distributed, all of which would be delegated by the courts.

At the time of her death, Margaret Priestley owned 30 individuals over the age of 12 and six children under the age of 10 who are listed with their respective mothers. Enslaved people listed on succession records were often identified by name, age, possible ailments, their skill or duties (i.e., le commandeur/driver, craftsman, seamstress, cook, sick nurse, domestic/house servant, field laborer, etc.) and their appraisal price. Margaret’s succession record did not provide information regarding their skills, duties, or positions on the plantation.