In New Orleans that week, the newspapers—The Louisiana Gazette, the Moniteur de la Louisiane, and the Ami des Lois—advertised embarkments bound for Liverpool, Philadelphia, and Baltimore upon ships with names such as Dolly, Ceres, and the George Washington. St. Philip Street Theatre announced the opening of plays, and a notice regarding some found strayed horses told how they could be reclaimed. There was even a hopeful note about a mislaid check that the owner thought someone might kindly return.
2 The cost of commodities such as salt, tobacco, coffee, and whale oil were printed alongside notices of the sale of estates, lots of land, and sundry items, including: 30 boxes of brown soap, 8 bales of India cotton, 10 barrels of pepper, 30 cases of cider, 30 boxes of mould candles. This was early January, in the year 1811, and among the advertised merchandise—indigo, almonds, velvet corks, flint decanters, tin plates, calicoes, loaf sugar, Jamaican rum, window glass, and Havana segars [sic]—there were also human beings offered for purchase. Some were named, including Sally, a woman being sold along with her two-year-old child.
3 Many others were left unnamed, vaguely described in a notice for an auction “in the St. Charles Parish, including around 70 heads of slaves, of all ages and two sexes, of which among them are many with talents and very good subjects.”
4 Aside from the callous treatment of humans as commodities that was blankly presented as business as usual, there was also an extraordinary event being chronicled in the papers that week—a slave revolt, what we now call the German Coast Uprising or the River Road Rebellion—and it caused widespread panic among the newspapers’ target audience.
